Many rich and famous entrepreneurs have gone bankrupt before in their lives. Also, in the movie Rocky Balboa, I love Stallone’s line “Its not about how hard you can hit the other guy, but about how hard you can get hit and still keep going”.

I think a tangential business conclusion one can draw from Roger Bannister’s story could be that competition can get inspired by the first mover. I’ve seen companies reject new ideas until their competition does it successfully and then they re-open old files and projects to go after the pioneer and compete.

That’s a good point about competitors. And for that matter, I have heard of big companies who explicitly take the tactic that they are going to wait until someone else proves a concept before they enter into the space. On the surface, it may actually be a good tactic to reduce risk.

The irony of this whole discussion, is that although I find the examples inspiring, and although it takes quite a unique character to perform such feats, I’m not sure I’d advise it. I think in many situations, if you don’t have good evidence to think something is possible and you have good reason to think it may be impossible, you’re probably better off quitting. There is nothing wrong with quitting and trying something new.

The more I’ve thought about it, I bet many of the examples above, the people who persevered actually *did* have reason to think the particular goal was possible. I just read something about Roger Banister that he once ran a race and did one of the four laps in ~55 seconds, and *that* was when he realized a 4 minute mile was possible. He just had to get in good enough shape to do 3 more sub-one-minute laps. There were probably similar insights in each of the examples that just don’t get passed on in the historical accounts.

Ending in a quote from Rand was perfect. I chuckled and raised my glass to capitalism. … and now back to work … unfortunately, I have nothing intelligent to add to the conversation. (-;