Sublime

no greater source of distrust than advisors who appear to be more interested in themselves than in trying to be of service to the client. We must work hard to show that our self-orientation is under control.

Results showed that subjects’ brains responded in the same way when the “nice” player received a shock as when they themselves were shocked. The subjects used their mirror neurons, empathized, and felt the other’s pain. But when the selfish player got a shock, people showed less empathy, and some even showed neural evidence of pleasure.39 In other

the key is to make it “all about them.”

I have found one of the most effective methods for getting individuals to do what I want them to do is to have them come up with my idea then I validate their idea.

Mr. Suspicion. Another variant on the breeds above, this is a future Joe Stalin. He sees what he wants to see—usually the worst—in other people, and imagines that everyone is after him. Mr. Suspicion is in fact the least dangerous of the three: Genuinely unbalanced, he is easy to deceive, just as Stalin himself was constantly deceived. Play on his

Bethe, whom Oppenheimer chose over Teller to head the Theoretical Division of the lab, was equally effusive in Oppenheimer’s praise. “He understood immediately when he heard anything, and fitted it into the general scheme of things and drew the right conclusions,” Bethe told Rhodes. “There was just nobody else in that laboratory who came even close

If you are repeatedly deceived and exploited, you will cease to trust everyone you meet, and confine yourself to the handful of people that you trust most.

What the passengers aboard Berengaria did not know was that Ivar spent hours every day just preparing to talk. When Ivar knew he would be meeting a new group of people, he planned the first impression he hoped to make in advance: whom to meet first, which nuggets of information to drop, and where to move next.