Parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it’s hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many m...
Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.
[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to...
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the principle of legitimacy, and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all...
We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legac...
The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. Keeping thin...
Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.
Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television,...
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplis...
Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you’ll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time...
But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)
When you remove time, de becker says, you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction
All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
[Research] suggests that 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 ac...
You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world...
We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—...
The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously the people of the book. There is surely something to that. But it...
In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.
If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.