“If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.”

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 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.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio’s use as a metaphor.

Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something’s time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.

We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we’ve been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.