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...
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...
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...
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;...
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...
They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed.
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...
There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwal...
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.
Playing, it turns out, makes us less afraid of cognitive friction.
Oscar Wilde once said, Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. The mourners at Startup Funeral are among the many people in the American technology culture who regularly celebrate sai...
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...
Like The Second City, Upworthy turned its work into rapid, scientific experiments. It turned tiny failures into depersonalized feedback and created an environment where total failure was nearly imposs...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.