“If you’re worried about giving your secrets away, you can share your dots without connecting them.”

“You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

“Pretend to be something you’re not until you are—fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them.”

“Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”

“There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.”

“You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.”