Nobody is destined for greatness.

Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he walked home with his cloak pulled over his face, certain his public life had ended before it started.What he did next settled the rest of his career. He dug out an underground study and shaved half his head, so that he'd stay indoors at his exercises for months, too ashamed to be seen. He crammed pebbles into his mouth and made himself speak around them. Climbing steep ground, he recited long passages, and he pitched his voice against the crash of the sea so that a hostile crowd could never break his rhythm again. He walked out of that hole as the finest orator Greece produced, the man who roused Athens against Philip of Macedon.Nobody handed him any of it. He built it out of repeated failure and a stubborn refusal to accept the verdict of one bad afternoon.The story we keep tellingWe tell ourselves a…