Jay Matthews

Peter Kropotkin spend 5 years observing animals in the wilds of Siberia, and having read Darwin, sought to replicate his opersations of the competitive struggle of species in the wild.

Caveats to the "Underdog Strategy" When a really credible person tells you you can't succeed, in some sense, you basically internalize those expectations, your confidence drops, you actually believe them, and you don't perform as successfully. On the other hand, when you receive low expectations from someone who's not seen as credible, you perceive... See more

There is so much to do. so, do the things that make you feel good.

Moreover, our culture of specialization conflicts with something most of us intuitively recognize, but which career advisers are only beginning to understand: we each have multiple selves. … We have complex, multi-faceted experiences, interests, values and talents, which might mean that we could also find fulfillment as a web designer, or a... See more

“ For love is not about merging. I t’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.”

The Power of the Gift To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable... You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking.

On complementarity: Near the end of A Beautiful Question, Wilczek devotes a few pages to complementarity—the idea that no single description of a phenomenon can be complete. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr introduced complementarity to resolve a problem bedeviling the developers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s: in some cases, it appeared to... See more

The function of the erotic is to encourage excellence and to give us the strength to pursue it.