Quote collection
304 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable."
"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."
"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world."
"The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?"
"What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation."
"We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility."
"The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection."
"If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing."
"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."
"The successful are those who have been given opportunities."
"An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone."
"There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria."
"Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."
"When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted."
"The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."
"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."
"A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention."
"If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking."
"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."
"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."