“I to the We means that both the individual’s effort and the power of the network matter, and they work in tandem. Someone with no skill won’t get very far, no matter how strong the network.”

I’m skeptical of passive learning. If you don’t write down what you’re hearing and learning, what the odds you remember it?

If frequency with which you cite an education credential does not decrease over the course of your life, you’re not accomplishing very much.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

I have a broad range of interests, so I’ll always be working on something.

Long-term goals are dangerous. They limit you. They hinder you from reacting to new conditions.

Sometimes Plan B can have the same desired outcome, but a different path for getting there.

Expose yourself to as much as possible. Attend conferences no one else is attending. Read books no one else is reading. Talk to people no one else is talking to.

Sometimes I have to pause to make the distinction between Ben the teenager and Ben the businessman.

I’m just the smallest dot in a big map of human history.

I really focused on three things in high school – my company, basketball and my school work.

I don’t want to be normal. I want to be something else.

I suspect the debate over the ethics will be much more heated than the debate over steroids in baseball or any other sport, where the use is limited to a select group of freakish athletes.

Similarly, someone with lots of skill but a weak network won’t realize his or her fullest potential. So, you need both.

It got a little stressful in my first two years of high school, trying to make conference calls with investors in between classes, but I definitely learned a lot of important time-management lessons.

One theme that fascinates me is cognitive enhancement. It seems only a matter of time until we live in a world where steroids for the brain are readily available to all. And once we come to grips with that reality,

The internet tends to make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives but often a description of a community, organisation or nation.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I’m not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I’m not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world

The truth is few people “think” big and even fewer “play” big. Why? Because “big” often means big responsibilitie s, big hassles and big problems. They look at that “bigness” and shrink. They’re smaller than their problems.

The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!

I hate rodents. I mean, the House of Commons is completely infested. I will stand on a chair if I see one of the things.