Yeager

I have been reading about Yeager.  What I have read has piqued my interest to know more.  Apparently the movie “The Right Stuff” was about him.  I have not seen it, but I intend to.
It is his answers to questions that has aroused my interest.  Asked if he would fly again he said, “If I do I will, and if I don’t, I won’t.”  Asked who the second-best pilot was (all pilots apparently believe they are the best) he replied, “if they are alive, they are a good pilot.”  Finally he asked someone how long he could go on doing what he was doing, and he was told he should have been dead three years before. 
Apparently, he had a really thick accent, and had trouble constructing sentences.  His first wife said when she first met him, she understood about one in three words.
I am interested in him, not because he was the status quo, but because he was out of the box.  Certainly, certain criteria needed to be met, but his thinking was that if that was all there was, then that only led to someone being spat out of the system.
Ok, my thinking is weird, but this lead me to table tennis and our health and safety.  Apparently it is big here.  We really look after our athletes.  We very much need to, as there are so few of us.  In China it is different.  It is like a production line.  There are thousands.  Fall off the perch for any reason, and there are a multitude ready to take your place.
I am all for following the system, but it is what is out of the box that sets something apart.  If I only pursue accepted norms, I will be one of many.  If I do something out of the ordinary, I will stand out.  It is important I do not do stuff for its own sake, but I should not hold back because “it hasn’t been done.”
I can only talk about my experience.  Our table tennis club was seen as exceptional.  There is a whole back story concerning our committee, but we did not think like a typical club. If we were typical, we would have been like most clubs. We were not typical.  What we did was different.  Because of it, we stood out.  Thankfully too, we were successful.  Success seems to speak for itself.
I want to know more about Yeager.  Being different for its own sake to me is meaningless.  Being different and succeeding, makes me ask, “why?”