Well, at Least I've Got a Ball of Yarn

Untangling yarn is about as fun and easy as reorganizing boxes
in a hot, spider-infested attic.

    Failures happen. It's a generally acknowledged part of life.
    But that doesn't mean it's always easy to accept them when they happen. Non-successes are not pleasant, they are not fun, and they can frankly be really depressing.
    A little while ago, I dove into a special knitting project that I needed time set aside for. I'd waited for a while with anticipation before the timing was right, and then got to work. For hours I knit incessantly, gradually noticing the project's progress, thinking out the next step, smiling as the piece grew longer and longer. Eventually, I ecstatically decided that the knitting piece was  finally long enough, and ready to be finished.
    But somehow I made a mistake. A big one. Something that wouldn't allow me to bind off the work. I tried to mend the mistake in several ways, but it was to no avail. I couldn't fix it. The work I'd spent hours and hours on was irreparable, ruined. All that time and effort, and it was a failure. The feeling that proceeded the actualization of that was was really crummy.
    Sitting there in the lamp light, looking at the stringy catastrophe in my minds, I reviewed my options. Turning the thing into something else wasn't possible, so I had no knitting piece to salvage. And I thought, Well, I have a lesson, at least.
    Though lessons are valuable things to glean from mistakes, the thought wasn't much of a consolation at that time.
    But then I looked at the yarn in my hands again, and considered. The failed project couldn't be bound off, couldn't be made into another piece, but it could be unraveled, bound up into a ball of yarn. And reduced to that basic form, the yarn would be something I could use for a different project--or the same one, just a little shorter. It could be salvaged from this failure.
    So I started to work on that, gradually unraveling the ruin of the project, undoing every single one of the many, many stitches and frequently untangling knots that appeared in the yarn. The unraveling process was long and even boring, but I finally managed to wrap up all the yarn of the failed project into a round orb about the size of a baseball.
    So then I thought: Well, I've got a lesson and a ball of yarn.
    There's always a lesson to be learned in a failure, but I wonder how often something else can be found. Using the yarn in this failed knitting project was kind of a no-brainer, but maybe other non-successes hold things that can be utilized in the present, rather than in some possible re-attempt in the unknown future. Maybe there's always more than one thing to be salvaged from a failure, and it has to be actively sought out.
    What do you think? Have you ever salvaged something from a failure besides a lesson?