Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The X Factor: A Quest for Excellence

George Plimpton

3.5/5 ( ratings)

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 & 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.

Language: English

Pages: 170

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Release: March 01, 1995

ISBN: 0393034844

ISBN 13: 9780393034844

The X Factor: A Quest for Excellence

George Plimpton

3.5/5 ( ratings)

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 & 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.

Language: English

Pages: 170

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Release: March 01, 1995

ISBN: 0393034844

ISBN 13: 9780393034844

More books from George Plimpton

Edie: American Girl

Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback

3.9/5 ( ratings)

D.V.

Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career

The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, ... Else in the World Since 1953

4.2/5 ( ratings)

The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Open Net

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Out of My League: The Classic Hilarious Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The Bogey Man: A Month on the PGA Tour

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Shadow Box

4.2/5 ( ratings)

The Best of Plimpton

Women Writers at Work

4.3/5 ( ratings)

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair: And Other Excursions and Observations

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Wild Stories: The Best of Men's Journal

4.3/5 ( ratings)

The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir: With the lost photographs of David Attie

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Writers at Work: Volume 3

4.2/5 ( ratings)

West Point: Two Centuries of Honor and Tradition

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life & Times of the Notorious Novel Candy

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Il principio dell'iceberg

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?