Great Throughts Treasury

"For every romantic possibility, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it."

"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do ? the innately talented ones. 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 role preparation seems to play."

"General intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other."

"Greenberg knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change."

"Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation."

"He waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience."

"He was maxed out. He had no resources left to do anything else. That's what happens when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things?things that you would pick up on any other day."

"Giants are not always what they seem."

"Have you ever wondered, for example, how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists, people like the Apostle Paul or Billy Graham or Brigham Young, but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power."

"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."

"I deal with writer?s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent?and when you don?t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise."

"I mean, it?s ridiculous, Dhuey says. It?s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them."

"I hope I have encouraged people in business to expand the way they make sense of human behavior."

"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."

"I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact."

"I think when one's working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dollop of each."

"Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."

"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."

"If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition"

"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 expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us."

"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."

"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."

"If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires."

"In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."

"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."

"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."

"In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller."

"In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ?gifted? improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."

"Innovation: the heart of the knowledge economy is fundamentally social."

"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."

"Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me."

"IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families."

"It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research."

"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."

"It is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people to go around."

"It made me realize that I'd changed what I thought was a trivial aspect of who I was but it profoundly made a difference in the way the world perceived me. That was when I thought it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions."

"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 was an admission of defeat... He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not even rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone."

"It would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and comes to all sorts of conclusions."

"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."

"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."

"It's not how much money ultimately we make that makes us happy between 9-5; it's whether our work fulfills us."

"I've always been drawn to those who are exceptional or weird in some way... and the book is about people whose achievement exceeds every expectation. What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve."

"It's the boiling point. It's the moment when the line starts to shoot straight upwards."

"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'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 judgment. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart."

"Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a form full of clever boys."

"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."

"Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response?even a micro-smile that takes no more than several milliseconds?it?s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you."

"No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."