Power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.
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...
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...
General intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.
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...
You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.
You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, ad...
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.
Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.
There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour, Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow, Elizabeth Bishop’s The...
The most intriguing candidate for that something else is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling...
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.
The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from...
Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims...
Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family...
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
