The following out-of-work period was difficult but gave him [DeVore] some real exercise in a new kind of resonance:

The unsuccessful job-hunting became very frustrating, and I became very depressed. So much so that I made myself susceptible to a virus that resulted in spinal meningitis. And I was laid down flat in bed for three months with no income coming in. Nothing coming in at all and a wife who was pregnant, mortgage payments that were overdue, and every time I started to stand up my head just throbbed and I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was read. And so I had my wife go to the library.

I said, “Get me every book you can on every great person, every person who has been successful.” In these three months I devoured about twenty-five autobiographies and biographies of great people. And every time I read these biographies or autobiographies I identified with these people. These people became models.

his pride had suffered. His weariness was still outmatched by fury. He did not pause to consider whether the HR people were right, or whether McKinsey was still the right path upwards. He refused to lose.

“On the downside, he doesn’t see himself sometimes. When something he does is shit – you know, he does sometimes actually just make a mistake – he can’t see it and thinks it’s gone wrong for some complicated reason to do with him being so brilliant.

It was not the time for Roland to start playing up. But James was realising that this was the nature of adult life. There were no breakthroughs into clear open space. Every time you were just getting into your stride, something tripped you. It was like trying to construct a functioning car out of pasta shapes: every time you, with supreme care and delicacy, got this improbable object moving forward, something snapped again.

The mistake must have been to work on the problems that happened to be in front of him, and not to seek other, more promising ones. He’d been sucked in by the work itself, by his capacity for it.