[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter — that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has… - Malcolm Gladwell

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930's was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from — and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.