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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
I didn't have a lot of universities interested in me. I've never gotten offers from the major institutions, aside from Chicago and Columbia. But I didn't consider that a setback. Chicago and Columbia were fine places, and I felt, well, that's the price of working on things that aren't so popular. So I accepted that. I didn't like it that my work wasn't received so well, but again, as I said earlier, I had this inner faith that I was right and they were wrong. I mean, I'll put it bluntly, that's what I felt. As did some of the people I respected so much, my teachers who had confidence in me, and a few other people, and that gave me further capacity to go on. So given my inner faith that what I was doing was important, it seemed obvious to me these are important problems and that I wasn't just a crazy man. There were some quite respected economists who thought I was doing important work, even though the bulk of the profession didn't. But that was enough for me. That kept me going. Everybody gets a little depressed, but I never went through any major depression over the fact that my work wasn't being accepted. I felt it will turn out to be that way. So I coped with my personal difficulties, with my wife's death. I remarried, a very fine marriage, my wife is here now, and she had two children who I'm very close to. So I sort of feel I have four children now, the two sons through her first marriage and my two daughters. So my personal life improved a lot. And finally, my work began to be accepted much more, I'd say sometime starting in the mid-'80s.
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Yogi Berra
Baseball Hall of Fame
I got in the Navy when I was 18 years old. And, from there they sent me to Bainbridge, Maryland, for boot camp. Then they shipped me down back to Norfolk where I started from, Little Creek down there -- base down there. And, I got tired of sitting around. Then they said, "We're looking for volunteers to go in the amphibs." And they didn't tell us what kind of boat, just "in the amphibs." So, I joined in, I said, "Well, I want to join the amphibs." There, being 18 years old. And, then they said I was on a rocket boat -- 36-footer, with 12 rockets on each side, five machine guns, a twin-50 and the 330s. And only 36 feet, made out of wood and a little metal. And, when I went back -- we went back to Bainbridge to do some training. And, I couldn't write home and tell them what I was doing, because them boats weren't out yet, for the invasion of Normandy. So, we started training there, and then we came back to Little Creek again and we started to train a little bit what we were supposed to do. It's amazing what that little boat could do, though; that 36-footer. We could shoot out rockets. We could shoot one at a time, two at a time, or we could shoot all 24 at a time. We went in on the invasion. We were the first ones in, before the Army come in.
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Yogi Berra
Baseball Hall of Fame
Yogi Berra: We stayed on the water for ten days. They gave us C-rations to eat while we were on it, slept on it. And, we finally got back on the ship, the USS Bayfield, P833. We were so tired, so they said -- and no sooner had I got in the bed, we get a general quarters order. And, I said, "Tough luck. I'm not getting out of this bed. I'm staying right in it." Fortunately enough, nothing happened to us. We were lucky. But, you just get so tired, you got to say that. But then, I enjoyed it. I wasn't scared. Going into, it looked like Fourth of July. It really did. Eighteen-year-old kid, going in an invasion where we had - I've never seen so many planes in my life, we had going over there.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos: I went to my boss and said to him, "You know, I'm going to go do this crazy thing and I'm going to start this company selling books online." This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, "Let's go on a walk." And, we went on a two hour walk in Central Park in New York City and the conclusion of that was this. He said, "You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job." He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. So, I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, "Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do." It's true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
The first initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com. And you know, that was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do because they didn't know. My dad's first question was, "What's the Internet?" Okay. So he wasn't making a bet on this company or this concept. He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother. So, I told them that I thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their whole investment, which was a few hundred thousand dollars, and they did it anyway. And, you know, I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because really, if you look at the odds of a start-up company succeeding at all, it's only about ten percent. Here I was, giving myself a 30 percent chance.
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