They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him.

And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.

The tendency to continue doing something simply because we have always done it is sometimes called the “status quo bias.

Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it. Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo? I didn’t.

he was soon drawn into a circle of associates who did not improve either his habits or his morals.

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

Much of the difficulty in attempting to restructure American and other societies arises form this resistance by groups with vested interests in the status quo. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and its resisted.

In general people put too much faith in the rich, the famous, the politicians, and not enough faith in themselves.

But as long as you have some fixed idea or are caught by some habitual way of doing things, you cannot appreciate things in their true sense.

I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path — the my-isn’t-that-impressive path — and keep you there for a long time.

The status quo sucks.

This, to a busy mind like his, was a truly deplorable situation; and had he not been a man of inflexible morals and regular habits, there would have been great danger of his taking to politics or drinking — both which pernicious vices we daily see men driven to by mere spleen and idleness.

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.