Malcolm Gladwell — Canadian Author born on September 03, 1963,

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CM is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Outliers: The Story of Success, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. All five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list... (wikipedia)

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.
If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.
A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.