Pitching Ideas Quotes

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

How can you tell when someone loves the real you and not the idea of you?” “They see you at your lowest,” he said softly, pitching his voice so Cruz had no hope of overhearing, “and they don’t blink. They don’t offer you a hand up, they offer you a hand to hold while you rise on your own.

In its own way, the most harmful dragon we chase is the one that makes us think we can change things that are simply not ours to change. That someone decided not to fund your company, this isn’t up to you. But the decision to refine and improve your pitch? That is. That someone stole your idea or got to it first? No. To pivot, improve it, or fight for what’s yours? Yes.

The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.

Lo pitched Superheroes & Scones to his father as a marketing strategy for Halway Comics. But I know the idea has nothing to do with his company. What he did was buy me something of my own, something I could look forward to after college. He found me happiness…

Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others—other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On that list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I’ve made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you’re not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow…) help me to come back “here” little by little.

Angie: "How do I pitch these ideas to her?" Mira: "From a distance, preferably wearing body armor.

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!

I've always known what you were thinking. You're squeezing that marble in your pocket and you're thinking your cattle wouldn't be at risk if it weren't for Louise. And maybe you're right. But take a hard look, son. When you see that woman working up a sweat pitching hay like a hired hand … you're looking at character. "And if we ever have another family dinner that goes like the last one did, you pay attention. I have an idea that your Louise doesn't sit still for too many insults, and I imagine she could cut someone down to size in about three sentences if she wanted to. But she sat silent while Philadelphia ridiculed and belittled her. Louise did this out of respect for you and this family. That is also character. "Maybe you really believe Wally is living your life. If so, then you haven't been honest with yourself. And you haven't taken a good hard look at the life you have. Mark my words, Max. Someday you're going to hold that marble, and it won't be a symbol of all you lost. That marble will be the gold you went to Piney Creek to find. It will be the most precious thing you own. I say this because I didn't raise any stupid sons.

As a book author, it's your responsibility to cast a vision for your book about the length and appearance before you pitch the idea to a publisher.

When we are selling our ideas, the audience must first buy us.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

To the Druidic mind, trees are sentient beings. Far from being unique to the Celts, this idea was shared by many of the ancient civilizations that lived in the vast virgin wildwoods of the past. The Celts believed a tree’s presence could be felt more keenly at night or after a heavy rain, and that certain people were more attuned to trees and better able to perceive them. There is a special word for this recognition of sentience, mothaitheacht. It was described as a feeling in the upper chest of some kind of energy or sound passing through you. It’s possible that mothaitheacht is an ancient expression of a concept that is relatively new to science: infrasound or “silent” sound. These are sounds pitched below the range of human hearing, which travel great distances by means of long, loping waves. They are produced by large animals, such as elephants, and by volcanoes. And these waves have been measured as they emanate from large trees.

Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has “implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music…[but] of the evolutionary origin” of both. In particular, they see absolute pitch, whatever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind.

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.

The Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -

Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating, or looking for, or having. We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it. To gather is to specify and to grasp. We fling stones, and spears, and boomerangs. We toss balls through hoops, and hit pucks into nets, and curl carved granite rocks down the ice onto horizontal bull’s-eyes. We launch projectiles at targets with bows, guns, rifles and rockets. We hurl insults, launch plans, and pitch ideas. We succeed when we score a goal or hit a target. We fail, or sin, when we do not (as the word sin means to miss the mark70). We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues’ failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. “I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas,” he said. “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent.

Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I'll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it's pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others - other things and other people.

I hope I’m being clear, I didn’t say I hate feminists, that would be weird. I said I hate feminist. I’m talking about the word. I have the privilege living my life inside of words and part of being a writer is creating entire universes, and that's beautiful, but part of being a writer is also living in the very smallest part of every word. ...But the word feminist, it doesn't sit with me, it doesn't add up. I want to talk about my problem that I have with it. ...Ist in it's meaning is also a problem for me. Because you can't be born an ist. It's not natural... So feminist includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda... ...My problem with feminist is not the word. It's the question. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist?" The great Katy Perry once said—I'm paraphrasing—"I'm not a feminist but I like it when women are strong."...Don't know why she feels the need to say the first part, but listening to the word and thinking about it, I realize I do understand. This question that lies before us is one that should lie behind us. The word is problematic for me because there's another word that we're missing... ...When you say racist, you are saying that is a negative thing. That is a line that we have crossed. Anything on the side of that line is shameful, is on the wrong side of history. And that is a line that we have crossed in terms of gender but we don't have the word for it... ...I start thinking about the fact that we have this word when we're thinking about race that says we have evolved beyond something and we don't really have this word for gender. Now you could argue sexism, but I'd say that's a little specific. People feel removed from sexism. ‘I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple. ...You don’t have to hate someone to destroy them. You just have to not get it. ...My pitch is this word. ‘Genderist.’ I would like this word to become the new racist. I would like a word that says there was a shameful past before we realized that all people were created equal. And we are past that. And every evolved human being who is intelligent and educated and compassionate and to say I don't believe that is unacceptable. And Katy Perry won't say, "I'm not a feminist but I like strong women," she'll say, "I'm not a genderist but sometimes I like to dress up pretty." And that'll be fine. ...This is how we understand society. The word racism didn't end racism, it contextualized it in a way that we still haven't done with this issue. ...I say with gratitude but enormous sadness, we will never not be fighting. And I say to everybody on the other side of that line who believe that women are to be bought and trafficked or ignored...we will never not be fighting. We will go on, we will always work this issue until it doesn't need to be worked anymore. ...Is this idea of genderist going to do something? I don't know. I don't think that I can change the world. I just want to punch it up a little.

I was just not cut out to be an American journalist. In England, I could phone my editor and say 'Do you want an interview with X?' and get an immediate yes or no. At Vanity Fair I had to 'pitch ideas' and then go through layers of editors, all of whom asked what my 'angle' was going to be. I have always deeply hated and resented this question. If you have an angle on someone, it means you have already decided what to write before you meet, so you really might as well not bother interviewing them" (126).

I opened the door of my mother's stand-alone wardrobe and let the smell of her wash over me. I loved having this one unspoiled part of her left just for me. I leaned forward, slipped my face in between the hanging silks and chiffons. Her scent was warm and possessive. If my idea of home had a smell, this would be it. Home. Mother. Oh God, please. My face crumpled, and my knees gave out. I pitched forward into her hanging clothes, grabbing at her blouses and dresses, smelling of gardenias and dusk. I fell to the closet floor, pulling some with me. I toppled amongst her shoes; stinging eyes squeezed shut, mouth frozen open in a silent "O." They were out there somewhere, their lifeless bodies, still and cold, and they would never be coming home again. I curled my legs inside the wardrobe and pulled the door closed, shutting myself away with her memory.

The author and screenwriter William Goldman says that "the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects.

Nothing infuriates reporters and editors more, I’m told, than to get a pitch from someone who clearly has no idea what their publication is about or who their audience is.

The idea of happiness pitching up in my life like that all of a sudden it terrified me

The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.

When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis.

How you communicate and influence others often matters more than the idea you’re pitching.

THE PROMISE: how your hustle will change someone’s life THE PITCH: why they should purchase or sign up now THE PRICE: what it costs to purchase or sign up (and how to do it)

disruption has become the high-fructose corn syrup of business, an overused ingredient sprayed on pitches and injected into keynotes in the hope of disguising the familiar taste of conformity.

I caught a glimpse of heaven once. The Angels showed me. The idea was I'd kill for them. Clean up their mistakes on Earth. Eventually redeem myself. Tried it. Didn't like it. Told them where to stick it. So they brought me up to heaven, to see what I'd be missing. A wife. A son. A daughter. I hadn't seen them since they bled out in my arms. Then I was cast down. Back to a world of killers. Rapists. Psychos. Perverts. A brand new evil every minute, spewed out as fast as men can think them up. A world where pitching a criminal dwarf off a skyscraper to tell his fellow scum you're back is a sane and rational act. The angels thought it would be hell for me. (Said dwarf hits the ground with a splat) But they were wrong. Welcome Back, Frank. Says New York City.

Bold ideas are often called nonsense until they make sense to the masses. That's why it's important to present ideas, even when we fear they might be called stupid or silly. What they laugh at today, may be what they laud tomorrow.

It’s amazing to consider that no matter what size customer we were pitching, or where in the world we were selling, a singular idea drove all our accomplishments: we never sold features. We sold the model and we sold the customer’s success.

Dancing in pitch-dark rooms, rooms illuminated exclusively by the tiny light on the turntable, is an activity which fits very well with my ideas of “rock-critic behavior” (which is like normal music-fan behavior, but substantially more pitiful and indulgent).

There were the venture capitalists, who’d gotten in early, watched the tokens they bought climb to ludicrous heights, and now believed they could predict the future. There were the founders of crypto start-ups, who’d raised so many millions of dollars that they seemed to believe their own far-fetched pitches about creating the future of finance. Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.

The Musalman, remaining faithful to his religion, has not progressed; he has remained stationary in a world of swiftly moving modern forces. It is, indeed, one of the salient features of Islam that it immobilizes in their native barbarism, the races whom it enslaves. It is fixed in a crystallization, inert and impenetrable. It is unchangeable; and political, social or economic changes have no repercussion upon it. " Having been taught that outside Islam there can be no safety; outside its law no truth and outside its spiritual message there is no happiness, the Muslim has become incapable of conceiving any other condition than his own, any other mode of thought than the Islamic thought. He firmly believes that he has arrived at an unequalled pitch of perfection; that he is the sole possessor of true faith, of the true doctrine, the true wisdom ; that he alone is in possession of the truth—no relative truth subject to revision, but absolute truth. " The religious law of the Muslims has had the effect of imparting to the very diverse individuals of whom the world is composed, a unity of thought, of feeling, of ideas, of judgement.

In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as

We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts—just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

The feeling of warmth dawning from deep within, for someone's first glance, their attention, first touch; the feeling of desire, missing and craving them; the feeling of being accustomed and too familiar to them and their idea; the feeling of indifference and apathy when it seemed impossible in the beginning; the feeling of heart-break, detachment, and hatred, and the shock of having these feelings; the feeling of new spark in pitch dark life - the course of life. And though so many have walked upon it, we think it's different for us somehow... - Blaz. . "When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into gathering their thoughts and presenting them clearly to an audience. But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider—just react. Knee-jerk it. That’s no way to treat fragile new ideas.

No one wants to be surprised or shot down, especially in a group setting. So the person who needs an answer, if they are smart, will have already led individual members towards their side. Conversations are happening behind the scenes so that by the time the big meeting takes place, the person pitching the idea already has buy in.

If you want a new challenge at work or more responsibility, it’s on you to pitch your boss or your client on what needs to be done, why it’s a good idea, why you’re the best person to do it, and why everyone will benefit. Lead the way with your own creativity and initiative, and back it up with enthusiasm and a strong business case.

To communicate about music, we must be able to name the pitches and associate them with frequencies. This is not an engineering problem so much as a design question, and each culture has answered it in a manner that speaks to what is important to that culture. In the West the choices have been profoundly influenced by the ideas of Pythagoras

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues’ failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. “I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas,” he said.

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.

presence. Once in Italy, needing two hours of not talking to each other, we went to the movies, not realizing there wouldn’t be subtitles. We stayed and enjoyed the cinematography. On the walk home, we pitched each other ridiculous ideas to fill the gaps in the plot we hadn’t understood. Those weren’t dates, though. Dates hold intention. They’re not just occasions—they’re declarations. I’m interested

proceeded to pitch their camp. Aslan’s mood affected everyone that evening. Peter was feeling uncomfortable too at the idea of fighting the battle on his own; the news that Aslan might not be there had come as a great shock to him. Supper that evening was a quiet meal. Everyone felt how different it had been last night or even that morning. It was as if the good times, having just begun, were already

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without antibiotics or anesthetics. The tedium of a world without movies or recorded music or... or... Internet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!

I came to love the way Morrie lit up when I entered the room. He did this for many people, I know, but it was his special talent to make each visitor feel that the smile was unique. “Ahhhh, it’s my buddy,” he would say when he saw me, in that foggy, high-pitched voice. And it didn’t stop with the greeting. When Morrie was with you, he was really with you. He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world. How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this—instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss? “I believe in being fully present,” Morrie said. “That means you should be with the person you’re with. When I’m talking to you now, Mitch, I try to keep focused only on what is going on between us. I am not thinking about something we said last week. I am not thinking of what’s coming up this Friday. I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I’m taking. “I am talking to you. I am thinking about you.” I remembered how he used to teach this idea in the Group Process class back at Brandeis. I had scoffed back then, thinking this was hardly a lesson plan for a university course. Learning to pay attention? How important could that be? I now know it is more important than almost everything they taught us in college.

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

13.  He wins his battles by making no mistakes. [Ch’en Hao says: “He plans no superfluous marches, he devises no futile attacks.” The connection of ideas is thus explained by Chang Yu: “One who seeks to conquer by sheer strength, clever though he may be at winning pitched battles, is also liable on occasion to be vanquished; whereas he who can look into the future and discern conditions that are not yet manifest, will never make a blunder and therefore invariably win.”] Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. 14.  Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. [A “counsel of perfection” as Tu Mu truly observes. “Position” need not be confined to the actual ground occupied by the troops. It includes all the arrangements and preparations which a wise general will make to increase the safety of his army.] 15.  Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. [Ho Shih thus expounds the paradox: “In warfare, first lay plans which will ensure victory, and then lead your army to battle; if you will not begin with stratagem but rely on brute strength alone, victory will no longer be assured.”] 16.  The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success. 17.  In respect of military method, we have, firstly, Measurement; secondly, Estimation of quantity; thirdly, Calculation; fourthly, Balancing of chances; fifthly, Victory. 18.  Measurement owes its existence to Earth; Estimation of quantity to Measurement; Calculation to Estimation of quantity; Balancing of chances to Calculation; and Victory to Balancing of chances. [It is not easy to distinguish the four terms very clearly in the Chinese. The

Recently, I watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory. One of the characters, Howard—an astrophysicist—is in space. His new bride, Bernadette, convinces him that it would be best if they lived by themselves when he comes back to earth and not with his loud, annoying mother. Howard agrees. He’s too scared to take ownership of the decision, so he pitches it to his mother like it was his wife’s idea. The mother yells so loud, she barely needs any equipment to be heard in space. Howard dutifully tells her that he will convince Bernadette and they’ll live with her. When Bernadette calls, he doesn’t have the, er, balls, to tell her the truth either. So he tells her all is well with the move. His counterpart, a Russian astronaut, cannot believe his country lost the Cold War to wusses like Howard. When he asks him what he plans to do, Howard has only one option. He’ll stay in space. Earth is where there are problems between his wife and mother. He’s safe in space. He’s not the only one. The world is full of conflicted husbands wishing they could be in space and

To get a sense of what I mean by evangelism as the practice of hospitality, visit your local church. Don’t go upstairs, to the sanctuary, go downstairs to that room in the basement with the linoleum tile and the coffee urn. That’s where the AA and NA meetings are held. At its best, Alcoholics Anonymous embodies evangelism as hospitality. They offer an invitation, not a sales pitch. They offer testimony — personal stories — instead of a marketing scheme. They are, in fact and in practice, a bunch of beggars offering other beggars the good news of where they found bread. At its worst, AA sometimes slips into the evangelism-as-sales model. You may have found yourself at some point having a beer when some newly sober 12-step disciple begins lecturing you that this is evidence that you have a problem. He will try to sell you the idea that you are a beggar so he can sell you some bread. The ensuing conversation is tense, awkward and pointless — the precise qualities of the similar conversation you may have had with an evangelical Christian coworker who was reluctantly but dutifully inflicting on you a sales pitch for evangelical Christianity.

Westerners, and perhaps Americans especially, have a conflicted relationship with danger. On one hand our heroes are entrepreneurs and adventurers who risk everything. We relish stories of the businessman who spends his last hundred dollars on a suit so he can pitch a great idea that secures a wealthy investor. We admire the mountaineer who puts it all on the line for a chance to summit an unclimbable peak. But when risk takers fail in their pursuits, we cluck our tongues and nod knowingly about their hubris. Failure, and perhaps even death, may be the wrong yardstick to evaluate a person’s journey.

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues’ failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. “I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas,” he said. “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They’re valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.

Are you certain it was Woody who stole the knife?” “Fifteen minutes ago I found him sneaking about the Tigers’ clubhouse,” said Bugs. “He picked up Excalibur—it’s a purple knife and my name is cut into it. He saw me and ran—we bumped as he got out the door. He shoved Excalibur into the pocket of his green pants as he got outside and kept running.” “You didn’t chase him?” “Naw, Woody broke his arm last week, and I don’t fight one-armed kids,” said Bugs. He rolled his eyes toward heaven. “Anyhow, his mother will be my math teacher next year.” “You want me to get the knife back without anyone knowing Woody stole it, is that the idea?” asked Encyclopedia.

The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.” It sprang from a belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys.

If there was any doubt about the authenticity of his fake ID, it would now be put to the test. As Sage waited for the Secret Service to do their due diligence, I wondered how much our mission to find Dad would be set back by Sage taking a quick detour to federal prison. “He’s clear,” the lead agent finally said. Great, we could go in. Sage politely insisted that Rayna and I enter before him. “Not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said, but he wouldn’t hear it. Rayna, Ben, and I shared a knowing smile. Then I shrugged and stepped over the threshold…immediately triggering the Piri alarm. I don’t know how she knew; she was all the way in the kitchen. But the minute I stepped into the foyer she raced in, arms waving in the air, a high-pitched scream keening from her lungs. “AIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!” “He made me do it, Piri,” I said, happily tossing Sage under the bus. “I tried to tell him-“ Piri strode right up to Sage, her head barely reaching his sternum, and jabbed her finger into his chest to emphasize each scolding word. “You never let a woman enter this house before a man! Very bad luck! And when the senator’s doing business! Jaj!” She pushed us back outside, closed the door, and spit three times on the porch (barely missing the shoes of one of the Secret Service agents), then turned her baleful eyes to Sage, asking him to do the same. “I don’t think I really need to spit on Clea’s porch,” Sage said uncomfortably, but Piri’s glare only grew more and more violent until he withered under its power…and spit three times. Piri smiled smugly and opened the door, gesturing for Sage to enter. Ben went next, bending to Piri’s ear to murmur, “If it’d been me, I would have gone in first.” “That’s because you’re a smart boy,” Piri said, kissing him on both cheeks. Once we were all in, Piri greeted us as if for the first time, with huge hugs and two-cheeked kisses. As she led us to the luncheon raging in the other room, Ben crowed to Sage, “You know, a real European scholar would be up on old-school superstitions.” Sage grimaced.

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.

Conceivably, though, the sea might have filtered into her body over the years in tiny fragments like the parts of a picture puzzle which, while she'd never identified the whole, had pieced themselves together as the sea in all its sparkling radiance. An internal sea. Untouched by anyone... Having drunk too much, the mother was beginning to drift off with the sound of the children's high-pitched voices in her ears. Fragments of the sea... Could she trace the matrix into which she'd fitted them all the way back to the flood of light she'd experienced at the moment of birth? The light was pain. She didn't actually remember that time, of course. She'd thought she was reminded of it when she heard the first cries of her own children: yes, she'd thought then, it was painful and dazzling, and I couldn't help crying. With every cry I was longing to accustom myself to the flood of light. But before my body had time to adjust, the light had ceased to exist as light. Perhaps what I was seeing was the brightness of the internal sea? My mother's sea. There were other memories. The tale of the Little Mermaid she'd come across in a foreign picture book. Though it would never have occurred to her to see herself in the person of the lovely little princess, she'd been haunted by the idea that perhaps she had been present herself, somewhere in the deeps where the princess lived. She sensed the sea's wan bluish gleam in the Little Mermaid's sobs.

It was not what the ballroom crowd wanted to hear at that moment. Not after listening to Muskie denounce Wallace as a cancer in the soul of America… but McGovern wasn’t talking to the people in that ballroom; he was making a very artful pitch to potential Wallace voters in the other primary states. Wisconsin was three weeks away, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan—and Wallace would be raising angry hell in every one of them. McGovern’s brain-trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was “soft”—that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” who’d been fucking them over for so long.

During my time at Eton, I led regular nighttime adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips. I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grill under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets. It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank. I took a pack of playing cards and a flashlight, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house. I loved that. “All crap flows from here,” I remember us joking at that time.

The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

EN EL ASCENSOR .   El elevator pitch es un discurso breve, de unos tres minutos, cuyo objetivo es llamar la atención y despertar el interés por nuestro proyecto. Simula un poco el tiempo que dura un viaje en ascensor, si tuviéramos la suerte de cruzarnos con algún potencial inversor. Es un primer paso que no da tiempo para explicaciones demasiado detalladas, pero sí para causar la impresión que deseamos y generar el interés suficiente como para obtener una nueva reunión. En esta presentación lo que hacemos es contar quienes somos, cómo trabajamos, la oportunidad que queremos capturar y cuál es la propuesta de valor principal. En este brevísimo lapso de tiempo seguimos como premisa la idea de que primero nos vendemos a nosotros como emprendedores, luego a nuestro proyecto como oportunidad, y al final al producto y su valor.

This chokes me up, this really chokes me up. It was so clear that Lee loved Apple so much. Here was the best guy in advertising. And he hadn’t pitched in ten years. Yet here he was, and he was pitching his heart out, because he loved Apple as much as we did. He and his team had come up with this brilliant idea, “Think Different.” And it was ten times better than anything the other agencies showed. It choked me up, and it still makes me cry to think about it, both the fact that Lee cared so much and also how brilliant his “Think Different” idea was. Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity—purity of spirit and love—and I always cry. It always just reaches in and grabs me. That was one of those moments. There was a purity about that I will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.

Before the troops left Rome, the consul Varro made a number of extremely arrogant speeches. The nobles, he complained, were directly responsible for the war on Italian soil, and it would continue to prey upon the country's vitals if there were any more commanders on the Fabian model. He himself, on the contrary, would bring it to an end on the day he first caught sight of the enemy. His colleague Paullus spoke only once before the army marched, and in words which though true were hardly popular. His only harsh criticism of Varro was to express his surprise about how any army commander, while still at Rome, in his civilian clothes, could possibly know what his task on the field of battle would be, before he had become acquainted either with his own troops or the enemy's or had any idea of the lie and nature of the country where he was to operate--or how he could prophesy exactly when a pitched battle would occur. As for himself, he refused to recommend any sort of policy prematurely; for policy was moulded by circumstance, not circumstance by policy. . . . [T]o strengthen [Paullus'] determination Fabius (we are told) spoke to him at his departure in the following words. 'If, Lucius Aemilius, you were like your colleague, or if--which I should much prefer--you had a colleague like yourself, anything I could now say would be superfluous. Two good consuls would serve the country well in virtue of their own sense of honour, without any words from me; and two bad consuls would not accept my advice, nor even listen to me. But as things are, I know your colleague's qualities and I know your own, so it is to you alone I address myself, understanding as I do that all your courage and patriotism will be in vain, if our country must limp on one sound leg and one lame one. With the two of you equal in command, bad counsels will be backed by the same legal authority as good ones; for you are wrong, Paullus, if you think to find less opposition from Varro than from Hannibal. Hannibal is your enemy, Varro your rival, but I hardly know which will prove the more hostile to your designs; with the former you will be contending only on the field of battle, but with the latter everywhere and always. . . . [I]t is not the enemy who will make it difficult and dangerous for you to tread, but your fellow-countrymen. Your own men will want precisely what the enemy wants; the wishes of Varro, the Roman consul, will play straight into the hands of Hannibal, commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian armies. You will have two generals against you; but you will stand firm against both, if you can steel yourself to ignore the tongues of men who will defame you--if you remain unmoved by the empty glory your colleague seeks and the false infamy he tries to bring upon yourself. . . . Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise. Hannibal will despise a reckless antagonist, but he will fear a cautious one. Not that I wish you to do nothing--all I want is that your actions should be guided by a reasoned policy, all risks avoided; that the conduct of the war should be controlled by you at all times; that you should neither lay aside your sword nor relax your vigilance but seize the opportunity that offers, while never giving the enemy a chance to take you at a disadvantage. Go slowly, and all will be clear and sure. Haste is always improvident and blind.

(Pericles:) In a single pitched battle the Peloponnesians and their allies are a match for all Hellas, but they are not able to maintain a war against a power different in kind from their own; they have no regular general assembly, and therefore cannot execute their plans with speed and decision. The confederacy is made up of many races; all the representatives have equal votes, and press their several interests. There follows the usual result, that nothing is ever done properly. For some are all anxiety to be revenged on an enemy, while others only want to get off with as little loss as possible. The members of such a confederacy are slow to meet, and when they do meet, they give little time to the consideration of any common interest, and a great deal to schemes which further the interest of their particular state. Every one fancies that his own neglect will do no harm, but that it is somebody else's business to keep a look-out for him, and this idea, cherished alike by each, is the secret ruin of all. (Book 1 Chapter 141.6-7)

The next night was New Year’s Eve, and I made a secret plan with Shara to meet her outside the back door on the stroke of midnight. “Let’s take a walk,” I suggested. “Sure. It’s midnight, minus five degrees, and pitch black, but hey, let’s walk.” She paused. “But not up Loyal,” she added, smiling. And so we walked together along a moonlit track. Twenty yards and then I will make the move to kiss her, I told myself. But plucking up the courage with a girl this special was harder than I had thought. Twenty yards became two hundred yards. Then two thousand. Forty-five minutes later, she suggested that maybe we should turn around and head back to the house. “Yes. Good idea.” I replied. Do it, Bear, you old woman. Do it now! And so I did. A quick kiss on the lips, then a longer lingering one, and then I had to stop. It was sensory overload. Wow. That was worth the walk, I thought, smiling from ear to ear. “Let’s head back,” I confirmed, still smiling. I am not sure Shara was quite as impressed by the effort-to-reward ratio--long cold walk to short, hot kiss--but as far as I was concerned the sky and clouds had parted, and nothing would ever be the same again.

The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.” It sprang from a belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys. So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it, especially when the action revolved around the toys’ being separated from their kid. The original treatment began, “Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy’s point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with by children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional foundation of their existence.

As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius were evoked by the names of Milton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Borges, Ray Charles; to lose physical sight, it is thought, is to gain second sight. One door closes and another, greater one, opens. Homer’s blindness, many believe, is a kind of spiritual channel, a shortcut to the gifts of memory and of prophecy. When I was a child in Lagos, there was a blind, wandering bard, a man who was held in the greatest awe for his spiritual gifts. When he sang his songs, he left each person with the feeling that, in hearing him, they had somehow touched the numinous, or been touched by it. Once, in a crowded market at Ojuelegba, sometime in the early eighties, I saw him. It was from quite a distance, but I remember (or imagine that I remember) his large yellow eyes, calcified to a gray color at the pupils, his frightening mien, and the big, dirty mantle he wore. He sang in a plaintive and high-pitched voice, in deep, proverbial Yoruba that was impossible for me to follow. Afterward, I imagined that I had seen something like an aura around him, a spiritual apartness that moved all his hearers to reach into their purses and put something in the bowl his assistant boy carried.

I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos,” which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: “Is that good? Is it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?” And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.

According to Freud here, it is only by inhibiting or prohibiting sexual satisfaction that a more enduring investment can be made in someone. When real sexual satisfactions are thwarted, sexual desire for that person gives rise to a kind of symbolic idealization of him or her, leading to an affectionate current which is secondary, not primary. Idealization of the partner and affectionate love itself (we perhaps see the fullest expression of idealization in courtly love, as we shall see in Chapter 7) thus involve endless deferral and sublimation of the sexual drives. Affectionate love, which earlier in his work was either anaclitic or narcissistic (we shall turn to the latter of these in the second part of this book), here seems to involve idealization of the object, attention being paid to its spiritual merits as opposed to its sensual merits. Love is not considered here to precede sexual desire, but rather to result from the inhibition of sexual satisfaction. It leads to far greater excitement about the potential sexual partner than would have existed without such inhibition. In other words, restricted sexual access to the partner intensifies sexual excitation, ultimately leading to greater sexual satisfaction than would have been possible otherwise. Education or socialization channels the sexual drives so extensively into narrow pathways that they reach a feverish pitch and the sexual act becomes, in a certain sense, overvalued – this, Freud believes, is especially true of men. The idea here seems to be that the more a certain activity is inhibited or restricted, the more intense our desire for it becomes. As I have put it elsewhere, “prohibition eroticizes.

So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present. Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.” Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.” Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?” Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating. “What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked. “Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not. “Go ahead,” he said. “The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.” Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected. “Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?” He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.

I run out onto the front porch, trying to slow my racing heart as I peer out into the night. The light gets closer and closer, causing hope to blossom in my chest. “Hey!” a familiar voice calls out, and I nearly weep with relief. He’s back. Thank God. But the relief is immediately replaced with anger. “Where the hell have you been?” I ask, my voice shaking. He clicks off the flashlight and makes his way up the porch steps. “Didn’t you see my note?” “Are you kidding me?” I sputter. “Do you have any idea how many hours you’ve been gone?” “Yeah, sorry about that. The house was fine, but the pool was a mess. A tree fell through the screen, and the roof was ripped off the pool house.” “You’re sorry? That’s all you have to say?” I take two steps toward him, fury thrumming through my veins. “Do you have any idea how worried I was? God, Ryder! I thought you were lying in a ditch somewhere. I thought you were hurt, or…or…” I trail off, shaking my head. “I was about to go looking for you, out in the pitch-dark!” He reaches for my hand, but I slap him away. “Don’t touch me! I swear, I can’t even look at you right now.” I turn and reach for the door. But before I can fling it open, Ryder pulls me toward him, his hands circling my wrists. “Look, I’m sorry, Jemma. It took me forever to get there, what with all the flooding and everything. And then I was trying to clean stuff up and…well, I guess the time just got away from me.” I try to pull away, but he tightens his grip. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “Well, you did scare me.” I manage to pull one hand loose, and I use it to whack him in the chest. “Idiot!” “I’m fine, okay? I’m here.” “I wish you weren’t!” I yell, fired up now. “I wish you were lying in a ditch somewhere!” I stumble backward, my heel catching on the porch’s floorboards. “You don’t mean that,” Ryder says, sounding hurt. He’s right; I don’t. But I don’t care if I hurt his feelings. I’m too angry to care. Angry and relieved and pissed off and…and, God, I’m so glad he’s okay. I thump his chest one more time in frustration, and then somehow my lips are on his--hungry and demanding and punishing all at once.

Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to the first sign of movement in the door way, Travis tucked the revolver under his belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed a shooter's stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher. The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy . Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog's uncontrollable shivering. No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could not even guess. In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled across the tile. Silence again. By responding to Travis's taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein's fear of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months had primed him to accept-and quickly adapt to-almost anything.

Cansrel could sit with Fire and do something no one else could: give her lessons to improve the skill of her mind. They could communicate without saying a word, they could touch each other from opposite ends of the house. Fire’s true father was like her—was, in fact, the only person in the world like her. He always asked the same question when he first arrived: “My darling monster girl! Was anyone mean to you while I was gone?” Mean? Children threw stones at her in the road. She was tripped sometimes, slapped, taunted. People who liked her hugged her, but they hugged her too hard and were too free with their hands. And still, Fire learned very young to answer no to his question—to lie, and to guard her mind from him so he wouldn’t know she was lying. This was the beginning of another of her confusions, that she would want his visits so much but fall immediately to lying once he came. When she was four she had a dog she’d chosen from a litter born in Brocker’s stables. She chose him, and Brocker let her have him, because the dog had three functional legs and one that dragged, and would never be any use as a worker. He was inky gray and had bright eyes. Fire called him Twy, which was short for Twilight. Twy was a happy, slightly brainless fellow with no idea he was missing something other dogs had. He was excitable, he jumped around a lot, and had a tendency on occasion to nip his favorite people. And nothing worked him into a greater frenzy of excitement, anxiety, joy, and terror than the presence of Cansrel. One day in the garden Cansrel burst upon Fire and Twy unexpectedly. In confusion, Twy leapt against Fire and bit her more than nipped her, so hard that she cried out. Cansrel ran to her, dropped to his knees, and took her into his arms, letting her fingers bleed all over his shirt. “Fire! Are you all right?” She clung to him, because for just a moment Twy had scared her. But then, as her own mind cleared, she saw and felt Twy throwing himself against a pitch of sharp stone, over and over. “Stop, Father! Stop it!” Cansrel pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dog. Fire shrieked and grabbed at him. “Don’t hurt him, Father, please! Can’t you feel that he didn’t mean it?

So,” Marlboro Man began over dinner one night. “How many kids do you want to have?” I almost choked on my medium-rare T-bone, the one he’d grilled for me so expertly with his own two hands. “Oh my word,” I replied, swallowing hard. I didn’t feel so hungry anymore. “I don’t know…how many kids do you want to have?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Six or so. Maybe seven.” I felt downright nauseated. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, my body preparing me for the dreaded morning sickness that, I didn’t know at the time, awaited me. Six or seven kids? Righty-oh, Marlboro Man. Righty…no. “Ha-ha ha-ha ha. Ha.” I laughed, tossing my long hair over my shoulder and acting like he’d made a big joke. “Yeah, right! Ha-ha. Six kids…can you imagine?” Ha-ha. Ha. Ha.” The laughter was part humor, part nervousness, part terror. We’d never had a serious discussion about children before. “Why?” He looked a little more serious this time. “How many kids do you think we should have?” I smeared my mashed potatoes around on my plate and felt my ovaries leap inside my body. This was not a positive development. Stop that! I ordered, silently. Settle down! Go back to sleep! I blinked and took a swig of the wine Marlboro Man had bought me earlier in the day. “Let’s see…,” I answered, drumming my fingernails on the table. “How ’bout one? Or maybe…one and a half?” I sucked in my stomach--another defensive move in an attempt to deny what I didn’t realize at the time was an inevitable, and jiggly, future. “One?” he replied. “Aw, that’s not nearly enough of a work crew for me. I’ll need a lot more help than that!” Then he chuckled, standing up to clear our plates as I sat there in a daze, having no idea whether or not he was kidding. It was the strangest conversation I’d ever had. I felt like the roller coaster had just pulled away from the gate, and the entire amusement park was pitch-black. I had no idea what was in front of me; I was entering a foreign land. My ovaries, on the other hand, were doing backflips, as if they’d been wandering, parched, in a barren wasteland and finally, miraculously, happened upon a roaring waterfall. And that waterfall was about six feet tall, with gray hair and bulging biceps. They never knew they could experience such hope.

know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire. I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him. When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating. After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every now and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and

Stop!” she called out. To a one, the crewmen froze. A dozen heads swiveled to face her. Sophia swallowed and turned to Mr. Grayson. “What about me? I’m also a virgin voyager.” His lips quirked as his gaze swept her from head to toe and then back up partway. “Are you truly?” “Yes. And I haven’t a coin to my name. Do you plan to dunk and shave me, too?” “Now there’s an idea.” His grin widened. “Perhaps. But first, you must submit to an interrogation.” A lump formed in Sophia’s throat, impossible to speak around. Mr. Grayson raised that sonorous baritone to a carrying pitch. “What’s your name then, miss?” When Sophia merely firmed her chin and glared at him, he warned dramatically, “Truth or eels.” Bang. Excited whispers crackled through the assembly of sailors. Davy was completely forgotten, dropped to the deck with a dull thud. Even the wind held its breath in anticipation, and Sophia gave a slight jump when a sail smacked limp against the mast. Though her heart pounded an erratic rhythm of distress, she willed her voice to remain even. “I’ve no intention of submitting myself to any interrogation, by god or man.” She lifted her chin and arched an eyebrow. “And I’m not impressed by your staff.” She paused several seconds, waiting for the crew’s boisterous laughter to ebb. Mr. Grayson pinned her with his bold, unyielding gaze. “You dare to speak to me that way? I’m Triton.” With each word, he stepped closer. “King of the Sea. A god among men.” Now they stood just paces apart. Hunger gleamed in his eyes. “And I demand a sacrifice.” Her hand remained pressed against her throat, and Sophia nervously picked at the neckline of her frock. This close, he was all bronzed skin stretched tight over muscle and sinew. Iridescent drops of seawater paved glistening trails down his chest, snagging on the margins of that horrific scar, just barely visible beneath his toga. “A sacrifice?” Her voice was weak. Her knees were weaker. “A sacrifice.” He flipped the trident around, his biceps flexing as he extended the blunt end toward her, hooking it under her arm. He lifted the mop handle, pulling her hand from her throat and raising her wrist for his inspection. Sophia might have yanked her arm away at any moment, but she was as breathless with anticipation as every other soul on deck. She’d become an observer of her own scene, helpless to alter the drama unfolding, on the edge of her seat to see how it would play out. He studied her arm. “An unusually fine specimen of female,” he said casually. “Young. Fair. Unblemished.” Then he withdrew the stick, and Sophia’s hand dropped to her side. “But unsatisfactory.” She felt a sharp twinge of pride. Unsatisfactory? Those words echoed in her mind again. I don’t want you. “Unsatisfactory. Too scrawny by far.” He looked around at the crew, sweeping his makeshift trident in a wide arc. “I demand a sacrifice with meat on her bones. I demand…” Sophia gasped as the mop handle clattered to a rest at her feet. Mr. Grayson gave her a sly wink, bracing his hands on his hips in a posture of divine arrogance. “I demand a goat.

I awake with a start, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from my mind. It’s pitch-dark out, the wind howling. It takes a couple seconds to get my bearings, to realize I’m in my parents’ bed, Ryder beside me, on his side, facing me. Our hands are still joined, though our fingers are slack now. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily. “That one was loud, huh?” “What was?” “Thunder. Rattled the windows pretty bad.” “What time is it?” “Middle of the night, I’d say.” I could check my phone, but that would require sitting up and letting go of his hand. Right now, I don’t want to do that. I’m too comfortable. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?” I ask him, my mouth dry and cottony. “I think I drifted off for a little bit. Till…you know…the thunder started up again.” “Oh. Sorry.” “It should calm down some when the eye moves through.” “If there’s still an eye by the time it gets here. The center of circulation usually starts breaking up once it goes inland.” Yeah, all those hours watching the Weather Channel occasionally come in handy. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Wow, maybe you should consider studying meteorology. You know, if the whole film-school thing doesn’t work out for you.” “I could double major,” I shoot back. “I bet you could.” “What are you going to study?” I ask, curious now. “I mean, besides football. You’ve got to major in something, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head--why he’s hesitating. “Astrophysics,” he says at last. “Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “Fine, if you don’t want to tell me…” “I’m serious. Astrophysics for undergrad. And then maybe…astronomy.” “What, you mean in graduate school?” He just nods. “You’re serious? You’re going to major in something that tough? I mean, most football players major in something like phys ed or underwater basket weaving, don’t they?” “Greg McElroy majored in business marketing,” he says with a shrug, ignoring my jab. “Yeah, but…astrophysics? What’s the point, if you’re just going to play pro football after you graduate anyway?” “Who says I want to play pro football?” he asks, releasing my hand. “Are you kidding me?” I sit up, staring at him in disbelief. He’s the best quarterback in the state of Mississippi. I mean, football is what he does…It’s his life. Why wouldn’t he play pro ball? He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head. “Right, I’m just some dumb jock.” “Oh, please. Everyone knows you’re the smartest kid in our class. You always have been. I’d give anything for it to come as easily to me as it does to you.” He sits up abruptly, facing me. “You think it’s easy for me? I work my ass off. You have no idea what I’m working toward. Or what I’m up against,” he adds, shaking his head. “Probably not,” I concede. “Anyway, if anyone can major in astrophysics and play SEC ball at the same time, you can. But you might want to lose the attitude.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Jem. It’s just…everyone has all these expectations. My parents, the football coach--” “You think I don’t get that? Trust me. I get it better than just about anyone.” He lets out a sigh. “I guess our families have pretty much planned out our lives for us, haven’t they?” “They think they have, that’s for sure,” I say.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and

The Bradford Exchange—a knockoff of [Joseph] Segel’s [Franklin Mint] business—created a murky secondary market for its collector plates, complete with advertisements featuring its “brokers” hovering over computers, tracking plate prices. To underscore the idea of these mass-produced tchotchkes as upmarket, sophisticated investments, the company deployed some of its most aggressive ads (which later led to lawsuits) in magazines like Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Architectural Digest. A 1986 sales pitch offered “The Sound of Music,” the first plate in a new series from the Edwin M. Knowles China Company, at a price of $19.50. Yet the ad copy didn’t emphasize the plate itself. Rather, bold type introduced two so-called facts: “Fact: ‘Scarlett,’ the 1976 first issue in Edwin M. Knowles’ landmark series of collector’s plates inspired by the classic film Gone With the Wind, cost $21.60 when it was issued. It recently traded at $245.00—an increase of 1,040% in just seven years.” And “Fact: ‘The Sound of Music,’ the first issue in Knowles’ The Sound of Music series, inspired by the classic film of the same name, is now available for $19.50.” Later the ad advised that “it’s likely to increase in value.” Currently, those plates can be had on eBay for less than $5 each. In 1993 U.S. direct mail sales of collectibles totaled $1.7 billion

The other important insight my research revealed was that the buyer’s decision to purchase is not made in response to the salesperson’s message after he has completed it, but rather throughout the salesperson’s message. Think about it like this: During the sale, potential customers are committing to or rejecting your ideas, statements of value, and recommendations. Then at the end of the sale, the results of this mental process are unveiled by whether they decide to purchase or not. In other words, though the buying decision may be revealed at the conclusion of the sale, it’s being cultivated throughout the entire sale.

There are far too many artists in the world these days. Everyone is writing a book or pitching ideas to Hollywood or describing the content of their cell phones as photography. Don't even get me started on YouTube. I don't mind creative impulses, but soon there wont be an audience left. The world will just be performers, stumbling around each other and impressing nobody in their presence.

Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11

While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.

store for them. He didn’t trust them in the slightest bit, but looked forward to scanning around the city to get ideas for planning their escape. Outside the fog hung low like a dense hand suffocating the city. The air smelled worse today, of pungent smoke and pitch and spoiled meat. Killian led them along a quiet, winding corridor, past several guard posts. They waited in a small square for a moment while Killian glanced nervously at a squad of soldiers marching down the street.

We’re all “storytellers.” We don’t call ourselves storytellers, but it’s what we do every day. Although we’ve been sharing stories for thousands of years, the skills we needed to succeed in the industrial age were very different from those required today. The ability to sell our ideas in the form of story is more important than ever. Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. In the information age, the knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Story is the means by which we transfer those ideas to one another. Your ability to package your ideas with emotion, context, and relevancy is the one skill that will make you more valuable in the next decade. Storytelling is the act of framing an idea as a narrative to inform, illuminate, and inspire. The Storyteller’s Secret is about the stories you tell to advance your career, build a company, pitch an idea, and to take your dreams from imagination to reality. When you pitch your product or service to a new customer, you’re telling a story. When you deliver instructions to a team or educate a class, you’re telling a story. When you build a PowerPoint presentation for your next sales meeting, you’re telling a story. When you sit down for a job interview and the recruiter asks about your previous experience, you’re telling a story. When you craft an e-mail, write a blog or Facebook post, or record a video for your company’s YouTube channel, you’re telling a story. But there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a transformative story that builds trust, boosts sales, and inspires people to dream bigger.

7. Energy. Your degree of personal energy and enthusiasm has a great deal to do with whether or not someone will want to hear the message you are trying to communicate. Believing in what you have to say also helps you to overcome interactive inhibition. If you care passionately about something, your life force will flow naturally, energizing you, and you will be able to focus better on getting the message out to others. Before entering an interactive situation, try “turning yourself on.” Put yourself in a peak state of enthusiasm. This might involve playing a piece of music that makes you feel great or thinking back to a time when you felt absolutely unstoppable. By accessing memories of a time when you felt energetic, you can induce the same state again. 8. Pitch and tone of voice. Speaking in a monotone is a quick way to turn off any audience. Practice using a variety of vocal qualities in your speech. Try using a tape recorder to make sure your voice is pleasant to listen to, and that your message matches your tone of voice. People pick up more from the voice tone than from the actual words you use. 9. Animation and gestures. Don’t be afraid to use your body, especially your hands, to use moderate gestures during conversation. Gestures send signals of enthusiasm and energy. Whenever you speak, you are essentially on stage, and appropriate gesturing helps you to communicate. 10. Ability to hold interest of others. In an interview, be prepared to discuss a variety of topics—not just the job you are applying for. And be sure to ask questions (prepare some in advance if necessary). 11. Commitment. This attribute has to do with caring passionately—about yourself, the other person, and the message you are trying to convey. If you convey that you can make a positive difference in the prospective workplace, you are much more likely to influence the interviewer and leave him or her with a lasting positive impression of you. 12. Ability to make others feel comfortable. In order to make others comfortable, you must first appear comfortable yourself. Practice looking more comfortable and relaxed by watching yourself in the mirror. Encouraging others to speak openly and freely also helps them to feel more comfortable and at ease with you. Dominating a conversation makes others feel uncomfortable very quickly. Asking others for their opinions, feelings, and values opens them up to you equally quickly. In an interview situation, it is usually a good idea to let the interviewer do most of the talking. Again, prepare some questions to get a two-way conversation going. All twelve elements are essential for good communication. They should work together in harmony, and each element should support the overall message you are communicating.

MICHAEL PILLER As soon as I started, I said, “I need to see every script, every abandoned story, and every submitted piece of material that’s sitting around, because I have to have something to shoot next week.” Somebody gave me a script called “The Bonding,” by a guy named Ron Moore who was about to go into the Marines, and it was a very interesting story about a kid whose mother goes down on an away mission and gets killed. The kid is obviously torn apart by the death of his mother, and seeing how much he’s suffering, aliens provide him with a mother substitute. The writing was rough and amateurish in some ways, but I thought it had real potential to tell an interesting story. I went to Gene and pitched him the story, and he said it didn’t work. I asked him why, and he said, “Because in the twenty-fourth century, death is accepted as a part of life, so this child would not be mourning the death of his mother. He would be perfectly accepting of the fact that she had lived a good life, and he would move on with his life.” I went back to the writing staff and told them what Gene had said, and they sort of smirked and said, “Ah-ha, you see? Now you know what we’ve been going through.” I said, “Wait a minute, let’s think about it. Is there any way we can satisfy Gene’s twenty-fourth-century rules and at the same time not lose the story that we have to shoot on Tuesday?” I finally said, “Look, what if this kid has in fact been taught all of his life not to mourn the death of his loved ones, because that’s what society expects of him? He’s taught that death is a part of life, so he loses his mother and doesn’t have any reaction at all. That’s what Gene is telling us has to happen. Well, that is freaky, that is weird, and that’s going to feel far more interesting on film than if he’s crying for two acts. What if the aliens who feel guilty about killing his mother provide him with a mother substitute and the kid bonds with this mother substitute, and it’s Troi who goes to Picard and says, “We have a problem? The kid is not going to give up this mother substitute until he really accepts and mourns the death of his real mother, and we’re going to have to penetrate centuries of civilization to get to the emotional core of this kid in order to wake up his emotional life.” So the show becomes a quest for emotional release and the privilege of mourning. Well, Gene loved the idea. It respected his universe and at the same time turned a fairly predictable story on its ear, and it became a far better story and episode than it would have if Gene had simply signed off on the original pitch. SANDRA

The lesson here is critical: The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.

1. Introduce yourself and the big idea: 5 minutes. 2. Explain the budget and secret sauce: 10 minutes. 3. Offer the deal: 2 minutes. 4. Stack frames for a hot cognition: 3 minutes. Phase

My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)