Great Throughts Treasury

"No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone"

"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."

"Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs."

"Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen."

"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."

"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 marvelous efficiency."

"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."

"Our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary. But even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work."

"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."

"Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making ? it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking."

"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. I think that approach is a mistake, and 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. 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."

"People are experience rich and theory poor. 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."

"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."

"People weren't getting their jobs through their friends. They were getting them through their acquaintances. Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs -- or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas -- "weak ties" are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same same churches, schools, or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn't know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don't. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties. Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are."

"Practical intelligence is practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Shouldn?t we think of someone who is nimble, has every technological advantage, and the Sprit of Lord as the favorite?"

"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."

"Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture, once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear."

"Specht says, It meant I know you think I'm worth it, because that's what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I'll fight you. Don't you tell me what I am. You've been telling me what I am for generations."

"Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback."

"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."

"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."

"Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer."

"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."

"Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities."

"The David position is a high-risk position. There was a possibility he could fail."

"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."

"Taleb likes to invoke Popper: 'No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

"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."

"That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first."

"Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE."

"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."

"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 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 10,000 hour rule is a definite key in success."

"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."

"The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process."

"The futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it."

"The great accomplishment of Jobs' life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection."

"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."

"The Law of the Few... says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger."

"The most important weapon is they had been through this before."

"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 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 culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."

"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."

"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."

"The principle elements of a puzzle all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight."