But instead, I got a lecture on fun. “Well, Jim, if you don’t love doing it, you won’t stay with it long enough to ever really get good at it.” Then he added, “Life is just too short not to enjoy what you’re doing. If we can’t make this fun, we should stop doing it!

You can look at life as a search for that one big winning hand, or you can look at life as a series of hands well played. If you believe life comes down to a single hand, of course, you can easily lose. But if you see life as a series of hands, and if you play each hand the best you can, there’s a huge compounding effect. Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great. As long as you don’t get a catastrophic stroke of bad luck that flat-out ends the game, what really matters is how well you play each hand over the long haul.

Laying out the conditions: To pursue this possibility, what would have to be true?

With No Deal as an option, you can honestly say, “I only want to go for Win/Win. I want to win, and I want you to win. I wouldn’t want to get my way and have you not feel good about it, because downstream it would eventually surface and create a withdrawal. On the other hand, I don’t think you would feel good if you got your way and I gave in. So let’s work for a Win/Win. Let’s really hammer it out. And if we can’t find it, then let’s agree that we won’t make a deal at all. It would be better not to deal than to live with a decision that wasn’t right for us both. Then maybe another time we might be able to get together.

Morrison relented and hoped Durham would make good on his word. But he also had to convince Silberman to let him work at his own pace. “Try this my way,” he wrote. "Allow me the exotic pleasure this time of calling you first with the work, rather than vice versia [sic]. I am highly conscious of the overhangings. But now that I’ve got the ball, I run faster and better when I give myself the illusion I’m in charge of it and the whistle wont blow before I wrap it up. I beat deadlines when I feel no deadlines.