If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.
I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.
Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.
Father: ‘Anything but journalism.’ I rebelled.
I’m totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it’s OK because I’m doing it for a reason, for a good reason.
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.
It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about your values.
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.
I suspect people who are indecisive are people who are far too enamored of analysis in all settings and are destroying their ability to make an instinctive judgment through over-analysis and that’s dangerous.
Arousal leaves us mind-blind.
Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.
I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.
Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.
If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?