The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who's going to be a good NFL quarterback, and we do a very bad job of it. We don't really know. And we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out who will be a good teacher, and we're really bad at that too. We don't know if someone is going to be a good teacher when they start teaching. So what should we do in those situations in which predictions are useless?

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.