This shape moves from one personal goal to the next, taking real risks for each, and wants every finish to happen where other people can see it. Because a goal only counts once it is reached, a long one can mean years of work with nothing yet to show.
In ordinary life
A law student in Split has swum a new crossing of the Adriatic each summer for five years, each route picked over the winter, with a judge in a boat beside her writing down the time.
A wedding photographer in Mexico City has spent his savings on a new personal project every two years, first a book of street portraits and then one of night markets, and has opened each with a public show.
A grandmother in Lyon has cycled to a different European capital every spring since she stopped work, and the town paper has printed a photo of each arrival.
Lives with this shape
None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.
Phileas Fogg (fiction)
In Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Phileas Fogg bets twenty thousand pounds at his London club that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and must be back in the club by a quarter to nine on 21 December. One chosen goal, a fixed finish and witnesses waiting at the end show the shape from outside.
Junko Tabei reached the top of Everest on 16 May 1975, the first woman to do so, on a climb paid for in part by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon Television. In 1992 she became the first woman to stand on the highest peak of every continent. A run of separate goals, each finished in public view, shows the shape from outside.
The Perennial shares three of these sides and differs on what done means: it wants the contest to go on, while this shape wants a finish and then a new goal.
One side away
Each shares three sides with this shape. On the right is the side it has instead.