Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

Frank Sulloway found that later-born children were roughly twice as likely as earlier-borns to take the radical position, while earlier-borns were more likely to defend the status quo.

People report feeling more at ease when there is similarity in factors like income, education, physical appearance, ethnicity, and race.

When you speak of what you want, and even one person hears, it may begin a generative loop.

Yet, just as legacy cultures can grow stodgy, a culture of newbies can innovate itself right into ridiculousness. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was a classic example.

This and nine more letters from Rilke to Kappus over six years came to be published as Letters to a Young Poet, one of history’s most urgent exhortations on the primacy of self-knowledge.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, another author nurtured by Maxwell Perkins, once declared that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind without cracking up.

Instead of feeling like you were in a relationship with the author, you’d suddenly feel like an outsider.

basic to human relations and the human psyche. Everyone, the psychologist Elaine Aron explains, has two primary relational impulses: to link, or find common ground, and to rank, or establish hierarchical positions.

She went on: “But I can be urged on to doing better work when I see that she’s moving quickly in her work, or if her paintings are really great that week, then I can feel like I’m falling behind or slacking off, and I want to do better in my work. I guess they call that ‘healthy competition.’ I don’t want to ‘beat’ her but I don’t want to fall behi