In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.

..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Achievement is talent plus preparation

...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

When I grew up, I never saw anyone looking like me on TV, you know? I'm so glad to see a lot more of us on television, whether it's Mindy Kaling or it's Irrfan Khan or Freida Pinto. You know, I hope, like, little girls across the world can just look at me and say, 'Ah, I want to be that!' Indian or not, it shouldn't matter.

I had a holding deal with ABC to find me a show, and I was very clear about the kind of show I wanted to do, because Indian people have always been seen as - well, we've been put in a box, about who we should be like.

When I won Miss World, I wasn't even 18, and I only remember, like, I thought of it as a day in the races or something. It didn't feel like it was Miss World of the Millennium Year, the change of the century. I didn't understand the magnitude of it for at least a couple of years.

I think it was very important for me to look at starting to build a safety net so that I didn't feel the insecurity of the ups and downs of finances because I might do no film a year, or I might do six commercials, or I might do none.

Art is collaboration: we are artists all over the world. I believe that people are always going to watch Hindi films... that's never going to die, but I think it's amazing that collaborations like that are happening.

I'm not even Indian-American: I'm Indian-Indian. Everybody expected me to have henna and a nose pin and talk in an accent like Apu from 'The Simpsons.' I was nervous because I wasn't sure if America was ready for a lead that looked like me.

When I grew up in America, I didn't see anyone who looked like me on TV. I feel overwhelmed with the things that people have said to me. When I meet Indian Americans who've lived here all their lives, it's overwhelming people holding me and crying. Someone said to me, 'Thank you for making us relevant.' It's such a big thing.

There are cliques in Bollywood, and people stick together, but I have always tried to stick to my work. As an industry, Bollywood is very competitive, and I'm very competitive as a person, but I've never been a part of any clique, and I've always worked with all actors and directors, all camps.