They were unconvinced of the power of giants.
Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.
Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse.
Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.
In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. 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.
George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control.
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.
You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries – all Goliaths – too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.
When you’re an underdog, you’re forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.
A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.