Being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well.
Creativity comes easier within constraints.
Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is a giver, a rarity in an industry full of takers. No...
You can accelerate your training if you know how to train properly, but you still don’t need to be that special. I don’t think I’m that special of a programmer or a businessperson or a race car driver...
Simplification often makes the difference between good and amazing.
Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition, Dane tells me. However, his research shows that, while logging hours of practice helps us see patterns subconsciously, we can often do just...
When we hear a story, the neural activity increases fivefold, like a switchboard has suddenly illuminated the city of our mind.
The common pattern among these fastest-rising US presidents’ journeys is that, like the BYU students, they didn’t parlay up a linear path. They climbed various ladders of success and then switched to...
Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles.
Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.
If you want people to buy your product, you have to get them to care about your story.
Trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who jus...
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
Playing, it turns out, makes us less afraid of cognitive friction.
I see this book as a simultaneous hat tip and counterpoint to some of the great success and innovation literature out there (check out shanesnow.com/ booklist for my recommendations). It’s a re-analys...
My whole thing was, if I can put in 5 percent of the effort of somebody getting an A, and I can get a C minus, that’s amazing, he explains. It’s certainly good enough, right? [Then] I can take the oth...
Hands-on learning and the use of tools, he says, helps us to want to learn, to get rapid feedback, and to actually grasp math better than memorizing facts from the bottom up.
We’re told that the best way to succeed is to start young, work hard, and move up through the ranks. The two ingredients are hard work—not quitting when things get tough—and luck—spots opening up on t...
THE SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure...
Increasingly in today’s culture, hacking is something done not just by criminals and computer scientists, but by anyone who has the capability to approach a problem laterally. (This is the original us...