Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with—because the odds are you’re going to become like them; they are not going to become like you. You can’t change them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.

“If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Oettingen pulled together a simple system for you to do this called WOOP. (Yeah, the formal term is “mental contrasting” but, c’mon. Who wouldn’t rather say “WOOP”?) WOOP—wish, outcome, obstacle, plan—is applicable to most any of your goals, from career to relationships to exercise and weight loss.

intensifiers are qualities that, on average, are negative but in certain contexts produce sweeping benefits that devastate the competition.

Want to know who will do best in school or who will actually have more knowledge? Don’t bet on IQ. Being an introvert is more predictive of good grades than intelligence. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain reports: At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ kn

As he assembled his first project at Pixar, Bird revealed his plan to address the creativity crisis: “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to.

So what is meaning? Meaning, for the human mind, comes in the form of the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

Shawn Achor recommends the “twenty second rule.” Make the things you should do twenty seconds easier to start and make the things you shouldn’t be doing twenty seconds harder. Sounds tiny but it makes a big difference.