Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!
It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone – or even close to everyone.
What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.
Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
I’ve always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.
The difference isn’t resources, it’s attitude.
In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.
In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
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.
If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they’ll yawn too.
If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.
Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish.
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.
People are experience-rich and theory-poor.
What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.