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Have You Ever Wondered... How Religious Movements Get Started? Usually, We Think Of Them As A Product Of Highly Charismatic Evangelists... But The Spread Of Any New And Contagious Ideology Also Has A Lot To Do With The Skillful Use Of Group Power.

-Malcolm Gladwell

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Have You Ever Wondered...

Malcolm Gladwell

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Have You Ever Wondered... How Religious Movements Get Started? Usually, We Think Of Them As A Product Of Highly Charismatic Evangelists... But The Spread Of Any New And Contagious Ideology Also Has A Lot To Do With The Skillful Use Of Group Power.

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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.

Humans Socialize In The Largest Groups Of All Primates Because We Are The Only Animals With Brains Large Enough To Handle The Complexities Of That Social Arrangement.

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?

No One Who Can Rise Before Dawn Three Hundred Sixty Days A Year Fails To Make His Family Rich.

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.

Good Writing Does Not Succeed Or Fail On The Strength Of Its Ability To Persuade. It Succeeds Or Fails On The Strength Of Its Ability To Engage You, To Make You Think, To Give You A Glimpse Into Someone Else's Head.

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

You Don't Want To Be First, Right? You Want To Be Second Or Third. You Don't Want To Be - Facebook Is Not The First In Social Media. They're The Third, Right? Similarly, You Know, If You Look At Steve Jobs' History, He's Never Been First.

Achievement Is Talent Plus Preparation

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.

Ideas And Products And Messages And Behaviors Spread Just Like Viruses Do.

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.

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

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!

Arousal Leaves Us Mind-blind.

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

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.

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.

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.

Six Degrees Of Separation Doesn't Mean That Everyone Is Linked To Everyone Else In Just Six Steps. It Means That A Very Small Number Of People Are Linked To Everyone Else In A Few Steps, And The Rest Of Us Are Linked To The World Through Those Special Few.

The Conventional Explanation For Jewish Success, Of Course, Is That Jews Come From A Literate, Intellectual Culture. They Are Famously "the People Of The Book." There Is Surely Something To That. But It Wasn't Just The Children Of Rabbis Who Went To Law School. It Was The Children Of Garment Workers. And Their Critical Advantage In Climbing The Professional Ladder Wasn't The Intellectual Rigor You Get From Studying The Talmud. It Was The Practical Intelligence And Savvy You Get From Watching Your Father Sell Aprons On Hester Street.

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.

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

If We Think About Emotion This Way - As Outside-in, Not Inside Out - It Is Possible To Understand How Some People Can Have An Enormous Amount Of Influence Over Others. Some Of Us, After All, Are Very Good At Expressiing Emotions And Feelings, Which Means That We Are Far More Emotionally Contagious Than The Rest Of Us.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

The Values Of The World We Inhabit And The People We Surround Ourselves With Have A Profound Effect On Who We Are.

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.

Instead Of Thinking About Talent As Something That You Acquire, Talent Should Be Thought Of As Something That You Develop.

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.

There Are Exceptional People Out There Who Are Capable Of Starting Epidemics. All You Have To Do Is Find Them.

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

And My Advice For College Graduates Is Don't Reflexively Give Money To Your Alma Mater, Something Particular To Americans That I Find Extraordinary. Take Princeton, For Example - It Has More Money On A Per Capita Basis Than Any Educational Institution In The History Of Educational Institutions. There Is No Scenario Where It Can Spend All The Money Its Endowment Generates Every Year. If There Is Anyone Who Gives A Single Dollar To Princeton, They Have Completely Lost Their Mind. I Will Say That Without Reservation.

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

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.

That's Your Responsibility As A Person, As A Human Being - To Constantly Be Updating Your Positions On As Many Things As Possible. And If You Don't Contradict Yourself On A Regular Basis, Then You're Not Thinking.

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

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

If We Are To Learn To Improve The Quality Of The Decisions We Make, We Need To Accept The Mysterious Nature Of Our Snap Judgments.

Decisions We Make

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

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.

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

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.

Acquaintances Represent A Source Of Social Power, And The More Acquaintances You Have The More Powerful You Are.

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.

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

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.

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.

When Writing, You Can't Break Physical Rules. You Can't Have People Come Back From The Dead. That's Cheating. I Am A Kind Of Narrative Fundamentalist In Many Ways.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

The World Is Not A Meritocracy, As Much As We May Like To Pretend That It Is. And We Have A Long Way To Go Before We Really Reward People Based On Their Own Merit.

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

The Difference Isn't Resources, It's Attitude.

My Father Read Charles Dickens To Us As Children, And At The End Of Virtually Every Novel He Would Choke Up And Start To Cry - And My Father Never Cried. It Always Made Me Love Him All The More.

Father: 'anything But Journalism.' I Rebelled.

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

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?

Innovation-the Heart Of The Knowledge Economy-is Fundamentally Social.

We Can Unravel The Logic Behind Who Succeeds And Who Doesn't.

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

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

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

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

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.

Visionaries Are Limited By Their Visions.

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

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

The Face Is Not A Secondary Billboard For Our Internal Feelings. It Is An Equal Partner In The Emotional Process.

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

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

The Act Of Facing Overwhelming Odds Produces Greatness And Beauty.

Take A Random Group Of 8-year-old American And Japanese Kids, Give Them All A Really, Really Hard Math Problem, And Start A Stopwatch. The American Kids Will Give Up After 30, 40 Seconds. If You Let The Test Run For 15 Minutes, The Japanese Kids Will Not Have Given Up. You Have To Take It Away.

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”?

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.

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

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.

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.

The Best Example Of How Impossible It Will Be For Major League Baseball To Crack Down On Steroids Is The Fact That Baseball And The Media Are Still Talking About The Problem As "steroids.

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

The Great Accomplishment Of Jobs's Life Is How Effectively He Put His Idiosyncrasies - His Petulance, His Narcissism, And His Rudeness - In The Service Of Perfection.

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

Our Unconscious Reactions Come Out Of A Locked Room, And We Can't Look Inside That Room. But With Experience We Become Expert At Using Our Behavior And Our Training To Interpret - And Decode - What Lies Behind Our Snap Judgment And First Impressions.

First Impression

Poverty Is Not Deprivation, It Is Isolation.

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

People Don't Rise From Nothing.

My Point Is That The Great Challenge Of An Artist Is To Balance Those Two Things: To Be Strong Enough To Have Your Own Personal Vision That You Will Put On The Page Or The Canvas Or The Screen, No Matter What People Say, But It Requires A Radical Sensitivity. You Have To Be Completely Open To What The World Is Telling You, To What Your Audience Tells You. And Balancing Those Two Things Is Nearly Impossible.

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

The Issue Isn't The Accuracy Of The Bombs You Have, It's How You Use The Bombs You Have - And More Importantly, Whether You Ought To Use Bombs At All.

Do You See The Consequences Of The Way We Have Chosen To Think About Success? Because We So Profoundly Personalize Success, We Miss Opportunities To Lift Others Onto The Top Rung...we Are Too Much In Awe Of Those Who Succeed And Far Too Dismissive Of Those Who Fail. And Most Of All, We Become Much Too Passive. We Overlook Just How Large A Role We All Play—and By “we” I Mean Society—in Determining Who Makes It And Who Doesn’t.

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

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

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

Hard Work Is A Prison Sentence Only If It Does Not Have Meaning.

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.

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!

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.

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

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?

Our World Requires That Decisions Be Sourced And Footnoted, And If We Say How We Feel, We Must Also Be Prepared To Elaborate On Why We Feel That Way...we Need To Respect The Fact That It Is Possible To Know Without Knowing Why We Know And Accept That - Sometimes - We're Better Off That Way.

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.

The Ethics Of Plagiarism Have Turned Into The Narcissism Of Small Differences: Because Journalism Cannot Own Up To Its Heavily Derivative Nature, It Must Enforce Originality On The Level Of The Sentence.

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

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

We Have, As Human Beings, A Storytelling Problem. We're A Bit Too Quick To Come Up With Explanations For Things We Don't Really Have An Explanation For.

The Goal Of Storytelling Should Be To Make Stories As Ubiquitous As Music.

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.

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

We Sometimes Think Of Being Good At Mathematics As An Innate Ability. You Either Have "it" Or You Don't. But To Schoenfeld, It's Not So Much Ability As Attitude. You Master Mathematics If You Are Willing To Try.

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.

When It's Easy To Make Money, You Have No Incentive To Think About Development Of Talent.

Clear Writing Is Universal. People Talk About Writing Down To An Audience Or Writing Up To An Audience; I Think That's Nonsense. If You Write In A Way That Is Clear, Transparent, And Elegant, It Will Reach Everyone.

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

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.

I Always Resist Seeing My Own Personal Motivation In My Work, But I Guess It Must Be There On Some Level. And I Do Feel Very Much That My Life Follows The Kinds Of Things I Talk About In My Books. I've Always Thought Of Myself As An Insanely Lucky Person, So Perhaps The Success Of My First Two Books Led Me To Want To Examine This Phenomenon On Some Unconscious Level.

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

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.

The Successful Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities.

Presence Of Mind

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

The Injunction To Be Nice Is Used To Deflect Criticism And Stifle The Legitimate Anger Of Dissent.

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

The Answer Is That We Are Not Helpless In The Face Of Our First Impressions. They May Bubble Up From The Unconscious - From Behind A Locked Door Inside Of Our Brain - But Just Because Something Is Outside Of Awareness Doesn't Mean It's Outside Of Control.

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.

Asian Culture Has A Profoundly Different Relationship To Work. It Rewards People Who Are Persistent.

I'm Someone Who Can Provide An Intellectual Framework, But I Can't Tell People Who Are Trying To Sell Product X How To Do That Because I Don't Know, And I Would Be Faking It If I Attempted To Step Into That Role.

Our Intuitions, As Humans, Aren't Always Very Good. Changes That Happen Really Suddenly, On The Strength Of The Most Minor Of Input, Can Be Deeply Confusing.

I Write My Books To Challenge My Own Feelings And Theories. Perhaps Most Surprising Was What I Learned About Rice Farming. It Was Really Interesting To Think Of How Different Asian And Western Cultures Are As A Result Of The Kinds Of Agricultural Practices That Our Ancestors Used For Thousands Of Years. The Life Of A Chinese Peasant In The Middle Ages Was So Dramatically Different From The Life Of A European Peasant - Night And Day Different.

Achievement Is Talent Plus Preparation. The Problem With This View Is That The Closer Psychologists Look At The Careers Of The Gifted, The Smaller The Role Innate Talent Seems To Play And The Bigger The Role Preparation Seems To Play.

If You Look At The Careers Of Great Entrepreneurs And You Look At The Moment They Took Their Plunge, The Plunge Is Rarely A Great Financial Or Material Risk, It’s A Social Risk. At The Moment They Started Their New Businesses, Everyone Around Them Said ‘you’re An Idiot’.

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

By Shifting The Balance Away From The Individual We Open The Door For The Individual. Because We Make It Obvious That Anyone Can Do It Given The Right Circumstance.

Truly Successful Decision-making Relies On A Balance Between Deliberate And Instinctive Thinking.

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 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.

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.

The 10,000-hours Rule Says That If You Look At Any Kind Of Cognitively Complex Field, From Playing Chess To Being A Neurosurgeon, We See This Incredibly Consistent Pattern That You Cannot Be Good At That Unless You Practice For 10,000 Hours, Which Is Roughly Ten Years, If You Think About Four Hours A Day.

People Who Are Busy Doing Things - As Opposed To People Who Are Busy Sitting Around, Like Me, Reading And Having Coffee In Coffee Shops -don't Have Opportunities To Kind Of Collect And Organize Their Experiences And Make Sense Of Them.

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.

In A Country That Never Wins Anything: In Canada, If One Of Our Athletes So Much As Makes The Final In A World Championship, We Declare A National Holiday.

It's Very Hard To Find Someone Who's Successful And Dislikes What They Do.

So Long As The Stereotype Is Used As A Way Of Understanding How To Fix The Problem As Opposed To Demonizing A People Or Writing Them Off, Then I Think It's Ok.

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.

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

Nobody Accomplishes Success By Themselves.

I Don't Want To Be Like The Angry Old Guy In The Corner Who Is Always Ranting And Raving About The Same Things - But I Don't Mind Doing That Just A Little Bit!

You Need To Have The Ability To Gracefully Navigate The World.

I've Been In Auditions Without Screens, And I Can Assure You That I Was Prejudiced. I Began To Listen With My Eyes, And There Is No Way That Your Eyes Don't Affect Your Judgement. The Only True Way To Listen Is With Your Ears And Your Heart. (p.251)

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

That Is The Paradox Of The Epidemic: That In Order To Create One Contagious Movement, You Often Have To Create Many Small Movements First.

The Answer Is That The Success Of Any Kind Of Social Epidemic Is Heavily Dependent On The Involvement Of People With A Particular And Rare Set Of Social Gifts.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Nothing Frustrates Me More Than Someone Who Reads Something Of Mine Or Anyone Else's And Says, Angrily, 'i Don't Buy It.' Why Are They Angry? Good Writing Does Not Succeed Or Fail On The Strength Of Its Ability To Persuade. It Succeeds Or Fails On The Strength Of Its Ability To Engage You, To Make You Think, To Give You A Glimpse Into Someone Else's Head—even If In The End You Conclude That Someone Else's Head Is Not A Place You'd Really Like To Be.

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

People Are Experience-rich And Theory-poor.

Does That Mean We Should Give Up? Probably. But There Are Two Issues Worth Considering. The First Is - Is It Really True That Drugs Destroy The Integrity Of The Game?

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.

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.

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 Interviewed One Of The Most Powerful Lawyers In The World And He Told Me, "at The Time, It Was The Worst Thing In The World Not To Be Able To Get A Job At A Fancy Law Firm, But It's The Greatest Thing That Ever Happened In My Life." It Was A Humble Acknowledgment Of How Forces Much Larger Than Himself Shaped His Career. I Really Wanted To Bring That Point Home.

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.

I'm Convinced That Ideas And Behaviors And New Products Move Through A Population Very Much Like A Disease Does.

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.

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.

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

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

There Is A Simple Way To Package Information That, Under The Right Circumstances, Can Make It Irresistible. All You Have To Do Is Find It.

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

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

Presence Of Mind

Have You Ever Wondered... How Religious Movements Get Started? Usually, We Think Of Them As A Product Of Highly Charismatic Evangelists... But The Spread Of Any New And Contagious Ideology Also Has A Lot To Do With The Skillful Use Of Group Power.

We Are Approaching Levels - If We're Not Beyond Levels - Of Threshold For The Number Of Messages That Consumers Can Take In In A Given Day. There Is A Kind Of Hunger For Some Kind Of New Approach To Getting The Word Out About Something.

Emotion Is Contagious.

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.

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

So The First Task Of A Police Force Is Not To Fight Crime And Enforce The Law. It Is To Establish Legitimacy With The Law-abiding Citizenry And Then Fight Crime And Enforce The Law.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My Writing Model Is My Mother, Who Is A Writer As Well. She Always Valued Clarity And Simplicity Above All Else. If Someone Doesn't Understand What You're Writing, Then Everything Else You Do Is Superfluous. Irrelevant. If Any Thoughtful, Curious Reader Finds What I Do Impenetrable, I've Failed.

We Overlook Just How Large A Role We All Play--and By 'we' I Mean Society--in Determining Who Makes It And Who Doesn't.

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