psychology

Even if you have rock-solid evidence and impeccable logic, and you back the other person into a corner, what happens? They might concede—but they definitely hate you. When we make it win-or-lose, everyone loses.

Creativity is built on basic foundational knowledge, as the brain has more building blocks to work with. Creativity is not just random ideas but novel ways to connect existing knowledge, new ways to solve more complex problems. Innovation requires creativity, which requires a foundation of basic knowledge ~ Make It Stick

When you combine items on your curiosities list like this, you’re amping up your engagement and identifying passions. As you begin to explore and act on your passions, you receive a reward: more dopamine.

You have to stand in the future to create a different future. Our friend, Mike Maples Jr., calls this “backcasting.” Legendary builders must stand in the future and pull the present from the current reality to the future of their design. So an important additional job of the builder is to persuade early like-minded people to join a new movement.

Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.

as we’ve just seen, the memories and experiences stored in an individual attic vary greatly from person to person, the general patterns of activation and retrieval remain remarkably similar, coloring our thought process in a predictable, characteristic fashion. And if these habitual patterns point to one thing, it’s this: our minds love nothing

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking—something that precludes mindfulness altogether.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

“Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”