The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
Graham states, Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the average do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is sma...
Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contemp...
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the work will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of...
Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE. 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two...
But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one o...
As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends...
If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)
What we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment...
The logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point,
The Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.
Psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X inc...
Learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don’t...
Is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
Innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, agreeableness, they tend to be on...
A social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when...
[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an i...