I put off a book for 15 years and finished it before lunch. The notebook it came out of had been filling since 2013, which is the whole point: Johan Cruyff's academy, a bankrupt royalist's letters about clover, and a Vanderbilt grandson who kept every dollar all run the same pattern at different speeds.

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James Dyson built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times in an unheated coach house while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. Four years on one problem bought him a position nobody else could follow him into, and the same shape shows up in a Michigan State lab, a Johns Hopkins operating room and a Toyota plant.

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Napoleon's surgeon-in-chief had more wounded men than surgeons, so he threw rank out and sorted by injury instead. Alexander Kotov wrote the same move down for chess in 1971, and Henry Singleton ran Teledyne on it with no five-year plan.

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Each book Neil Gaiman writes gets written twice. He writes the first draft by hand, because a pen is slow enough to think a sentence all the way through, then types the whole thing up. Lucretius, Darwin's finches and Chris Rock all ran the same test.

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Day 389 the cold water stopped scaring me, and that is the day it stopped being a courage challenge. Clinicians call the mechanism exposure therapy: repeat the thing that frightens you until the fear drains out, then climb to the next rung.

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Five good habits can be one bet wearing five coats. Mine all covered my health, and nothing else in my life had any cover at all. Three hydraulic systems ran through one DC-10 tail, two flight computers ran one piece of software, and millions of banana plants were one plant repeated. Each looked like redundancy and each failed in a single stroke.

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Egypt dammed the Nile to stop the yearly flood, and two years later the sardine catch off the delta had fallen from about 15,000 tons to about 550. Britain tore out close to a million kilometers of hedgerow and now pays farmers to plant it back. India walked away from its stepwells until the taps started running dry. Three things that still worked, cut because nobody was watching them any more.

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Chris Ferguson had already won a World Series of Poker Main Event when he ran a fresh bankroll from zero to ten thousand dollars, and he never put more than 5 percent of it on a table. Poker players run four tests before they move up in stakes. The same four decide when to raise the floor on a daily habit, and passing them is still a separate question from whether you should.

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Coke swapped a recipe that worked and 40,000 people wrote in to complain. The bicycle, the honeycomb and the QWERTY keyboard each show a different way a design stops changing, and why touching a finished one costs you.

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Her best proof that her hair formula worked was her own bald head. She carried before-and-after photographs into church basements and told the story herself.

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