xiii The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone
and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's
a very hard thing to do. Our instincts as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting.
xv Good writing... succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make
you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head
p.153-154 Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part
is not that we have too little information but that we have too much... sometimes the information we've been given
is inadequate, and sometimes we aren't very smart about making sense of what we've been given, and sometimes
the question cannot be answered.
p.360-361 On a scale where 0.1 or below means virtually no correlation and 0.7 or above implies
a strong correlation (your height, for example, has a 0.7 correlation with your parents' height), the correlation
between IQ and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3. "What IQ doesn't pick up is effectiveness at commonsense
sorts of things, especially working with people," Richard Wagner, a psychologist at Florida State University, says.
