[By the time] he was 46, Oscar Hammerstein had worked with 30 different composers. Nothing took off. There was no successful song. It was a despairing, dispiriting time for him. Finally, Oscar Hammerstein tied in with Richard Rodgers. The following year they wrote the musical Oklahoma. He was a success. In fact his success was so enormous in its impact that he went out and bought a full page ad in Variety magazine. To keep himself humble, he bought this headline, “I’ve done it before and I can do it again!” He then listed every single one of his failures.

—Robert Schuller, Be An Extraordinary Person in an Ordinary World (Jove/Berkley Publ: 1985, p. 30f)