Colonel Sanders — Age 65, the 1,009th Door

Colonel Sanders in his white suit is the world's most famous symbol of late blooming. His life was turbulent: job after job, and the roadside restaurant he finally built was bled dry when the highway was rerouted. At sixty-five, he was left with a small pension and a method for frying chicken.

At an age when most consider closing up shop, he loaded his recipe and pressure cooker into his car and toured America's restaurants: "Adopt my method; pay me a little per chicken sold." The count of rejections, as the story goes: 1,009. The 1,010th door said yes — and that franchising seed grew into KFC's tens of thousands of stores.

Consider the number: at 100 rejections most doubt the recipe; at 500, themselves. To knock past 1,000 required unclouded faith in his chicken. If you truly believe in your product, rejections are merely a count — and if you haven't reached 1,009, statistically you haven't even earned the right to quit.

What do you work for?