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Winning is everything. Because it is. Every day, in everything you do, your wins are waiting for you. They’re everywhere. But they won’t wait forever. Stop waiting to be told what you can and can’t do. Stop watching others win while you stand on the sidelines wondering when it’s going to be your turn. Your turn is now. Long-term goals are great… but “long term” isn’t promised to anyone. Your skills and opportunities have an expiration date. If you want something, go get it now. I get so frustrated with those who say they want to win, but show no urgency or drive to actually do it, as if they’ll have unlimited years and opportunities to figure it out. As if it’s just going to happen eventually. To me, a sense of urgency is the ultimate distinction between those who win and those who watch others win.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
And yet the world came close to nuclear war. Each was directing his military to carry on provocative activities—on the Soviet side, making the missiles operational on a crash basis in Cuba and sending submarine patrols in the Caribbean; on the American side, pursuing all preparations for an invasion of Cuba and pressing aggressive low-level aerial reconnaissance over Cuba while harassing Soviet submarines. Each of them was prolonging the crisis day by day while they haggled over the resolution of the conflict, each hoping to achieve better terms than he was prepared, at bottom, to accept. If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was “very reasonable”—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
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