If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us.
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.
If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Instead, creators ought to build a car and see if customers will drive it.
Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness – and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
To overcome fear, why does getting excited work better than trying to calm yourself down? Fear is an intense emotion. You can feel your heart pumping and your blood coursing. In that state, trying to relax is like slamming on the brakes when a car is going 80 miles per hour. The vehicle still has momentum. Rather than trying to suppress a strong emotion, it’s easier to convert it into a different emotion – one that’s equally intense, but propels is to step on the gas.
After all, the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.
There’s a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.
Overall, on average, happier people earn more money, get higher performance ratings, make better decisions, negotiate sweeter deals, and contribute more to their organizations. Happiness alone accounts for about 10 percent of the variation between employees and job performance.
We often favor feeling right, over being right.
Psychologists discovered that there are two routes to achievement: conformity and originality. Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.
Being a scientist is not just a profession. It’s a frame of mind... Scientific tools are not reserved for people in white coats and beakers. Hypotheses have as much place in our lives as they do in the lab. Experiments can inform our daily decisions.
If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.
We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.
Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better.
We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk.
Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.
How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental – a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the defensive.