Jennifer Baez

  The Gaia Theory sees planets, at least the Earth, as more than just balls of rocks and mud. They don’t think that Earth has life  on  it. They theorize that Earth is life itself — it’s living. The Gaia theory states that living things and all their non-living and inorganic surroundings evolve together as a single complex living organism. This

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.

When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we'd all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation-it's idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for

Fifteen billion people were born in the 19th and 20th centuries. But try to imagine how different the global economy—and the whole world—would be today if just seven of them never existed:

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

Mao Zedong

Gavrilo Princip

Thomas Edison

Bill Gates

Martin Luther King

Another way to put this is that 0.00000000004% of people were

Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns

In the era of the institutional marriage, from the nation’s founding until around 1850, the prevalence of individual farming households meant that the main requirements Americans had for their marriage revolved around things like food production, shelter and protection from violence.

In the era of the companionate marriage, from roughly 1850 until

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well: