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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.

-Malcolm Gladwell

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The Answer Is That

Malcolm Gladwell

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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.

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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.

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

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."

Incompetence Annoys Me. Overconfidence Terrifies Me.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

Hard Work Is A Prison Sentence Only If It Does Not Have Meaning. Once It Does, It Becomes The Kind Of Thing That Makes You Grab Your Wife Around The Waist And Dance A Jig.

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.

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

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.

Arousal Leaves Us Mind-blind.

To Be Someone's Best Friend Requires A Minimum Investment Of Time. More Than That, Though, It Takes Emotional Energy. Caring About Someone Deeply Is Exhausting.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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”?

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

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The Act Of Facing Overwhelming Odds Produces Greatness And Beauty.

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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.

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The Successful Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities.

Presence Of Mind

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, A Four-volume Work So Dense That Its Readers Were Evenly Divided Between Those Who Understood It And Thought It Was Brilliant And Those Who Did Not Understand It And Thought It Was Brilliant.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If People Disobey, Don't Ask What Is Wrong With Them, Ask What's Wrong With Their Leaders.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There Can Be As Much Value In The Blink Of An Eye As In Months Of Rational Analysis.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What A Gifted Child Is, In Many Ways, Is A Gifted Learner. And What A Gifted Adult Is, Is A Gifted Doer. And Those Are Quite Separate Domains Of Achievement.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Character Isn't What We Think It Is Or, Rather, What We Want It To Be. It Isn't A Stable, Easily Identifiable Set Of Closely Related Traits, And It Only Seems That Way Because Of A Glitch In The Way Our Brains Are Organized. Character Is More Like A Bundle Of Habits And Tendencies And Interests, Loosely Bound Together And Dependent, At Certain Times, On Circumstance And Context.

An Innate Gift And A Certain Amount Of Intelligence Are Important, But What Really Pays Is Ordinary Experience.

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

Presence Of Mind

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.

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!

Visionaries Are Limited By Their Visions.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

Anyone Who Knows The Marketing World Knows That Ideas Come And Go, And People Latch Onto Things And Think Of Them As A Kind Of Solution.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

Emotion Is Contagious.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

When People Reflexively Write Checks To Institutions That Have Billions Of Dollars In The Bank, They Are Essentially Committing A Moral Crime. Your Money Could Do Good In This World And You're Choosing Instead To Waste It. People Have To Do A Better Job Of That. You've Got To Find Places Where Your Money's Going To Do Some Good And Direct Your Dollars Towards That Institution.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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?

Starting Epidemics Requires Concentrating Resources On A Few Key Area. The Law Of The Few Says That Connectors, Mavens, And Salesman Are Responsible For Starting Word-of-mouth Epidemics, Which Means That If You Are Interested In Starting A Word-of-mouth Epidemic , Your Resources Ought To Be Solely Concentrated On These Three Groups. No One Else Matters.

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!

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

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)

If You Play An Audiotape Of A Yawn To Blind People, They'll Yawn Too.

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.

The Band-aid Solution Is Actually The Best Kind Of Solution Because It Involves Solving A Problem With The Minimum Amount Of Effort And Time And Cost.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sometimes The Most Modest Changes Can Bring About Enormous Effects.

Who We Are Cannot Be Separated From Where We're From.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Key To Good Decision Making Is Not Knowledge... It's Whether Our Work Fulfills Us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I See Someone Who Reads Something Of Mine And Draws Something Out Of It That's Very Different From My Perspective, I Think That's Actually Cool. Sometimes It's Worrisome When You Feel They Badly Misinterpret It, But It Just Says That They're Thinking, And They're Bringing Their Own Interpretation To Bear On It. [...] That's Part Of The Wonderful Thing About Putting Words Into The World, And If I Was Worried About That, I Couldn't Be A Writer.

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.

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

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