When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars – we’re surprised. I’m saying, don’t be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.
A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That’s one of the little-known facts.
It’s very hard to find someone who’s successful and dislikes what they do.
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?
Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.
It’s as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.
There’s no idea that can’t be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn’t get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old’s.
Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making – it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They’d have nothing to blog about.
The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.
It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.
That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.
People who are busy doing things – as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.
Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
We overlook just how large a role we all play – and by ‘we’ I mean society – in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
Our intuitions, as humans, aren’t always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.
It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.