Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate pr...
New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based (in this case: it’s that you can only help one person).
Luck is often talked about as being in the right place at the right time. But like a surfer, some people—and companies—are adept at placing themselves at the right place at the right time. They seek o...
Counterintuitively, however, Informal mentoring, Underhill found, produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.
A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody love...
They called the results a paradox of failure. It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their s...
OFTEN, THE THING HOLDING us back from success is our inability to say no.
Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t. Mentoring programs break down in the workplace so often that scholarly research contradicts itself...
In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill. To
For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. Your entire philosophy of money changes, writes author...
FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could make it. The allure, the prestige, the strugg...
Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues. How much better is hard work when it’s amplified by a lever? Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rat...
Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber made it in one-fifteenth...
We’re multiplying our capabilities as a civilization and yet we still accept the notion that important societal progress, like combating inequality and crime—or even innovating in government and medic...
True success is not defined by how much money do I make, how well do I speak, how well do I deal with the subjects I deal with, he says. But how great of a father I am.
Not every astronaut struggled postspace like Buzz Aldrin did. Several parlayed sideways rather than stopping their momentum. Earth orbiter John Glenn went into politics. Alan Shepard, America’s first...
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck. It’s how brand-new startups scale and young sci-fi geeks become movie directors. It’s how below-average school sys...
Kids there have much more sense that they’re going to have to construct their own future, Wagner says. They’re taught to be entrepreneurs of their own lives. Instead of standing passively on an educat...
Jimmy’s goal since childhood, he explained to Siegel, had been to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was endearing. After a two-hour call, Siegel offered to represent him. She had one question,...