The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something

I like to question the minutia, to get to the essence of things. The minutia of life is all about design. It's about the design of how you talk to another human being; it's the design of speech; it's the design of everything we do. We need to be better at listening, and we need to aim more directly at understanding and being understood.

One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.

I live by two credos: If you don't ask, you don't get. And most things don't work.

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say.

We do not think in a linear, sequential way, yet every body of information that is given to us is given to us in a linear manner ... we are taught to communicate in a way that is actually constricting our ability to think.