Quotes About Opportunity

We cannot grow without challenge. Challenges routinely produce crises that severely test us. However, crises also offer us the greatest opportunities. People going through tough times typically feel isolated, and unsure what to do. When I face a crisis, I try to keep in mind a few simple concepts: we cannot control our destinies, but we can help to shape them; we must try to make life hop a bit, but we must also accept that we can only do the best we can.

Reducir la diferencia de resultados escolares entre blancos y negros —declararon los autores de un estudio— haría más para promover la igualdad racial que cualquier otra estrategia que cuente con un amplio apoyo político.»

Here's a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.

income and education are strongly correlated

The second lesson to be drawn from Kobayashi's success has to do with the limits that we accept, or refuse to.

Morning robberies yield far more than afternoon robberies . . .' - When to Rob a Bank: A Rouge Economist's Guide to the World by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed.

Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, "reserv[ing] and set[ting] apart for the settlement of the negroes . . . the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida," to be subdivided "so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.

They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

where small niches can flourish.

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.

Nature's innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked.

Part of that magic is economic: emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.

But the easiest way to live in the moment is to put yourself in a situation where there's no other choice.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder," wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she's not wrong.

Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection.