Ross Perot, 1930-

 

Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.

Born in Texarkana, Texas to a father who worked as a cotton broker, Ross Perot could have lived and died in obscurity like thousands before him. But from a young age, Perot’s ambition set him apart. He became an Eagle Scout in high school and then attended the Naval Academy where he helped establish the school’s honor code and became class president and battalion commander.
After leaving the Navy, Perot became a salesman for IBM. Perot quickly distinguished himself from the pack, filling the year’s sales quota in two weeks. Full of entrepreneurial ideas, but ignored by the higher ups, Perot left IBM in 1962 to found his own company, Electronic Data Systems. Things started off rocky; Perot’s initial attempts to sell their data processing services to corporations resulted in 77 rejections. Yet Perot persisted, won EDS government contracts, and turned the company into a technology powerhouse. EDS was eventually bought by GM for a cool 700 million. Not content to rest on his business laurels, Perot began to involve himself in political policy issues, an interest that culminated in his famous run for the presidency in 1992. Garnering the largest percentage of the popular vote as a third party candidate since TR’s run in 1912, Perot’s success surprised the pundits and assuredly a lot of folks back in Texarkana.

And there's so much more. When Jimmie's 1980 mission to rescue the embassy personnel in Tehran failed miserably Ross mounted- despite US gov prohibition-  a successful mission and rescued his EDS people from prison in Tehran. The 1992 run was retaliation for the 1980 Gov interference.