But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the...
But the Lord said to Samuel, Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance,...
Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too...
Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glan...
A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.
When we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success--then ... We have a way to successes out of the unsucessful.
Mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.
As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
A four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.
Being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience
As it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic self-concept—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a cruc...
You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision...
What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a unified trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced...
Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western...
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kin...
We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us strong...
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a soc...
To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.