In her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand describes this commitment to one's highest potential, understood as she understands it, as something reverent and sacred, and the human potential as something to worship. She explains that these terms belong in a rational philosophy, because they capture a man's dedication to a moral ideal. They apply to the heroic in man.

"Heroism" is not a perspective a heroic person would take on himself. He seeks only to live up to the best possible. But the term refers, from outside, to that person's success in exemplifying a moral ideal. The term designates the "exceptional", but this need not be a statistical exception. A rational ideal is the exceptional only as measured against all other possibilities taken together. As a rational ideal, Ayn Rand's vision of moral greatness is open to everyone. ...

I have observed--to speak now in my own voice--that good people sometimes fail to reach the view of the universe and of human possibility that we have been discussing, because, on the issue of life's possibilities, they have insufficient trust in their own judgment and their own souls. They base their view of what's possible--in the building of one's character, in love relationships, in life in general--on what they see in the people around them, and not on what they see in their own souls as possible to man and to themselves. As a result, they miss out on so much in life. With this issue in mind, and for all my readers, I would like to conclude with lines from the end of John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged, where Ayn Rand, too, is speaking to us all.

[4th-to-the-last and 3rd-to-the-last paragraphs of John Galt's speech: e.g., "Do not let your fire go out," "Do not let the hero in your soul perish," "The world you desired can be won," "Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life ..."]