Steven Bradbury appeared lucky when he won gold for Australia in the short track speed skating final at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The whole story, however, implies that it wasn’t just luck, but hard work and persistence, that led him to win.  This week, Mark shares the story behind Steven Bradbury’s win. […]

Micheal Phelps broke both his personal record and the world record when he won the men’s 400m Individual Medley Final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Four years later, he battled for 4th place in the same event. Don’t become complacent, it takes hard work to stay on top. A few years ago, Shawn was working […]

The story of how James Dyson designed and produced the first bagless vacuum cleaner is one of perseverance and iteration. We know the ending of this story, but the fifteen years which precede it are well worth sharing for the insights they offer into innovation. Most of us know the Dyson brand. Their vacuum cleaners, […]

It takes a lot of hard work and persistence to do something great. Naturally, if the goal is a big one it’s going to be harder to achieve. You just don’t want to give up and find out that you were close to achieving it. This week, Mark tells a story about the Colorado gold […]

It’s Mark’s turn to share a story, and so he tells a great one of how Janusz Kamiemski wanted to come to Australia but didn’t think he had any chance of doing so. It’s a great example of persistence with a twist at the end. He told the story at a TedX, so if you […]

Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in luck, and he found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. His friend and fellow signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, shared this belief in hard work and self development. From a remarkably young age Franklin understood the importance of practice. Not the kind […]

In 1993, as the co-founder of photographic library startup, I travelled to Los Angeles to check out one of America’s largest commercial photographic collections. Remarkably they were well under way converting their film stock to Kodak PhotoCD, a proprietary digital format launched the year before. We were impressed with Eastman Kodak because it looked like […]

I’m thoroughly enjoying reading Influencer at the moment and the story of Dr Everett Rogers grabbed my attention. After finishing his PhD his first job was to help Iowa farmers adopt a new strain of corn which promised much higher yields. He spoke to many farmers and couldn’t get a single one to try out […]

There was a boy who was born without a right arm. On his ninth birthday he asked his parents if he could join a karate club. They were delighted by the idea and the boy quickly became a regular at the local dojo. The boy wanted to compete in a tournament and asked his master […]