Laurence Olivier

What failed

In 1964, while running a new national theatre company and playing Othello, he began suffering panic attacks on stage rooted in a fear of forgetting his lines. He had to ask fellow actors not to look him in the eye. The attacks worsened over the following decade, constricting the muscles of his mouth and throat.

What happened next

He did not stop. He kept performing and kept running the company, controlling the panic with Valium for two years — until a colleague spotted that the drug was itself causing the memory lapses and persuaded him to quit it. He worked until his death.

The point

The fear never fully went away and he did the work regardless. He also got the remedy wrong for years, which is the honest version of iterating: you try a fix, it fails, someone tells you, you change it.