Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

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

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.

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

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.