By nature, I am not an optimist, though I try to act as if I am.
I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.
Hitler didn’t travel. Stalin didn’t travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn’t want to have their orthodoxy challenged.
Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don’t seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn’t have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.
My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board.
When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate this subject in as many different ways as possible and to present it so that it would be comprehensible to people accustomed to different modes of thought and with different educational preparations.
It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell.
Discover your difference – the asynchrony with which you have been blessed or cursed – and make the most of it.
Extraordinary individuals stand out in the extent to which they reflect – often explicitly – on the events of their lives, large as well as small.
Extraordinary individuals are distinguished less by their impressive “raw powers” than by their ability to identify their strengths and then to exploit them.
Extraordinary individuals fail often and sometimes dramatically. Rather than giving up, however, they are challenged to learn from their setbacks and to convert defeats into opportunities.
And Einstein stood out among natural scientists in his abiding curiosity about children’s minds. He had once declared that we know all the physics that we will ever need to know by the age of three.
I think that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity. Once you are sophisticated, you know too much-far too much.
The less a person understands his own feelings, the more he will fall prey to them. The less a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of others, the more likely he will interact inappropriately with them and therefore fail to secure his proper place in the world.
I see Freud as energized by three motivations: pleasure in classifying, lust for problem solving, passion for system building.
It cannot be overstated that the emphasis on visual thinking among German-speaking scientists and engineers circa 1900 was widespread. Yet in 1905 it was Einstein who combined visual thinking with Gedanken experiments and quasiaesthetic notions with dazzling results.
He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.
Jean Monnet: “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.
Few things in life are as enjoyable as when we concentrate on a difficult task, using all our skills, knowing what has to be done.
In his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud recalled: “When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressure and preoccupations of today, it seems to me like a glorious ‘heroic era’; my ‘splendid isolation’ was not lacking in advantages and in charms.” It is striking that one encounter virtually the same words and affects-the heights and the depths- in the recollections of other innovators as they reflect on their subjective state on the eve of their greatest breakthroughs.
There is a limit to the development of the intellect but none of that of the heart.