“All progress depends upon the unreasonable man,” the “creatively maladjusted,” Khosla declared, borrowing eclectically from George Bernard Shaw and Martin Luther King Jr.[4] “Most people think improbable ideas are unimportant,” he loved to add, “but the only thing that’s important is something that’s improbable.” If you were going to pitch Khosla an invention, it had better not fall into the incremental category he called “one sheet of toilet paper, not two.”[5] Khosla wanted radical dreams, the bolder and more improbable the better. (Location 136)
Reasonable people—well-adjusted people, people without hubris or naïveté—routinely fail in life’s important missions by not even attempting them; (Location 179)
power law, so called because the winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate, so that they explode upward far more rapidly than in a linear progression. (Location 218)
Anytime you have outliers whose success multiplies success, you switch from the domain of the normal distribution to the land ruled by the power law—from a world in which things vary slightly to one of extreme contrasts. And once you cross that perilous frontier, you better begin to think differently. (Location 220)