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Larry Ellison
Founder, Oracle Corporation
Suddenly we hit a wall. We reached a billion dollars in revenue, and we were having senior management problems all over the place. The people who were running the company, the billion dollar company, were the same people that had run the company when we were a 15 million dollar company, one twentieth the size. I had an incredible sense of loyalty to those people who had worked with me to build Oracle. It was a very painful realization in 1990 that I was going to have to change the management team. The company had outgrown the management. People who are good at running a 15 million dollar company don't use the same skills. They're just different, not one is better or worse, just an entirely different skill set in running a 15 million dollar company than a billion dollar company. Both skill sets are rare and precious. But we needed a different group of managers, and virtually the entire management team had to be replaced. That means I had to ask people who I had worked with for a decade to leave. I had to fire people. That was the most difficult thing I had to do in business, asking a bunch of people to leave Oracle.
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Nora Ephron
Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director
People think that when you write something it's cathartic, and I had written a lot of personal articles at Esquire, and people always say, "Oh God, it must have been so great when you finally wrote about having small breasts." No. You get through that, and then you write it. It is not the writing that is the catharsis. The catharsis has happened, and it in some way has moved you from the boo-hoo aspect of things to the "Oh, and wait until I tell you this part of the story! Wait until you hear this, if you want to hear what " where you really don't want people to feel sorry for you. I have such a strong sense of that, that I did not ever want people to think, "Oh, poor Nora!" You know?
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Suzanne Farrell
Ballerina Extraordinaire
It took me a long time to admit that I had arthritis, and that it was not going to ever get better. But strangely enough, when I got on stage, I had no pain, because the moment when I was out there was so important and the "now" of the situation was the only thing that mattered, that my body rallied somehow. We have these powers within us, you know, endorphins. The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called upon. And so I remained dancing and performing so that I didn't have the pain.
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Suzanne Farrell
Ballerina Extraordinaire
I had no choice and so I had the operation. I was very happy when I went in, and happy when I came out. Because suddenly I saw that I would live my life, instead of watch it go by, which was the way it had become lately in that situation. And so, of course, the doctor said I would never dance again. But I wanted to. But I didn't think about dancing again, I just thought about getting well. I put all my energies into the moment that I was now living in, and that was getting well. And I thought, if God wanted me to dance, He will let me dance.
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