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...
A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
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...
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
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...
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.
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.
One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.
No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that, the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said. But I remember seeing it as a kid, and thinking, At least...
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.
In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not...
In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.
In recent years, for example, there has been much interest in the idea that one of the most fundamental factors in explaining personality is birth order: older siblings are domineering and conservativ...
If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—i...
Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in t...
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...
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...