The X Factor: A Quest for Excellence
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Book Overview
George Plimpton is embarrassed. The noted amateur of odd sporting experience has lost one horseshoe match to George Bush, a match that was as much a test of wills as of skills. Now Bush has invited him back for a rematch. How to avoid humiliation the second time? What is that quality - we'll call it the X Factor - that all winners, from famous athletes to successful CEOs, seem to possess? Plimpton sets out to find it. The quest for this elusive ingredient is both hilarious and informative, leading from the locker room to the boardroom, with several strange stops in between. Plimpton corners superstars like Bill Russell and Billie Jean King, famous coaches, the chairman of American Express, sports doctors, and M and A king Henry Kravis, and puts the same question to all of them: What is it that allows an individual, or a team, to outperform competitors who are no less gifted, mentally and physically? Their answers run the gamut from motivational rage to new-age meditation, and Plimpton slowly pieces together a definition of this mysterious winning quality.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0962474541
ISBN13:9780962474545
Release Date:January 1990
Publisher:Whittle Direct Books
Length:85 Pages
Weight:0.85 lbs.
Dimensions:1.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
The Perfect Saturday Afternoon Read
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
Something about Plimpton's writing, his lack of adjectives I think, makes for quick reading. I read this in one sitting and laughed through a lot of it. This little book is Plimpton wandering around the country asking famous athletes and CEOs for advice on his upcoming horseshoes rematch against then-president George H W Bush. He asks each of these people, including Bush, what it is that makes them succeed in what they do. It's not hard work, practice, or innate abilities but rather some "ingredient... a potion that people in all walks of life would go to extravagant lengths to obtain if it came in a small earthenware jug corked at its mouth." In the process of interviewing people around the country he loses badly to Billie Jean King at tennis, discovers that his athletic stature most resembles a bull, and kicks it around Camp David. Classic Plimpton, and a unique look at Bush the husband and father. Read it on a rainy day.
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