Risk taking and the drive to pursue innovative ideas are the fuel that stokes the entrepreneurial spirit.
One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility.
We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.
The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.
One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory – patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were sad.
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we’re learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections.
Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.
Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn’t a chance.
People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.
It is difficult to spread the contagion of excitement without having a sense of purpose and direction.
The social brain is in its natural habitat when we’re talking with someone face-to-face in real time.
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy – a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one’s own emotions and the emotions of others.
Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and “proofs” all their own.
At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.
The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.
Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.
Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.
Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.
Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there’s more need for affiliation.