I had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.
The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world- class expert-in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. . . no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.
Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep. . . music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.
It's getting harder and harder to know, when you find things on the Internet, what you can believe and what you can't.
The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one to another, often to unrelated thoughts, without you controlling where they go. This brain state acts as a neural reset button, allowing us to come back to our work with a refreshed perspective. Different people find they enter this mode in different ways: reading, a walk in nature, looking at art, meditating, and napping. A 15-minute nap can produce the equivalent of a 10-point boost in IQ.
Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad. ' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song. '
You don't need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.
I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.