Giants Are Not What We Think They

Where They Come From Matters. They're Products Of Particular Places And Environments.

I'm In The Storytelling Business, And So You're Always Drawn To The Unusual. And Early On, I Discovered That's The Easiest Way To Tell Stories... If You Come Up Through A Newspaper As I Did, Your Whole Goal Is To Get A Story On The Front Page, And You Only Get Something On The Front Page If It's Unusual.

[norden] Said, With The Mark 15 Norden Bombsight, He Could Drop A Bomb Into A Pickle Barrel At 20,000 Feet.

We Spend A Lot Of Time And Effort Trying To Figure Out Who's Going To Be A Good Nfl Quarterback, And We Do A Very Bad Job Of It. We Don't Really Know. And We Also Spend A Lot Of Time Trying To Figure Out Who Will Be A Good Teacher, And We're Really Bad At That Too. We Don't Know If Someone Is Going To Be A Good Teacher When They Start Teaching. So What Should We Do In Those Situations In Which Predictions Are Useless?

Take A Random Group Of 8-year-old American And Japanese Kids, Give Them All A Really, Really Hard Math Problem, And Start A Stopwatch. The American Kids Will Give Up After 30, 40 Seconds. If You Let The Test Run For 15 Minutes, The Japanese Kids Will Not Have Given Up. You Have To Take It Away.