Right now, millions of hopeful students are celebrating the receipt of acceptance letters from colleges and universities. But with school’s like Harvard accepting only about 2,030 applicants out of 29,000* you can bet there is also a lot of crushing news in the mail.

Sue Shellenbarger wrote an encouraging piece in the Wall Street Journal that I recommend to any applicant.

In “Before They Were Titans, Moguls and Newsmakers, These People Were…Rejected,” Shallenbarger reports on example after example of famously successful individuals—Warren Buffett to Meredith Vieira—who were flat out rejected by their first choice of higher education. The lesson learned, in most of the examples is, that our unrealistic expectations for what we think we have to attain often create an illusion of defeat when we don’t get what we desire.

Certainly, even illusions of defeat can create rubble in our lives. In these cases, much of the “digging” is a really a matter of asking how real the perceived obstacles really are.

In the cases that Shallenbarger describes, Buffett, Vieira, Tom Brokaw and others became phenomenally successful by finding a “plan B.”

Is an Ivy League degree the real goal? Or is it to be the best in your field? Or is it to be happy in your work? Sometimes if we reframe the situation against real goals that we can control, the rubble simply disappears.

*According to The Wall Street Journal.