It’s not what a player is, but what he can become… that will allow him to grow.
Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.
The opposite of a taker’s powerful communication style is called powerless communication. Powerless communicators tend to speak less assertively, expressing plenty of doubt and relying heavily on advi...
Merely knowing that you are not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd.
Hiring stars is advantageous neither to stars themselves, in terms of their performance, nor to hiring companies in terms of their market value.
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...
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, he was fond of saying.
Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t...
When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us...
Originality is not a fixed trait. It is a free choice. Lincoln wasn’t born with an original personality. Taking on controversy wasn’t programmed into his DNA; it was an act of conscious will. As the g...
You gotta kiss a lot of frogs, he often told his team, before you find a prince. In fact, frog kissing was one of his mantras: he encouraged his engineers to try out many variations to increase their...
We tend to privilege the lone genius who generates ideas that enthrall us, or change our world. According to research by a trio of Stanford psychologists, Americans see independence as a symbol of str...
When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others.
Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person’s distress or our own distress. If the goal is to reduce our own distress, we...
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.
We prefer the regular photos of our friends, because that’s how we’re used to seeing them, but we like the inverted photos of ourselves, because that’s how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror....
Psychological safety—the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Se...
Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively.
Good givers are great getters; they make everybody better, Simmons explains.
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