p.55 [wide receiver Jerry] Rice didn't need to do everything well, just certain things...
Rice and his coaches understood exactly what he needed in order to be dominant. They focused on those things
and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed.
p.86-87 Top performers can figure out what's going to happen sooner than average performers by seeing
more... Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see.
p.88 The experts did not have sharper eyes in the usual sense. They were all looking at the same [x-ray]
films and could see them just as clearly. The difference wasn't literally what they saw. It was what they perceived.
p.89,90 [Top performers] understand the significance of indicators that average performers don't
even notice... excellent performers in other fields have learned to spot nonobvious information that's important...
Often these nonobvious indicators are well-guarded secrets... developing and using them requires extensive practice.
p.93 In each case, seeing differences that others don't see is another way of perceiving more.
p.122-124 For anyone, a rich mental model contributes to great performance in three major ways: A mental
model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain... A mental model helps you distinguish
relevant information from irrelevant information... Most important, a mental model enables you to predict
what will happen next.
p.150 Edward de Bono, the best known business consultant on creative thinking, has stated this view explicitly:
"Too much experience within a field may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done
that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas."
p.155 Watson and Crick came into possession of various papers, X-Ray photographs, and raw data... that combined
into a sum of critically important knowledge that none of the others possessed in total... Watson and Crick were the
first to solve the overall problem of DNA's structure because they, and they alone, had all the necessary facts.
As Weisberg concludes, "one does not have to assume that Watson and Crick were different (or better) thinkers than
the others. They simply had available what was needed to develop the correct model of DNA, and the others did not."
p.162 The impression that emerges most strongly from research on great creators is that
of their enthusiastic immersion in their domain and their resulting deep knowledge of it.
