If you aim at nothing, it's easy to hit.
I have such respect for taking a chance, regardless of whether it pays off.

Actually, I am a scab who crash landed in the Gulch. You will learn about scabs later on in the book. Thus, I am not the appropriate person to welcome you.

Thank you!

Your reaction is the appropriate response to reading Atlas Shrugged when living in a society that devalues our values. Welcome to the Gulch!

It is as if a part of my experience that felt missing since childhood was only buried, but buried alive. It is as if that missing, profound and powerful part of my experience has been restored. Is it just coincidence that it occurred while reading AS? I can''t say.

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.” - Now deceased former national champion NC State basketball coach Jim Valvano

My pain was his pain. That's a real man!

I think a man who cannot cry is not really a man. My father, a half-breed American Indian (Comanche) cried when his mother died. I had an injury to my hand and he was charged with the treatment of helping me and I saw tears in his eyes.

I shed no tears over the deaths of my parents and siblings, hence my self-characterization as cold, heartless and callous. But man! Relating to the challenges I'm facing with my invention, I felt like bawling over Hank's and Dagney's challenges.

I read AS during my businesses failure and finish it very close to my company's last breath. Tears never came over me but I do remember the feeling, a slap on the noggin like the old V8 commercial, over the sobering realization that my business philosophy, my mindset guiding key decisions, had they been more aligned and proper with Rand, may have prevented my financial collapse or lessened it.

Hindsight is 20/20 and painful lessons are seldom, if ever, forgotten (at least for rational folks).

I'm amazed at how her writing has evoked such strong feelings in me; clear genius IMO.

I don't think I shed any tears. Lots of nodding about how close she got to events that are in the news today. Amazing that her experience with the Soviet Union gave her the prescience to write that in the 1950's.

Oh, yeah, there were also some people in the book (and their analogs today) that I thought deserved to be destroyed. The collapse if the Taggart Tunnel didn't claim nearly enough. And there hasn't been an analog in today's world. So far ...