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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Sir Roger Bannister: To everybody's surprise, I was put in a team. It was a dreadful winter in 1947. Historically, there's never been a winter like it since. The track was frozen. They couldn't have trials. So, I couldn't prove that I could be in the team. My previous best time was about five minutes. You know, won a freshman's race. But, I had been seen shoveling away the snow rather vigorously. So the captain -- and sport is entirely run by students in Oxford -- the captain said, "Well look, just as a third string." That means the third runner who is not expected to do anything. "Why don't we put him in?" And they put me in. Then on the race itself, I just overtook all the rest of the field and won, which at the time was 30 seconds faster than I had done before, but very modest of course, four and a half minutes. That was the beginning of an eight-year process in which every year I improved and then after eight years I was near the world record. And, then on the eighth year, broke it. I had qualified as a doctor six weeks later. I tidied up one or two other races. My record was broken by an Australian, John Landy. Then John Landy and I had to compete head-to-head in what was then called the Empire Games, when we still had a bit of an empire. That is now the Commonwealth games. I then defeated him. So my honor was satisfied. I had another European race and then retired and never ran again competitively.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
For example, I knew I wasn't going to be an obstetrician, and there were certain areas of medicine which could be reduced to formulae. You know, "There are six complications of this condition " and once you had mastered that, it was not too difficult where you had to deliver some babies and things. So I would tend to take about two hours off to travel to a track, spend about 35 minutes running, but running very hard and then just have a shower, didn't warm up, didn't warm down, had a shower, would get something to eat and get back to the hospital by two o'clock. So that was really the pattern for several years with, of course, intervals for traveling to matches and team. So, it was a major incursion into my medical studies, and I think that -- although I passed all my examinations the first time and so on -- I did not pay as much attention in depth to clinical medicine as I had to my physiology. But in the long-term, I simply had to catch up after qualifying by studying for the various higher exams which our specialist physicians and neurologists need to do.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Ehud Barak: I believe that I already came from my childhood with the kind of feeling somehow that the fact that I'm slightly different doesn't mean that I'm worse. Or somehow -- it doesn't create -- should not kind of deter me from trying to do things. It's just a matter of fact. I cannot throw the ball through the basket so I cannot become a basketball player. But it somehow did not deter me. Somehow I came out of childhood with kind of a self-confident -- or not self-confidence in things that I cannot do, but kind of calibrated assessment of what I can do, and with a basic sense of direction of what I can do, a sense of judgment.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
And under battle, under exercises, it's unbelievably -- the simplest operations become unbelievably tough. It's like burden on all the people. People become paralyzed. Some of them that were so kind of easy going and kind of hyper before battle become totally paralyzed. They don't hear well. They tend -- everyone tends to stay behind cover. To move a unit to assault is infinitely complicated. You know, it's -- first of all, personally you are paralyzed by the shooting. You are confident that once you raise your head over you will get a bullet at your head. It's only the eyes of your own soldiers that you know that they know that you are committed to lead them. They expect you to do something. You cannot avoid it. You cannot leave there and leave them kind of paralyzed.
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
I got a job working in a sawmill over the vacation to get money to go around Europe. And in the sawmill, there was a big dumpster, an empty dumpster, empty except for an old calculator which had these rows of buttons. I had this dream of putting together a computer terminal. So I heaved it out and took it home and removed those buttons and then relabeled them with a QWERTY keyboard and then put sort of diode matrices on the back to produce the right code, binary code for each number. So that gave me the keyboard. Then I went down to the TV store and asked the guy whether he had any TVs which he could give me for cheap which had a working monitor, but where the radio frequency tuner had broken. He rolled his eyes and said yeah, he sure did have lots like that. I could take my pick. I actually got two.
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
In 1991, '92, every day I'd have to decide whether to write some code, or go and persuade somebody else to write some code, or write some documentation, or persuade somebody else to write some documentation, or go and give a motivating talk somewhere explaining what the whole thing is supposed to be about, or try to argue with administration for funds or resources or whatever it takes. Today, everything -- the same sort of choices exist all the time, and I have to balance my time and find more things. Some things are more motivating than others, but I find to stay sane I have to keep working with other people, and I have to keep programming. I have to keep involved with the actual design.
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