Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

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

If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.

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.

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.

It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!