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...
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...
Playing, it turns out, makes us less afraid of cognitive friction.
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
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,...
Too many of us place our hopes and dreams in the unreliable hands of luck, but the world’s most rapidly successful people take luck into their own hands (even though many are too humble to say so). To...
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...
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...
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
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.
Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous 20% Time. 20% Time is not Google indigenous. It was borrow...
The key to intellectual humility is increasing the cognitive diversity inside our own heads.
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...
The most popular post on Eli Pariser’s blog on the day after he launched it was about Gandhi. Twelve people shared it. The post told the story of the talisman the revered Indian leader once gave to hi...
The important ingredient, the thing that gets teams into The Zone, is not peace and harmony and sameness--it's engaging the tension between their perspectives, heuristics, ideas, and differences.
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...
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...
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...
THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone...
All ten of the top ten presidents in C-SPAN’s survey were hackers. Only one, JFK, climbed a semblance of a traditional ladder; he served in both houses of Congress, but was a war hero and author of a...
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