Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

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.

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.

As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.

What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.

We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't.