The tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich,...
That made the unfamiliar familiar.
Soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of...
Power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.
Potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes f...
Look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn...
General intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.
You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?
You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him, he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money...
Working really hard is what successful people do,
Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncert...
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?
What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't.
We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…The contrast between the previous apprehension and the pre...
We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what...
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten ye...