All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas th...
Value the perspectives and interests of others, givers are more inclined toward asking questions than offering answers, talking tentatively than boldly, admitting their weaknesses than displaying thei...
Seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates.
Physicist Max Planck once observed, A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.
Analysts were more likely to maintain their star performance if they worked with high-quality colleagues in their teams and departments. The star analysts relied on knowledgeable colleagues for inform...
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...
When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.
When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.
When I put up a slide that says ‘Here’s why you shouldn’t buy this company,’ the first response was laughter. Then you could see them physically relax. It’s sincere; it doesn’t smell, feel, or look an...
Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy.
Timing accounted for forty-two percent of the difference between success and failure.
The identification of talent may be the wrong place to start. For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second.
Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more suppo...
Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a hig...
People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and litera...
One of the keys to cultivating grit is making the task at hand more interesting and motivating.
On matters of style, swim with the current, Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but on matters of principle, stand like a rock. The pressure to achieve leads us to do the opposite. We find surface way...
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. Mark Twain
In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Or...
Every day, we all encounter things we love and things that need to change. The former give us joy. The latter fuel our desire to make the world different—ideally better than the way we found it. But t...