Starting Epidemics Requires Concentrating Resources On A

So The First Task Of A Police Force Is Not To Fight Crime And Enforce The Law. It Is To Establish Legitimacy With The Law-abiding Citizenry And Then Fight Crime And Enforce The Law.

Superstar Lawyers And Math Whizzes And Software Entrepreneurs Appear At First Blush To Lie Outside Ordinary Experience. But They Don't. They Are Products Of History And Community, Of Opportunity And Legacy. Their Success Is Not Exceptional Or Mysterious. It Is Grounded In A Web Of Advantages And Inheritances, Some Deserved, Some Not, Some Earned, Some Just Plain Lucky - But All Critical To Making Them Who They Are. The Outlier, In The End, Is Not An Outlier At All.

We Sometimes Think Of Being Good At Mathematics As An Innate Ability. You Either Have "it" Or You Don't. But To Schoenfeld, It's Not So Much Ability As Attitude. You Master Mathematics If You Are Willing To Try.

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.

Our Acquaintances—not Our Friends—are Our Greatest Source Of New Ideas And Information. The Internet Lets Us Exploit The Power Of These Kinds Of Distant Connections With Marvellous Efficiency.