Your ads are saying, “look, I’m don’t have Porsche’s speed or Chevrolet’s muscles. I’m not as sexy as Mercedes-Benz and I’m not as classy as Cadillac. I’ll never be as patriotic as Ford because I’m German to the core. I know what I am…and I’m proud of it. I’m not made to be shown off, I’m made to be functional: my purpose is to get you from point A... See more

I want you to act as a novelist. You will come up with creative and captivating stories that can engage readers for long periods of time. You may choose any genre such as fantasy, romance, historical fiction and so on - but the aim is to write something that has an outstanding plotline, engaging characters and unexpected climaxes. My first request

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Gladwell: I get attracted to stories that strike me as having potential. Outliers began, for example, with the chapter on the Jewish lawyers. I was talking to someone whose father was one of those lawyers, and she made this observation: “They are all like my dad. They are all from the Bronx, and their parents were all in the garment industry. They ... See more

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and tak... See more

More recently I’ve kept repeating to myself, don’t abandon your vision . Decisiveness is knowing myself well enough to take the plunge, then the rest is all faith.

Are you familiar with the midwit meme? So, it’s this bell curve with a guy who doesn’t think very much, then someone who has average intelligence but thinks it’s superior, and then the guy who’s kind of transcended everything and is very intelligent and actually thinks in the same way as the guy who doesn’t think very much. So for me, I think I st

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Picking a few hits requires a tolerance for many bad ideas, mediocre ideas, and even good ideas cursed with bad timing. Above all, it requires a business model that supports the inevitability that most new things fail; the most promising ideas often attract a chorus of skeptics; and one big hit can pay for a thousand flops.

1. The argument is that accountings of history are not accurate, and can never be accurate, thanks to the narrative fallacy . By its nature, narrative necessarily compresses reality into some coherent tale, meaning that accountings of history tend to overemphasise intention and action, instead of the more plausible ‘random actions by actors in a compl

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