In the end, I had to pay $3.3 million dollars to buy back that 90%.

At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting – I carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared to affect them. We knew, however, that they would eventually drift to sufficiently high altitudes to be destroyed by solar radiation. The question was not only what destroys them, but more importantly, what the consequences are.

Failure is the most likely outcome of entrepreneurship. Hence there is absolutely nothing wrong with failure. It is the default outcome. Success on the other hand is rare and unpredictable. Very few find it. However what can help entrepreneurs succeed is when an ecosystem learns from failure.

My contemporaries were more upset about the Nobel than I was not to be recognised. One of them labelled it the 'No-Bell' prize! But it was fine by me. There's no Nobel Prize in astronomy and I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

The first thing to recommend is that they don’t work in some place that they don’t like, that they don’t do things that they don’t like. That they look for what they really want to do and what kind of thing they want to be involved in, or if they want to go it alone by themselves, to find that.

It takes a combination of ways to do these things, more than discipline. It’s a way of life. It’s like diet or gymnastics. You can know all the gymnastic things, all the exercises. You can know all the diets, but if you don’t do the diets, if you don’t do the exercise, it won’t work. It’s the same if you have some rules, but you don’t live them. It doesn’t work.