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

What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.

By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.

We are approaching levels - if we're not beyond levels - of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?