Tournament Of Power Quotes

At Peter’s court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.

The sounds of gunfire didn't bother Winn any more. It just meant that this was the weekend, or a soccer tournament, or someone had a sale on ammunition.

Russell T. Goode was so dominant in the Olympic Power Wrestling tournament that he fought himself in the final.

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

Halt nodded at him gratefully. "Exactly. We need to elect a leader - and give him the power to make decisions and the authority to have those decisions obeyed and carried through. Otherwise we're like a band of headless chickens." "But dangerous chickens nonetheless," Leander said with a faint smile.

Halt nodded at him gratefully. "Exactly. We need to elelct a leader - and give him the power to make decisions and the authority to have those decisions obeyed and carried through. Otherwise we're like a band of headless chickens." "But dangerous chickens nonetheless," Leander said with a faint smile.

If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses' armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so many present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. Many of these reports are nothing more than props in a Kabuki-like corporate theater—no one actually reads them all the way through.

The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy, but all alike expected to be allowed occasional outbursts of passion in the form of war, murder, pillage, or rape. Monarchs might repent, for they were sincerely pious, and after all, repentance was itself a form of passion. But the Church could never produce in them the quiet regularity of good behaviour which a modern employer demands, and usually obtains, of his employees. What was the use of conquering the world if they could not drink and murder and love as the spirit moved them? And why should they, with their armies of proud knights, submit to the orders of bookish men, vowed to celibacy and destitute of armed force? In spite of ecclesiastical disapproval, they preserved the duel and trial by battle, and they developed tournaments and courtly love. Occasionally, in a fit of rage, they would even murder eminent churchmen.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Another former chess player shared his own fond memory of Thiel from this era. Around the spring of 1988, the team was driving to Monterey for a tournament, with Thiel behind the wheel of the Rabbit. They took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that crosses the Santa Cruz Mountains and is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous. The team was in no particular hurry, but Thiel drove as if he were a man possessed. He navigated the turns like Michael Andretti, weaving in and out of lanes, nearly rear-ending cars as he slipped past them, and seemed to be flooring the accelerator for large portions of the trip. Somewhat predictably, the lights of a California Highway Patrol cruiser eventually appeared in his rearview. Thiel was pulled over, and the trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. The young men in the rest of the car, simultaneously relieved to have been stopped and scared of the trooper, looked at each other nervously. “Well,” Thiel responded, in his calmest, most measured baritone. “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense.” The officer said nothing. Thiel continued: “It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.” The officer looked at Thiel and the geeks in the beater car and decided the whole thing wasn’t worth his time. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. “I don’t remember any of the games we played,” said the man, now in his fifties, who’d been in the passenger seat. “But I will never forget that drive.

On the one hand, I recognize the power of the placebo effect: if you believe it’s working, it may well work. If you think an object brings you luck, you are more confident. And yet what the Italian students in the “lucky” seats showed wasn’t confidence; it was overconfidence. They thought they were doing better, but the evidence didn’t actually back them up. And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made-up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition. Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium. I like to think of this as the black cat effect. You see one cross the parking lot as you walk to a tournament. You brood about the bad luck. Your game is thrown off. You blame the cat. You bust. You feel validated. Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

The winner of the tournaments takes control of the Wizard Council, which governs the guilds. Those who have come to power through the system are unlikely to change it. Our family is an aristocracy: privileged and idle, with little to do but spin intrigue.

I definitely have a warm relationship with a lot of the kids,” Spiegel told me at one tournament. “But I think my job as a teacher is to be more like a mirror, to talk about what they did on the chessboard and help them think about it. It’s a big thing to offer a kid. They put a lot of work into something, and you really look at it with them on a non-condescending level. That’s something that kids don’t often get, and in my experience, they really want it. But it’s not like I love them and

The Relics—weapons powered by high magick—fall at random throughout the tournament’s three month duration. They are the Cloak, the Hammer, the Mirror, the Sword, the Medallion, the Shoes, and the Crown.

According to her, cursed aren’t magick’s natural state. You need to twist the power into that shape, and it will do everything it can to resist you. So you have to mean them. Death curses especially. If your command is weak, the curse won’t work—or worse.” He gave her a pointed look. Isobel nearly rolled her eyes. Meaning a curse was pointless. The sort of idea a villain would fancy. Crafting enchantments was a neutral art. But she wouldn’t tell him that. She was completely powerless in the lair of the tournament’s most infamous champion, alive based only on his mood swings. Survival meant swallowing her insults and forcing a smile. “Maybe you can help, then,” she said, as though she’d offered him the page he’d grabbed from her. He scoffed. “I can’t teach you how to be wicked.

When dusk fell, my family, along with what appeared to be all the citizens of Hytanica, gathered at the military training field, where the Captain of the Guard’s body had been placed on a litter above a stack of firewood, ready to be burned, his soul already committed to God by our priests. Soldiers had stood guard around the site all day, and people had been coming in a steady stream to pay their respects. Many of them had left tokens of esteem at the base of the pyre--weapons of various types, coins, embroidered handkerchiefs, trophies won in battle or at tournaments, military medals and insignia. Even small children came forward, laying flowers, notes, toys and other items that had some special meaning to them among the other gifts. It made me both sad and proud when Celdrid walked forward and added his sword to the growing mound of mementos, the one that had originally been given to Steldor by our father, to be passed on by Steldor to my brother. It was perhaps Celdrid’s most coveted possession. He looked to Steldor as he came back to stand by us, and our cousin gave him a salute. When all the individuals who wanted to do so had paid homage to the captain, everyone stood in silence, the stillness of the large crowd itself a potent tribute. Grief could be a powerful, uniting force. Off to the side, separated from the masses, stood Steldor and Galen, their faces stoic, both wearing their military uniforms and holding lighted torches in preparation for setting the wood ablaze. King Adrik finally broke the silence, stepping forward as the appropriate representative of the royal family to say a few words. Queen Alera had not yet returned from Cokyri, another source of worry for the subdued throng. The former King cleared his throat and then began to speak, his deep voice easily carrying across the field. “We come together to honor a man of duty and devotion, strength and compassion, courage and wisdom. A man who put kingdom and family before all else, but who included within his family every citizen in need. A man of unwavering allegiance who steadfastly served his King and Queen for over thirty years. A man whose legacy will live on in his son and in every life he touched. A man I was proud to name my Captain of the Guard and to call my friend. And who, while serving the kingdom he loved, made the ultimate sacrifice. Let us celebrate his life this night, and may his funeral pyre burn as a bright beacon of hope in the darkness, letting the entire Recorah River Valley know that Hytanica is free once more.” Cheers went up from the crowd, then Steldor and Galen stepped forward and touched their torches to the pitch-soaked firewood. With a roar, flames shot into the air, befitting the man who had lived with an equally fiery passion.

I firmly believe in my heart that the U.S. must lead women's soccer and create change on the field and socially.' But, referring to American coaches, he said, 'The whole men's side doesn't respect the women's game,' believing it to be on a level of teenage boys. 'There may be some jealousy,' he said, adding that the men's national team was competing against 200 other countries, most with superior soccer cultures, while the American women were competing 'against five other countries.' This was a frequently made, but entirely specious, argument against the American women. First of all, only seven countries have ever won a men's World Cup, and only 11 have ever reached the finals in 70 years of competition. The power in the men's game is just as concentrated as it is in the women's game. A lack of competition was used to diminish the achievements of the American women, but of course it was a double standard. No one complained about the weak tournament fields when UCLA began its basketball dynasty or when the San Francisco 49ers won a handful of Super Bowls after playing against execrable regular-season competition in the NFC West division.

As des Roches moved to intercept one of the duke’s knights, William charged forward to confront Richard himself. The great tournament champion was about to meet the Lionheart in single combat.

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

Yet evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategists are actually slow and unsure. Like careful scientists, they take their time so they have the flexibility to change their minds.

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

The first game of a chess tournament is critical, since it sets the tone for the months to come. It is often a slow and quiet struggle, with the two players preparing themselves for the war and trying to read each other’s strategies. This game was different.

Can you be totally intrinsically motivated? “Not necessarily, it’s not always black and white,” says Brad Feld, partner at the Boulder, Colorado-based venture capital firm Foundry Group. I consider Brad a good friend and an expert at understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I met Brad through a good friend, Bing Gordon, the founder of EA Sports, and we quickly became friends. As he explains, “People fall along a continuum.” Brad uses tennis star Rafael Nadal as an example. He sees Nadal as having a blend of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Nadal clearly likes to win. He likes the limelight and the attention he gets. “Yet . . . Nadal, after he loses a match, he’s a very gracious loser, acknowledging that the other guy played better and did an awesome job,” Brad explained to me. Nadal recharges his battery by heading off to the beach, and then he is back in training for the next tournament. His daily training regime includes four hours of playing tennis on court, two and a half hours in the gym, and a strict stretching routine. He’s continued this training whether he is ranked at number one, five, or seven in the world. It’s for him, not for the ranking. Brad also believes something I’ve really taken to heart—that one person can’t truly motivate another person, a concept especially important in business when you manage people. “I can’t motivate another person, but [I can] create a context in which they are motivated, and part of being a leader is to understand what motivates other people,” explained Brad. “So if I’m the leader of an organization that you’re a part of, I have to understand what motivates you. Then I can create a context in which to motivate you. Most people struggle to understand how somebody else is motivated because they do it based on what motivates them.” Brad’s words ring true: While my own inspiration has come from various people, none of them actually motivated me. When I was extrinsically motivated, it was based largely on what others thought about me. My inner desire to win was based on extrinsic rewards. Only I had the power to change that.

To be sure, temperament and genetics explain some of Nicklaus’s tremendous achievement, but as we know both from research and from his own story, it was also through his relationship to his father, Charlie Nicklaus, that he developed a sense of ownership and accountability. When Jack said, “Dad, it’s my game,” that comment came out of their Corner Four relationship, in which his father was his fuel and his support. But his father also respected Jack’s sense of ownership and self-control. Charlie Nicklaus supported him from the days of playing junior golf up until the pros. He encouraged him, provided a coach for him, and gave him input, discipline, and much more. But he also gave him something huge that all Corner Four relationships give us: autonomy and responsibility. The balance between support and autonomy were there all along. As a psychologist, I can tell you that this balance helped develop the self-control that hit that 1-iron and helped him own the results he got in every other tournament he played.

What’s surprising about these results is that we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong-minded and clear-sighted. They’re supposed to be paragons of conviction: decisive and certain. Yet evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategists are actually slow and unsure.

Afghanistan was not an end in itself; the jewel was India which had to be protected from the lusting Russian eyes. As J.R. Seeley noted, …we have the possession of India, and a leading interest in the affairs of all those countries which lie upon the route to India. This and this only involves us in that permanent rivalry with Russia. Two of the world’s greatest powers then, Victorian Britain and Czarist Russia, were engaged in this tournament of shadows; the so-called permanent rivalry which profited neither country. When they started in the beginning of nineteenth century they were 2,000 miles apart. Within a hundred years they were within sniffing distance of each other; some Russian positions were just about 20 miles away from India.

Through several hours of revelry, I somehow got the idea that I could keep up with an English journalist. (Put English and journalist together and you get a liver as powerful as a nuclear reactor.) Cary was his usual moderate self, but I plowed along with Roddy, and I got as drunk as a rugby team after a tournament win.

It would blow her mind if she knew that she just served her nemesis breakfast.

In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called 'A Roma Therapy'. In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn't sleep. In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey's relationships. In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic. In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power. In one life she was an aid worker in Bostwana. In one life a cat-sitter. In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter. In one life she was sleeping on her only friend's sofa. In one life she taught music in Montreal. In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that. In one life she had no social media accounts. In one life she'd never drunk alcohol. In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament. In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute. In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu. In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored. In one life she was a vegan power-lifter. In one life she was travelling around South Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, and mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name. In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn't climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn't. She had been a rock star, an Olympics, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She'd had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She'd had emails and emails and emails. She'd had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She'd had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn't choose not to work but still couldn't find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn't even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn't a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she'd suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.