We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way. 1.
We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off that way.
We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much informat...
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...
To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.
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.
They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? Mary got a quarter, Friedman says. There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter,...
They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten. Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.
There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a c...
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 success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
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...
The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
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...
Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.