What would happen if you went to the soil and said, Give me some fruit. Give me some plants? The soil would probably respond, Excuse me, sir, but you're a little confused. You must be new here. That's not the way the game is played. Then it would explain that you should plant the seed. You take care of it. You water it and cultivate the soil. You fertilize it. You protect it and nurture it. Then, if you do it well, you will get your plant or your fruit sometime later. You could ask from the soil forever, but it wouldn't change things. You have to keep giving, keep nurturing, for the soil to bear fruit ― and life is exactly the same way.

When we furnish our rooms or fill our closets, we say I want that, but we also tell manufacturers make more of that ― setting in motion a whole process of extraction, production, distribution, marketing, and sales. In the process, we tell each other that this level of consumption is normal, natural, and good. Each of our decisions, therefore, is a case study in ethics, a determination about the nature of the good life. As we peruse the stuff available to us, we're making judgements about which goods are good for us and why. We don't think we're engaged in ethical reflection, but we are deciding what we value, and how we will embody our values in the material world. Our rooms and our belongings send messages about identity and community, but they also express our ethical sensibilities, whether we like it or not.

After witnessing an event, we are sometimes exposed to new information that can actually change our memory. What is known as the post-event information effect often results from our dialogues with other people. For example, an eyewitness to some event frequently discusses with others what they saw. In the aftermath of some event, the eyewitness and others may speculate as to exactly what happened, the sequence in which it occurred, and the degree to which various participants were involved. Rather than facilitating reproductive memory ― the accurate reproduction of some past event, an eyewitness' dialogues with other people create reconstructive memory ― a reconstruction of the past which may be quite inaccurate because it responds more to considerations of plausibility than fact. Therefore, people can reconstruct inaccurate memories after witnessing some event as a result of discussing that event with other people.

John Boyle O'Reilly, poet, was one day walking along Boylston street in Boston. A stranger who was approaching him from behind mistook him for a friend whom he had not seen for a long time. He slapped O'Reilly on the shoulder and greeted him heartily. Many men in O'Reilly's place would have been annoyed and shown it, but not so the poet. Turning about, he stretched out his hand. I am not Jack, said he, but I am glad to shake hands with any man who is as glad to see an old friend as you seem to be. This handsome speech was a great relief to the stranger, who had been much embarrassed upon seeing an unknown face turned toward him.

The 'Merton Rule' was devised in 2003 by Adrian Hewitt, a local planning officer in Merton, southwest London. The rule, which Hewitt created with a couple of colleagues and persuaded the borough council to pass, was that any development beyond a small scale would have to include the capacity to generate ten percent of that building's energy requirements, or the developers would be denied permission to build. The rule sounded sensible and quickly caught on, with over a hundred other local councils following it within a few years. In London, the mayor at the time, Ken Livingstone, introduced 'Merton Plus,' which raised the bar to twenty percent. The national government then introduced the rule more widely. Adrian Hewitt became a celebrity in the small world of local council planning, and Merton council started winning awards for its environmental leadership.

Sometimes athletes need to be allowed to practice their skills on their own before they receive feedback. That way they can determine what is working and what isn't and can become more mindful of their strengths and weaknesses. If you attempt to provide assistance when athletes would prefer to practice on their own, you may be wasting a lot of time and breath. When athletes realize that their best efforts are producing unsatisfactory outcomes, they are usually more motivated to hear what you have to say. In other words, athletes are responsive to assistance when they fail to achieve the outcome they were hoping for. A coach's challenge, then, is to remain patient until these and other types of teachable moments arise. The reward for such patience is athletes who are motivated to hear what you have to say and eager to incorporate your suggestions.

The above graph shows six Olympians who won the most medals in the Summer Olympic Games. Michael Phelps of the USA is now the most decorated Olympian of all time with a total of 20 medals including 16 gold medals. Larisa Latynina of the USSR takes up the second place winning just two medals fewer than Phelps, but in terms of gold medals she is seven medals behind him. After Latynina comes Nikolay Andrianov of the USSR with a total of 15 medals, two golds and one bronze fewer than Latynina. Boris Shakhlin of the USSR, Edoardo Mangiarotti of Italy and Takashi Ono of Japan won the same number of medals, 13 medals each. In terms of gold medals, however, Shakhlin won more than Mangiarotti or Ono, and he even won the same amount of gold medals as Andrianov, who won seven gold medals.

The MacDowell Colony is an artists' colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, USA. The colony is designed to facilitate a balance between social interaction and focus on work. Private studios are available to artists 24 hours a day, along with the dining and recreation rooms at Colony Hall. To ensure all colonists' autonomy and privacy, no one may visit a studio without invitation. Breakfast and dinner are served in the dining room; lunch is delivered to each studio. After dinner, occasional presentations are a traditional, elective part of the stimulating and supportive environment. Friendships established among artists in residence often lead to collaborations and connections beyond the colony. The maximum length of residence is two months; the average stay is five to six weeks.

When we are children, our bodies grow automatically. A year goes by, and we become taller, stronger, more capable of doing new things and facing new challenges. I think many people carry into adulthood a subconscious belief that mental, spiritual, and emotional growth follows a similar pattern. Time goes by, and we simply get better. We're like Charlie Brown in Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, who once said, I think I've discovered the secret of life ― you just hang around until you get used to it. The problem is that we don't improve by simply living. We have to be intentional about it. Musician Bruce Springsteen commented, A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be. No one improves by accident. Personal growth doesn't just happen on its own.

Table manners help us to see that politeness is not, after all, a disadvantage. Although the ill-mannered person can grab more of the food, he will receive less of the affection; and fellowship is the real meaning of the meal. Next time, he will not be invited. Politeness makes you a part of things and so gives you an enduring edge over those who never acquired it. And this gives us a clue to the real nature of rudeness: to be rude is not just to be selfish, in the way that children (until taught otherwise) and animals are instinctively selfish; it is to be alone. Even in the friendliest gathering, the rude person will reveal, by some word or gesture, that he is not really part of it. Of course he is there, a living organism, with wants and needs. But he does not belong in the conversation.

Can you recall what you bought for your dinner on the same day last month? Probably not. How about this then: herdsmen of the Swazi tribe of East Africa are able to remember in great detail each cow or bull bought a year ago, including who sold the animal, whether it was a bull, a cow, or a calf, its age and appearance, and what it was bartered for. Impressive, huh? Cattle have tremendous social and economic importance in the Swazi tribe. When the psychologist Barlett tested these same men on other kinds of detail, their memory wasn't better than the average person's. The conclusion we can draw from this is that we tend to to remember what matters most to us.

Aristotle learned a lesson in wisdom in fourth-century B.C. Athens, watching the carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and boat pilots. Their work was not governed by systematically applying rules or following rigid procedures. The materials they worked with were too irregular, and each task posed new problems. Aristotle thought the choices craftsmen made in acting on the material world provided clues to the kind of know-how citizens needed to make moral choices in the social world. Aristotle was particularly fascinated with how the masons on the Isle of Lesbos used rulers. A normal, straight-edged ruler was of little use to the masons who were carving round columns from slabs of stone and needed to measure the circumference of the columns. Unless you bent the ruler. Which is exactly what the masons did. They fashioned a flexible ruler out of lead, a forerunner of today's tape measure. For Aristotle, knowing how to bend the rule to fit the circumstance was exactly what practical wisdom was all about.

In one experiment researchers had people sit at computers and review two online articles describing opposing theories of learning. One article laid out an argument that knowledge is objective; the other made the case that knowledge is relative. Each article was set up in the same way, with similar headings, and each had links to the other article, allowing a reader to jump quickly between the two to compare the theories. The researchers hypothesized that people who used the links would gain a richer understanding of the two theories and their differences than would people who read the pages sequentially, completing one before going on to the other. They were wrong. The test subjects who read the pages linearly actually scored considerably higher on a subsequent comprehension test than those who clicked back and forth between the pages. Using the links got in the way of learning, the researchers concluded.

For a hunter-gatherer ancestor, it would have been useful to make plans and be able to follow through with them. It might be very advantageous to carefully and deliberately develop skills in tool-making, a development whose pay-off might be years away, rather than just try to use whatever can be grabbed when a tool is needed. However, much of hunter-gatherer life is unplannable because of events. It would really not be a good response, observing a passing herd of wildebeest, to say, Actually, Wednesday is my honey-gathering day. Life for a hunter-gatherer would be a series of urgent improvisations on the stimuli occurring right now, be they passing prey, the lack of passing prey, attacks by others, changes in the make-up of the group, or countless other possibilities. People would do well who could abandon plans at the moment's notice and quickly mobilize an energetic, spontaneous, physical response to whatever happened to turn up.

When scientists created a hunk of mass called the international prototype kilogram(IPK), and distributed about 40 of these prototype kilograms to other countries, they realized contaminants could coat the kilogram's surface. To try to counteract this effect, they made the masses into cylinders, which have less surface area to acquire dust and debris. Nevertheless, the fundamental unit of mass has gained tens of micrograms of mass from surface contamination. A skilled technician will rub the cylinders with alcohol, but because every country cleans their kilograms differently and at different times, each kilogram in the world is off by a different, unknown amount. As a result, each country that has one of these standard masses has a slightly different definition of the kilogram, which could throw off science experiments that require very precise weight measurements or international trade in items that are highly restricted by weight.

Wise leaders don't just encourage followers to reveal bad news. They dig for evidence that clashes with their presumptions. Veteran project manager Paul Snare tells how, in a big diaper plant in Michigan, supervisors believed their best mechanic wasn't documenting his work because he wanted to maintain an information edge over coworkers. They also believed he was strongly pro-union and resisted providing information that could help supervisors run the plant during a strike. These assumptions were dashed when a foreman asked the mechanic why he wasn't writing things down. His answer was simple: He felt he had lousy penmanship and was ashamed to have his writing on display. Snare concludes, Walk around, look, ask questions. Asking questions is the best source of information, yet it is the least used.

I look for lip compression or disappearing lips during interviews or when someone is making a declarative statement. This is such a reliable cue that it will show up precisely at the moment a difficult question is asked. If you see it, that doesn't necessarily mean the person is lying. Instead, it indicates that a very specific question served as a negative stimulus and really bothered the person. For example, if I ask someone, Are you hiding something from me? and he compresses his lips as I ask the question, he is hiding something. This is especially accurate if it is the only time he has concealed or compressed his lips during our discussion. It is a signal that I need to push further in questioning this person.

In one experiment, 49 college students were asked to sit at a cluttered cubicle, a tidy cubicle, or one that was in-between. After sitting at the desk, the volunteers were asked to rate on a scale of one to nine how well a series of statements fit them: It upsets me to go into complicated situations, I would like to simplify my life as much as I can, I would like to keep things simple, and I am bothered by complicated things. Next the volunteers were given a test in which they needed to sort 33 products into groups — the volunteers had to come up with an organizing principle themselves. When the results were in, it was clear that people sitting at messy desks came up with much simpler organizing principles. They were also the ones who scored high on questions like, I would like to simplify my life as much as I can.

Location of events is key to newsworthiness. The nearer something happens to your readers, the more they should care about it. For example, the news may be that a school in your state has adopted a new attendance policy that allows seniors to call themselves in sick at the attendance office. That's newsworthy. It's interesting. Right? Now imagine that same event happened, not just in your state, but in your own school. Which story is more newsworthy? Which would more readers care to read? But again, that's not to say that news that happens only in your own backyard should make it to print. No, what good journalists need to do is localize news events. Even if they happen miles away, most (if not all) stories can be made more proximal. You just have to ask the right questions, questions that, inevitably, your readers should ask. Let's say the story is that a high school golfer in a state other than your own has been kicked off the team for using illegal clubs. Just ask the right questions. Could this happen at your own school? Why? Why not? What are the rules governing club use in golf? What are the rules to prevent cheating in other sports? Do some students get around those rules? How? See what I mean? Even events that don't happen next door have meaning. It's up to you to provide that closeness, that proximity, to your readers.

Recently, Sylvia Sebring had a series of dreams in which she saw a light gray mare standing in a corral. The horse had a severe limp, and, what was most unsettling, the mare was telepathically asking her for help. Witnessing the plight of an injured horse was certainly not an unusual experience for Sylvia Sebring. She is a vet and deals daily with suffering animals. But to dream repeatedly of an injured horse that was unknown to her was a unique occurrence for her. What did the horse want her to do? One day a local newspaper carried a story about a rescued horse that had been abandoned to die by drug smugglers in the desert. A US Customs Service aircraft had sighted the mare lying nearly dead. The horse had lain in the terrible heat of the desert with no water for at least a week. The newspaper story described the horse as a white Arabian mare, and stated that she had a twelve-inch cut on one of her legs. Ms. Sebring felt an eerie shock of recognition as she read about the mare found in the desert. The horse in the desert seemed to perfectly fit the horse in her dreams. Could it be that the horse had been sending her desperate messages in her dreams that she needed to come and rescue it? Prompted to do some investigation regarding the condition and present location of the rescued horse, Ms. Sebring learned that the animal was due to be auctioned at the Marana Stockyards soon. When Sylvia Sebring visited the corral at the Marana Stockyards and saw the Arabian mare, she knew immediately that the horse was the same light gray mare that she had seen in her dreams. Ms. Sebring knew that she had received the horse's cry for help, and she was there to answer that desperate entreaty. At last, the outcry from an abandoned and injured horse had been answered. She was now the proud owner of the Arabian mare and called her Dream Walker.