You can learn the success secrets of the greatest people who ever lived. The lives of famous people have been recorded in biographies and are ready for you to read and research. The lives of great government leaders, businesspeople, and humanitarians are there. You will read about successes and triumphs. You will also learn how many times champions lose on their way to winning. In reading biographies, you may come to the startling conclusion that you are not very different from those great people. You may conclude, Hey, I can do that. You can make your life significant. Biographies help show the way. You only have to go to the library, bookstores, or surf the Internet.

Nineteenth-century inventors often found themselves cheated and spent much of their lives fighting costly court battles. Consider the fate of poor Elias Howe. In 1846, this young Boston native produced the first workable sewing machine. The trouble was that no one wanted it. Depressed by his failure, Howe traveled to England, where he hoped that the invention might be given a warmer reception. It was not. After two terrible years, the frustrated inventor had to work his passage home on a merchant ship. Arriving penniless in Boston, he discovered that in his absence a man called Isaac Singer had stolen his patent and set up a sewing machine factory. Howe took Singer to court, where two things became clear: Singer was a thief, but he was so rich that he could afford to hire the sharpest lawyers. It was only after a lengthy fight that Howe could get royalties from Singer.

We do not hear with our eyes, but sometimes it almost seems as if we do. An environment-agency official tells a surprising incident about some people who lived in an apartment building close to a busy state highway. The families were made miserable by the noise, and they complained to the city government. City officials went to the state capital again and again to ask that something be done about quieting the highway noise. They were put off repeatedly. At last the city officials had an idea. They planted a single row of trees in front of the apartment house. The trees made hardly any difference in the amount of noise, but they did block the view of the highway. After that, there were very few complaints from the people in the building.

The observation that old windows are often thicker at the bottom than at the top is often offered as supporting evidence for the view that glass flows over a time scale of centuries. However, this assumption is incorrect; once solidified, glass does not flow anymore. The reason for the observation is that in the past, making uniformly flat glass was almost impossible. The technique used to make panes of glass was to spin molten glass so as to create a round, mostly flat plate. This plate was then cut to fit a window. However, the edges of the disk became thicker as the glass spun. When installed in a window frame, the glass would be placed thicker side down for the sake of stability.

Rice paddies are built, not opened up the way a wheat field is. You don't just clear the trees, underbrush, and stones, and then plow. Rice paddies are carved into mountainsides in an elaborate series of terraces, or painstakingly constructed from marshland and river plains. They have to be irrigated, so a complex system of channels must be dug from the nearest water source. The paddy itself, meanwhile, has to have a hard clay floor; otherwise the water will simply seep into the ground. And the paddy has to be carefully engineered so that it will drain properly and also keep the plants submerged at the optimum level.

After five hours of rock climbing, we six finally stood on top, shaking hands. It was a big moment. As I grasped the hands of my companions, one by one, I felt I was being welcomed into a special club: the brotherhood of the rope. Having missed breakfast we turned eagerly to lunch, breaking out peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and cookies. As we sat on the summit, gobbling the food, we surveyed our domain like kings — the lakes, the rolling granite, the meadows and forests, all spread out beneath us. Beautiful spires rose on all sides. This was the wonderland of the High Sierra and we were in the heart of it. We weren't just visitors or mere sightseers. We had struggled and climbed a mountain. We had earned the right to be part of all this.

There are all kinds of reasons that people fail themselves and their children when trying to correct inappropriate behavior. One of them is both serious and obvious to people outside the parental unit. It occurs when one parent interferes with the other during the correction process. It is hardly ever done consciously and it almost always happens because of predictable, inherent differences between partners. And it is essential to stop. Couples who do not present a united front to their children not only risk confusing their children, but they also risk damaging their husband-wife relationships. One parent becomes the good guy, and the other becomes the bad guy to the kids. If Dad says no candy at the grocery store and Mom gives in all the time, look out. They're in for trouble.

Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question, What makes innovators different? In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed three thousand executives to find out. Their conclusions are interesting, but the investigators could have saved themselves a lot of time by simply asking Steve Jobs. According to the Harvard research, the number one skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is associating: the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The more diverse our experience and knowledge, the more connections the brain can make. Fresh inputs trigger new associations; for some, these lead to novel ideas.

When you watch a chase scene in an action movie, your heart races as well — you may be a little bit scared, or excited. Your body and mind may react like the experience is real, as though it is happening to you. That's what happens when you visualize: You ask for the experience and your mind believes that it is real, which creates the attraction for you to receive in your life. This technique is favored by many of the world's great coaches as they encourage athletes to visualize the actual race or contest ahead of time. Every stroke, step, and muscle exertion is vividly imagined. The idea is, when you see it in your mind, your body will surely follow. And, when the big day comes, mind and body are so well trained to act in unison that ultimate performance is virtually assured.

The other day, while riding in an airplane flying at 30,000 feet, I had a sudden realization. I knew nothing about the pilot, beyond the sound of his voice. I couldn't even remember his name because I had not been paying close attention when he made his welcoming announcement. Yet I was there, feeling comfortable and safe. I realized that I was lacking a lot of other important information about the situation I was in. Who were the mechanics that checked the plane before it took off? Who had put in the fuel? Who had performed the routine maintenance? Who were the air traffic controllers that were watching the little spot on their tracking screens, the little spot that contained my life and the lives of my fellow passengers? The awareness of how much trust we put in complete strangers really came home to me.

Our sense of smell is particularly vulnerable to outside influence. A team of scientists at Oxford has shown that a simple word label can profoundly alter what we think our noses are telling us. When an experimental subject is given odorless air to smell but told he is smelling cheddar cheese, his olfactory areas light up in hungry anticipation. But when the same air arrives with a body-odor label, the subject unwittingly shuts down the smell areas of his brain. Although the sensation hasn't changed — it's still just purified air — the mind has completely revised its olfactory response. We unknowingly deceive ourselves. In reality, our olfactory sensations are influenced by their context.

During World War II, a physician named Henry Beecher was stationed on Italy's Anzio beachhead, where he treated 201 wounded soldiers. In recording his treatments, he observed that only three-quarters of the wounded soldiers requested pain medication, although they had suffered serious injuries ranging from penetrating wounds to extensive surgical wounds. Beecher compared these observations to treatments of his civilian patients who had been hurt in all kinds of accidents, and he found that people with civilian injuries requested more medication than the soldiers injured in battle did. Beecher concluded that there was no direct relationship between the severity of the wound and the intensity of pain. He was among the first to propose that the meaning our minds give to an injury greatly determines the level of pain. For soldiers, the wound meant surviving combat and returning home.

A few years ago, the animal researcher Maxine Morris spotted some curious behavior while observing a group of Asian elephants at Washington Park Zoo in Indiana. At feeding time, each elephant was given a big bundle of hay. Morris noticed that a couple of the elephants tended to eat their own hay quickly, approach their slower-eating companions, and then start swinging their trunks from side to side in a seemingly aimless way. To the uninformed, it appeared that these elephants were just passing the time of day. However, Morris's repeated observations suggested that this behavior masked a dishonest intent. Once the trunk-swinging elephants were sufficiently close to another elephant, they would suddenly grab some of the uneaten hay and quickly gobble it up. Elephants are notoriously nearsighted, and so the slow-eating elephants were often completely unaware of the theft.

There are situations in which the differences between experts and the public reflect a genuine conflict of values. For example, experts often measure risks by the number of lives lost, while the public tends to draw finer distinctions between good deaths and bad deaths, or between random accidental fatalities and deaths that occur in the course of voluntary activities such as skiing. These legitimate distinctions are often ignored in statistics that merely count cases. The public may have a richer conception of risks than the experts do. Consequently, the view cannot be maintained that experts' opinions should be accepted without question when they conflict with the opinions of other citizens. When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.

Girls usually agreed that wearing a uniform to school every day reduced their daily stresses. Not having to worry about what to wear meant one less decision to make every morning. Many of them also felt that the uniform enhanced school spirit and solidarity. They could feel like they belong to a community. Moreover, the uniforms didn't eliminate their individuality. If you want to know a thousand and one ways to modify a school uniform, just ask the girls who wear it: ties can be worn loosely or tight, and skirts can be raised or lowered in any of a half-dozen ways. Then there are accessories — a gray region in the dress code, but an entire subcontinent in the world of women's apparel. There are a million options in the domain of hairpins, watches, and bags alone.

Even an electronic car key can fight crime. After a thief broke into a car, the owner, alerted to the break-in by a neighbor, grabbed her car keys and hurried outside. When the burglar saw the owner approaching, he tried to exit the car. But the owner was too fast. She pressed the automatic lock button on the car's remote key system, trapping] the burglar. When the bad guy unlocked the door, the owner locked it again before he could escape. Over and over the burglar tried to unlock the door, and over and over the owner relocked it. The burglar finally put up his hands in surrender and waited for the police to arrive.

The chef always wears a uniform in the kitchen. The uniform protects the chef from the food, and it also protects the food from the chef. In the first case, the long sleeves, long pants, and double-breasted jacket are a barrier against burns, spills, and splatters. Sturdy shoes guard against falling equipment and knives, and they also prevent the chef from slipping on floors made slippery by spilled food and grease. In the second case, the long sleeves, double-breasted jacket, and neckerchief protect the food from a sweating chef. The tall white chef's hat keeps the chef's hair out of his eyes and out of the food, and also, like the stars on a general's hat or the distinctive hat of an admiral, makes it easy to see who is in charge in a crowded kitchen.

Try an interesting experiment. Call a friend and say, I'm mad at you in a tone that conveys that you aren't ― the tone you would use if the next sentence were something like, You didn't tell me about your promotion. Then ask your friend if she thought you were truly angry. The answer will probably be no. Now imagine what would have happened if you had sent that friend an email that read, I'm mad at you. Our voice is a very subtle instrument and can convey every shade and nuance. An executive recruiter said she never uses email to check references. When she's on the phone, a pause or a strained voice in response to a question about work habits can hint at a more complicated answer than the one she's been given.

This graph shows how much waste was produced from 2006 to 2010 by our company. The total amount of waste produced each year was over 10,000 tons between 2006 and 2008, but it fell to below 10,000 tons starting from 2009. The rate of recycling waste increased during the five-year period, reaching ninety-seven percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the amount of recycled waste reached its peak in 2008. On the other hand, the waste that was disposed of in landfills decreased in amount during the years from 2006 to 2010. Especially in 2007, the landfill amount sharply decreased to less than half that of the previous year.

In 1898, a peculiar six-inch wooden object was found in a tomb in Egypt. 'The object' had a body, seven-inch wings that curved downward slightly, a fixed rudder, and a tail. It looked very much like a modern airplane. But as airplanes had not yet been invented in 1898, it was labeled as a model of a bird and just stored away in the basement of the Cairo Museum. In 1969, the object was rediscovered by Dr. Khalil Messiha, an authority on ancient models. According to him and to other researchers, it has characteristics of very advanced aerodynamics. The curved wings can attain great amounts of lift, and a similar design is employed on the Concorde aircraft. Was this just a child's toy? Or was it a scale model of an aircraft the Egyptians planned to build... or built? Even if they did build a full-scale version of the aircraft, no evidence exists of it.

Miles underneath the ice in Antarctica lie liquid lakes. The largest of these is Lake Vostok, which is similar in size to Lake Ontario in Canada, but four times as deep. Lake Vostok was formed along geologic fault lines. It stays liquid because of the pressure of the glaciers above it and the heat from the geologic fault beneath. Lake Vostok is thought to have been sealed off from Earth's atmosphere for half a million years. Samples of ice from near the surface of Lake Vostok, located under a glacier more than 3.2 km thick, contain microbes thought to have come from inside the lake. Scientists are working to create technology that will allow them to remove water samples from the lake and examine them for ancient life in a way that does not introduce contamination from the modern world.

As a counselor, I often use the North Star as a metaphor. I tell clients: You are in a boat that is being tossed around by the winds of the world. The voices of your parents, your teachers, your friends, and the media can blow you east, then west, then back again. To stay on course you must follow your own North Star, your sense of who you truly are. Only by orienting north can you keep from being blown all over the sea. True freedom has more to do with following the North Star than with going whichever way the wind blows. Sometimes it seems like freedom is blowing with the winds of the day, but that kind of freedom is really an illusion. It turns your boat in circles. Freedom is sailing toward your dreams.

It's great, it's amazing, it's so cool.... Can you tell from these whether it's your coworker telling you about her new car, or your teenager son describing the new telephone he wants you to get him? I'm sure you can't. We'll believe your experience is amazing only if you tell us why. We need to know ― what did you see? Hear? Touch? Taste? Smell? How did it make you feel? What did it remind you of? Notice when others are just saying, great, amazing, bad, terrible. Once you've spent some time observing others, you will want to change your own bad habits of using these meaningless words. Now, let's practice: How was your day? Your sandwiches? The movie? Instead of blurting out, It was great, try to answer these questions as vividly as possible. Once you learn to do that, people will start referring to you as a master storyteller.

In 2007, the Ecuadorean government announced that it intended to protect the oilfields located in the Yasuni Rainforest. It's home to one of the world's largest undeveloped oil reserves — close to one billion barrels' worth. Not extracting that oil will prevent the release of an estimated 400 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Taking a stand for the Yasuni oilfield's protection is a bold move, considering that about seventy percent of Ecuador's income is from oil. To accomplish the plan, they asked the international community to pay them half of the income that would result from the extraction, or $350 million a year for a decade. This is a big deal: an innovative idea that other developing countries could employ to protect their own resources and help combat climate change.

Some people work long hours even at very high levels of income. Have they got their priorities right? Most people would agree that, at a low level of income, an increase in income is likely to improve your quality of life, even if it means longer working hours. At this level, even if you have to work longer in your factory, higher income is likely to bring a higher overall quality of life by improving your health through better food, heating, hygiene and healthcare and by reducing the physical demands of household work through more household appliances. However, above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption in relation to leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life.