The most important breakthroughs rarely dazzle everyone right away. They often arrive covered in warts, with early failures that make them easy to dismiss.

A few years ago, an exciting project at Bahcall’s biotech company hit some negative results in the lab. Bahcall expressed his disappointment to the Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist Sir James Black, who replied, “Ah, my boy—it’s not a good drug unless it’s been killed at least three times.” The Three Deaths tells the honest story, as opposed to the revisionist history, of many important breakthroughs around the world.

In 1972, Japanese microbiologist Akira Endo discovered a drug that could possibly lower cholesterol levels, a major breakthrough at a time when heart disease was claiming so many lives. Endo was excited, but first, his drug had to survive the Three Deaths.

Death #1: Endo presented his promising results at a conference. But at around the same time, a number of trials had been showing that lowering cholesterol may not actually reduce the risk of heart disease after all. Almost no one came to hear Endo’s talk.

Death #2: Endo gave his drug to rats to see if their cholesterol levels would go down. Nothing happened.

Death #3: A new study came out showing that high doses of the drug appeared to cause cancer in dogs. Endo’s company gave up on the project. Years later, a new study showed that the dogs’ condition wasn’t cancer at all—it wasn’t even harmful. So the pharmaceutical company Merck picked up where Endo left off, and today, Endo’s drug and its later incarnations have become the most widely prescribed drug franchise in history, preventing roughly half a million heart attacks and strokes each year, in the U.S. alone.

So don’t get discouraged if your project fails once, twice, or even three times. In fact, breakthroughs that don’t fail in the early stages may not be radical enough.