The key to intellectual humility is increasing the cognitive diversity inside our own heads.
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...
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...
In the end, Castro’s revolutionary message reached a massive audience through a superconnector—a radio—but the rebels won the people’s hearts because they showed that they sincerely cared. The movemen...
In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill. To
If you had an Internet connection and lived in North America at the time, you may have seen it. Vasquez is the man behind the Double Rainbow video, which at last check had 38 million views. In the cli...
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...
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...
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.
Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generati...
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,...
Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback f...
20% Time is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours expe...
The secret to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow;...
Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate.
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...
There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey. OUR TYPICAL PARADIGM FOR mentorship is that of a young, enterprising worker...