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Larry Ellison
Founder & CEO, Oracle Corporation
I think we should think of altruism -- giving -- as a strategy for happiness. Forget the morality of it all. "It's the right thing to do." Instead, think of it as something totally in your self-interest. If you can help others, you will feel great. The more you can help, the more intelligently you can help, the bigger lever you can get on the world to make it better, the better you will feel about yourself. The more joy you will experience. That is the road to bliss. That is the intelligent pursuit of happiness. That is what we should do. That is my argument for giving, not simply that it's the right and moral thing to do. It happens to also be that, but I don't find that as persuasive as that it is the road to happiness.
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Larry Ellison
Founder & CEO, Oracle Corporation
This is America, people can change jobs, and people like to work with other intelligent and interesting people. They like to do interesting things. We have fantastic salary scales; I think we're the highest paying company in Silicon Valley. We have wonderful benefits, all of these things, but again, don't mistake any of that for altruism. That is in our interest, to retain our employees. Their job, my job, is to build better products than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace, and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one. That is our reason for being.
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Larry Ellison
Founder & CEO, Oracle Corporation
There are networks everywhere: around the world, in offices, in schools, in major government institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks? A television network is enormously complicated. It has got satellites and relay stations and cable head-ins and recording studios. You have this huge, professionally managed network, accessed by a very low-cost and simple appliance, the television. Anyone can learn how to use a television. Ninety-seven percent of American households have televisions. Ninety-four percent of American households have telephones. The telephone: again, a very simple appliance attached to an enormously complex, professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?
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Nora Ephron
Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director
Nora Ephron: My second marriage ended in this very melodramatic way. Melodramatic if you weren't involved with it, and dramatic if you were. I was pregnant, and my husband had fallen in love with this extremely tall woman who was married to the British ambassador, and it was very painful and horrible at the time. But then a few months later, I found myself at a typewriter working on a screenplay, and instead I wrote the first eight pages of a novel, and it was a novel that I knew if I could -- you know, when I was going through the nightmare of the end of the marriage, I absolutely knew that there was -- if I could ever find the voice to write it in, that someday it would be a story, someday it would be copy. But at the time, I was way too distraught to ever feel that. But you know, time heals, especially if you had a mother like mine. So I started writing a novel that became Heartburn, and that was the thinly disguised version of the end of that marriage.
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Nora Ephron
Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director
One day, someone -- an editor at Vogue -- called me and said they were doing an issue on age and was there anything that I wanted to write about, and I said, "Yeah. I want to write about my neck." It wasn't anything hard, and I just wrote this funny thing called "I Feel Bad About My Neck," which everybody read, a huge number of people. Most people, you don't expect, when you have a piece in Vogue, to have a huge -- you know, people don't buy Vogue necessarily for the articles, but this was an issue all my friends read, and a lot of people said, "Oh, that was really funny," and I thought, "Oh, I see. There's a book here. There's a book about getting older," and I started making a list of things that I thought could be written about that no one had written about, like maintenance, which is a full time career for those of us who are getting on in years, just sort of keeping your finger in the dike, so that you don't look like a bag lady. So I made a list of things and then wrote most of the book and sold it. And then there's all sorts of things that aren't about aging, like my summer in the White House when President Kennedy didn't sleep with me.
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Julius Erving
The Great and Wondrous Dr. J
When handling the ball, I always would look for daylight, wherever there was daylight. Sometimes there's only a little bit of daylight between two players, and you'd find a way to get the ball between those two bodies and you make something happen. Having good peripheral vision, I would always see daylight. Maybe I could see daylight that a lot of other players couldn't see. I see a lot of extraordinary players today, Jordan and Drexler and what have you. They see daylight where other players don't see that daylight. They see a body there, and they don't want to challenge that body, and they just don't see the daylight. So, that's a great optic option to have. The flamboyance wasn't intentional. The approach was result-oriented, more than reaction-oriented. Trying to get the results -- stop the team on defense anyway you can: block a shot, steal a ball, force a turnover. Offensively: try to score, set up a teammate to score, keep it very simple. The result was the priority, the effect was an added bonus, I guess. That was part of the gift, the blessing. Once it became very sensible business-wise, if you do things with a certain type of result and cause a certain type of reaction or effect, then you increase your market value. It's very much a competition for the entertainment dollar, and that's never been more clearly evident than in today's NBA game.
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