“Achievement is talent plus preparation.”
“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”
“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.”
“Emotion is contagious.”
“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning”
“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.”
“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
“No one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone”
“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.”
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
“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 random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”
“Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we 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.”
“Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
“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.”
“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”
“What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”
“When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.”
“When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.”
“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”