In 1981 in a letter to Sports Illustrated the golfer Hubie Green is credited with the saying [HGSI]: Most of the time change is a good thing and I think that’s what it’s all about–embracing change, being brave, doing whatever you have to so everyone in your life can move forward with theirs, and maybe it’s the only way you can truly make her be happy.”

Every once in a while, as I worked my jobs and made my deposits into my savings account, I’d want to buy something. I would go talk to my dad about it. “You can buy it, Joe,” he would tell me. “It’s your money. You earned it. But understand what that’s going to do to your savings account, and what it’s going to do to you in the future.” Dear Quote Investigator: I am a fan of the golfing legend Gary Player, and the Wikipedia article about him says he: “Coined one of the most quoted aphorisms of post-War sport”: Building Reputation: A strong work ethic can help build your reputation in the industry. Partners, investors, and clients are drawn to entrepreneurs who are known for their dedication and reliability. This can open up numerous opportunities for your business. Then I got interested in getting a new bicycle. I suppose I thought my old bike wasn’t good enough. So, I asked my father if I could have a new bike. He said I could have one—I just had to make my own money to pay for it. I asked him how I could go about doing that. He said there were jobs listed in the newspaper, in the section called the want ads. He showed me where they were and promised he would help me understand how to talk when I went for an interview. Yet, 1961 is the date of the earliest instance of the aphorism that QI has located that uses the word “practice”. It appears in a book titled “The Devil to Pay” and is used by a soldier of fortune. (Thanks to ace researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake for verifying this citation on paper.) The following passage describes a man being killed with a single shot [DTP]:

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Guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman, and it was painted on the wall there. It said, 'Be curious, not judgmental.' I like that." In 1913 the fantasy author L. Frank Baum, creator of the famous World of Oz, uses the maxim variant that hails knowledge [OZP]: But the version that Barber is quoted saying does not contain the word “practice”. Indeed, the version Barber uses invokes “hard work” and that variant appears more than a decade earlier in 1949 as shown further below. It is possible that Barber also used a version of the maxim containing the word “practice”, and Gary Player heard or was told of that version.

Now here is a mystery. That boy who was brought along to clean up the wood scraps, who grew up in a working-class town with a frontier mentality, would go on to found one of the most disruptive businesses of finance's computer age. That business would utilize the latest communications and digital technologies to revolutionize and democratize the clubby, old, highly regulated, East Coast–based financial industry—and in the process, the founder of that business would become a billionaire. J. J. Lerner, owner of the stores bearing his name, met a great admirer of his playwright-son, Alan Jay, who auth’d such delights as “Brigadoon,”“Day Before Spring” and “Love Life.” My friends would ask me why I wasn’t playing baseball, why I wasn’t playing basketball. I told them, “I got a job. I prefer to work.” My parents had never discouraged me from playing sports, but they did encourage me to make money. And my friends didn’t understand that I did not have the urge to do what they did. It hurt sometimes that my peers rejected what I cared about. Especially with girls—it seemed the girls all went after athletes, but I was carrying newspapers, clerking in a drugstore. None of the girls seemed to care about boys with jobs.I will never forget that first day. The pride. This was our own office, the office of the business we ourselves had started, and our business was to be honest brokers. We weren't padding our commissions or taking our customers' money in ways I didn't think was right. We were not going to cut corners. We could establish the type of operation and destiny we believed in.

That was what he wanted me to understand: the effect this tool could have on their work and their lives. In that sense, he had an innovator’s eye, not because he had invented the buzz saw but because he saw the possible benefit in it. I did not need to know the concept of productivity or the term early adopter. I could hear the meaning in my father’s voice and see it in the men’s smiling, sawdust-covered faces.He saw me, turned and swung the grease gun toward me. I hit the ground, my .38 in hand. We let fly at the same instant, and my first shot caught him in the chest. Special thanks to Steven Hales who told QI that the bibliographic data for the 2002 “Golf Digest” citation had mistakenly been omitted from a version of this article.) When my grandfather saw that the stairway was off a quarter inch, he knew his reputation was at stake. He didn't want to take that risk. He looked the staircase over, mused for a minute while the men held their breath, and said, "Build it over." My mother didn’t tell their story all at once. There were many different parts and versions, and they would come out while she was cleaning the house or painting, home all day with us kids and thirsty for someone to talk to. I can picture her with her sleeves rolled and her hair tied up in a scarf—she reminded me of the wartime poster of Rosie the Riveter, with the slogan “We Can Do It!” Like my father, she was a person resigned to adversity, but she could not talk about her family history without emotion. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

For me, it’s the getting there. It’s the competition, the problem-solving. It’s being right when no one thought you were right and winning when the stakes are high. Even after I had more money than I could spend, I went on working forty to sixty hours a week. I still wanted to succeed at business, not for the increased buying power that success would earn me, but for the pleasure of making a business succeed.The first half of the book was a 5, the 2nd half was a 2. It was a great entrepreneur journey defying the odds and fighting through many obstacles. In the next generation, my great-grandmother was ambitious and married a banker. This was before federal regulation of banking, so a local banker was like the owner of any small business: He made his own decisions and lived with the consequences. That meant that our family had access to capital. They had seven children and wanted a farm for each. My grandfather was the oldest child, so they bought the first farm for him, taking on a lot of debt. The crops were good, the farm made money, and as soon as they had some equity in it, they borrowed against that and bought another. In time, they owned farms from South Dakota down through Kansas. You could say that for their time and place, my immigrant forebears were very successful entrepreneurs.