The Social Animal

But the wanderer endures uncertainty. The wise wanderer holds off and restrains, possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

In a follow-up study by Melita Oden in 1968, the people in the group who seemed to be doing best had only slightly higher IQs. What they had was superior work ethics. They

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.

The most successful people are mildly delusional status inflators. They maximize their pluses, thus producing self-confidence, and decide their minuses are not really that important anyway, thus eliminating paralyzing self-doubt.

The manager of a Brunswick pool-table store tried an experiment. One week he showed customers to his lowest priced pool table first, at $329, and then worked his way up. The ones who bought any table that week spent on average $550. The next week he showed customers to the $3,000 table first and worked his way down. That week, the average sale topp

“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

The science writer Jonah Lehrer sometimes reminds his readers of Karl Popper’s distinctions between clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It’s

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, but of his own weakness in the face of it. He knows that his mind will seize on the first bit of data it comes across and build a universal theory aroun

In other words, there is a big difference between mental force and mental character. Mental character is akin to moral character. It is forged by experience and effort, carved into the hinterland of the mind.