There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?

There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.