When takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses. Research shows that people tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to knock them down a notch.
Malcolm Gladwell showed us in Outliers, research led by psychologist Anders Ericsson reveals that attaining expertise in a domain typically requires ten thousand hours of deliberate practice.
If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dis...
If we create networks with the sole intention of getting something, we won’t succeed. We can’t pursue the benefits of networks; the benefits ensue from investments in meaningful activities and relatio...
Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less you have.
Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively.
The higher the psychological safety in a unit, the fewer errors they made. Why? In the units that lacked psychological safety, health care professionals hid their errors, fearing retribution. As a res...
Responsibility bias occurs because we have more information about our own contributions than others’.
Highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck.
When we’ve developed an idea, we’re typically too close to our own tastes—and too far from the audience’s taste—to evaluate it accurately. We’re
When we have an original idea to invent a product or start a company, we’re encouraged to be the first mover. There are, of course, clear advantages to speed: we can be sure to finish what we start an...
We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—w...
The primary purpose has already been served by your preparation for this exam . . . Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does. Studies
The customer service agents who accepted the defaults of Internet Explorer and Safari approached their job the same way. They stayed on script in sales calls and followed standard operating procedures...
Steve Jones, the award-winning former CEO of one of the largest banks in Australia, wanted to know what made financial advisers successful. His team studied key factors such as financial expertise and...
Speak softly, but carry a big stick. —Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president
Of course, natural talent also matters, but once you have a pool of candidates above the threshold of necessary potential, grit is a major factor that predicts how close they get to achieving their po...
If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative, Steve Jobs said back in 1982, you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does. Working
Giving was the only characteristic to predict performance: it didn’t matter whether the salespeople were conscientious or carefree, extroverted or introverted, emotionally stable or anxious, and open-...
You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party. The