Seth Godin

First things first: I was weird. Chip was an all-star. Generous, handsome, smart and ready to open the door for anyone who needed a hand. Second: The real leap in Chip’s search for Wisdom that day at Stanford was going first. Not waiting to be picked, but becoming the picker.

For the decade and a half that I was a struggling entrepreneur, rubbing two sticks together for heat, I’d find myself in San Francisco a couple of times a year. And I’d stay at the Phoenix. Not because it was free (Chip charged me the slightly-discounted starving-entrepreneur rate) but because (at least at the beginning) Chip needed the business and I needed a cheap place to stay.

Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile together, not alone. He was surrounded by pace runners. But it wasn’t a competition, it was a mastermind. Wisdom doesn’t come from a blog post or a book. It only comes from one place: experience.