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My berating continued: “Ev, let me explain something to you. You took the most important part of a blog post—the body of the post, the contents—and you removed it, leaving only the subject line. Every idiot in the world will now think they are a blogger and they will be on even footing with all the other writers, except now we’ll all be writing headlines!” Ev explained to me exactly why I was wrong, but I cut him off and told him, “No, Ev, you’re wrong and I would never, ever invest in something as inane and pointless as Twitter.” That was a $50 million mistake. Fifty. Million. Dollars. It was at that point I realized that I didn’t need to know if the idea would be successful. I only needed to know if the person would be. It was clear as day to me that whatever Ev worked on would be successful, but my own ego and my need to be right and understand everything got in the way of me hitting my first big home run. Since then, I’ve stopped trying to understand what will work and what won’t, and instead I use my Jedi powers to understand how strong the Force is in the founder. I’m here so you don’t repeat my mistakes. Especially not the $50 million ones.
national ambitions stirred him, he became a man who spanned regions. He was not of the South but of the West, he could pilot civil rights legislation through the Congress, he could heal, he could understand the heartache of both sides, and also he had genuine ability. In discussing his own presidential race, Jack Kennedy had said that he had a right to run for it; no one else had more ability except Lyndon, and Lyndon could never make it because he was a Southerner. The prejudice against him never disappeared, and the sense of prejudice, the hurt always remained in Johnson, made him more interesting and, curiously, more sensitive. Even when he was placed on the ticket in 1960 he was put there to help Easterners, first Jack, who would hold office for eight years, and then perhaps Bobby. And he felt the pain of those three years of the Vice-Presidency; President Kennedy had been particularly aware of his sensibilities, but not everyone else was so sensitive (except for Rusk, who shared the same origins, humiliations and enemies). Johnson, who had always known about one thing, power, who held it and who did not, knew that as Vice-President he was a living lie, that his title was bigger than his role, that he did not have power, that younger, faster men with no titles held and exercised more power. And then suddenly, shockingly, he was President, the awkward easy-to-caricature Southerner replacing the beloved handsome slain Eastern President, shot down in Dallas, a hated city in Johnson’s own Texas. That did not ease his own sense of the prejudice against him as he acceded. So the perfectly prepared and trained and tuned parliamentary leader moved into the most public office in the world, an entirely different office for which all his previous training was in some ways meaningless, indeed the wrong training; he had learned many of the wrong things. The Presidency is a very different power center; it is not a particularly good place from which to perform private manipulation and to do good things for the folks in spite of themselves. It is at its best when a President identifies what he is and what he seeks as openly as possible, and then slowly bends public opinion toward it. If the President is found manipulating or pressuring a lower figure, putting too much pressure on a congressman, it can easily, and rather damagingly, backfire. Harry Truman was a success in the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they being in general the inadequacies of most normal mortal men, and he made his limitations his assets; the American people had a sense of identification with him and what he was trying to do. Franklin Roosevelt was a fine back-room manipulator, but he always had a sense of the public part of his office, of it as a pulpit, and he used the rhythms of radio expertly in seeming to bring the public into his confidence. Lyndon Johnson never could.…
The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam
“If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the background, it ruins what you are concentrating on,” said the neuroscientist who ran the experiments for the show. “Even though you are not aware at the time, the brain responds to distractions.”
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