Those who have a system for making better decisions win. Some decisions are quick, while others take time.

It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself.

But those who are able to distinguish between a range of various emotions “do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity

If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t come down to who has the most talent or intelligence. It comes down to who is willing to make the choices that others are not willing to make. Like who is willing to shoot baskets in the dark when everyone else is sleeping? Who is willing to prepare more for an interview? Who is willing to practice their speech ten times more than anyone else? All are choices we make.

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people - really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.