If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

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.

If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.