Whenever we have something that we are good at — something we care about — that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first i… - Malcolm Gladwell

George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.

extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.