Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other. Smith came away from his Vietnam experience with an increased faith that if you start with basic respect for people, and you show trust by putting them in situations where they have to come through because others depend on them, they’ll summon whatever it takes to achieve the mission.

It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman talked and wrote extensively about her specific practices; she even wrote a whole book on her methods, Practicing History.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.

Bill Meehan, intellectual provocateur and caring friend, encouraged and challenged me to widen and deepen the scope of what this book is all about. “Don’t waste your time— or your words— on the little questions,” he’d hammer at me. “Go for the big questions, the questions of truth and wisdom and meaning. You need to be more of a poet and less of an analyst, more of a philosopher and less of a strategist” I’ve always built my books on a foundation of rigorous research and empirical evidence, and What to Make of a Life is no exception.