If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.

In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.

understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.