Outcomes

How to convince others that it's better to burn out than fade away or never to have been a star at all.


1. Compare value of Shaq (or other top player) in prime to value of any non-athlete filling it. Shaq is, say, 15% taller than the normal man (the 'mean man'), and 25% heavier. He is also, say, 15% better than the mean man at a test of reflexes. Those three things combined to make him worth what compared to the mean man at the game of basketball? It may be infinite, because the normal man's value approaches zero, while Shaq's approaches some decent fraction of the value of an entire sports team franchise plus the value of worldwide personal marketing. Shaq was not twice as valuable at the game; it was at least hundreds of times.

I'm sure this type of analysis is used in books about the 'new' elite in business. But those analyses are much harder because a CEO's useful traits are so much more difficult to measure. The concept is probably still the same--20% better functioning at a measurable skill may yield 2000% better results for the company.