they’ve changed that reality by infusing their task environments with more helpful varieties that automatically activate a preferred way of responding.

There were few cues in that environment to spur me to think routinely and automatically of those individuals as I wrote. From my desk at home, though, the cues were matched to the task.

Other callers got the identical information printed on paper carrying a photo of a runner winning a race. It was a photo that had previously been shown to stir achievement-related thinking. Remarkably, by the end of their three-hour shifts, the second sample of callers had raised 60 percent more money than their otherwise comparable coworkers.

all human societies have developed ways to respond together, in unison or synchrony, inside songs, marches, rituals, chants, prayers, and dances. What’s more, they’ve been doing so since prehistoric times;

scientific research showing that the weakness-before-strength tactic works best when the strength doesn’t just add something positive to the list of pros and cons but, instead, challenges the relevance of the weakness.

“As a health care organization, we’re devoted to acts of healing, so we never use language associated with violence. We don’t have bullet points; we have information points. We don’t attack a problem, we approach it.”

It makes sense, then, that in early and middle age, it can be so hard to turn our minds away from tribulations. To serve our principal aims at those times, we need to be receptive to the real presence of negatives in order to learn from and deal with them. The problem arises when we allow ourselves to become mired in the emotions they generate; whe

focused you on the trait of stubbornness, sending you down a single psychological chute constructed unfairly to confirm my judgment.

the takeaway here is that an effective linkage between concepts doesn’t have to be located in prevailing reality. It can be constructed. The concepts only have to be experienced as linked directly in some way for the subsequent presentation of one to prepare the other for pertinent action.