If you are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility that you have to deal with in your own life or your own home, you are going to have to figure out a way that you can balance out these responsibilities. For example, is there somebody that you can turn to to tell them that you have too much on your plate and you are feeling too overwhelmed by these responsibilities? If you can find somebody and divide up the labor so that you don't feel so overwhelmed by everything that you are doing, all you have to do sometimes is to ask for help and your life will feel that much better. Many times people will surprise you with their willingness to help you out, so never assume that other people don't care about your stress. Let them know honestly how you are feeling and allow yourself some opportunities to avoid responsibility and give yourself a chance to relax.

You can be perfect, but you need to change the way you think about it. Perfection actually is possible if you delete "perfect" and insert "complete." Imagine a basketball player taking a fifteen-foot shot and the ball going through the net, never touching the rim. Someone is likely to exclaim, "That was a perfect shot!" And it was perfect. The scoreboard reflects an increase of two points. Now again imagine that same player a few minutes later taking another fifteen-foot shot. But this time the ball hits one side of the rim, rolls around and stands still for half a second, and it finally falls through the net. An announcer might comment on what an ugly shot that was, and she would be right. But basketball games are not won on such criteria as pretty or ugly. In this instance the ball went through the net and the scoreboard increased by two points. In that sense, the second shot was as perfect as the first.

In this world, being smart or competent isn't enough. People sometimes don't recognize talent when they see it. Their vision is clouded by the first impression we give and that can lose us the job we want, or the relationship we want. The way we present ourselves can speak more eloquently of the skills we bring to the table, if we actively cultivate that presentation. Nobody likes to be crossed off the list before being given the opportunity to show others who they are. Being able to tell your story from the moment you meet other people is a skill that must be actively cultivated, in order to send the message that you're someone to be considered and the right person for the position. For that reason, it's important that we all learn how to say the appropriate things in the right way and to present ourselves in a way that appeals to other people ― tailoring a great first impression.

One cannot take for granted that the findings of any given study will have validity. Consider a situation where an investigator is studying deviant behavior. In particular, she is investigating the extent to which cheating by college students occurs on exams. Reasoning that it is more difficult for people monitoring an exam to keep students under surveillance in large classes than in smaller ones, she hypothesizes that a higher rate of cheating will occur on exams in large classes than in small. To test this hypothesis, she collects data on cheating in both large classes and small ones and then analyzes the data. Her results show that more cheating per student occurs in the larger classes. Thus, the data apparently support the investigator's research hypothesis. A few days later, however, a colleague points out that all the large classes in her study used multiple‐choice exams, whereas all the small classes used short answer and essay exams. The investigator immediately realizes that an extraneous variable (exam format) is interfering with the independent variable (class size) and may be operating as a cause in her data. The apparent support for her research hypothesis may be nothing more than an artifact. Perhaps the true effect is that more cheating occurs on multiple-choice exams than on essay exams, regardless of class size.

Psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and sociologist Kurt Back began to wonder how friendships form. Why do some strangers build lasting friendships, while others struggle to get past basic platitudes? Some experts explained that friendship formation could be traced to infancy, where children acquired the values, beliefs, and attitudes that would bind or separate them later in life. But Festinger, Schachter, and Back pursued a different theory. The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that "friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood." In their view, it wasn't so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and so came to adopt similar attitudes over time.

As entrepreneur Derek Sivers put it, "The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." If you were sitting with seven other people and six group members picked the wrong answer, but the remaining one chose the correct answer, conformity dropped dramatically. "The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its pressure," Asch wrote. Merely knowing that you're not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. Emotional strength can be found even in small numbers. In the words of Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." To feel that you're not alone, you don't need a whole crowd to join you. Research by Sigal Barsade and Hakan Ozcelik shows that in business and government organizations, just having one friend is enough to significantly decrease loneliness.

At the pharmaceutical giant Merck, CEO Kenneth Frazier decided to motivate his executives to take a more active role in leading innovation and change. He asked them to do something radical: generate ideas that would put Merck out of business. For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck's top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats. This "kill the company" exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. When deliberating about innovation opportunities, the leaders weren't inclined to take risks. When they considered how their competitors could put them out of business, they realized that it was a risk not to innovate. The urgency of innovation was apparent.

When you enter a store, what do you see? It is quite likely that you will see many options and choices. It doesn't matter whether you want to buy tea, coffee, jeans, or a phone. In all these situations, we are basically flooded with options from which we can choose. What will happen if we ask someone, whether online or offline, if he or she prefers having more alternatives or less? The majority of people will tell us that they prefer having more alternatives. This finding is interesting because, as science suggests, the more options we have, the harder our decision making process will be. The thing is that when the amount of options exceeds a certain level, our decision making will start to suffer.

What we need in education is not measurement, accountability, or standards. While these can be useful tools for improvement, they should hardly occupy center stage. Our focus should instead be on making sure we are giving our youth an education that is going to arm them to save humanity. We are faced with unprecedented perils, and these perils are multiplying and pushing at our collective gates. We should be bolstering curriculum that helps young people mature into ethical adults who feel a responsibility to the global community. Without this sense of responsibility we have seen that many talented individuals give in to their greed and pride, and this destroys economies, ecosystems, and entire species. While we certainly should not abandon efforts to develop standards in different content areas, and also strengthen the STEM subjects, we need to take seriously our need for an education centered on global responsibility. If we don't, we risk extinction.

Although we don't know the full neurological effects of digital technologies on young children's development, we do know that all screen time is not created equal. For example, reading an e-book, videoconferencing with grandma, or showing your child a picture you just took of them is not the same as the passive, television-watching screen time that concerns many parents and educators. So, rather than focusing on how much children are interacting with screens, parents and educators are turning their focus instead to what children are interacting with and who is talking with them about their experiences. Though parents may be tempted to hand a child a screen and walk away, guiding children's media experiences helps them build important 21st Century skills, such as critical thinking and media literacy.

The whole history of mathematics is one long sequence of taking the best ideas of the moment and finding new extensions, variations, and applications. Our lives today are totally different from the lives of people three hundred years ago, mostly owing to scientific and technological innovations that required the insights of calculus. Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibniz independently discovered calculus in the last half of the seventeenth century. But a study of the history reveals that mathematicians had thought of all the essential elements of calculus before Newton or Leibniz came along. Newton himself acknowledged this flowing reality when he wrote, "If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Newton and Leibniz came up with their brilliant insight at essentially the same time because it was not a huge leap from what was already known. All creative people, even ones who are considered geniuses, start as nongeniuses and take baby steps from there.

People often assume erroneously that if a Hadza adult of Tanzania does not know how to solve an algebraic equation, then he must be less intelligent than we are. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that people from some cultures are fast learners and people from others are slow learners. The study of comparative cultures has taught us that people in different cultures learn different cultural content (attitudes, values, ideas, and behavioral patterns) and that they accomplish this with similar efficiency. The traditional Hadza hunter has not learned algebra because such knowledge would not particularly enhance his adaptation to life in the East African grasslands. However, he would know how to track a wounded bush buck that he has not seen for three days and where to find groundwater.

You are in a train, standing at a station next to another train. Suddenly you seem to start moving. But then you realize that you aren't actually moving at all. It is the second train that is moving in the opposite direction. The illusion of relative movement works the other way, too. You think the other train has moved, only to discover that it is your own train that is moving. It can be hard to tell the difference between apparent movement and real movement. It's easy if your train starts with a jolt, of course, but not if your train moves very smoothly. When your train overtakes a slightly slower train, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking your train is still and the other train is moving slowly backwards.

You're probably already starting to see the tremendous value of network analysis for businesspeople. In the business world, information is money: a tip about anything from a cheap supplier to a competitor's marketing campaign to an under-the-table merger discussion can inform strategic decisions that might yield millions of dollars in profits. You might catch it on TV or in the newspaper, but that's information everyone knows. The most profitable information likely comes through network connections that provide "inside" information. And it isn't just information that travels through network connections ― it's influence as well. If you have a connection at another company, you can possibly ask your connection to push that company to do business with yours, to avoid a competitor, or to hold off on the launch of a product. So clearly, any businessperson wants to increase their personal network.