When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You
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...
Takers have a knack for generating creative ideas and championing them in the face of opposition. Because they have supreme confidence in their own opinions, they feel free of the shackles of social a...
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...
I’d rather be defined by perseverance than by whether or not I passed an exam.
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...
In a recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But...
Consider the four responses to dissatisfaction: exit, voice, persistence, and neglect. Only exit and voice improve your circumstances.
As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for...
As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environmen...
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...
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...
Takers sometimes win in independent roles where performance is only about individual results, givers thrive in interdependent roles where collaboration matters.
Questions are effective persuasive devices.
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.