The Failure beast has a rapacious appetite. Eats millions of unwary travelers everyday. Makes Tyrannosaurus Rex look like a toothless, little lizard. When you feel discouraged, it is probably because the Failure creature, having lured you from the Path, is feeding on you. Like Death, Failure is strongly energized by self-centered thinking and fear, and for that reason it is difficult for people to see that what we call failure, although an arduous path, is still only one of the many paths by which we succeed.
Failure is just another way of climbing the mountain.
It is somewhat more painful than success, and usually slower. However, it often takes a very significant failure to send a message that will be loud enough to wake up a deeply-sleeping traveler, and frequently the progress made by the awakened one is quite spectacular. So, in this sense, failure is success. Just in passing, I think that, very frequently, the second initiation comes packaged as a big, big failure. You know it's the Big One because it really hurts.