I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.

There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.