...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

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.

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.

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.