What I learned from reading The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the America’s Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie.[0:01] Larry Ellison to Steve Jobs: I’m talking about greatness, about taking a lever to the world and moving it. I’m not talking about moral perfection. I’m talking about people who changed the world the most during their lifetime.[0:56] Larry’s choice for history’s greatest person could not have been more different from Gandhi (Steve Jobs’s choice): the military leader Napoleon Bonaparte.  [3:15] Steve liked to say the Beatles were his management model — four guys who kept each other in check and produced something great.[3:47] Larry’s favorite history book was Will and Ariel Durant’s The Age of Napoleon, which he had read several times. Like his buddy Steve, and like Larry himself, Napoleon was an outsider who was told he would never amount to anything.[6:09] Now the book is technically about the America’s Cup race. But that is not really what it is about. This books gives insights into extreme winners.[7:50] Steve and Larry had found they had much in common. They both had adoptive parents. Both considered their adoptive parents their real parents. Both were “OCD,” and both were antiauthoritarian. They shared a disdain for conventional wisdom and felt people too often equated obedience with intelligence. They never graduated from college, and Steve loved to boast that he’d left Reed College after just two weeks while it took others, including Larry and their rival Bill Gates, months or even years to drop out. [9:09] Steve Jobs: “Why do people buy art when they can make their own art?” Larry thought for a moment and replied, “Well , Steve , not everyone can make his own art. You can. It’s a gift.”[10:46] What he (Steve Jobs) liked was designing and redesigning things to make them more useful and more beautiful.[11:02] If Michael Jordan sold enterprise software he would be Larry Ellison. Larry is addicted to winning.[12:38] An idea I learned from Steve was the further you get away from one the more complexity you are inviting in.[13:20] Larry was a voracious reader who spent a great deal of time studying science and technology, but his favorite subject was history. He learned more about human nature, management, and leadership by reading history than by reading books about business.[14:52] His adopted Dad said over and over again to Larry, “You are a loser. You are going to amount to nothing in life.”[15:19] Larry treats life like an adventure.[15:26] He envied how Graham’s parents supported him on his adventure, as this was the opposite of his own life. The story of Graham transported Larry from the regimentation of high school to the adventure and freedom of the sea. Here was a boy alone at sea for weeks at a stretch; dealing with storms, circling sharks, and broken masts; visiting exotic locales. Through it all he was his own navigator.That is definitely the way Larry approached his life.[18:04] Why Larry uses competition as a way to test himself: He wanted to see just how much better a sailor he had become. It will be an interesting test. There was a clarity to be found in sports that couldn’t be had in business. At Oracle he still wanted to beat the rivals IBM and Microsoft, but business was a marathon without end; there was always another quarter. In sports , the buzzer sounds and time runs out.[18:50] It is not what two groups do a like that matters. It's what they do differently that's liable to count. —Charles Kettering[22:20] Why test yourself: After the laughter died down Larry turned serious. “Why do we do these things? George Mallory said the reason he wanted to climb Everest was because ‘it’s there.’ I don’t think so. I think Mallory was wrong. It’s not because it’s there. It’s because we’re there, and we wonder if we can do it.” [24:11] Larry’s personality: He didn’t like letting them have control. It was the same reason he didn’t