london, july 1977. a 32-year-old reggae singer was diagnosed with acral lentiginous melanoma in his right big toe. the surgery his doctors offered would have saved his life. he refused on religious grounds. three years and ten months later bob marley was dead at 36. february 6 1945. nine mile, saint ann parish, jamaica. norval marley was a 60-year-old white english quartermaster. cedella booker was an 18-year-old black jamaican. they had one son. norval saw him three times before he died. the child grew up poor enough to walk barefoot to school. he was a rastafarian by 17. the faith reads the body as sacred and unalterable. the same reading rules out removing flesh, even to stop cancer. when the london doctors told him in 1977 that the melanoma in his toe was metastasizing, he chose a nail bed graft and partial removal of the nail instead. the cancer kept spreading. 1980. madison square garden. the wailers played two sold-out nights on the uprising tour. the next morning he went jogging in central park with friends. he collapsed. the doctors at sloan kettering told him the cancer was now in his lungs, his liver, and his brain. he was 35 years old. he flew to bavaria. doctor josef issels offered alternative therapy in a clinic outside rosenheim. laetrile, ozone injections, vegetable juice. marley followed the protocol for seven months while his weight dropped from 175 to 90 pounds. his hair fell out. he kept making music. he recorded the demo of "redemption song" at this stage on a cassette in his hospital bed. may 1981. the issels treatment failed. he asked to be flown home to jamaica. he made it as far as miami. cedars of lebanon hospital, miami. may 11 1981. he turned to his son ziggy and said "money can't buy life." he died at 11:45 that morning. he was 36. his funeral in jamaica eight days later was a state event. prime minister edward seaga gave the eulogy. michael manley gave the second. half a million people lined the route from kingston to nine mile. he was buried with his guitar, a soccer ball, a bible, and a stalk of cannabis. he had 11 children with 7 women. four of them perform reggae today. ziggy alone has won 8 grammys. the family runs an estate worth an estimated 200 million dollars in licensing alone. in 1999 time magazine named exodus the greatest album of the 20th century. it was recorded in london two months after the diagnosis the doctors told him would kill him in 18 months. the toe was the start. religion was the choice. the world has been singing his songs every day since.

lou gehrig benched himself. on may 2 1939, halfway through a season, the iron horse who had played 2,130 games in a row took himself out of the lineup for the simple reason that he was getting too slow at first base. that day was the last he ever played in the major leagues. gehrig signed with the yankees at 19. he was so broke growing up that he didn't have proper equipment. one $1,500 bonus check later, he was the cleanup hitter behind ruth in the murderers' row lineup. he hit 23 grand slams. nobody beat that record for 81 years until alex rodriguez did it in 2013. he was the first american league player to hit four home runs in a single game. june 3 1932 against philadelphia. only 18 players have ever done it. he played hurt and never told anyone. medical records on him later revealed 17 separate healed fractures in his hands. he never missed a single game for any of them. what nobody at yankee stadium knew on july 4 1939: gehrig had been examined at the mayo clinic 15 days earlier. the prognosis was als, and it was unforgiving. his speech that afternoon wasn't fully recorded. only fragments survived in newsreels. what got remembered was the line he closed with: 'today, i consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.' his uniform number was retired that same afternoon. number 4. it was the first number ever retired in major league baseball history. they invented the practice for him. he passed 23 months later in his bronx home. june 2 1941. he was 37. the condition has carried his name for 85 years.

satoru iwata was the only person at nintendo who could write code. in 1999 the pokemon gold and silver dev team came to him with a problem. the game was too big for the game boy cartridge… he rewrote it himself in a week. then because he had room left over, he added the entire kanto region from pokemon red and blue as a bonus second half. nobody had ever done that before. nobody has done it since. in 1994 he had already saved earthbound. nintendo was about to cancel the game. iwata rebuilt the engine in months and salvaged two years of work. he started at hal laboratory as a college student programming balloon fight in his bedroom. by thirty-three he was president of hal, taking over a company near bankrupt and running it back to profit. in 2002 he became the fourth president of nintendo. in 2005 he gave a gdc keynote called heart of a gamer and said the line every developer remembers. on my business card i am a corporate president. in my mind i am a game developer. but in my heart i am a gamer. in 2014 nintendo was bleeding money. western executives would have laid off thousands. iwata took a 50 percent pay cut for five months instead. zero layoffs. that same year he was diagnosed with a bile duct tumor. he had surgery. he returned to work. he kept recording nintendo direct presentations through chemo. he died on july 11 2015. he was fifty-five. the switch launched twenty months later. he never saw it. he never stopped being a gamer. that is why he is the only ceo gamers ever genuinely loved.

in 1990 he convinced nasa to turn voyager 1 around and photograph earth from six billion kilometers away. our planet showed up as a single pixel... he called it the pale blue dot. he wrote that every saint, every sinner, every emperor, every farmer, every dreamer you have ever heard of had lived their whole life on that one piece of dust. before that, he chaired the committee that decided what humanity should send to anyone who might find us. two voyager spacecraft. one golden record on each. music from 27 cultures, 55 greetings, the sound of a kiss. ann druyan was on his team. while sagan was traveling, she quietly had her own brain waves and her own heart sounds recorded for the disc, while specifically thinking about being in love with him. they were not a couple yet. those neural patterns are now traveling through interstellar space at thirty-six thousand miles per hour. he and ann married soon after. she is still alive. in 1985 he testified before the us senate about the greenhouse effect. thirteen years before kyoto. forty years before any of it would be a normal thing to argue about. his peers in the national academy of sciences kept refusing to elect him. they thought making the universe legible to taxi drivers and the merely curious was beneath the profession. 500 million people across sixty countries watched cosmos. he was the most famous scientist on earth and the academy still said no. he never actually said billions and billions. that line was johnny carson doing him on the tonight show. december 20, 1996. pneumonia. age 62. ann was holding his hand. if voyager 1 is ever opened, the loudest signal on the disc is a woman thinking about him. what carl sagan moment first made the universe feel real to you?

the nfl handed out 198 picks before one of these guys. 7 rings. 4 mvps. the all-time rushing lead. the all-time receiving yards. a 6th rounder with two super bowl mvps. the 5 greatest draft steals ever. who's your biggest miss to add?

jim henson was 19 years old when he made kermit the frog out of his mother's old green coat. 35 years later he signed a 150 million dollar deal with disney and didn't get to see it close. how much he built in between is easy to forget… september 24 1936, greenville mississippi. born james maury henson. his family moves to maryland when he is a boy 1954. freshman year at university of maryland. he starts building puppets for fun. may 11 1955. sam and friends premieres on WRC-TV in washington dc. he is 19 years old. the show runs 6 years 1955. he sews kermit the frog out of a light green coat his mother no longer wears. ping pong balls cut in half for eyes. he performs with this same puppet for the next 35 years november 10 1969. sesame street premieres. his muppets are in the very first episode. he invents a new style of tv puppetry where only the puppet's head appears on screen and the performer stays below the frame september 18 1976. the muppet show premieres. 120 episodes. syndicated to more than 100 countries. 4 emmy wins. june 22 1979. the muppet movie. 79 million dollars worldwide december 17 1982. the dark crystal. first feature film in history with no human actors on screen. january 10 1983. fraggle rock debuts. 96 episodes february 17 1990. he signs a 150 million dollar acquisition deal with disney. it is the peak of his career and his business life may 16 1990. he is 53 years old. the disney deal falls apart overnight. disney does not own the muppets until 2004, 14 years later may 21 1990. memorial service at the cathedral of st john the divine in new york. over 2000 people attend. the muppet performers sing the song "just one person" together he always said he preferred the word performer over puppeteer. a puppeteer hides. a performer gives you something. which jim henson moment, muppet, or movie still lives in your head the loudest?

steve jobs built the most valuable company on earth while making choices about his own mortality and his own family that the official narrative still struggles to explain: october 2003. diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. rare, treatable, operable. he delayed surgery for 9 months while trying a fruitarian diet, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. he later told walter isaacson he believed the delay let the cancer spread… his biological father was abdulfattah jandali, a syrian graduate student in wisconsin. jandali later ran a reno restaurant where jobs dined multiple times without either of them knowing. he met his biological sister, novelist mona simpson, for the first time at age 30 paternity of his first daughter lisa was established in a 1980 court case with a 94.1% DNA match. jobs publicly denied for years that she was his. then named the apple lisa computer after her while still denying it he was fired from the company he founded in september 1985 at age 30. the CEO he had personally recruited from pepsi with the line "do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life" cast the decisive vote june 12 2005 at stanford he gave the commencement address. opened by announcing he had cancer. closed with "stay hungry, stay foolish." delivered 14 months after his first surgery. he never sounded sick march 21 2009. liver transplant at methodist university hospital in memphis. he waited in tennessee for a donor match because its transplant list was shorter than california's he parked his silver mercedes in handicapped spaces at the apple campus and drove without a license plate. leased an identical car every 6 months to exploit a california rule that gave new vehicles 6 months before plates were required he dropped out of reed college after one semester in 1972 but kept auditing classes. a calligraphy class he sat in on, years later, became every proportional-spaced font the macintosh shipped october 5 2011, palo alto. respiratory arrest, age 56. his sister mona simpson's eulogy reported his final words: "oh wow. oh wow. oh wow." the man who convinced a generation that design was how something worked made some of the most consequential choices of his own life against his own best interests. and the company he built kept going anyway. which steve jobs story still surprises you?

the broken ankle isn't what makes tom cruise different. it's what he did ON PURPOSE that's even wilder: hung off the side of an airbus A400 during takeoff. lloyd's of london refused to insure it. he signed a personal liability waiver and did it anyway. age 52 jumped a motorcycle off a 40 meter cliff in norway. trained 5 hours a day for 4 months building grip strength to 200 pounds per hand. 13 takes to get the shot. he was 60 years old flew 225 F-18 super hornet missions for top gun maverick. 15 hours of flight training per week for 3 months. he was 58 held his breath underwater for 6 minutes 31 seconds. trained with a freediver for 31 days. 80 takes. most stunt doubles last 2-3 minutes the halo skydive took 872 jumps to get right. on take 106 he nearly collided with another skydiver at 15,000 feet. he was 55 climbed the outside of the burj khalifa at 1,680 feet with 40 mph winds. 20 takes. he was 48 the ankle jump in london took 7 weeks to recover from and cost paramount $1.5 million. he finished the take before telling anyone the man is 63 years old and still doing this. no cgi. no doubles. just commitment do you respect it, or is he built different?