Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.
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 prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.
..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.
I don't want a door bell. I don't want anyone ringing my door bell... seems to be intrusive. They can call me on their cell phones.
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience
Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.
My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.
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.
There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
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.
I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
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 key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.
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.
I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.
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.
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.
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 paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall.
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 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.
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.
For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.
There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.
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.
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.
People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.
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.
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!
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.