“They learned to respect me because I respected myself. I was fair, I minded my business, and I could play well. I’m still friends with many of those boys today, all now men with families of their own. What I started realizing even from my young days is that people treat you the way you treat yourself. I never hid or felt ashamed to look and act the way I did. If you gave me something sour to taste, I gave it right back.

“They were all good soccer players, but they knew they weren’t great. And most of them were playing for fun, they weren’t dreaming of getting on airplanes and being a professional athlete like I was. “Doesn’t matter what you say. You can’t understand,” I’d say to them. “I can see light with my running. All of you are here just chasing a ball around a field. Where’ that going to take you?” I had to be as harsh with them as they were being with me. I wanted to live in a proper city, travel the world, be known and appreciated for my talents.

16. Black and White

“Triumphant, Asha felt confirmed in a suspicion she’d developed in her years of multi-directional, marginally profitable enterprise. Becoming a success in the great,

rigged market of the overcity required less effort and intelligence than getting by, day to day, in the slums. The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn’t all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren’t all that likely to get caught.

“Of course it’s corrupt,” Asha told the deferential new secretary of the nonprofit.

“But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers — when the big people say that it’s right?

James was twenty-seven and never had a boss again. Until that moment, he and Roland had lived as employees, as if in the warm, dark, cosy-fetid hold of a ship. What happened up at the helm was not their concern. Their preoccupations were how to get a better position, and the whims and characters of their superiors and colleagues. Even James had never cared about what was best for McKinsey. Now, however, they were up and exposed. The wind blew away the comfy indoor reek; the horizon was a wide blue empty circle around them, as if the ship were the fluttering needle on a gigantic compass. And they had to choose the direction.

science. Really, this was a lesson in humility. You couldn’t blame the outside world for not conforming to your ideas. It wasn’t the world that was wrong, it was you. Either you could be humiliated and angry and hurt, or you could let that go and start building a better model. He began to search where he always had: within himself. In some ways, it wasn’t complicated: if tidal energy wasn’t going to beat gas and coal on price, and you still needed tidal to win, you had to assume that gas and coal were finished.