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Blog

Personal Branding

Dan Schawbel interviewed me today about Clutch for his Personal Branding blog. The questions were great – read it here – but the photos that went with his interview were fantastic. I particularly like the ones of Jamie Dimon with his fists up and David Boies looking like the person he was talking to is about the biggest idiot in the world.

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Boies Beats A-Rod

When I set out to write Clutch, I would have never imagined that two of the book’s subjects would converge on a single day. But that was what happened today when the attorney David Boies helped win the case overturning California’s ban on same-sex marriage, and Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees third baseman, hit his 600th home run.

The two men to me sit at opposite ends of the clutch spectrum, and Boies is the one I would call on in a pressure situation. As an attorney, he is always focused in court, and focus is the foundation for any clutch performance. For him, it is a skill he uses to craft the “morality play” of a trial. In the trial over Proposition 8, Boies seemed to cast his “morality play” on the argument against discrimination, whereas his opponents argued on the basis of morality itself. Boies could focus on a well-established legal precedent – one that was easier to sustain under intense pressure – while the other side was dealing with a more subjective feeling – morality is not defined the same way for everyone.

But how can an attorney be more clutch than perhaps the greatest baseball player in the game today? The answer lies in A-R0d’s 40-something at-bats and recent 0-17 slump before hitting number 600. Up until today, he had stopped swinging like the man who had hit 599 other home runs. When he stood over the plate, he was overthinking his every swing – with just one good one, he knew he would become the youngest player ever to reach 600 homers. Seeing this scared me because I saw the old A-Rod, the one who became synonymous with choking in every postseason game. As a Yankees fan, that is the last person I ever want to see return to the lineup. I only hope today’s homer will free A-Rod’s mind to get back to being a great player, and stop him from thinking of himself as the greatest player ever.

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