“I did not get what I wanted, and I left a system that had nurtured and helped define me for the better part of 17 years,” he said. “I went from being in the center of the grid to not only off the grid, but underneath the coffee table that the grid sits on, lost in the shag carpeting that is underneath the coffee table supporting the grid. It was the making of a career disaster, and a terrible analogy.

“But then something spectacular happened,” O’Brien continued. “Fogbound, with no compass, and adrift, I started trying things. I grew a strange, cinnamon beard. I dove into the world of social media. I started tweeting my comedy. I threw together a national tour. I played the guitar. I did stand-up, wore a skin-tight blue leather suit, recorded an album, made a documentary, and frightened my friends and family. Ultimately, I abandoned all preconceived perceptions of my career path and stature and took a job on basic cable with a network most famous for showing reruns, along with sitcoms created by a tall, black man who dresses like an old, black woman. I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous and seemingly irrational things and guess what: with the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life. To this day I still don’t understand exactly what happened, but I have never had more fun, been more challenged—and this is important—had more conviction about what I was doing. How could this be true? Well, it’s simple: There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.

“For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host ‘The Tonight Show,’” O’Brien said. “It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000—in 2000—I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.”

Ayn Rand, the “philosopher” , wrote a letter to
Boris Spassky shortly before he
was going to play his world championship chess match with Bobby Fisher in
1972.
Here’s a look at her mug: http://www.libertystory.net/images/rand3.jpg

An Open Letter to Boris Spassky

Dear Comrade Spassky:

I have been watching with great interest your world chess championship match
with Bobby Fischer. I am not a chess enthusiast or even a player, and know
only the rudiments of the game. I am a novelist-philosopher by profession.

But I watched some of your games, reproduced play by play on television, and
found them to be a fascinating demonstration of the enormous complexity of
thought and planning required of a chess player—a demonstration of how many
considerations he has to bear in mind, how many factors to integrate, how
many contingencies to be prepared for, how far ahead to see and plan. It was
obvious that you and your opponent had to have an unusual intellectual
capacity.

Then I was struck by the realization that the game itself and the players’
exercise of mental virtuosity are made possible by the metaphysical
absolutism of the reality with which they deal. The game is ruled by the Law
of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Causality. Each piece is what it
is: a queen is a queen, a bishop is a bishop—and the actions each can
perform are determined by it’s nature: a queen can move any distance in any
open line, straight or diagonal, a bishop cannot; a rook can move from one
side of the board to the other, a pawn cannot; etc. Their identities and the
rules of their movements are immutable—and this enables the player’s mind
to devise a complex, long-range strategy, so that the game depends on
nothing but the power of his (and his opponent’s) ingenuity.

This led me to some questions that I should like to ask you.

1.. Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment—when, after hours
of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent—an
unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his
favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able
to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your
country—and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected,
not to play, but to live.
2.. Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to
conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge—so that, at a
crucial moment, your queen turned suddenly from White to Black, becoming the
queen of your opponent; and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You
would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of
reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.
3.. Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork—i.e., if you
were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of
advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as
champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort
would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best?
Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist,
range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent’s knight at the
price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to
continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your
country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with
scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity
required for man’s survival.
4.. Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were
streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind
you, with a gun pressed to your back—a man who would not explain or argue,
his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be
able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is
the practical policy under which men live—and die—in your country.
5.. Would you be able to play—or to enjoy the professional understanding,
interest, and acclaim of an international Chess Federation—if the rules of
the game were splintered, and you played by “proletarian” rules while your
opponent played by “bourgeois” rules? Would you say that such “polyrulism”
is more preposterous than polylogism? Yet in the living world, your country
professes to seek global harmony and understanding, while proclaiming that
she follows “proletarian” logic and that others follow “bourgeois” logic, or
“Aryan” logic, or “third-world” logic, etc.
6.. Would you be able to play if the rules of the game remained as they
are at present, with one exception: that the pawns were declared to be the
most valuable and non-expendable pieces (since they may symbolize the
masses) which had to be protected at the price of sacrificing the more
efficacious pieces (the individuals)? You might claim a draw on the answer
to this one—since it is not only your country, but the whole living world
that accept this sort of rule in morality.
7.. Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged,
but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian
principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the
winner, but to the loser—if wining were regarded as a symptom of
selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a
superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in
order to give others a chance? Would you and your opponent try playing not
to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?
You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to
think of such questions—and I know the answers. No, you would not be able
to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this
category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess.

Oh yes, Comrade, chess is an escape—an escape from reality. It is an “out,”
a kind of “make-work” for a man of higher than average intelligence who was
afraid to live, but could not leave his mind unemployed and devoted it to a
placebo—thus surrendering to others the living world he had rejected as too
hard to understand.

Please do not take this to mean that I object to games as such: games are an
important part of man’s life, they provide a necessary rest, and chess may
do so for men who live under the constant pressure of purposeful work.
Besides, some games—such as sports contests, for instance—offer us an
opportunity to see certain human skills developed to a level of perfection.
But what would you think of a world champion runner who, in real life, moved
about in a wheelchair? Or of a champion high jumper who crawled about on all
fours? You, the chess professionals, are taken as exponents of the most
precious of human skills: intellectual power—yet that power deserts you
beyond the confines of the sixty-four squares of a chessboard, leaving you
confused, anxious, and helplessly unfocused. Because, you see, the
chessboard is not a training ground, but a substitute for reality.

A gifted, precocious youth often finds himself bewildered by the world: it
is people that he cannot understand, it is their inexplicable,
contradictory, messy behavior that frightens him. The enemy he rightly
senses, but does not choose to fight, is human irrationality. He withdraws,
gives up, and runs, looking for some sanctuary where his mind would be
appreciated—and he falls into the booby trap of chess.

You, the chess professionals, live in a special world—a safe, protected,
orderly world, in which all the great, fundamental principles of existence
are so firmly established and obeyed that you do not even have to be aware
of them. (They are the principles involved in my seven questions.) You do
not know that these principles are the preconditions of your game—and you
do not have to recognize them when you encounter them, or their breach, in
reality. In your world, you do not have to be concerned with them: all you
have to do is think.

The process of thinking is man’s basic means of survival. The pleasure of
performing this process successfully—of experiencing the efficacy of one’s
own mind—is the most profound pleasure possible to men, and it is their
deepest need, on any level of intelligence, great or small. So one can
understand what attracts you to chess: you believe that you have found a
world in which all irrelevant obstacles have been eliminated, and nothing
matters, but the pure, triumphant exercise of your mind’s powers. But have
you, Comrade?

Unlike algebra, chess does not represent the abstraction—the basic
pattern—of mental effort; it represents the opposite: it focuses mental
effort on a set of concretes, and demands such complex calculations that a
mind has no room for anything else. By creating an illusion of action and
struggle, chess reduces the professional player’s mind to an uncritical,
unvaluing passivity toward life. Chess removes the motor of intellectual
effort—the question “What for?”—and leaves a somewhat frightening
phenomenon: intellectual effort devoid of purpose.

If—for any number of reasons, psychological or existential—a man comes to
believe that the living world is closed to him, that he has nothing to seek
or to achieve, that no action is possible, then chess becomes his antidote,
the means of drugging his own rebellious mind that refuses fully to believe
it and to stand still. This, Comrade, is the reason why chess has always
been so popular in your country, before and since it’s present regime—and
why there have not been many American masters. You see, in this country, men
are still free to act.

Because the rulers of your country have proclaimed this championship match
to be an ideological issue, a contest between Russia and America, I am
rooting for Bobby to win—and so are all of my friends. The reason why this
match has aroused an unprecedented interest in our country is the
longstanding frustration and indignation of the American people at your
country’s policy of attacks, provocations, and hooligan insolence—and at
our own government’s overtolerant, overcourteous patience. There is a
widespread desire in our country to see Soviet Russia beaten in any way,
shape or form, and—since we are all sick and tired of the global clashes
among the faceless, anonymous masses of collective—the almost medieval
drama of two individual knights fighting the battle of good against evil,
appeals to us symbolically. (But this, of course, is only a symbol; you are
not necessarily the voluntary defender of evil—for all we know, you might
be as much its victim as the rest of the world.)

Bobby Fischer’s behavior, however, mars the symbolism—but it is a clear
example of the clash between a chess expert’s mind, and reality. This
confident, disciplined, and obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when
he has to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child, breaks
agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the kind of whim
worship one touch of which in the playing of chess would disqualify him for
a high-school tournament. Thus he brings to the real world the very evil
that made him escape it: irrationality. A man who is afraid to sign a
letter, who fears any firm commitment, who seeks the guidance of the
arbitrary edicts of a mystic sect in order to learn how to live his life—is
not a great, confident mind, but a tragically helpless victim, torn by acute
anxiety and, perhaps, by a sense of treason to what might have been a great
potential.

But, you may wish to say, the principles of reason are not applicable beyond
the limit of a chessboard, they are merely a human invention, they are
impotent against the chaos outside, they have no chance in the real world.
If this were true, none of us would have survived nor even been born,
because the human species would have perished long ago. If, under irrational
rules, like the ones I listed above, men could not even play a game, how
could they live? It is not reason, but irrationality that is a human
invention—or, rather, a default.

Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are
just as immutable (more so)—but her rules and their applications are much,
much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may
memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply
them, i.e., in order to play well—so each man has to use his own mind in
order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A
long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic
principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and
life. His name was Aristotle.

Would you have wanted to escape into chess, if you lived in a society based
on Aristotelian principles? It would be a country where the rules were
objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its
fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you would gain rewards for
your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the
power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves. Such a social system
could not be devised, you say? But it was devised, and it came close to full
existence—only, the mentalities whose level was playing jacks or craps, the
men with the guns and their witch doctors, did not want mankind to know it.
It was called Capitalism.

But on this issue, Comrade, you may claim a draw: your country does not know
the meaning of that word—and, today, most people in our country do not know
it either.

Sincerely,

Ayn Rand

Sep. 11, 1972

http://www.chess4all.org/Articles/Fischer/ol_to_bs.htm

Many of her “philosophical” writtings if you can call them that are virulent
pro-capitalist bordering on fascist propaganda.
Ironically she was born in Russia in 1902 and emigrated to the United States
in 1926. Ah-ha!
http://www.libertystory.net/LSTHINKRAND.htm

— Grant loved to go to the Fox Hills indoor mall in Los Angeles with his daughter, browsing the endless stores. His favorite? The Gap, because they stocked Levi’s 501s — the only jeans he wore —because they “got better with age” and bore no garish logo —something Grant detested on clothing.

— Grant had a bank-quality, room-size vault with a six-inch thick door in his home where he kept ten to 15 large boxes of keepsakes, all catalogued and labeled. All of his childhood records had been burned in WWI, Jennifer writes, and his goal was that “nothing would rob me of my records again.” Among the hundreds of documents were the most minute notes Jennifer wrote and threw away; he had retrieved them, ironed them and placed them in one of the boxes.

— Grant and Muhammad Ali would “gift” one another with a “Happy Birthday” phone call every year, as their birthdays were one day apart.

— Grant’s performance in “Arsenic and Old Lace” made him shudder. He referred to his acting as “way over the top.” Father and daughter rarely discussed his career, and he never asked her to watch any of his films.

— Grant enjoyed being called gay, calling the rumors funny; plus “it made women want to prove the assertion wrong.”

— At age 80, Grant and his fifth wife Barbara were trying to conceive a child. At the time of his death, they had moved on to artificial insemination with donor sperm, to no avail.

— Howard Hughes was a good friend of her father’s; he would visit the aging actor and they would dine on steaks and ice cream.

— Grant sunbathed every day for 30 minutes to “keep that healthy glow”; wrinkles were the price to pay, but he told his young daughter, “You’ll enjoy those, too.”

— Grant kept a “candy drawer” filled with his “most cherished” sweets, including chocolate, marzipan, lemon drops and hard candies. Because he had grown up with war rationing, even when some of the candy turned bad, he was hardpressed to toss it out.

— Grant loved going to the race track, specifically Hollywood Park, where he would squeal delight at the food court and its variety of kiosks, taking her and his race-day guests on a “food court tour” between the fourth and fifth races.

—Grant loved being on the board of directors of major companies including MGM and Faberge, where he earned generous “horizontal money,” (a term he learned from Quincy Jones), referring to the money one could make “while you’re sleeping.”

— Grant for years drove sky blue Cadillacs because the color was described on the dealership sticker as “Jennifer blue.”

— Grant’s favorite tongue twister was “Black bug’s blood.” (Try saying it 10 times fast — if you can.)

— Grant didn’t want animals in the house calling dogs and cats unsanitary and germ-infested (though his daughter was allowed to have fish and turtles). After several years together, his fifth (and final wife) Barbara, broke down his resolve and brought a cat into their lives.

— Grant hated makeup on women, preferring the natural look or spare use, otherwise a woman “looked like a clown.” He pointed out actresses such as Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Bisset and Diane Keaton who didn’t cover their faces in “colored goo.”

— Grant told his daughter to stand by her man, even if he wasn’t as smart or as wealthy as her. His only advice about relationships was “Don’t marry the guy you break the bed with.”

— For most of her early years with her dad, Cary Grant wore monogrammed pajamas and silk robes in the mornings and on weekend afternoons. When his fifth (and last) wife Barbara entered his life, he opted for caftans which she would sew for him.

—One of Cary Grant’s favorite board games was Trivial Pursuit, which the family played for the last time two days before his death.

“The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.

“Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”

“It was in the early ’70s and I was trying to get across town at two or three o’clock in the morning. This little car kept coming around and offering me a ride. I kept saying ‘No’ but finally I took the ride because I couldn’t get a cab.”

“I got in the car and the windows were are rolled up, except for a tiny crack. This driver had an incredibly bad smell to him. I looked down and there were no door handles. The inside of the car was stripped. The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.”

“I wiggled my arm out of the window and pulled the door handle from the outside. I don’t know how I did it, but I got out. He tried to stop me by spinning the car but it sort of helped me fling myself out.”

” Afterwards I saw him on the news– Ted Bundy.”