Find Your Larry Holmes

Few things are stranger than watching the winner cry.

It happened on October 2, 1980, in Las Vegas, in a stadium built on top of the Caesars Palace parking lot, the way you set up a party venue where cars were parked that morning. Larry Holmes, heavyweight champion of the world, won every single round against Muhammad Ali. After the tenth, Ali’s corner wouldn’t let him go back out. It was the first time in his career that Ali had been stopped before the final bell.

Holmes had just done the thing he did best in the world, and he was crying. To understand those tears, you have to go back a few years, to a car wash.

Holmes had dropped out of school in seventh grade. He washed cars, and boxing was the only thing he had, until Ali picked him as a sparring partner. Five hundred dollars a week, with room, food and travel included. For a kid who washed cars, that was like winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

For nearly four years he lived in the camp of the most famous man on the planet, and he got to know him the way the people you live with know you, which is the only way anyone really does.

Sparring is a strange trade. You get paid to get hit, and to hit back just enough. Holmes never tried to embarrass him: Ali was his idol, and he wanted to see him beat Foreman and Frazier. But round after round, almost without noticing, he was drawing a map nobody else had. Where Ali’s guard opened up when he got tired, what he did when something hurt, which punches he never saw coming.

In 1978, Holmes won the title. A year later Ali retired, and not long after, he announced he was coming back to become champion for a fourth time. Ali had plenty of people around him, and it was Holmes who asked him not to. He told Ali he didn’t want to fight him, and that Ali shouldn’t want to either. “Your mind is making a date your body can’t keep.”

Ali fought anyway. That night in Las Vegas, the only man who had the map found out he’d been right. That’s why he was crying.

This doesn’t only happen in boxing.

Seventeen years later, Ali’s face showed up again, in black and white, in an ad for computers. Steve Jobs had been back at Apple for about two months and found the company at its lowest point. Jobs knew how to make computers better than anyone, but Apple had forgotten why it made them, and you didn’t need an engineer to see that.

He sat down with Lee Clow, the creative he’d made the famous 1984 commercial with, someone who knew him from before. Together they built a campaign with no products, no specs and no price: just portraits of Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali. Jobs told his employees that marketing was about values, because the world was so noisy that nobody was going to remember much about Apple. What Apple believed, at its core, was that people with passion can change the world. The commercial opened with a line people still quote: Here’s to the crazy ones.

Warren Buffett had spent his life buying cheap companies, and when a chocolate chain came along that cost more than he was used to paying, he said no. Charlie Munger, the partner he’d nicknamed the abominable no-man, pushed for once. See’s Candies became, for Buffett, the model of a dream business.

Ali had the punch, Jobs had the computers, Buffett had the numbers. What they also had was someone with the map, and the trust to show it to them.

Now think about your company.

At some point, without noticing, you went from selling an idea to selling a product with a price tag. It’s not that you didn’t look for help. You asked your marketing manager to sharpen the message, hired an agency, brought in a couple of consultants, showed the new website to your CFO and your oldest friends. Your marketing manager knows you, but works for you, and it’s hard to tell the person who signs your paycheck that the story doesn’t land. The agency and the consultants know their craft, but they see you a few hours a month. Your CFO asks, rightly, what all of this is going to return. Your friends love you and tell you it looks great, which is what friends say.

Each of them sees you from where they stand, and that’s why your company talks about specs, prices and projects. It’s what you gave them. A lighting designer I know summed it up for me once, after twenty-eight years of exceptional work: the work is excellent, and nobody outside your circle ever finds out.

People don’t get on a ship for the quality of the hull. They get on because they believe in where it’s going. Lulu Cheng Meservey, who advises some of the best-known founders in Silicon Valley, says the best ones are, deep down, cult leaders. Who gets on the ship of someone who isn’t sure where it’s headed?

Ali had trainers, promoters, reporters and friends around him. Holmes was the only one who had lived with him, who could tell him no, and who also wanted to see him win. That’s why he had the map.

Who has yours?

After retiring, Holmes kept visiting Ali for years. There was no fight left to prepare for, no title to defend. He went to see the man, not the champion, because he had known him before the world was watching.

Your company also has a story from before anyone was watching, and it probably doesn’t show up in anything your company puts out. The finished projects, the features, the client list, the price: all of it is true, and all of it your competitors can say too.

If you run a construction company, somewhere there’s a house that explains why you once wanted to build homes for other people. Maybe it was the house you grew up in, the one your dad finished piece by piece, the bedroom one summer and the bathroom the next, with the bricks bare for years because there wasn’t enough money for plaster. Maybe it was a house your family lost.

If you design interiors, there’s a room that taught you a space can change how you feel: the afternoon light coming through your grandmother’s kitchen window, or a lamp someone switched on at the same time every evening.

If you build software, maybe it all started watching someone lose an entire afternoon to something that should have taken five minutes. Your mom doing the family business’s books in a hardcover notebook, with a battery-powered calculator and a patience that ran out before the batteries did.

None of that shows up in a pitch deck. Nobody on your team will suggest it for the next campaign, because they don’t know it, or because the ones who do think it belongs in a different drawer. And yet it’s the only thing about your company nobody else can copy.

You know where it all started. Who else around you does?

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