Title of Annotations

The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.

I went to Vienna, that momentous, coffee-scented crossroads, where Stalin and Trotsky and Tito and Hitler and Jung and Freud all lived, at the same historical moment, and all loitered in the same steamy cafés, plotting how to save(or end) the world.

After all, I was standing at the birthplace of Western civilization. Maybe I merely wanted it to be familiar. But I didn’t think so. I had the clearest thought: I’ve been here before. Then, walking up those bleached steps, another thought: This is where it all begins. On my left was the Parthenon, which Plato had watched the teams of architects and workmen build. On my right was the Temple of Athena Nike. Twenty-ve centuries ago, per my guidebook, it had housed a beautiful frieze of the goddess Athena, thought to be the bringer of“nike,” or victory.

It was one of many blessings Athena bestowed. She also rewarded the dealmakers. In the Oresteia she says:“I admire . . . the eyes of persuasion.” She was, in a sense, the patron saint of negotiators.

discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes. I don’t know when I gured out that the play was called Knights. I do know that as I turned to leave I noticed the temple’s marble façade. Greek artisans had decorated it with several haunting carvings, including the most famous, in which the goddess inexplicably leans down . . . to adjust the strap of her shoe.

No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.

This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

“No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane.“But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa.

Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more.

The harder you work, the better your Tao.