Bob Dylan

"People love easy more than they love cheap. As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.”"

"So, select a mentor much as Bob Dylan did, by conscious choice and without necessarily asking their permission. The most important thing a mentor can do is to galvanise and infuse us with their spirit, so that our self-belief is enhanced and focused on what similar or greater ends we can attain. A mentor can do all this without knowing us at all."

"A. J. P. Taylor, Brad Stone, Andrew Roberts, Roy Jenkins, Winston Churchill (the author), David Cannadine, Robert Tombs, Walter Isaacson, Neal Gabler, Tom Cannon, Bob Dylan (the author), Ian Bell, Thomas Kuhn, Viktor Frankl, Robert Skidelsky, Victor Sebestyen, Nelson Mandela (the author), Peter Hain, Lindy Woodhead, A. N. Wilson, Andrew Welburn, John Campbell, Nancy Andreasen, Timothy Wilson and Max Gunther."

"Here are examples of pool vehicles the players used. For Bill Bain, it was the theories of business strategy that had been originated by the Boston Consulting Group. BCG put its ideas such as the Boston Box out into the public domain to build reputation and sell business. When Bill Bain started Bain & Company, he was able to use all BCG’s concepts. They were high-octane stuff, fuelling a whole new industry. Jeff Bezos also used the BCG ideas to develop his philosophy for Amazon, especially dominant market share, and lowest costs and prices. Bezos also benefitted from two other pool vehicles – internet retailing and ‘Californian Venture Capital Syndrome’, which values growth above short-term profits, supporting Amazon’s losses for long years, allowing a focus on customer experience and low prices. Otto von Bismarck rode the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. This was his pool vehicle to turn Germany from a fragmented cluster of dozens of independent states into a unified superpower dominating central Europe. The popularity he gained by his unification of Germany pleased the liberal politicians and William, the Prussian King, and kept Bismarck in power for a generation. Winston Churchill’s pool vehicle was the rise of German National Socialism, Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism, and his own opposition to them. An environmental factor does not have to be appeased or promoted; it can also be a pool vehicle when it is opposed first or most vigorously. Marie Curie’s pool vehicle was the new field of x-rays and radiation. The two pool vehicles which Walt Disney exploited so well were the rise of animated cartoons and, later, the rise of amusement parks. Disneyland was in many ways the opposite of traditional amusement parks, which Walt disdained as ‘nasty, dirty places run by hard-faced men’. Without their existence he would probably not have had the idea for a pristine and uplifting park idealising the best of American small-town values. Leonardo da Vinci would not have been Leonardo if he had not been born where and when he was. Renaissance Florence was his pool vehicle. Bob Dylan’s pool vehicle was the early 1960s folk movement in New York City, with its liberal-protest values, and self-importance, epitomised by his relationship with Joan Baez. He rode them until he became famous, then dumped them sharpish. Albert Einstein benefited from the…"