A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
Malcolm Gladwell
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
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.
Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
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?
Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.
A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.
We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.
The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.
Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it.
I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.
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.
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 Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.
It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
I don't golf. I've never golfed. I will never golf.
For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.
There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice.
Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.
I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame.
The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.
I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself.
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.
The underdog winning is the romantic position.
My mother read me biblical stories at night.
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.
Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.
The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.
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.
In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.
Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.
When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
If I was President of the United States, I'd rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I'd rather be right than interesting. But I'm a journalist - what journalist would rather be right than interesting?
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.
All my books are optimistic!
I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing.
You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
A runner needs not just to be skinny but - more specifically - to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That's why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect.
In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
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.'
