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"You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over."
—Richard Branson
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
—George Bernard Shaw
"Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind."
—Douglas MacArthur
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
—Carl Sagan
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Seth Godin has great stories:
"I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand-new office tower in Boston had a serious problem--there was a brown stain coming through the drywall, (all of the drywall) no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty-story building, if you have to rip out all the drywall, this is a multi-million-dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired my professor in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, "I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed." They instantly signed on, because if he succeeded, the project would be saved. My professor asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware store chemical and handed it to them. "Here, this will work. And then he billed them $45,000. That's quite an hourly wage. It's also quite a bargain."
James Cameron has great stories too. After he submitted a cut of Avatar to 20th Century Fox, he met the studio execs.
"Why is the flying scene so long?" one executive asked. "It doesn't advance the narrative or the character."
Cameron replied, "You're right on every count. You've ticked every box, like a good studio executive, but guess what? I want to see it. And if I want to see it, my cognitive leap is there are going to be other people that want to see it. It turned out that the flying is what the audience loved the most, in terms of our exit polling and data gathering."
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