Exceptional entrepreneurs know that everything is possible for those who believe. They don’t need to see to believe. It is because they believe that they eventually see. Mark 9:23 Jesus said to him, “If you can! Everything is possible for one who believes.” It was thanks to the precise calculations of Katherine Johnson that man was able to walk on the moon. Hired as a “calculator” by the organization that would later become NASA, her job was to perform complicated and tedious calculations all day long, based on formulas written by engineers. She calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s flight, the first American to travel to space, in 1961.

Before his first orbital flight in 1962, John Glenn demanded that Katherine Johnson verify the calculations, having more confidence in her calculations than in the 30 operations carried out by NASA’s brand-new electronic computers. Katherine Johnson’s greatest pride was calculating the launch window for the Apollo mission. The success of Neil Armstrong’s mission to and from the moon depended on the work of Katherine Johnson and her colleagues, which he had to follow to the letter. If he deviated by just one degree, the mission would have failed.

Katherine Johnson was certainly not the only calculator with the abilities to make space travel a reality. However, she stood out due to her faith in the task and all the obstacles of segregated America.

In my youth, I believed that certain things were destined for a certain category of people. I was convinced that people who achieved great things did so because God had chosen them among all human beings. I therefore believed that my parents, as well as most of my relatives, failed because God had not chosen them as achievers.

This way of attributing success and failure to God’s will was the mindset of almost everyone around me. This way of thinking prevented me from taking any initiative to improve my living conditions. I told myself that those who received the grace to achieve great things had the duty to take care of me and all those who had not been selected by God for that. My mindset began to change with the reading of biographies of different successful entrepreneurs.

The more I studied their different paths, the more I realized that many of them had grown up in poor families; but despite this, they knew that everything was possible for them. This faith translated into the great visions and projects they dared to develop in their minds. They saw themselves at the head of large companies and began to prepare for it with the means they had at their disposal. They sought information, people, and circumstances that could bring them closer to realizing their dreams. By constantly moving towards their dreams, they ended up achieving them…

This text is an excerpt from the book “THE MINDSET OF EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE” written by Dominique MBOG.

We invite you to read the following article “It Is Important To Develop Potential“.