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.
Capitalization learning: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
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...
Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M’s because men, money, and matériel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appre...
Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what...
The IQ fundamentalist Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (p. 113): The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that dif...
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg c...
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally fro...
Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in popu...
Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and l...
Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.
Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major, they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest s...
Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.
People are in one of two states in a relationship, Gottman went on. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spous...
Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers t...
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the ve...
My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constit...