Shortly after the birth control pill was approved for public distribution, one woman wrote to John Rock, its inventor, "You should be afraid to meet your maker." Rock, despite being Catholic replied, "My dear Madam, in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions."
[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.
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 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success
You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!
being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.
People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.
It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.
What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.
So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.
I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.
If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
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.
Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.
It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.
I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.
Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.
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.
We are approaching levels - if we're not beyond levels - of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.
So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.
Anyone who knows the marketing world knows that ideas come and go, and people latch onto things and think of them as a kind of solution.
I'm someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can't tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don't know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.
