That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

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.

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.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.

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.

All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.