Quotes from David Shenk

Microsoft, by some accounts, the second most capitalized company on the planet, is the only corporate colossus in history whose entire product line could be eliminated with a giant magnet.

You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation," he writes. "You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.

It's not that I'm so smart," Albert Einstein once said. "It's just that I stay with problems longer." Einstein's simple statement is a clarion call for all who seek greatness, for themselves or their children. In the end, persistence is the difference between mediocrity and enormous success.

Because talent is a function of acquired skills rather than innate ability, adult achievement depends completely on long-term attitude and resources and process rather than any particular age-based talent quotient.

Playing well requires study—period. There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers. (Understanding this hard truth didn't amount to acting on it, but it was at least a good first step.)

In a sense, all schooling in the United States was an elaborate training session for the free market, democratic, meritocratic, modern, bloodless warfare that would dominate their adult lives.

Regardless of whether a child seems to be exceptional, mediocre, or even awful at any particular skill at a particular point in time, the potential exists for that

Deliberate practice requires a mind-set of never, ever, being satisfied with your current ability. It requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again.

Such warnings are not to be taken lightly, and it behooves every chess parent, chess organizer, and chess instructor to be mindful of the game's destructive power—to work on tapping into chess's positive Benjamin Franklin forces while avoiding its corrosive Bobby Fischer forces.

Finally, often as we relax or "tune out" other distractions, sometime after "retirement" for example, some previously hidden, latent interests, talents or abilities quite suddenly, and surprisingly, emerge. Sometimes that emergence is actually a re-kindling of some earlier childhood abilities, such as art, for whatever reason set aside with maturation and "growing up.

Seasoned players realized all too well that with the tweaking of a few pieces' powers of motion, it was an entirely new game.

For the English player, more comfort is not required. He sits straight as a poker on his chair, keeps his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and does not move until he for an hour has [surveyed] the chessboard. His opponent has sighed hundreds of times when the Englishman eventually moves his piece.

The paradox of illuminating complexity is that it is inherently difficult to do so without erasing all of the nuance.

One legend has it that Ferdinand was himself right in the middle of a chess game when Christopher Columbus approached the court with his plan to sail west in search of the Indies; at that moment, victory came to Ferdinand on the chess-board, putting him in such a good mood that he quickly approved Columbus's request.

Chess holds its master in its own bonds," Albert Einstein once said, "shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.

It seems most of you believe that people are inherently good and to be trusted, that strangers are friends and friends brethren.

Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine," Viennese player Rudolf Spielmann would later advise. Even

You're a good lot, you Deadheads. I'm proud to be one of you.

Acquire knowledge. It guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament amongst friends, and an armour against enemies.

Serious converts to the game usually have some powerful motivation—perhaps unknown to them—for investing in the game at a particular time in their lives.

The electronic town hall allows for speedy communications and bad decision-making.