Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family...
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benef...
People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect — and self-consciousness is the enemy of interestingness.
Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked...
Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan—the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, David fought Go...
In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the qualit...
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind...
I think overall it’s a disadvantage, Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson...
I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want...
Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If...
Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success sim...
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation...
But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get aroun...
Biologists often talk about the ecology of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blo...
A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
They were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.
Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardene...