When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not...
Our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary.but even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work.
You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game
Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point...
Extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.
We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight
Underdog strategies are hard.
To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest...
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they bel...
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much w...
In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig. (150)
[Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.
We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, a...
We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults....
The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.
The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the F...
Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you w...