1. The brain's wiring for persistence gets in the way of cognitive disengagement on a completely unconscious level. Bluma Zeigarnik's experiment, conducted in 1927, was the first to demonstrate how the brain deals with unfinished business-specifically a goal that was consciously selected and then unselected - but its results have been replicated many times since. The experimenters told people to work on jigsaw puzzles and to keep at it until they finished. But some of the participants weren't permitted to finish, and even though they were put to work at other tasks —to distract them from the initial goal and to substitute another in its place -when these participants were tested, they had thought about the unfinished task with twice as much frequency as the other tasks, even though they were told not to think about it. This explains why so many people get stuck in a loop when they quit a goal or situation; it's as though the unconscious is nudging them to go back and finish what they started.

2. We often realize the presence of something only when it breaks down. We take our computer, or printer, or coffeemaker for granted —until it stops working. In a certain sense, it is only when these things fail that they start to exist for us and come into full view; they become visible after a measure of nothingness has crept into them. As long as you can use your car unproblematically la move from one place to another, you don't pay much attention to the car itself; gradually, as it keeps working as it should, you see less and less of it. But when it breaks down in the middle of the road, the car becomes suddenly, massively present. You cannot not notice it now: here it is, an imposing pile of steel and stuff, noticeably not moving. Not unlike Heidegger's hammer, except on a grander and more annoying scale. Failure unsettles-it dusts things off, exposing them for what they are.

3. Over time, creative masters learn to find, evaluate, and explore more combinations than other people. They get better at guessing which combinations will be more interesting, so their odds improve. They also learn there are reusable patterns that can be used to develop new ideas. For example, musicians throughout history have reused melodies, chord progressions, and even entire song structures. The national anthem of the United States was based on the tune of an old British drinking song. The Disney film The Lion King is a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Shakespeare was likely influenced by the early Greek tragedies. Study any creative field, from comedy to cooking to writing, and you'll discover patterns of reuse and recombination everywhere. It's an illusion that when an artist makes a painting or an author writes a novel, it appeared magically into her hands from out of nowhere. Everything comes from somewhere, no matter how amazing or wonderful the thing is. The Mona Lisa was not the first portrait any more than the Destiny's Child song "Survivor" was the first four-minute R&B hit.

4. Delayed gratification has been a familiar theme in the homes of immigrants like Jae and Dae Kim, who were born in South Korea and raised two daughters in North Carolina. The sisters, Soo and Jane, became a surgeon and a lawyer, respectively, as well as the coauthors of Top of the Class, a book about Asian parents' techniques for fostering achievement. They tell how their parents started teaching them the alphabet before their second birthday, and how their mother was never one to reward a child whining for candy at the supermarket. When they reached the checkout counter, before the girls had a chance to beg, Mrs. Kim would preempt them by announcing that if they each read a book the following week, she would buy them a candy bar on the next shopping trip. Later, when Soo went off to college and asked her parents for a cheap used car to get around, they refused but offered to buy her a brand-new car if she was admitted to medical school. Thus, these parents did provide good things for their daughters -but each treat was given out as a reward for some valued achievement.

5. Our society is not uniform. Among us even the best educated cannot participate in our whole civilization. Among primitive tribes the differences in occupations, interests, and knowledge are comparatively slight. Every individual is to a great extent familiar with all the thoughts, emotions, and activities of the community. The uniformity of behavior is similar to that expected among ourselves of a member of a social "set." A person who does not conform to the habits of thought and actions of his "set" loses standing and must leave. In our modern civilization he is likely to find another congenial "set" to the habits of which he can conform. In primitive society such sets are absent. With us the presence of many groups of different standards of interest and behavior is a stimulus for critical self-examination, for conflicts of group interests and other forms of intimate contact are ever present. Among primitive people this stimulus does not occur within the tribal unit. For these reasons individual independence is attained with much greater difficulty and tribal standards have much greater force.

6. The emergence of the romantic movement in music is in many ways a catalog of rule-breaking. Instead of conforming closely to key signatures as earlier composers had done, upstarts like Schubert chose to shift keys in ways that deliberately defied expectations. Schumann left chords unresolved that Haydn or Mozart would have felt compelled to complete. Chopin composed dense moments of chromatic runs and challenged rhythmic expectations with his unusual accented passages and bending of tempos. The move from one musical era to another, from Medieval to Baroque to Classical to Romantic to Impressionist to Expressionist and beyond, is one long story of smashing the rules. It almost goes without saying that historical context plays an important role in allowing us to define something as new. Creativity is not an absolute but a relative activity. We are creative within our culture and frame of reference.

7. The aging of a population influences how aging itself is viewd. As groups of people born at different times (cohorts) move through the stages of aging, they are affected by, but also have an impact on, the experience of being older. The baby boomers will experience aging in a very different way than the current generation of older people. Negative stereotypes are being challenged, age discrimination is illegal, and there is growing recognition of the expanding mature market for goods and services. All of these changes were set into motion by earlier groups of people as they grew older, but are picking up speed as the very large baby boom cohorts enter later life (the youngest are 50 in 2014). When these social changes combine with the political activism that has historically characterized the baby boomers, and with their potential power in the marketplace and in the polling booths, the experiences and definitions of aging are expected to change.

8. We encounter a potentially uncomfortable cost for executives and leadership. Organizations need to invest in the personal lives of their employees and a fuller notion of well-being if they want to build capabilities of resilience. Employees who are better connected and supported through a network of family, friends, and other relationships will do better in crisis situations. As Michael Ungar concludes after decades of research on resilient people, "success is dependent on the support [individuals] receive from the people around them. Resourced individuals do much better than individuals without resources, regardless of personal qualities." The more overall "margin" people have in their lives, the more they will be able to contribute to the organization during disaster and crisis situations. This means that leadership must consciously determine and invest in improving the overall well-being of employees before, during, and after a crisis. This investment, like all other investments in resilience, is not free.

9. In human social interactions, rationality is not in the driver's seat. Imagine an economic game, called the Ultimatum Game, where you are given $100 to split between yourself and another person. You have to give some of it away but get to decide the actual amount. The catch is that the other person can refuse the whole transaction. If he or she says no, neither of you gets any money. There is only one rational strategy, from a purely cold-cognition perspective: given $100 to split, you should offer $0.01, keeping $99.99 for yourself, and the other person should accept, since both of you end up better off financially than before. In reality, no one makes such low offers (would you?), and people on the receiving end will resentfully reject any deal that seems extremely unfair, the usual rejection threshold hovering around 20 to 30 percent. Neuroimaging studies of subjects playing the Ultimatum Game show that powerful emotion drives the rejection of unfair offers.

10. Mountain climbers perhaps provide the most interesting setting for understanding the benefits and costs of hierarchy. Years ago, I studied the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy, in which accomplished mountaineers Rob Hall and Scott Fisher died while leading expeditions on the world's tallest mountain. Three of their clients died as well. In that case, the status hierarchy within the teams appeared to diminish people's willingness to speak up and voice their concerns. One climber described a "clear guide-client protocol." As a client, he explained that, "We had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment." Even one of the guides felt pressured not to speak up because of the status hierarchy. Neil Beidleman reflected, "I was definitely considered the third guide... so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn't always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it." The lack of open dialogue and dissent contributed to faulty decision making. Many climbers found themselves continuing toward the summit long after they should have turned around. They ignored their own rules, yet no one appeared to question the decision to do so.

11. Bearing in mind the lessons of the subjectivist tradition should lead us to recognize that when seemingly small changes in the situation have large effects on behavior, it may be because those small changes significantly changed the meaning of the situation for the actor. Consider, for example, the finding that European countries requiring drivers to explicitly "opt out" of a program allowing the harvesting of their organs if they are the victim of a fatal accident recruit five to ten times as many potential donors as countries that require them to explicitly "opt in" to such a program. Superficial consideration might lead one to attribute this difference to laziness on the part of potential donors; but further analysis would lead one to recognize that the "opt-in" procedure conveys the message that participation in the program is a matter of altruism or of indifference as to the treatment of one's corpse, whereas the "opt-out" procedure conveys the message that participation is normative and non-participation reflects idiosyncratic rejection of a norm.

12. Science is never finished, so the relevant policy question is always whether the available evidence is persuasive, and whether the established facts outweigh the residual uncertainties. This is a judgment call. Chris Bernabo, who worked at the White House Council on Environmental Quality at the time and served as research director for the Interagency Task Force on Acid Precipitation, suggests that because so much more was at stake for Canada —70 percent of their economy at the time came from forests and fish or tourism related to them—it was only natural that they would interpret the evidence as more dire than their U.S. counterparts would. Pollution went across the border in both directions, but by far the larger share came from the United States, which would therefore bear most of the burden of cleanup. As Bernabo puts it, for any problem, the degree of scientific certainty demanded is proportional to the cost of doing something about it. So the United States was more resistant to accepting the evidence and demanded a high level of certainty.