If Your Ambition Comes At The Price

If Your Ambition Comes At The Price Of An Unbalanced Life, That There's Nothing Else That Gives You Comfort But Success, It's Not Worth It.

You Can't Start Out At 20 In Whatever Your Profession Is And Say, "i Want To Win An Olympic Medal," Or "i Want To Become President," Or "i Want To Win The Pulitzer Prize." If You Love What You're Doing, It's Sort Of A Nice Thing That Happens Toward The End Of Your Career, Or In The Middle Of Your Career. It Is Not The Reason You Were Doing It. The Reason You Were Doing It Is Because Every Day You Wake Up In The Morning And You Can't Wait To Learn Something New.

All Through My Childhood, My Father Kept From Me The Knowledge That The Daily Papers Printed Daily Box Scores, Allowing Me To Believe That Without My Personal Renderings Of All Those Games He Missed While He Was At Work, He Would Be Unable To Follow Our Team In The Only Proper Way A Team Should Be Followed, Day By Day, Inning By Inning. In Other Words, Without Me, His Love For Baseball Would Be Forever Incomplete.

As A Historian, What I Trust Is My Ability To Take A Mass Of Information And Tell A Story Shaped Around It.

I Now Rely On A Scanner, Which Reproduces The Passages I Want To Cite, And Then I Keep My Own Comments On Those Books In A Separate File So That I Will Never Confuse The Two Again.