The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

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

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.