there were rituals, such as weekly all-hands meetings, that regularly communicated the firm’s values to its workers.

how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.

“The Little Train That Died.” (“I know I can! I know I can! Heart attack! Heart attack! Oh, my God, the pain!

By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.

The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper

Rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it.

Creativity can’t be reduced to a formula. At its core, it needs novelty, surprise, and other elements that cannot be planned in advance to seem fresh and new. There is no checklist that, if followed, delivers innovation on demand.

Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re

As a group, they were less likely to make it to an IPO