“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”-Yiddish saying
“Truth is that we are drawn to the Niederhoffers of this world because we are all at heart, like Niederhoffer: we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. This is the lesson of Taleb and Neiderhoffer and the volatile times we live in. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”
“It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”
-Philip Mangano
“Lesson of late-bloomers: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.”
-Gladwell, referring to Cezanne and others
“Estimates show that on average with a bad teacher one half year of work was covered as compared to a 1.5 year of work with a very good teacher. The teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school w/ an excellent teacher than in an excellent school w/ a bad teacher.
After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a Quarterback problem.”
-Malcolm Gladwell
The quarterback problem refers to the problem Dan Shonka a football scout mentioned when talking about successful college quarterbacks such as Chase Daniel, Ryan Leaf and Joey Harrington who just could not perform at the NFL-level.
