Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

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.

I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.