Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.
Why are man hole covers around?” If you don’t knwo the answer to the questions, you’re not smart enough to work at microsoft.
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.
You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.
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.