Insight is the result of turning hindsight into foresight. While that profound sentence sounds simple, it requires a courageous willingness to mine our painful life lessons along the way. Those lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom, so our wisdom comes from our hinds … | Continue reading
Business leaders may think they can’t learn anything from a book published in 1969 — but Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and investment guru Warren Buffett disagree. Their favorite book about commercial life is Business Adventures by John Brooks: a collection of articles describi … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, I published a book about the power of questioning that focused on the connection between asking questions and coming up with innovative ideas. The book was well-received, particularly among readers interested in business innovation (no small market). But somehow th … | Continue reading
Because I wrote a whole book about the benefits of following your interests without a clear objective, the opportunity to reflect on what that means for hindsight seems interesting. After all, it’s easy to regret when you fail to achieve your objective, but what exactly do you re … | Continue reading
It’s New Year’s Day, 2000, and a line of NYPD officers is primed to raid an underground bunker of armed criminals. Vizors down, body armor tight, and guns ready. Crash. A lock gets broken and splinters fly. A door slams inward and the shouting begins. “NYPD! On the ground. Get on … | Continue reading
A leader’s job is, first and foremost, to field a high-performing team. Your people must not only be able to execute their individual tasks well but also work together for the collective win. That requires careful consideration of each person’s skills, attitude, past experiences, … | Continue reading
There are few things quite as jaw-dropping as a well-executed plot twist. Think about the first time you watched Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, or Gone Girl. Think about that moment of breathless exhilaration when the big reveal pops up to change everything. In the wake of a good p … | Continue reading
More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as ethics, politics, economics, the arts, and the natural sciences. While some of his ideas are certainly dated, many retain such a timeless quality that they are still studied today. In … | Continue reading
“Learning is the greatest asset a team has.” That’s Bobak Tavangar, the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs, a tech company that makes open-source, AI-powered eyewear. And he’s right. Organizational learning is critical to innovative thinking, employee engagement, healthy risk-t … | Continue reading
It all began a long time ago, but by 2018, Hollywood was starting to get nervous. Every year, more and more people were carrying around smartphones. And no one uses a smartphone just to make calls. People were using their phones to consume huge amounts of data to watch increasing … | Continue reading
Our Solar System began to take shape about 4.56 billion years ago, as the Sun’s core ignited nuclear fusion, and the protoplanetary disk surrounding it then began to fragment and form tiny protoplanets. After about 50 million years had elapsed, many of the worlds — including plan … | Continue reading
In a year-long study carried out between June 2016 and October 2021, 296 previously sedentary older adults with mild cognitive impairment, a disorder that often precedes Alzheimer’s disease, were assigned to undergo one of two treatments for 12 months. Their disease progression w … | Continue reading
Earlier in his career, Jesse Eisenberg was on the set of the movie Adventureland (2009) when he suffered a panic attack. He felt his breath racing, his mind going blank, and his body shutting down. An entire crew of professionals on set, a production with deadlines, and he had to … | Continue reading
Earlier in his career, Jesse Eisenberg was on the set of the movie Adventureland (2009) when he suffered a panic attack. He felt his breath racing, his mind going blank, and his body shutting down. An entire crew of professionals on set, a production with deadlines, and he had to … | Continue reading
Imagine Simon — an archetypally horny teenager — trying to get his hands on porn throughout the ages. In the ancient world, he wouldn’t find much besides some dodgy graffiti on the walls of the Colosseum and some childish doodles scratched into the cliffside. Sure, rich families … | Continue reading
In 1951, Solomon Asch, a social psychologist from Poland, set out to understand our uniquely human desire to fit in among the crowd. In his first “conformity study” at Swarthmore College, he assembled groups of eight young men and presented the group with a simple picture. The im … | Continue reading
Perhaps the greatest leaps in all of science history occurred during the 17th century. At the dawn of the century, heliocentrism was just an alternative idea: one that fit the data more poorly than the leading geocentric model that had held sway for over 1000 years. The laws gove … | Continue reading
We haven’t been on this planet very long. That’s why, in general, we really don’t get it. With only about 300,000 years as a distinct species under our belts, homo sapiens can be forgiven for misunderstanding what kind of “thing” the Earth represents. But as we’ve grown in power … | Continue reading
If you were alive in the ‘90s and had access to Nickelodeon, chances are you found Kel Mitchell on your screen. He was everywhere: All That, Cousin Skeeter and his own co-titular show with SNL legend Kenan Thompson. And let’s not forget one of the most iconic movies about burgers … | Continue reading
What is life, really? Despite our scientific advancements, we still don’t really know. Lee Cronin, the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, says there is a significant disconnect between the physics of the universe and the biological processes we observe. Th … | Continue reading
The demands faced by our organizations are constantly changing. As I began work on The Problem with Change, the world was confronting a never-before-in-our-lifetimes trauma turducken of pandemic, social injustice, and political upheaval. Since then, we’ve added to the mix economi … | Continue reading
When galaxy clusters collide, something fascinating happens. The colliding galaxy cluster “El Gordo,” the largest one known in the observable Universe, shows the same evidence of dark matter and normal matter separating when galaxy clusters collide, as seen in other colliding clu … | Continue reading
On the wall opposite Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s birth house, on a street in Valencia where the now Harvard-based behavioral neurologist spent his childhood, stands a marble plaque that reads: “In this house lived the distinguished researcher Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who began his hist … | Continue reading
New research from the group of MIT Professor Brett McGuire has revealed the presence of a previously unknown molecule in space. The team’s open-access paper, “Rotational Spectrum and First Interstellar Detection of 2-Methoxyethanol Using ALMA Observations of NGC 6334I,” appears i … | Continue reading
It’s 2035, and the entire world has access to the internet. This means everyone, finally, is able to further their education, access a huge range of jobs, easily start their own business, and find health information that could literally save lives. Here’s how we’ll do it. The dig … | Continue reading
When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think … | Continue reading
Let’s say something strange happens at work; not necessarily anything illegal, but someone bending the rules for their own liking. Is there a line between ruthless opportunism and being bravely experimental, so to speak? Should we ever intervene? -Emilia, FL When I first started … | Continue reading
We’ve been looking at intelligence all wrong, explains a neuroscientist. Our society has an obsession with quantifying everything, often applying measurements and numerical values where they aren’t necessary. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and professor at USC, argue … | Continue reading
One of the greatest historical mysteries lies in why our hunter-gatherer ancestors made the sudden transition to agriculture. Hunter-gatherer economies always focused on the here and now, without spending a great deal of effort doing anything which was more than meeting their spe … | Continue reading
Max Planck was a quantum physicist of such brilliance that he literally gave the word “quantum” to physics. In the early-20th century, Planck’s work on atomic radiation was the talk of the academic town. And so he was invited to speak on the topic all over Munich. For months he w … | Continue reading
Some of the most impressive objects in our Universe are supermassive black holes. Weighing in at millions, billions, or even tens of billions of solar masses, they’re the heaviest single objects contained within the known Universe. One of the great problems in modern astrophysics … | Continue reading
Search the business section of your favorite bookstore, and you’ll find plenty of titles focused on giving and receiving feedback. The sheer volume indicates that many leaders struggle over how to improve their skills in this area, and something is standing in their way. For inst … | Continue reading
The world is full of things. So many things. It’s mind-boggling the number of things out there that we pay little to no attention to. For instance, even avid readers probably don’t stop to consider those tiny strips of cloth at the top and bottom of their hardcover book spines. W … | Continue reading
As the already dizzying pace of the digital era continues to accelerate, many leaders have had to scramble to react. They often lag behind, having to grasp with known experience and the vastness of unknown knowledge and know-how beyond just the digital components of shifting busi … | Continue reading
If you spend enough time listening to theoretical physicists, it starts to sound like there are two separate worlds that they inhabit. The real, experimental-and-observational world, full of quantities and properties we can measure to high precision with a sufficient setup. The t … | Continue reading
In the series, guests read aloud questions that pop out from a gumball machine [literally!]. The questions, like “who would you be if you stripped away all of your identities?”, or, “who are you still trying to please?” encourages our guests, and viewers, to reflect on their own … | Continue reading
In early August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed some odd activity around his hives. Something was hunting his honeybees. It was a flying insect bigger than a yellowjacket, mostly black with bright yellow legs. The creature would hover at the hive ent … | Continue reading
From The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford. Subscribe to Jason’s Substack here. Chapter 2, Section 1: Surrender of the Gods So far we have told the story of progress as one of humanity climbing out of poverty, isolation, disease and death into abundance, connectedness, … | Continue reading
What if you could heal from trauma in your sleep? For most of the history of medical surgery, it’s been commonly assumed that patients do not dream while under anesthetics. However, recent research suggests not only that people can dream under the influence of anesthesia but also … | Continue reading
Although it’s hard to believe, it was only two years ago, in July of 2022, that the very first science images from JWST were unveiled to the world. Showcasing a diversity of views in a whole new light, JWST’s unprecedented combination of: a large, cold, infrared-optimized observa … | Continue reading
You might be wondering what a definition of happiness is and how changing it could possibly have such a huge impact. You’d be right to do so, given it’s something we rarely discuss. [Previously], I wouldn’t have known how I defined happiness either. My definition was so embedded … | Continue reading
We humans map our lives with models of what we perceive and feel. As travelers exploring known and unknown territories, we rely on them for guidance. What is routine becomes so ingrained that we don’t even pay attention: “I know this land like the palm of my hand.” Novelty become … | Continue reading
As a scientist, the most exciting moments in your professional life arise when you work hard to get a result, and — no matter how hard you try to understand it — it simply doesn’t match up with your expectations. For theorists, that moment comes when you derive a result that conf … | Continue reading
There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce unconsciousness in patients. Exactly how these drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question, but MIT neuroscientists have now answered that question for one commonly used anesthesia drug … | Continue reading
It’s unclear when ancient humans first arrived on the shores of Sulawesi, a 71,898-square-mile Indonesian island west of Borneo. The oldest-known skeleton dates back to between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago, while some stone tools and rock shelters seem to have been assembled more … | Continue reading
Arthur Brooks, author and Harvard professor, has some startling news: In order to be happy, we also need to be unhappy, at least a little bit. To explain this theory, Brooks reflects on the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who proposed that the key to happiness is to simply su … | Continue reading
Being a “good” kid can be good for us — at least when we are a kid. But staying that way isn’t always beneficial for us as adult leaders. And as much as we might like to think of ourselves as different now, our experiences as children and how we behaved back then can stay with us … | Continue reading
In 2008, Usain Bolt won Olympic gold, setting the 100 meter world record. In the 2008 Olympics. Usain Bolt not only won Olympic gold, he outclassed all of his rivals and became the first human to break through the 9.70 second barrier. Credit: PhotoBobil & SillyFolkBoy/Wikimedia C … | Continue reading