An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.

A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.

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.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.

Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.