11. P.T. Barnum
via biography.com
“How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?”
It’s certainly not the master showman’s most known quote; that would be “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but it does reveal a lot of insight into one of the world’s great entrepreneurs and self-made men. One of Barnum’s early schemes was to create the circus sideshow promising amazing things people had never seen. When he couldn’t keep topping himself the honest way, he just started faking it, creating oddities like the “Fiji Mermaid,” which was just a monkey’s head sewn onto the body of a fish. His lasting influence though is as the creator of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus. During an 1890 show, he suffered a stroke and died a few months later in April of 1891.
10. Leonardo da Vinci
via hdwallpapersnew.net
“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
Whoa! Hold on a second! The guy who painted the Mona Lisa and the guy who painted The Last Supper didn’t think he did enough? In examining some of his drawings, people have given him credit for creating the first drafts for inventions that would come to be known as the parachute, the helicopter and the tank. He didn’t think he did enough? How demanding was da Vinci’s father? Hopefully he was simply being humble and didn’t actually think he hadn’t lived up to his potential since we’re still talking about him 500 years later.
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