Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

Afterword: A Personal Note about My Career

Back in 2007, I was invited to give a talk at a CEO Leadership Summit sponsored by Yale University. Since I was bound to be the old warhorse among the group, I settled on a subject that I thought would be both retrospective and prospective: "Why Do I Bother to Battle?" It happened that the television writers were on strike at the time, so on the theory that the summit participants might be suffering from an absence of late-night humor, I decided to frame my talk as one of those inverse "Top Ten" lists from the Late Show with David Letterman.

As comedy, my list might be wanting. (Remember, I was an economics major!) But as a summation of what has pushed me on during my entire life and what continues to push me on today, it's right on the mark.

• 10. Damned if I know why I bother to battle. I just do it, and I don't know how to stop.

• 9. Because, in all the nearly nine decades of my life I've never done anything but battle—as a boy delivering newspapers; then as a young man working as a waiter (in many venues), ticket seller, mail clerk, cub reporter, runner for a brokerage firm, even a pinsetter in a bowling alley (as I wrote earlier, a Sisyphean battle!); and as a man, fighting the battle for personal advancement, for attention, for innovation, for progress, for service to society, and yes, even for power and the hope of being remembered. (Might as well admit it!) That's one reason why I write books, including this one.

• 8. Because the great battlers ...