The Importance of Working With “A” Players
Stop me if this sounds familiar. There is a person who toils alone for years in relative obscurity before finally cracking the code to become a hero. The myth of the lone genius. It’s the stuff …
Culture
The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right
The Pygmalion Effect is a powerful secret weapon. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. In this article, discover how expectations can influence performance for better or …
First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break …
Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You
Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he’s working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends …
Complex Adaptive Cities
Complex adaptive systems are hard to understand. Messy and complicated, they cannot be broken down into smaller bits. It would be easier to ignore them, or simply leave them as mysteries. But given …
Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen
Critical mass, which is sometimes referred to as tipping points, is one of the most effective mental models you can use to understand the world. The concept can explain everything from viral cat …
The Trojan Horse: When True Intents Are Concealed
A Trojan Horse is an innocuous appearing container for hiding something within to get past defenses or some other obstacle. Trojan Horses can be used for both good and evil. Here’s how to recognize …
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time
“We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.” *** Despite having been published in 1910, Arnold Bennett’s book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day remains …
Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on The Tension Between Reason and the Silence Required for Thinking
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, in 1923. The work endures as a timeless meditation on the art of living. Gibran’s thoughts on love and giving offer a glimpse …
Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet and the Struggles to create the Newtonian Revolution
Against great odds, Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) taught herself mathematics and became a world authority on Newtonian mathematical physics. I say against great odds because being a woman at the time …
Get More Done By Working Less
In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not opposed but rather complementary to each other. “When we define ourselves by our work, …
The Science of Sleep: Regulating Emotions and the 24 Hour Mind
Even if we often think of sleeping as ‘switching off’, it’s a complex state during which a lot of important things occur in our bodies. In particular, dreams are vital for helping our brains to …
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
We think that we’re in control. We believe that our conscious mind directs our thoughts and somehow controls our subconscious mind. We’re wrong. In Richard Restak’s The Brain Has a …
The Shortness of Time
If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time. …
Why the Printing Press and the Telegraph Were as Impactful as the Internet
What makes a communications technology revolutionary? One answer to this is to ask whether it fundamentally changes the way society is organized. This can be a very hard question to answer, because …
Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on the Relationship between Vulnerability and Love
In 1923 the Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, which endures as a timeless classic meditation on living. The essence of …