Word: neal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...always longed for Shaq-grade confidence, because to write well, you have to believe that tons of people want to know what you have to say, even though, in person, not even your wife does. So I asked O'Neal how he does it. "To this day, I don't remember myself ever missing a shot, missing a free throw or losing a game. That comes from a military background. Move on. Always move on," he said. I have no doubt that if I mentioned his movie Kazaam, he'd have no idea what I was talking about. Although neither...
...beat me. "I probably can't," he said. This clearly was a trick, perhaps a way of distracting me while he appeared out of my boom box as a genie and dunked a basketball on my head. Seriously, I feel better every time I mention Kazaam. But then O'Neal said, "There's a difference between confident and arrogant. I'm a humble person. I'm not going up against a fifth-grade writer. I'm going up against the man." For a moment, I truly believed that O'Neal knew who I was. And that he should...
Despite O'Neal's cheerleading, I worried about my contest entry. I finished an entire piece about how O'Neal's Twitter success meant society valued authenticity over quality. That essay was as boring as it sounded. I scrapped it and wrote one about how impotent my Twitter power was, since I could get only four of my 700,000 followers to spread false rumors about CNN's Rick Sanchez. I went through five different first sentences, finally choosing one just because my editor kept e-mailing me that I was past my deadline...
Afraid I would lose, I asked O'Neal, who I assumed took five minutes to speak his piece to an assistant, how the writing went. He told me it had taken him four hours, five drafts and four friends, who had given him advice. "I tried to use a lot of big words to sound Harvardish," he said. "I just really respect your profession. I didn't want to have too many Ebonic words in there." And I do believe that at Harvard, students now write papers in which they...
...whether I win or O'Neal does (you can read both essays and vote on a winner at time.com/Shaqvsjoel I beseech you to judge both pieces as if they were written by scrawny, long-haired guys with new babies, whose main method of making a living depends on this), I have learned from O'Neal. Confidence, even if it's faked, makes life more interesting. Instead of wondering if he can write, swim, act, rap, get an M.B.A., be a cop, wrestle, fight in mixed martial arts or give himself ridiculous nicknames, he does it. And the results...