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

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

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

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.