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

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 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 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 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.

I serve dinner in three phases: serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead.

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap.

I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes – not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they’re looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.

And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.

But that is the only thing that slows me down is the system. No one, two or three was big enough to slow me down, only the system. It was the system that slowed me down to make my numbers fall. Not because I am older.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

If poverty was to be sold three cents today, i can’t buy it.