Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

Try to see what it feels like to be the one assessed by a very different culture and not always assessed so generously. See how helpless or clueless you can at times feel. Without summoning up whatever external markers of status and wealth you might possess, try to ask someone in a (very) foreign culture to do you a significant favor. Try to measur

Raising the aspirations of other people is one of the most beneficial things you can do with your time. At critical moments, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something more important and ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relat

Tony then cites Tyler (on Tim Ferriss’s show) speaking as follows: “I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are writing me. If I had too many not smart emails I would feel that I was doing something else wrong with what I’m writing.… The rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I’m lowering it just by

Perhaps most significantly, much of the gender gap in wages seems to be mediated by the personality factor of self-confidence. In a large variety of workplace settings, women, on average, are less self-confident than men and exhibit less self-confidence in public settings. Yet labor markets often reward confidence, sometimes even excess confidence.

When you raise the aspirations of an individual, in essence you are bending upward the curve of that person’s achievement for the rest of his or her life. There is a powerful multiplier effect of compounding returns that can continue for many decades. Actually, the full net impact can be longer yet, if that individual in turn works to later raise t

If you would like another concrete suggestion that goes beyond reading, visit a black church at least once, arguably more times if you find the experience to be meaningful (again, assuming public health conditions allow). It is one accessible way to see a very open side of black America, and you will be welcomed heartily.

That said, confidence gaps to some extent are self-fulfilling prophecies. As younger women see that there are relatively few female role models in a particular area, that may lower their confidence all the more. A self-perpetuating cycle is set in motion, and that cycle can be hard for a society to break.

More generally, making such trips will mean you will be caught less unaware when you are assessing and interviewing people from other cultures. Working off these principles, do send your kids to study abroad, or to live for a while in another country, if at all possible and affordable. If nothing else, you are contributing to their long-run success

If you wish to get more intellectually daring, here is another step you can take. Read or listen to some of the more radical takes on race, whatever might be outside your comfort zone. Recognize that you don’t have to agree with them. But try to spell out in your own mind why somebody might possibly believe and promote those claims. If necessary, w