Rejection doesn’t always hurt. Sometimes rejection may _________ a more certain path to our final goals.

This year football fans have been watching to see how Joe would _________ in the playoffs(季后赛) this season. Joe dreamed to play in the National Football League (NFL), but his journey wasn’t a(n) _________ one. He applied to several colleges, but none _________ him. Later, he got into Ohio State, but he sat on the _________ for three years. Ohio State had a great football program and coaches, who didn’t think Joe had _________. But Joe thought differently. He _________ Nebraska and got rejected once again, but he didn’t quit. Then he applied to Louisiana State University, which accepted him. The rest is history.

Joe became the Heisman Trophy _________ during his senior year, then he was admitted to the NFL, and later, his team participated in the World Championship.

Joe’s story reminds us that there are _________ paths to our final goals and that it __________ strong endurance and determination to reach them. No single __________ is going to prevent you from __________ your long-term goals. Be sure to__________ the pain that comes from disappointment and face it bravely. Try to focus on goals rather than the __________ outcome of being rejected and remember that the hurt of rejection comes from how we __________ it.

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a goods yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I can dimly remember the _________ of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a(n) _________ can do strange things to people.

It ________ to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, _________. I don't mean that I would prefer to _______ without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had ________.

Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of _________ to reality. In ________ of the fact they are never easy, I had my parents and teachers to help. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have ________ and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about _________ the kind of self confidence that helps me down an ________staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite __________, a real, positive person; that there is a special place where I can make myself _______.

It took me years to discover and _________ this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was laughing at me and I was hurt. “I can't use this.” I said. “Take it with you，” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words ________ in my head. “Roll it around！” By rolling the ball I could hear where it _______. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought ________: playing baseball.   At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.

All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to achieve them, one at a time. I had to learn my _________. It was no good crying for something that I knew at the start was wildly out of ________ because that only __________ the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.