There is an old image of public failure, older than any business book, and it isn't the crash or the bankruptcy. It's the half-built tower.
Somebody laid a foundation. Big one, by the look of it. Then the money ran out, or the will did, and now the thing just stands there at the edge of town — not a building, not a plan, a monument to the gap between the two. And here's the cruel part: nobody who walks past it remembers what it was going to be. The vision is invisible. The only thing visible is that its builder began and could not finish.
Nobody mocks a small tower. A small tower with a roof on it is a building — people live in it, work in it, point to it. The mockery is reserved entirely for the abandoned one. The world has never once punished a founder for building something modest and finishing it. It punishes the beginning that goes nowhere, publicly, every time.