My top 10 highlights from the book:

1. He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop.

2.  Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one.

3. I didn't want to be standard in any way.

4.  I began to feel that I was a hamster on a wheel. Part of me felt I was running on the wrong wheel, that I should be going into business for myself. I believed I wasn't really a hamster, but a cheetah, the fastest animal in the field. Even as everyone was telling me to slow down, I wanted to speed up.

5.  I'd absorbed a basic rule for success: love what you do. Too many people fight their job, a battle they cannot win.

6.  Seeing me hesitate, Ron said, "You have no gamble in you. Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice." That got me thinking. I was twenty-seven. If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over.

7.  You can't kill the great ones.

8.  I believed that nobody wants to be treated as just what they are. Everyone wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are—to become the best version of themselves.

9.  In any multiplayer contest, you want to be the outlier.

10.  I could have worked ten percent less, and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success. But I would have been a lot happier.

I had an intense and fun 3 hour dinner with Michael Ovitz. I made an episode about our dinner and another episode about Ovitz's excellent autobiography.

Listen to #381 I Had Dinner with Michael Ovitz on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the web.

Listen to #382 Who Is Michael Ovitz?: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the web.

Also: Video episodes now available on YouTube.