psychology

The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.

But oh how difficult it can be to apply either of these principles—the discounting of emotion or the need to never make exceptions,

As Harvard professor Teresa Amabile discusses in her book The Progress Principle, meaningful work is the number-one thing people want from their jobs.

thinking about an expert’s arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert’s status as “expert.” This tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of information in a situation is what we have been calling automatic or click, run responding; the tendency to react on

“At the elite level,” explains high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “talent and ability are mostly equal. The difference is in the head. High performance is 90 percent mental. And most of that mental edge comes from being able to control your thoughts.”

I also thought that if I were to give advice to someone who’d just received thanks for a meaningful favor, I’d warn against minimizing the favor in all-too-common language that disengages the influence of the rule of reciprocation: “No big deal.” “Don’t think a thing about it.” “I would have done it for anybody.” Instead, I’d recommend retaining

judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation.

It is our own mind we must explore, not the bare expression of another. The darkness of our subconscious pours into our conscious mind when confronted with mystery.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.