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All of the greats I’ve worked with—MJ, Kobe, Dwyane, Scottie, Charles, Hakeem, and so many others—understood the power of isolation. Not just as the inability to go out in public places for fear of causing a security issue, but as a mental state. No matter how many fans and cameras followed them around—regardless of how many were always watching their every move—they knew a huge part of their success was the ability to be mentally alone. Same for the executives and entrepreneurs I work with; each has a method for creating space and silence around himself or herself. The insurance executive who starts her day before the family gets up, so she has a couple of hours to think and plan without interruption… the pharmaceutical CEO who built a private gym for himself so he can work out in total solitude… the music producer who learned to fly his own airplane so he can literally take off and get away… they all crave silence and solitude. That’s their time to think, to plan, to escape the noise and chaos and demands of the outside world. Winning teaches you isolation. Because no one can understand what you’re going through.
Whenever I offered any plan that would give the other teams a fighting chance against them, the Yankees always cried socialism, the first refuge of scoundrels. I say it is not socialism to tighten competition; I say it is capitalism at its best. The essence of capitalism is competition, and there is no competition when you are playing with a stacked deck. Weiss made his reputation by starting off so far ahead of the field every year that he almost had to break a leg to lose. The fallacy of this kind of “competition” is that it doesn’t really help the Yankees either. We are in a strange business; we are in competition and yet we are partners. Weak teams like Washington, Kansas City and Los Angeles are a drag on all of us.
Veeck--as in Wreck
Bill Veeck, Ed Linn
He had noticed, however, that when reports of a battle were printed, his newspapers sold faster than on other days, and then he could barely carry enough copies of the papers to the train. He therefore made it his practice to go to the composing room of the Detroit Free Press and inquire what the headlines were on the advance galley proofs for that day’s edition, so that he might better estimate his needs. Necessity and early experience in hawking produce had given him a shrewd commercial sense. One day in April, 1862, the first accounts of an immense and sanguinary battle between the armies of Grant and Johnston at Shiloh reached the newspaper office by telegraph. Learning of this before the newspaper was out (and before the evening train left for Port Huron), the trainboy conceived the idea of a splendid little stroke of business for himself. The proofs he had seen showed that the Free Press would carry huge display heads announcing a battle in which 60,000 were then believed to have been killed and wounded! Here was a chance for enormous sales, if only the people along the line could know what had happened. Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I rushed off to the telegraph operator and gravely made a proposition which he received just as gravely. At Edison’s request, a short bulletin was to be wired by the Detroit train dispatcher to the railroad stations along the road to Port Huron, and the telegraphers there would be asked to chalk them up on bulletin boards in the depots, before the train arrived. For this free telegraph service Tom Edison would pay the friendly Detroit telegrapher with gifts of some merchandise, newspapers, and magazine subscriptions. Thus forearmed, the boy went to the office of the newspaper’s managing editor, Wilbur F. Storey, to ask for a thousand copies of the paper, an uncommonly large assignment, since usually he took but two hundred, and he asked for this on credit. He had boldly marched up to Mr. Storey himself, because the man in charge of distribution had rebuffed him. The managing editor examined the ragged boy whose expression, however, was resolute enough. “I was a pretty cheeky boy, and felt desperate,” he himself recalled later. The authorization was given him and, with the help of another boy, he lugged huge bundles of the newspaper to the train and folded them up. His device of having advance bulletins telegraphed and posted at the depots worked even better than he had hoped. In his own vivacious way Edison related: When I got to the first station on the run... the platform was crowded with men and women. After one look at the crowd I raised the price to ten cents. I sold thirty-five papers. At Mount Clemens, where I usually sold six papers, the crowd was there too... I raised the price from ten cents to fifteen... It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train about one quarter of a mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand to…
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