Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key area. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic , your resources ought to be solely concentrated on these three groups. No one else matters.

Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.

I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.