我们知道结局，他不知道

One of my favourite photos of the past few years shows Elon Musk crouching over the wreckage of an early Falcon 1 after a failed launch. Today it looks inspiring because we know what came next. At the time it wasn't inspiring at all. SpaceX was founded in 2002. The first Falcon 1 launch in 2006 failed, the second in 2007 failed, and the third in 2008 failed too. By then SpaceX had money for only one more launch, Tesla was also running out of cash, the financial crisis had arrived, and Musk had put almost everything he had into both companies. On 28 September 2008 the fourth launch reached orbit, and a few months later NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth about US$1.6 billion. The lesson isn't just don't give up. SpaceX didn't simply try again; each time it found the cause, fixed it and retried. After three failures its success rate was zero, and a rational person might have said stop. Failure is often linear, costing a bit of money and time each time, while success can be non-linear, repricing years of effort in one breakthrough. What moves me most is that the man in the photo didn't know whether he would succeed. We know the ending; he didn't. You don't need to know whether you'll win. You just need to stay at the table and get closer to the answer each time.