Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
It was an admission of defeat. ... He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were t...
Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his s...
The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
Concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he’s bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and h...
Complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
Words belong to the person who wrote them
Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separat...
Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else p...
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll...
We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points,
Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much m...
There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
That’s not because journalists know more about Japan. It’s because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.
That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.
Taleb likes to invokePopper: 'No amount of observationsof white swans can allow the inferencethat all swans are white, but the observationof a single black swan is sufficientto refute that conclusion.