“Cerf bet me fifty bucks I couldn’t write a book using only 50 words,” he said later. “I did it to show I could.” This encapsulated the lesson I learned from the recent Michael Jordan documentary - take silly bets and trivial insults seriously and you can be driven to do great things.
Gee, just 5 minutes ago I was thinking on how Werner Herzog bet Errol Morris that Morris wouldn't finish the documentary he'd started, or Herzog would eat his shoe. Now that is a friend, and a great motivating bet. And I loved Gates of Heaven.
"After a few unproductive months, he happened to read a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read, "450 Dead Pets Going To Napa Valley". Morris left for Napa Valley and began working on the film that would become his first feature, Gates of Heaven, which premiered in 1978. Herzog had said he would eat his shoe if Morris completed the documentary. After the film premiered, Herzog publicly followed through on the bet by cooking and eating his shoe, which was documented in the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. ...Critic Roger Ebert was and remained a champion of the film, including it on his all-time top ten best films list."
After 10 years he has built up quite a repertoire, and it's starting to get rarer to run across a quote he hasn't covered.
The primary lesson is that almost every famous quotation has been misattributed, inevitably to someone more famous. It's surprisingly unusual to find a famous quote that the famous person actually said.
I'm afraid Churchill is very much included. He didn't say "up with which I will not put", he didn't say "I am drunk but you are ugly and in the morning I shall be sober", he didn't say "if I were your husband I'd drink that poison", and so on. He didn't say most of the best Churchill lines. Lincoln didn't say most of the best Lincoln lines either. Same with Mark Twain, Einstein, and so on.
