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.

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.

Many parents do not understand why their teenagers occasionally behave in an irrational or dangerous way. At times, it seems like teens don't think things through or fully consider the consequences of their actions. Adolescents differ from adults in the way they behave, solve problems, and make decisions. There is a biological explanation for this difference. Studies have shown that brains continue to mature and develop throughout adolescence and well into early adulthood. Scientists have identified a specific region of the brain that is responsible for immediate reactions including fear and aggressive behavior. This region develops early. However, the frontal cortex, the area of the brain that controls reasoning and helps us think before we act, develops later. This part of the brain is still changing and maturing well into adulthood.

Online environments vary widely in how easily you can save whatever happens there, what I call its recordability and preservability. Even though the design, activities, and membership of social media might change over time, the content of what people posted usually remains intact. Email, video, audio, and text messages can be saved. When perfect preservation is possible, time has been suspended. Whenever you want, you can go back to reexamine those events from the past. In other situations, permanency slips between our fingers, even challenging our reality testing about whether something existed at all, as when an email that we seem to remember receiving mysteriously disappears from our inbox. The slightest accidental tap of the finger can send an otherwise everlasting document into nothingness.

Verbal and nonverbal signs are not only relevant but also significant to intercultural communication. The breakdown of them helps to identify aspects of conversations. Here is an excellent example. Newly hired Indian and Pakistani assistants in a staff cafeteria at Heathrow Airport were often perceived as rude or uncooperative by their supervisors and the airport staff, while the Indian and Pakistani women complained of discrimination. Observation revealed that intonation patterns were the primary cause. When the staff ordered meat, the cafeteria assistant was supposed to ask them whether they would like to have some gravy. Instead of saying gravy? with a rising intonation, the Asian assistants would say gravy with a falling intonation, which is their normal way of asking a question. However, this may appear rude to native speakers of English: gravy with falling intonation came across as a statement, suggesting This is gravy. Take it or leave it.

Science can only tell us how the world appears to us, not how it is independent of our observation of it, and therefore right now will always elude science. When you look into space, you are looking into an ancient past. Some of the stars are already long dead yet we still see them because of their traveling light. Let's say that we are on one of those stars situated roughly sixty million light-years away. If we had a really awesome telescope pointed at the earth, we would see the dinosaurs walking around. The end of the universe is probably so old that if we had that telescope, we might be able to see the beginning. Besides faraway things, even the immediate objects around us are all afterimages of the past because there is still a time lag for the reflection of light to reach our eyes. Every sensation our body feels has to wait for the information to be carried to the brain.

For many centuries European science, and knowledge in general, was recorded in Latin ― a language that no one spoke any longer and that had to be learned in schools. Very few individuals, probably less than one percent, had the means to study Latin enough to read books in that language and therefore to participate in the intellectual discourse of the times. Moreover, few people had access to books, which were handwritten, scarce, and expensive. The great explosion of scientific creativity in Europe was certainly helped by the sudden spread of information brought about by Gutenberg's use of movable type in printing and by the legitimation of everyday languages, which rapidly replaced Latin as the medium of discourse. In sixteenth-century Europe it became much easier to make a creative contribution not necessarily because more creative individuals were born then than in previous centuries or because social supports became more favorable, but because information became more widely accessible.

Calling your pants blue jeans almost seems redundant because practically all denim is blue. While jeans are probably the most versatile pants in your wardrobe, blue actually isn't a particularly neutral color. Ever wonder why it's the most commonly used hue? Blue was the chosen color for denim because of the chemical properties of blue dye. Most dyes will permeate fabric in hot temperatures, making the color stick. The natural indigo dye used in the first jeans, on the other hand, would stick only to the outside of the threads. When the indigo-dyed denim is washed, tiny amounts of that dye get washed away, and the thread comes with them. The more denim was washed, the softer it would get, eventually achieving that worn-in, made-just-for-me feeling you probably get with your favorite jeans. That softness made jeans the trousers of choice for laborers.

Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs. For example, concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise. In Western culture, most music is based on an octave divided into twelve equally spaced pitches: the equal-tempered scale codified by Johann Sebastian Bach in the 17th century. All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they can't explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it's more likely to sound like noise. A brain that's been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales doesn't have a concept for that music.

Framing matters in many domains. When credit cards started to become popular forms of payment in the 1970s, some retail merchants wanted to charge different prices to their cash and credit card customers. To prevent this, credit card companies adopted rules that forbade their retailers from charging different prices to cash and credit customers. However, when a bill was introduced in Congress to outlaw such rules, the credit card lobby turned its attention to language. Its preference was that if a company charged different prices to cash and credit customers, the credit price should be considered the normal (default) price and the cash price a discount ― rather than the alternative of making the cash price the usual price and charging a surcharge to credit card customers. The credit card companies had a good intuitive understanding of what psychologists would come to call framing. The idea is that choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are stated.

Tap your finger on the surface of a wooden table or desk, and observe the loudness of the sound you hear. Then, place your ear flat on top of the table or desk. With your finger about one foot away from your ear, tap the table top and observe the loudness of the sound you hear again. The volume of the sound you hear with your ear on the desk is much louder than with it off the desk. Sound waves are capable of traveling through many solid materials as well as through air. Solids, like wood for example, transfer the sound waves much better than air typically does because the molecules in a solid substance are much closer and more tightly packed together than they are in air. This allows the solids to carry the waves more easily and efficiently, resulting in a louder sound. The density of the air itself also plays a determining factor in the loudness of sound waves passing through it.

At their heart, games differ from other media in one fundamental way: they offer players the chance to influence outcomes through their own efforts. With rare exception, this is not true of film, novels, or television. Readers and viewers of these other media follow along, reacting to the story and its twists and turns, without having a direct personal impact on the events they witness. In games, players have the unique ability to control what unfolds. As Sid Meier, a game designer, once said, A good game is a series of interesting choices.

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.

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.