Creativity comes easier within constraints.
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...
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...
OFTEN, THE THING HOLDING us back from success is our inability to say no.
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
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...
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...
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...
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...
By itself, one small win may seem unimportant, writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern t...
Aristotle was privileged to study at Plato’s Academy, but some kid on the other side of the world was probably just as promising as young Aristotle and never got the mentorship. How can building deep...
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.
Playing, it turns out, makes us less afraid of cognitive friction.
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).
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...
They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed.