Swimming Across

His teacher once said: “Life is like a big lake. All the boys get in the water at one end and start swimming. Not all of them will swim across. But one of them, I’m sure, will. That one is Grof.” Before his name was Andy Grove—he had lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship, the German military occupation, the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a succession of repressive communist regimes, and the Hungarian revolution. Those experiences of course shaped his childhood and his outlook on life, and perhaps give an added dimension to the title of his bestselling 1996 business book, Only the Paranoid Survive.