Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play.

The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence.

Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.