Quotes About Competition

The first was the news that if the great American swimmer Buster Crabbe, winner of the 1932 men's 400-meter freestyle, had swum in the present Olympic Games at the same pace he did in 1932 (and admittedly this would be asking a lot, as he has been dead for many years), he would have lost to Ian Thorpe by two full pool lengths. Isn't that amazing?

I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.

The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34

Sun Tzu said, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.

Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.

At Breakthrough Energy, we fund only technologies that could remove at least 500 million tons a year if they're successful and fully implemented. That's roughly 1 percent of global emissions. Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn't compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero. There may be other good reasons to pursue them, but significantly reducing emissions won't be one of them.

in a gunfight there is no second place winner

This is the opposite of the free market.

The only important statistic is the final score.

We spent so many years searching for an archrival for Jordan—the Frazier to his Ali, someone who'd bring out the best in him—when really, that player was probably Len Bias. We were robbed.

he intended to exploit as best he could the traditional rivalries, for that was one of the best things the league had going for it, genuine rivalries in which the players themselves participated. Those rivalries, Boston-Philly, New York–Baltimore, needed no ballyhoo; the athletes themselves were self-evidently proud and they liked nothing better than to beat their opponents

fact, the '01 Lakers swept a 50-win Blazers team (that nearly beat them the previous spring), a 55-win Kings team (that almost beat them 12 months later), and a 58-win Spurs team (that won three titles in the next six years),43 then came within an overtime loss of sweeping the 56-win Sixers

Do Magic's Lakers win five titles with Jordan before Jordan thriving in Denver and Walton's feet holding up in Portland? I'm going out on a limb and saying no. What a shame.

By the time Payton had finished whipping him like a dominatrix, Stockton was thirty-four and heading toward the twilight of his career.

The score is still Q to 12!

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquility.

Pressure is a privilege

She's trying to sleep with every boy on the football team before her junior year. If she does, she wins five hundred dollars." "Now who would pay her to do a thing like that?" "The football team.

I'm playing checkers while they're playing chess They make the big moves that make me a little less Even when I win and beat the pants off of the best I'm still playing checkers while they're playing chess

Somewhere else in the world, someone is practicing while you're not, and when you meet him, he'll beat you.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind

For any competitive individual—and entrepreneurs are competitive by definition—it becomes quite tempting to chase after growth at a certain point in a company's life. The financial indicators are, after all, the most convenient, and objective, measures of success available. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you're maximizing growth, you're also maximizing success. It feels like you're winning, and who doesn't like to win?