Great essay on business and luck. Two highlights:

If you have a choice between listening to the best cellist perform the piece or the second best, why would you want to listen to the second best? You might be willing to pay a few cents more only to hear the best, because they’re all good. But, even if you’d be willing to pay a few cents more, the fact that there are millions of copies of these things sold means that the fact that the company that bids successfully for Yo-Yo Ma or whoever is regarded as the best cellist is going to get that market all to himself.

And so the price that you have to pay to get the best recording artist is set accordingly. One earns eight or nine figures a year while the cellist who is almost as good is teaching music lessons to third graders in New Jersey somewhere. It’s a dogfight now to see who gets to be regarded as that best performer. The person who is eventually successful got there by defeating thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of rivals in competitions that started at an early age.

And this, on Bryan Cranston and Breaking Bad:

Vince Gilligan wanted to cast him as Walter White right from the beginning. The studio bosses didn’t want that. It was going to be an expensive production. They were experimenting to see if AMC could carve out a new role for itself in the cable firmament. And so they were going to put a lot of money behind this series and they wanted an A-list dramatic actor. I think at the time Cranston was best known for playing the dad in Malcolm in the Middle, which is a sitcom I never even saw. Apparently he was pretty good in that role, but it wasn’t a leading dramatic role to be sure.

They wanted a more visible, dramatic actor. At the studio bosses insistence Gilligan offered the part of Walter White to John Cusack. Cusack turned it down. They offered it to Matthew Broderick. Broderick also turned it down. I don’t remember which one had the first crack at it. Both of them turned it down. Gilligan went back to the bosses and again pleaded his case. Finally they reluctantly allowed him to cast Cranston as Walter White. And, you know, White was the breakout part of that series. He got four Emmys in the show’s five seasons. He is today one of the very most sought after actors in his age group. But I still wouldn’t have heard of him except that Cusack and Broderick turned the role down first.

Terrific read.