Great companies have secrets, specific reasons for success other people don’t see. And you can’t find secrets without looking for them. Here is a little story which might set you up for a secret quest in your company.

“Andrew Wiles demonstrated this when he proved Fermat’s Last Theorem after 358 years of fruitless inquiry by other mathematicians-the kind of sustained failure that might have suggested an inherently impossible task. Pierre de Fermat had conjectured in 1637 that no integers a, b, and c could satisfy the equation

a” + 6″ = c” for any integer n greater than 2. He claimed to have a proof, but he died without writing it down, so his conjecture long remained a major unsolved problem in mathematics.

Wiles started working on it in 1986, but he kept it a secret until 1993, when he knew he was nearing a solution. After nine years of hard work, Wiles proved the conjecture in 1995. He needed brilliance to succeed, but he also needed a faith in secrets.

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”