The Social Animal

Most relationships are bound by trust. Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other. Trust

Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know. Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery.

“When I come out of the state, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Siegel says it’s like you’ve been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly you turn off the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light on the narrow spot. But gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded.

There is the Pareto Principle. We have in our heads the idea that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle) But this is not how the world is often organized. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers will contribute a giant share of any company’s actual produ

There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age.

This is a different sort of knowledge. It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics. It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational—observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

Erica noticed, in sum, that certain cultures are better adapted for modern development than others. In one class she was assigned a book called The Central Liberal Truth by Lawrence E. Harrison. People in what he calls progress-prone cultures assume that they can shape their own destiny. People in progress-resistant cultures are more fatalistic. Pe

As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.