A perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us.
This is the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea. When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head. You wrote the song. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks,...
The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You
The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expecte...
The greatest communicators of all time, says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing what is: here’s the status quo....
Rice professor Erik Dane finds that the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. He points to studies showing that expert br...
Research suggests that there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful, and authoritative...
I’d rather be defined by perseverance than by whether or not I passed an exam.
In roles as leaders and mentors, givers resist the temptation to search for talent first. By recognizing that anyone can be a bloomer, givers focus their attention on motivation. The
If you’re a matcher, you’ll also punish takers for acting unfairly toward other people.
If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch,
Givers tend to use more powerless speech, talking with tentative markers like these: • Hesitations: well, um, uh, you know • Hedges: kinda, sorta, maybe, probably, I think • Disclaimers: this may be a...
For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they h...
Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves. The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, exper...
By giving away credit, Meyer compromised his visibility. For a long time, George’s towering contribution to what some see as the most important TV show of the period was not as well known as it should...
At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious—and the higher they score on these dimensions...
As Jack Handey advised in one of his Deep Thoughts on Saturday Night Live, before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and...
Anthony and Stanton viewed Stone’s support of voting rights for black men as a betrayal of the women’s cause. They reneged on their commitment to a joint organization and announced the formation of th...
And in the long run, research shows that the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission. If we could do things over, most of us would censor ourselves less and express our...