One of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.
And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.
Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious.
We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean.
Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay Belgium.
In Steiger’s case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.
Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.
When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.
Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.
The problem is that buried among the things we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes some time to understand that we actually like them.
You have to explain the invention to customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.
But is the commercial theory of learning true? Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don’t like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials “don’t tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people.
E3-20171107-JV-PC.
We’re friends with the people we do things with as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friend, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small physical spaces that we do.
The Power of the Glance Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.
My great-great-great-grandmother.
Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.
Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from – and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.