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Basketball Is An Intricate, High-speed Game Filled With Split-second, Spontaneous Decisions. But That Spontaneity Is Possible Only When Everyone First Engages In Hours Of Highly Repetitive And Structured Practice--perfecting Their Shooting, Dribbling, And Passing And Running Plays Over And Over Again--and Agrees To Play A Carefully Defined Role On The Court. This Is The Critical Lesson Of Improve, Too, And It Is Also A Key To Understanding A Puzzle Of Millennium Challenge: Spontaneity Isn't Random.

-Malcolm Gladwell

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Basketball Is An Intricate,

Malcolm Gladwell

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Basketball Is An Intricate, High-speed Game Filled With Split-second, Spontaneous Decisions. But That Spontaneity Is Possible Only When Everyone First Engages In Hours Of Highly Repetitive And Structured Practice--perfecting Their Shooting, Dribbling, And Passing And Running Plays Over And Over Again--and Agrees To Play A Carefully Defined Role On The Court. This Is The Critical Lesson Of Improve, Too, And It Is Also A Key To Understanding A Puzzle Of Millennium Challenge: Spontaneity Isn't Random.

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Television Allows The Audience To Argue With The Creator In A Way You Don't In A Movie.

Understanding The True Nature Of Instinctive Decision Making Requires Us To Be Forgiving Of Those People Trapped In Circumstances Where Good Judgment Is Imperiled.

There Are Moments, Particularly In Times Of Stress, When Haste Does Not Make Waste, When Our Snap Judgments And First Impressions Can Offer A Much Better Means Of Making Sense Of The World.

First Impression

People Don't Rise From Nothing.

[norden] Said, With The Mark 15 Norden Bombsight, He Could Drop A Bomb Into A Pickle Barrel At 20,000 Feet.

It Is Quite Possible For People Who Have Never Met Us And Who Have Spent Only Twenty Minutes Thinking About Us To Come To A Better Understanding Of Who We Are Than People Who Have Known Us For Years.

I Don't Like Things That Aren't True.

It Is Those Who Are Successful, In Other Words, Who Are Most Likely To Be Given The Kinds Of Special Opportunities That Lead To Further Success. It’s The Rich Who Get The Biggest Tax Breaks. It’s The Best Students Who Get The Best Teaching And Most Attention. And It’s The Biggest Nine- And Ten-year-olds Who Get The Most Coaching And Practice. Success Is The Result Of What Sociologists Like To Call “accumulative Advantage.

Arousal Leaves Us Mind-blind.

My Highest Compliment Is When Someone Comes Up To Me To Say, "my 14-year-old Daughter, Or My 12-year-old Son Read Your Book And Loved It." I Cannot Conceive Of A Greater Compliment Than That - To Write Something That As An Adult I Find Satisfying, But Also That Manages To Reach A Curious 13- Or 14-year-old.

The Trick To Finding Ideas Is To Convince Yourself That Everyone And Everything Has A Story.

We Prematurely Write Off People As Failures. We Are Too Much In Awe Of Those Who Succeed And Far Too Dismissive Of Those Who Fail.

Science Fiction Annoyed Me Because It Was Like, "why Is The World As It Is Not Enough For You?"

Success Is A Function Of Persistence And Doggedness And The Willingness To Work Hard.

Basketball Is An Intricate, High-speed Game Filled With Split-second, Spontaneous Decisions. But That Spontaneity Is Possible Only When Everyone First Engages In Hours Of Highly Repetitive And Structured Practice--perfecting Their Shooting, Dribbling, And Passing And Running Plays Over And Over Again--and Agrees To Play A Carefully Defined Role On The Court. This Is The Critical Lesson Of Improve, Too, And It Is Also A Key To Understanding A Puzzle Of Millennium Challenge: Spontaneity Isn't Random.

A Prediction, In A Field Where Prediction Is Not Possible, Is No More Than A Prejudice.

If You Want To Bring A Fundamental Change In People's Belief And Behavior...you Need To Create A Community Around Them, Where Those New Beliefs Can Be Practiced And Expressed And Nurtured.

I Know It Sounds Hard To Believe, But Habits Laid Down By Our Ancestors Persist Even After The Conditions That Created Those Habits Have Gone Away.

The 10,000hr Rule Is A Definite Key In Success

It's Not About How Smart You Are. It's About Your Values.

..... It Would Be Interesting To Find Out What Goes On In That Moment When Someone Looks At You And Draws All Sorts Of Conclusions.

The Single Most Important Thing A City Can Do Is Provide A Community Where Interesting, Smart People Want To Live With Their Families.

Of The Great Entrepreneurs Of This Era, People Will Have Forgotten Steve Jobs.

Superstar Lawyers And Math Whizzes And Software Entrepreneurs Appear At First Blush To Lie Outside Ordinary Experience. But They Don't. They Are Products Of History And Community, Of Opportunity And Legacy. Their Success Is Not Exceptional Or Mysterious. It Is Grounded In A Web Of Advantages And Inheritances, Some Deserved, Some Not, Some Earned, Some Just Plain Lucky - But All Critical To Making Them Who They Are. The Outlier, In The End, Is Not An Outlier At All.

Policy Is Driven By More Than Politics, However. It Is Equally Driven By Ideas.

As Human Beings, We Always Expect Everyday Change To Happen Slowly And Steadily, And For There To Be Some Relationship Between Cause And Effect.

Cause And Effect

A Book, I Was Taught Long Ago In English Class, Is A Living And Breathing Document That Grows Richer With Each New Reading.

An Aggressive Drug-testing Program Would Cut Down On Certain Abuses, But Its Never Going To Catch Everyone - Or Even Close To Everyone.

If We Can Control The Environment In Which Rapid Cognition Takes Place, Then We Can Control Rapid Cognition

If You're In Business It's Both A Promise And A Warning. It Says That Sometimes Little Things Can Cause Some Little Guy To Have An Overnight Success.

...mediocre People Find Their Way Into Positions Of Authority...because When It Comes To Even The Most Important Positions, Our Selection Decisions Are A Good Deal Less Rational Than We Think.

So, It's A Very, You Know - Maybe We're Wrong In - You Know, We Go Around Thinking The Innovator Is The Person Who's First To Kind Of Conceive Of Something. And Maybe The Innovation Process Continues Down The Line To The Second And The Third And The Fourth Entrant Into A Field.

Success Is Not A Function Of Individual Talent. It's The Steady Accumulation Of Advantages. It's Bound Up In So Many Other Broader Circumstantial, Environmental, Historical, And Cultural Factors.

Individual Talent

The Difference Between A Crime Of Evil And A Crime Of Illness Is The Difference Between A Sin And A Symptom.

Practice Isn't The Thing You Do Once You're Good. It's The Thing You Do That Makes You Good.

Trump Is An Innovator Who Has Shown How Out Of Step The Political Establishment Was. Which I Think, Probably, In The Long Term Will Be Healthy. We Have To Figure Out How To Reinvigorate Our Political Institutions And He's Demonstrating To Us The Urgency Of That Task.

The Religious Paradigm And The Science Fiction Paradigm Are Different. Apologies To Science Fiction Fans, But The Paradigm There Is To Create A New World And Describe It With A Kind Of Specificity That We Describe The World We Inhabit. Religiosity, On The Other Hand, Does None Of That.

Track Is Full Of The Absolute Nicest And Most Polite Athletes In All Of Sports, And Where Does It Get Us?

Extreme Visual Clarity, Tunnel Vision, Diminished Sound, And The Sense That Time Is Slowing Down. This Is How The Human Body Reacts To Extreme Stress.

I'm Necessarily Parasitic In A Way. I Have Done Well As A Parasite. But I'm Still A Parasite.

You May Hate Hillary Clinton And You May Have Good Reason For Hating Hillary Clinton, But Hillary Clinton Is One Person Who Even If She's Elected Will Be Gone One Day And You Still Have The Task Of Keeping American Democracy Going.

The First Person Who Throws The Rock Is A Lot More Radical Than A Hundredth Person.by The Time The Riot Has Attracted A Hundred People, You Don't Have To Be Nearly As Much Of A Daredevil Or A Hothead Or Committed Or Any Of Those Things To Want To Engage In A Riot.

Choking Is About Thinking Too Much. Panic Is About Thinking Too Little. Choking Is About Loss Of Instinct. Panic Is Reversion To Instinct. They May Look The Same, But They Are Worlds Apart.

I've Always Been Baffled By How Much We Over-rate The Statistically Insignificant Differences That Separate Competitors At The Top End Of The Distribution.

There Are Some People, Who I'll Charitably Call Snobs, Who Are Dismissive Of Any Conversation That Doesn't Begin With The Full Level Of Complexity. That's Just Not How The World Works.

The Conventional Wisdom Is Often Wrong. Crime Didn't Keep Soaring In The 1990s, Money Alone Doesn't Win Elections, And - Surprise - Drinking Eight Glasses Of Water A Day Has Never Actually Been Shown To Do A Thing For Your Health. Conventional Wisdom Is Often Shoddily Formed And Devilishly Difficult To See Through, But It Can Be Done.

Sometimes [genius] Is Just The Thing That Emerges After Twenty Years Of Working At Your Kitchen Table.

The Key To Good Decision Making Is Not Knowledge. It Is Understanding. We Are Swimming In The Former. We Are Desperately Lacking In The Latter.

Activism That Challenges The Status Quo, That Attacks Deeply Rooted Problems, Is Not For The Faint Of Heart.

It's Just Strange To Think That So Much Of Our Enjoyment From Sports Comes From The Elevation Of Arbitrary Differences.

Bad Improvisers Block Action, Often With A High Degree Of Skill. Good Improvisers Develop Action.

If You Don't Contradict Yourself On A Regular Basis, Then You're Not Thinking.

What Happens When Two People Talk? That Is Really The Basic Question Here, Because, That's The Basic Context In Which All Persuasion Takes Place.

You Can't Concentrate On Doing Anything If You Are Thinking, “what's Gonna Happen If It Doesn't Go Right?

Once A Musician Has Enough Ability To Get Into A Top Music School, The Thing That Distinguishes One Performer From Another Is How Hard He Or She Works. That's It. And What's More, The People At The Very Top Don't Work Just Harder Or Even Much Harder Than Everyone Else. They Work Much, Much Harder.

I'm In The Storytelling Business, And So You're Always Drawn To The Unusual. And Early On, I Discovered That's The Easiest Way To Tell Stories... If You Come Up Through A Newspaper As I Did, Your Whole Goal Is To Get A Story On The Front Page, And You Only Get Something On The Front Page If It's Unusual.

A Lot Of What Is Most Beautiful About The World Arises From Struggle.

Through Embracing The Diversity Of Humans Beings, We Will Find A Sure Way To True Happiness.

The Act Of Facing Overwhelming Odds Produces Greatness And Beauty.

Incompetence Annoys Me. Overconfidence Terrifies Me.

The Sad Thing About Doping Is How Much It Obscures Our Appreciation Of Greatness.

Flom Had The Same Experience...he Didn't Triumph Over Adversity. Instead, What Started Out As Adversity Ended Up Being An Opportunity.

Lands' End Has Undergone Three Major Changes Over The Past Couple Of Decades. The First Was The Introduction Of An 800 Number, In 1978; The Second Was Express Delivery, In 1994; And The Third Was The Introduction Of A Web Site, In 1995. The First Two Innovations Cut The Average Transaction Time-the Time Between The Moment Of Ordering And The Moment The Goods Are Received-from Three Weeks To Four Days. The Third Innovation Has Cut The Transaction Time From Four Days To, Well, Four Days.

Jenny Simpson Loses Her Shoe In The Women's Fifteen Hundred, With A Lap And A Half To Go, Destroying Her Chances To Repeat As World Champion, And She Gives The Most Gracious Interview Afterward About How She's Had A Wonderful Career Already. Great For Jenny Simpson. Bad For The Sport! We Need Drama!

Often A Sign Of Expertise Is Noticing What Doesn't Happen.

If There Is One Thing I Learned By Reading Epstein's "the Sports Gene" It Is That World-class Athletes Are, By Definition, Abnormal: That Is, The Kind Of Person Capable Of Competing At That Level Is Necessarily Very Different From The Rest Of Us Physiologically. They Are Outliers.

The Law Of The Few... Says That One Critical Factor In Epidemics Is The Nature Of The Messenger.

Success Is Not A Random Act. It Arises Out Of A Predictable And Powerful Set Of Circumstances And Opportunities.

It's As If You Were Interested In Fashion And Your Neighbor When You Were Growing Up Happened To Be Giorgio Armani.

One Of The Things I Think The Police Have To Do Is To Stop Behaving Like Armies.

Success Has To Do With Deliberate Practice. Practice Must Be Focused, Determined, And In An Environment Where There's Feedback.

Those With Health Insurance Are Overinsured And Their Behavior Is Distorted By Moral Hazard. Those Without Health Insurance Use Their Own Money To Make Decisions Based On An Assessment Of Their Needs. The Insured Are Wasteful. The Uninsured Are Prudent. So What's The Solution? Make The Insured A Little More Like The Uninsured.

People Who Bring Transformative Change Have Courage, Know How To Re-frame The Problem And Have A Sense Of Urgency.

When The Students Were Asked To Identify Their Race On A Pretest Questionnaire, That Simple Act Was Sufficient To Prime Them With All The Negative Stereotypes Associated With African Americans And Academic Achievement. If A White Student From A Prestigious Private High School Gets A Higher Sat Score Than A Black Student From An Inner-city School, Is It Because She’s Truly A Better Student, Or Is It Because To Be White And To Attend A Prestigious High School Is To Be Constantly Primed With The Idea Of “smart”?

Being Able To Act Intelligently And Instinctively In The Moment Is Possible Only After A Long And Rigorous Of Education And Experience

What Track Needs To Figure Out: How To Engage Us Between The Races. Instead, The Entire Off-the-track Conversation Is About Doping. This Is How You Kill A Sport.

The Hope With Tipping Point Was It Would Help The Reader Understand That Real Change Was Possible. With Blink, I Wanted To Get People To Take The Enormous Power Of Their Intuition Seriously. My Wish With Outliers Is That It Makes Us Understand How Much Of A Group Project Success Is. When Outliers Become Outliers It Is Not Just Because Of Their Own Efforts. It's Because Of The Contributions Of Lots Of Different People And Lots Of Different Circumstances.

The Tipping Point Is That Magic Moment When An Idea, Trend, Or Social Behavior Crosses A Threshold, Tips, And Spreads Like Wildfire.

I Want To Convince You That These Kinds Of Personal Explanations Of Success Don't Work. People Don't Rise From Nothing....it Is Only By Asking Where They Are From That We Can Unravel The Logic Behind Who Succeeds And Who Doesn't.

For Every Romantic Possiblity, No Matter How Robust, There Exists At Least One Equal And Opposite Sentence, Phrase, Or Word Capable Of Extinguishing It.

There Is Nothing More Common Than Critics Of Journalists Accusing Them Of Practicing Journalism. It Is Our Function In The World To Take Things That Are Complicated And Render Them In A Form That Non-experts Can Follow And Make Sense Of.

Sometimes The Most Modest Changes Can Bring About Enormous Effects.

There Is This Tremendous Body Of Knowledge In The World Of Academia Where Extraordinary Numbers Of Incredibly Thoughtful People Have Taken The Time To Examine On A Really Profound Level The Way We Live Our Lives And Who We Are And Where We've Been. That Brilliant Learning Sometimes Gets Trapped In Academia And Never Sees The Light Of Day.

We Tell Ourselves That Skill Is The Precious Resource And Effort Is The Commodity. It's The Other Way Around. Effort Can Trump Ability-relentl Ess Effort Is In Fact Something Rarer Than The Ability To Engage In Some Finely Tuned Act Of Motor Coordination.

Whenever We Have Something That We Are Good At--something We Care About--that Experience And Passion Fundamentally Change The Nature Of Our First Impressions.

First Impression

Our First Impressions Are Generated By Our Experiences And Our Environment, Which Means That We Can Change Our First Impressions... By Changing The Experiences That Comprise Those Impressions.

First Impression

That Was It! The Whole Redwood City Philosophy Was Based On A Willingness To Try Harder Than Anyone Else.

An Incredibly High Percentage Of Successful Entrepreneurs Are Dyslexic. That's One Of The Little-known Facts.

Anyone Who Has Ever Scanned The Bookshelves Of A New Girlfriend Or Boyfriend- Or Peeked Inside His Or Her Medicine Cabinet- Understands This Implicitly; You Can Learn As Much - Or More - From One Glance At A Private Space As You Can From Hours Of Exposure To A Public Face.

I Don't Think People Are Averse To Thinking About Things In A Deep Way, But We Have Limited Time And Opportunity To Think About Things In A Deep Way. I Think That's Why There Is An Appetite For Non-fiction - It Gives People The Opportunity To Reexamine Ordinary Experience And Be Smarter About It.

All Artists Have To Do That At A Certain Point. This Shift That Has To Happen Between The Initial Moment Of Creation And Then The Consideration Of What Has Been Created.

Father: 'anything But Journalism.' I Rebelled.

To Build A Better World We Need To Replace The Patchwork Of Lucky Breaks And Arbitrary Advantages Today That Determine Success--the Fortunate Birth Dates And The Happy Accidents Of History--with A Society That Provides Opportunities For All.

Happy Accidents

Part Of Me Thinks That Innovation, Real Innovation In Health Care Delivery, Needs To Happen From The Bottom To The Top.

You Don't Start At The Top If You Want To Find The Story. You Start In The Middle, Because It's The People In The Middle Who Do The Actual Work In The World.

Now I Basically Just Read Spy Stories Because They're About Solving A Puzzle Within The Constraints Of History. It's The Tick Tock, The Clockwork That I'm Interested In.

People Are In One Of Two States In A Relationship,” Gottman Went On. “the First Is What I Call Positive Sentiment Override, Where Positive Emotion Overrides Irritability. It’s Like A Buffer. Their Spouse Will Do Something Bad, And They’ll Say, ‘oh, He’s Just In A Crummy Mood.’ Or They Can Be In Negative Sentiment Override, So That Even A Relatively Neutral Thing That A Partner Says Gets Perceived As Negative.

If You Are Going To Do Something Truly Innovative, You Have To Be Someone Who Does Not Value Social Approval. You Can't Need Social Approval To Go Forward. Otherwise, How Would You Ever Do The Thing That You Are Doing?

Shortly After The Birth Control Pill Was Approved For Public Distribution, One Woman Wrote To John Rock, Its Inventor, "you Should Be Afraid To Meet Your Maker." Rock, Despite Being Catholic Replied, "my Dear Madam, In My Faith, We Are Taught That The Lord Is With Us Always. When My Time Comes, There Will Be No Need For Introductions."

Without The New York Times, There Is No Blog Community. They'd Have Nothing To Blog About.

Since Becoming A Journalist, Each Time I Engage With Subjects I Become More Radicalized.

The Sense Of Possibility So Necessary For Success Comes Not Just From Inside Us Or From Our Parents. It Comes From Our Time: From The Particular Opportunities That Our Place In History Presents Us With.

We Have The Kind Of Self-made-man Myth, Which Says That Super-successful People Did It Themselves.

Occasions When You Can Change Your Mind Should Be Cherished, Because They Mean You're Smarter Than You Were Before.

Living A Long Life, The Conventional Wisdom At The Time Said, Depended To A Great Extent On Who We Were-that Is, Our Genes. It Depended On The Decisions We Made-on What We Chose To Eat, And How Much We Chose To Exercise, And How Effectively We Were Treated By The Medical System. No One Was Used To Thinking About Health In Terms Of Community.

Instinct Is The Gift Of Experience. The First Question You Have To Ask Yourself Is, 'on What Basis Am I Making A Judgment?' ... If You Have No Experience, Then Your Instincts Aren't Any Good.

That Fundamentally Undermines Your Ability To Access The Best Part Of Your Instincts. So My Advice To Those People Would Be Stop Thinking And Introspecting So Much And Do A Little More Acting.

When We Become Expert In Something, Our Tastes Grow More Esoteric And Complex.

Change Your Mind About Something Significant Every Day.

Changing Your Mind

Innovators Have To Be Open. They Have To Be Able To Imagine Things That Others Cannot And Be Willing To Challenge Their Own Preconceptions. They Also Need To Be Conscientious. An Innovator Who Has Brilliant Ideas But Lacks The Discipline And Persistence To Carry Them Out Is Merely A Dreamer ... But Crucially, Innovators Need To Be Disagreeable ... They Are People Willing To Take Social Risks-to Do Things That Others Might Disapprove Of.

Cultural Legacies Are Powerful Forces. They Have Deep Roots And Long Lives. They Persist, Generation After Generation, Virtually Intact, Even As The Economic And Social And Demographic Conditions That Spawned Them Have Vanished, And They Play Such A Role In Directing Attitudes And Behavior That We Cannot Make Sense Of Our World Without Them.

If You Think Advantage Lies In Resources, Then You Think The Best Educational System Is The One That Spends The Most Money.

My Earliest Memories Of My Father Are Of Seeing Him Work At His Desk And Realizing That He Was Happy. I Did Not Know It Then, But That Was One Of The Most Precious Gifts A Father Can Give His Child.

Performance Ought To Improve With Experience, And Pressure Is An Obstacle That The Diligent Can Overcome.

[research] Suggests That What We Think Of As Free Will Is Largely An Illusion: Much Of The Time, We Are Simply Operating On Automatic Pilot, And The Way We Think And Act – And How Well We Think And Act On The Spur Of The Moment – Are A Lot More Susceptible To Outside Influences Than We Realize.

Success Is Deeply Rooted In Time And Place. You May Have The Drive To Read Tons Of Books On Biology. But If There Are No Books On Biology In Your Library, And The Library Is Never Open, Your Drive Is Meaningless.

The Ipod Is Clearly A Tipping Point (and I'm Not Quite Sure It Is A Wholly Positive Development), Because It Is A Revolution In The Way That We Consume Creative Property, Which I Would Call Art. It Has Radically Changed The Relationship Between The Artist And The Audience, How Money Changes Hands, And How Much Money Changes Hands. Music Was The First, And Books Are Coming Next. The Kindle Or Some Form Of Electronic Book Is Clearly Inevitable, And It Will Massively Reshape How Books Are Sold, Who Pays For Them, And How They're Consumed. It Is Going To Be Really Fascinating.

Look At The World Around You. It May Seem Like An Immovable, Implacable Place. It Is Not. With The Slightest Push - In Just The Right Place - It Can Be Tipped.

If You Think Success Is About So Many More Things And Is So Much More Arbitrary, Then You Can Be Much More Open To The Idea That You Can Be Ben Fountain And Publish Your Great Book At Forty-nine.

Courage Is What You Earn When You've Been Through The Tough Times And You Discover They Aren't So Tough After All.

Those Three Things - Autonomy, Complexity, And A Connection Between Effort And Reward - Are, Most People Will Agree, The Three Qualities That Work Has To Have If It Is To Be Satisfying.

I Suspect People Who Are Indecisive Are People Who Are Far Too Enamored Of Analysis In All Settings And Are Destroying Their Ability To Make An Instinctive Judgment Through Over-analysis And That's Dangerous.

Nobody Accomplishes Success By Themselves.

Our Acquaintances—not Our Friends—are Our Greatest Source Of New Ideas And Information. The Internet Lets Us Exploit The Power Of These Kinds Of Distant Connections With Marvellous Efficiency.

It's Not How Much Money We Make That Ultimately Makes Us Happy Between Nine And Five. It's Whether Or Not Our Work Fulfills Us. Being A Teacher Is Meaningful.

Insight Is Not A Lightbulb That Goes Off Inside Our Heads. It Is A Flickering Candle That Can Easily Be Snuffed Out.

We Learn By Example And By Direct Experience Because There Are Real Limits To The Adequacy Of Verbal Instruction.

I Don't Go To An Office, So I Write At Home. I Like To Write In The Morning, If Possible; That's When My Mind Is Freshest. I Might Write For A Couple Of Hours, And Then I Head Out To Have Lunch And Read The Paper. Then I Write For A Little Bit Longer If I Can, Then Probably Go To The Library Or Make Some Phone Calls. Every Day Is A Little Bit Different. I'm Not Highly Routinized, So I Spend A Lot Of Time Wandering Around New York City With My Laptop In My Bag, Wondering Where I'm Going To End Up Next. It's A Fairly Idyllic Life For Someone Who Likes Writing.

It Wasn't An Excuse. It Was A Fact. He'd Had To Make His Way Alone, And No One - Not Rock Stars, Not Professional Athletes, Not Software Billionaires, And Not Even Geniuses - Ever Makes It Alone.

I Think Actually The Marketing Community Is Approaching A Crisis: There Are Just Too Many Messages Competing For Too Little Attention. That Is The Fundamental Problem.

I Became Convinced That Knowing Lots Of People Was Kind Of Skill, Something That The Diligent Can Overcome.

Sometimes Constraints Actually Create Success. Not Being Able To Swim Made Me Run. And Running Taught Me The Discipline I Needed As A Writer.

Outlier Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities-- -and Who Have Had The Strength And Presence Of Mind To Seize Them.

Presence Of Mind

I Would Say First Of All, Anyone Who Wants To Challenge The Status Quo Always Gets That Response. Ninety Percent Of The Time, That's Just Bull. That's Just The Way In Which People Choose To Prop Up Their Own Privilege Or Their Own Particular Position. So Mostly I Shrug It Off.

Economists Often Talk About The 80/20 Principle, Which Is The Idea That In Any Situation Roughly 80 Percent Of The “work” Will Be Done By 20 Percent Of The Participants. In Most Societies, 20 Percent Of Criminals Commit 80 Percent Of Crimes. Twenty Percent Of Motorists Cause 80 Percent Of All Accidents. Twenty Percent Of Beer Drinkers Drink 80 Percent Of All Beer. When It Comes To Epidemics, Though, This Disproportionality Becomes Even More Extreme: A Tiny Percentage Of People Do The Majority Of The Work.

There Are Lots Of Issues More Important Than Where Billionaires Donate Their Money.

The People Who Stand Before Kings May Look Like They Did It All By Themselves. But In Fact They Are Invariably The Beneficiaries Of Hidden Advantages And Extraordinary Opportunities And Cultural Legacies That Allow Them To Learn And Work Hard And Make Sense Of The World In Ways Others Cannot. It Makes A Difference Where And When We Grew Up.

The Particular Skill That Allows You To Talk Your Way Out Of A Murder Rap, Or Convince Your Professor To Move You From The Morning To The Afternoon Section, Is What The Psychologist Robert Sternberg Calls "practical Intelligence." To Sternberg, Practical Intelligence Includes Things Like "knowing What To Say To Whom, Knowing When To Say It, And Knowing How To Say It For For Maximum Effect.

It Changes How People Read You If You Believe In God. It Gives Insight Into Your Motivation, How You Look At Problems And How You Deal With People.

We Vary Greatly In The Natural Advantages That We've Been Given. The World's Not Fair

In The Act Of Tearing Something Apart, You Lose Its Meaning.

I'm A Purist: I Start To Wrinkle My Nose When The Cold War Ends.

Every Cop Will Tell You That Their Real Job Is Being A Social Worker. That's What They Do All Day. The Large Majority Of Police Officers In This Country Never Even Draw Their Gun, Let Alone Fire It. They Do Conflict Resolution, Right? And If That's Their Job, Why Do They Need To Look Like They're An Occupying Force?

The Rule Of 150 Says That Congregants Of A Rapidly Expanding Church, Or The Members Of A Social Club, Or Anyone In A Group Activity Banking On The Epidemic Spread Of Shared Ideals Needs To Be Particularly Cognizant Of The Perils Of The Bigness. Crossing The 150 Line Is A Small Change That Can Make A Big Difference.

What Interests Me About Fiction Is Plot. And What Interests Me About Plot Is Whether Someone Tells A Story That Moves Me Within The Constraints Of Storytelling. And I Have Narrowly Defined Storytelling.

Giants Are Not What We Think They Are. The Same Qualities That Appear To Give Them Strength Are Often The Sources Of Great Weakness.

Happiness, In One Sense, Is A Function Of How Closely Our World Conforms To The Infinite Variety Of Human Preference.

What We Do As A Community, As A Society, For Each Other, Matters As Much As What We Do For Ourselves. It Sounds A Little Trite, But There's A Powerful Amount Of Truth In That, I Think.

If A Window Is Broken And Left Unrepaired, People Walking By Will Conclude That No One Cares And No One Is In Charge. Soon, More Windows Will Be Broken, And The Sense Of Anarchy Will Spread From The Building To The Street On Which It Faces, Sending A Signal That Anything Goes.

Do I Think That American Democracy Ends If Trump Is President? No! I Think, There Are Plenty Of Checks And Balances In Place. I Think He Would Do Some Damage To The Country But We Would Recover. The Office Of The Presidency And American Democratic Institutions Are A Lot Stronger Than One Person. So If He Wins, Our Job Is Just To Keep The Office Strong, Right? And Hope He'll Be Replaced By Something Better!

I Don't Really Collect Books. I Tend To Lose Interest In Them The Minute I've Read Them, So Most Of The Books I've Read Are Left In Airplanes And Hotel Rooms.

David Epstein, The Author Of The Best Book On Athletics In Recent Memory - "the Sports Gene" - Wrote To Me To Say That He Thinks I'm Being Overly Generous. He Points Out That, For Years, There Used To Be An "all-star Challenge" On Television, In Which The Best Professional Athletes From A Variety Of Sports Competed In A Kind Of Makeshift Decathlon.

We Need To Be Clear When We Venerate Entrepreneurs What We Are Venerating.they Are Not Moral Leaders. If They Were Moral Leaders, They Wouldn't Be Great Businessmen.

People Are Experience-rich And Theory-poor. I Help People Organize / Make Sense Of Their Experiences.

Our Unconscious Is Really Good At Quick Decision-making - It Often Delivers A Better Answer Than More Deliberate And Exhaustive Ways Of Thinking.

People At Cdc [centers For Disease Control] Who Cut Their Teeth On Diseases Over The Last 10 Years Have Started To Think Of Crime As Another Disease, And Using Some Of These Same Concepts. It Was Something That Was In The Air In That World, But It Was Time To Bust It Out And Apply It To Any Number Of Different Social Epidemics.

When You're An Underdog, You're Forced To Try Things You Would Never Otherwise Have Attempted.

When People In Authority Want The Rest Of Us To Behave, It Matters-first And Foremost-how They Behave.

Incompetence Is Certainty In The Absence Of Expertise. Overconfidence Is Certainty In The Presence Of Expertise.

In Order To Get One Of The Greatest Inventions Of The Modern Age, In Other Words, We Thought We Needed The Solitary Genius. But If Alexander Graham Bell Had Fallen Into The Grand River And Drowned That Day Back In Brantford, The World Would Still Have Had The Telephone, The Only Difference Being That The Telephone Company Would Have Been Nicknamed Ma Gray, Not Ma Bell.

A Fan Is Always An Outsider. Most Sportswriters Are Not, By This Definition, Fans. They Capitalize On Access To Athletes. They Spoke To Kobe Last Night, And Kobe Says His Finger Is Going To Be Fine. They Spent Three Days Fly-fishing With Brett Favre In March, And Brett Says He's Definitely Coming Back For Another Season.

Poverty Is Not Deprivation, It Is Isolation.

Consistency Is The Most Overrated Of All Human Virtues... I'm Someone Who Changes His Mind All The Time.

I Think That Persistence And Stubbornness And Hard Work Are Probably, At The End Of The Day, More Important Than The Willingness To Take A Risk.

I Recently Talked To An Eighteen-year-old - A Huge Fifa Fan - And Realized That He Spends More Time Playing The Fifa Video Game Than He Does Watching Actual Fifa Games.

The Tipping Point Is The Biography Of An Idea, And The Idea Is Very Simple. It Is That The Best Way To Understand The Emergence Of Fashion Trends, The Ebb And Flow Of Crime Waves, Or, For That Matter, The Transformation Of Unknown Books Into Bestsellers, Or The Rise Of Teenage Smoking, Or The Phenomena Of Word Of Mouth, Or Any Number Of The Other Mysterious Changes That Mark Everyday Life Is To Think Of Them As Epidemics. Ideas And Products And Messages And Behaviors Spread Just Like Viruses Do.

People Can't Do Much About The Fate Part, But We Can Certainly Do A Lot About The Man Part.

It Is Those Who Are Successful, In Other Words, Who Are Most Likely To Be Given The Kinds Of Special Opportunities That Lead To Further Success.

The Kinds Of Errors That Cause Plane Crashes Are Invariably Errors Of Teamwork And Communication.

Did They Know Why They Knew? Not At All. But The Knew!

What Do We Tell Our Children? Haste Makes Waste. Look Before You Leap. Stop And Think. Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover. We Believe That We Are Always Better Off Gathering As Much Information As Possible And Spending As Much Time As Possible In Deliberation.

A Radical And Transformative Thought Goes Nowhere Without The Willingness To Challenge Convention.

Radio Stations Have Constructed A Narrow Door[way], And That's Because They Don't Understand How Complex And Paradoxical Our Snap Judgments Are. It's Hard To Measure New Songs.

I Worry That Track Is Going To Enter Into An Impossibly Complicated Stage, Where Our Understanding Of The Complexities Of Human Physiology - And Our Ability To Accentuate And Exploit Them - Is Going To Make The Notion Of Pure Competition Impossible.

The Lesson Here Is Very Simple. But It Is Striking How Often It Is Overlooked. We Are So Caught In The Myths Of The Best And The Brightest And The Self-made That We Think Outliers Spring Naturally From The Earth. We Look At The Young Bill Gates And Marvel That Our World Allowed That Thirteen-year-old To Become A Fabulously Successful Entrepreneur. But That's The Wrong Lesson. Our World Only Allowed One Thirteen-year-old Unlimited Access To A Time Sharing Terminal In 1968. If A Million Teenagers Had Been Given The Same Opportunity, How Many More Microsofts Would We Have Today?

We Tend To Credit Those Who Create An Idea, Not Those Who Perfect It, Forgetting That It Is Often Only In The Perfection Of An Idea That True Progress Occurs. Putting Sixty-four Transistors On A Chip Allowed People To Dream Of The Future. Putting Four Million Transistors On A Chip Actually Gave Them The Future.

Where They Come From Matters. They're Products Of Particular Places And Environments.

We Cling To The Idea That Success Is A Simple Function Of Individual Merit And That The World In Which We All Grow Up And The Rules We Choose To Write As A Society Don't Matter At All.

The Fact Of Being An Underdog Changes People In Ways That We Often Fail To Appreciate. It Opens Doors And Creates Opportunities And Enlightens And Permits Things That Might Otherwise Have Seemed Unthinkable.

The People At The Top Don't Work Just Harder Or Even Much Harder Than Everyone Else. They Work Much, Much Harder.

I Have A New Way Of Doing Things, And I Don’t Care If You Think I’m Crazy.

When Crime Drops Dramatically In New York For No Apparent Reason, Or When A Movie Made On A Shoestring Budget Ends Up Making Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars - We're Surprised. I'm Saying, Don't Be Surprised. This Is The Way Social Epidemics Work.

We Spend A Lot Of Time And Effort Trying To Figure Out Who's Going To Be A Good Nfl Quarterback, And We Do A Very Bad Job Of It. We Don't Really Know. And We Also Spend A Lot Of Time Trying To Figure Out Who Will Be A Good Teacher, And We're Really Bad At That Too. We Don't Know If Someone Is Going To Be A Good Teacher When They Start Teaching. So What Should We Do In Those Situations In Which Predictions Are Useless?

To Become A Chess Grandmaster Also Seems To Take About Ten Years. (only The Legendary Bobby Fisher Got To That Elite Level In Less Than That Amount Of Time: It Took Him Nine Years.) And What's Ten Years? Well, It's Roughly How Long It Takes To Put In Ten Thousand Hours Of Hard Practice. Ten Thousand Hours Is The Magic Number Of Greatness.

It Is The New And Different That Is Always Most Vulnerable To Market Research.

We Need To Look At The Subtle, The Hidden, And The Unspoken.

I'm Totally Engaging In Cultural Stereotyping, No Question About It. But I Think It's Ok Because I'm Doing It For A Reason, For A Good Reason.

I Should Point Out That I Have A Picture Of Asbel Kiprop As The Screensaver On My Phone. Is That Embarrassing?

A Study At The University Of Utah Found That If You Ask Someone Why He Is Friendly With Someone Else, He’ll Say It Is Because He And His Friend Share Similar Attitudes. But If You Actually Quiz The Two Of Them On Their Attitudes, You’ll Find Out That What They Actually Share Is Similar Activities. We’re Friends With The People We Do Things With, As Much As We Are With The People We Resemble. We Don’t Seek Out Friends, In Other Words. We Associate With The People Who Occupy The Same Small, Physical Spaces That We Do.

It Takes Ten Thousand Hours To Truly Master Anything. Time Spent Leads To Experience; Experience Leads To Proficiency; And The More Proficient You Are The More Valuable You'll Be.

The Entire Principle Of A Blind Taste Test Was Ridiculous. They Shouldn't Have Cared So Much That They Were Losing Blind Taste Tests With Old Coke, And We Shouldn't At All Be Surprised That Pepsi's Dominance In Blind Taste Tests Never Translated To Much In The Real World. Why Not? Because In The Real World, No One Ever Drinks Coca-cola Blind.

What Must Underlie Successful Epidemics, In The End, Is A Bedrock Belief That Change Is Possible, That People Can Radically Transform Their Behavior Or Beliefs In The Face Of The Right Kind Of Impetus.

The Nature Of Athletic Celebrity Is Increasingly Moving Away From The Actual Field Of Play.

Re-reading Is Much Underrated. I've Read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Once Every Five Years Since I Was 15. I Only Started To Understand It The Third Time.

The Biggest Mistake We Make Is Trying To Square The Way We Feel About Something Today With The Way We Felt About It Yesterday. You Shouldn’t Even Bother Doing It. You Should Just Figure Out The Way You Feel Today And If It Happens To Comply With What You Thought Before, Fine. If It Contradicts It, Whatever. Life Goes On.

What Does It Say About A Society That It Devotes More Care And Patience To The Selection Of Those Who Handle Its Money Than Of Those Who Handle Its Children?

If Your Parents Are Billionaires, That Might Actually Be An Obstacle To Your Own Happiness And Self-development. If You Go To Oxford Or Harvard, That Might Actually Thwart Your Desire To Graduate With A Science Or Math Degree.

The Poorer Children Were, To Her Mind, Often Better Behaved, Less Whiny, More Creative In Making Use Of Their Own Time, And Have A Well-developed Sense Of Independence.

You Don't Manage A Social Wrong. You Should Be Ending It.

Success Is A Function Of Persistence And Doggedness And The Willingness To Work Hard For Twenty-two Minutes To Make Sense Of Something That Most People Would Give Up On After Thirty Seconds.

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Michelle Shocked

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