It is easy to judge people based on their actions. We are often taught to put more value in actions than words, and for good reason. The actions of others often speak volumes louder than their words. However, when someone exhibits some difficult behavior, you might want to reserve judgement for later. People are not always defined by their behavior. It is common to think, "He is so bossy," or "She is so mean," after observing less-than-desirable behavior in someone. But you should never make such assumptions right away. You should give someone a second chance before you label them and shut them out forever. You may find a great co-worker or best friend in someone, so don't eliminate a person from your life based on a brief observation.

Study the lives of the great people who have made an impact on the world, and you will find that in virtually every case, they spent a considerable amount of time alone thinking. Every political leader who had an impact on history practiced the discipline of being alone to think and plan. Great artists spend countless hours in their studios or with their instruments not just doing, but exploring their ideas and experiences. Time alone allows people to sort through their experiences, put them into perspective, and plan for the future. I strongly encourage you to find a place to think and to discipline yourself to pause and use it because it has the potential to change your life. It can help you to figure out what's really important and what isn't.

In perceiving changes, we tend to regard the most recent ones as the most revolutionary. This is often inconsistent with the facts. Recent progress in telecommunications technologies is not more revolutionary than what happened in the late nineteenth century in relative terms. Moreover, in terms of the consequent economic and social changes, the Internet revolution has not been as important as the washing machine and other household appliances. These things, by vastly reducing the amount of work needed for household chores, allowed women to enter the labor market and virtually got rid of professions like domestic service. We should not "put the telescope backward"　when we look into the past and underestimate the old and overestimate the new. This leads us to make all sorts of wrong decisions about national economic policy, corporate policies, and our own careers.

From the beginning of human history, people have asked questions about the world and their place within it. For early societies, the answers to the most basic questions were found in religion. Some people, however, found the traditional religious explanations inadequate, and they began to search for answers based on reason. This shift marked the birth of philosophy, and the first of the great thinkers that we know of was Thales of Miletus. He used reason to inquire into the nature of the universe, and encouraged others to do likewise. He passed on to his followers not only his answers but also the process of thinking rationally, together with an idea of what kind of explanations could be considered satisfactory.

It's hard enough to stick with goals you want to accomplish, but sometimes we make goals we're not even thrilled about in the first place. We set resolutions based on what we're supposed to do, or what others think we're supposed to do, rather than what really matters to us. This makes it nearly impossible to stick to the goal. For example, reading more is a good habit, but if you're only doing it because you feel like that's what you're supposed to do, not because you actually want to learn more, you're going to have a hard time reaching the goal. Instead, make goals based on your own values. Now, this isn't to say you should read less. The idea is to first consider what matters to you, then figure out what you need to do to get there.

Houston Airport executives faced plenty of complaints regarding baggage claim time, so they increased the number of baggage handlers. Although it reduced the average wait time to eight minutes, complaints didn't stop. It took about a minute to get from the arrival gate to baggage claim, so the passengers spent seven more minutes waiting for their bags. The solution was to move the arrival gates away from the baggage claim so it took passengers about seven minutes to walk there. It resulted in complaints reducing to almost zero. Research shows occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. People usually exaggerate about the time they waited, and what they find most bothersome is time spent unoccupied. Thus, occupying the passengers' time by making them walk longer gave them the idea they didn't have to wait as long.

Having extremely vivid memories of past emotional experiences and only weak memories of past everyday events means we maintain a biased perception of the past. We tend to view the past as a concentrated time line of emotionally exciting events. We remember the arousing aspects of an episode and forget the boring bits. A summer vacation will be recalled for its highlights, and the less exciting parts will fade away with time, eventually to be forgotten forever. As a result, when we estimate how our next summer vacation will make us feel, we overestimate the positive. It seems as though an imprecise picture of the past is one reason for our inaccurate forecasts of the future.

Studying history can make you more knowledgeable or interesting to talk to or can lead to all sorts of brilliant vocations, explorations, and careers. But even more importantly, studying history helps us ask and answer humanity's Big Questions. If you want to know why something is happening in the present, you might ask a sociologist or an economist. But if you want to know deep background, you ask historians. That's because they are the people who know and understand the past and can explain its complex interrelationships with the present.

Without a doubt, dinosaurs are a popular topic for kids across the planet. Something about these extinct creatures from long ago seems to hold almost everyone's attention, young or old, boy or girl. Though we don't know a lot about dinosaurs, what we do know is fascinating to children of all ages. But why?. "I think the reason kids like dinosaurs so much is that dinosaurs were big, were different from anything alive today, and are extinct. So they are imagination engines," explains Jack Horner, a technical advisor for the Jurassic Park films. Teachers all over the country would agree. Dinosaurs are studied in classrooms each year, not only for the science behind the topic, but also because of the creative thinking it seems to foster in students. "The best part about this is what happens with their writing," Jennifer Zimmerman, a primary school teacher in Washington, D.C. says. "I think it's the mystery of dinosaurs―the fact that there are still so many things we don't know―that inspires them to use that topic in their journals." Children also feel powerful when asked to draw a dinosaur. Since no one knows what colors dinosaurs actually were, a child can use what information he has―and his imagination―to draw a dinosaur as he sees it.

Parents may often claim that they spend a lot of time with their children. Actually, what they mean is not with but in proximity of their children. That is, they may be in the same room as their child but watching TV, reading, on the phone, reviewing emails, or conversing with other guests. What is needed is active engagement with children. This implies reading together, playing sports and games together, solving puzzles together, cooking and eating together, discussing things together, joking together, shopping together, building blocks together, and washing dishes together. In other words, it is not simply being in a child's company while simultaneously leaving the child alone but it means being an active participant and partner in activities with the child.

Sometimes, we are fascinated when our assumptions are turned inside out and around. The artist Pablo Picasso, for example, used Cubism as a way to help us see the world differently. In his famous work Three Musicians, he used abstract forms to shape the players in such an unexpected way that when you first see this artwork, you assume that nothing makes sense. Yet when you look at the painting a second time, the figures come together. Picasso's work challenges your assumptions about how space and objects are used. His artwork helps you see the world differently and reminds you there are alternative ways of using shape, objects, and colors. The reward for this is the intrinsic pleasure you get by looking at this work.

The often-used phrase "pay attention" is insightful: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 x 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

Impressionist paintings are probably most popular; it is an easily understood art which does not ask the viewer to work hard to understand the imagery. Impressionism is 'comfortable' to look at, with its summer scenes and bright colours appealing to the eye. It is important to remember, however, that this new way of painting was challenging to its public not only in the way that it was made but also in what was shown. They had never seen such 'informal' paintings before. The edge of the canvas cut off the scene in an arbitrary way, as if snapped with a camera. The subject matter included modernization of the landscape; railways and factories. Never before had these subjects been considered appropriate for artists.

Everyone knows a young person who is impressively "street smart" but does poorly in school. We think it is a waste that one who is so intelligent about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work. What we don't realize is that schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to draw such street smarts and guide them toward good academic work. Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools and colleges overlook the intellectual potential of street smarts: the fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-intellectual concerns. We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic.

Imagine for a moment that your boss remembers all of your children's names and ages, routinely stops by your desk and asks about them, and then listens as you talk about them. Imagine that same boss tells you about a skill you need to develop and opens up an opportunity for you to be trained on that particular skill. Imagine there is a death in the family, and the boss has your company cater meals for your family after the funeral as a gesture of support. All of these are real scenarios, and guess what? All the bosses who engaged in these acts of care and concern have fiercely loyal employees. They have employees who absolutely do not mind going the extra mile for their boss. They enjoy going to work and voluntarily suggest creative ideas that save the company money and increase sales. These bosses influence the behavior of their team not by telling them what to do differently, but by caring.

Music connects people to one another not only through a shared interest or hobby, but also through emotional connections to particular songs, communities, and artists. The significance of others in the search for the self is meaningful; as Agger, a sociology professor, states, "identities are largely social products, formed in relation to others and how we think they view us." And Frith, a socio-musicologist, argues that popular music has such connections. For music fans, the genres, artists, and songs in which people find meaning, thus, function as potential "places" through which one's identity can be positioned in relation to others: they act as chains that hold at least parts of one's identity in place. The connections made through shared musical passions provide a sense of safety and security in the notion that there are groups of similar people who can provide the feeling of a community.

The acceleration of human migration toward the shores is a contemporary phenomenon, but the knowledge and understanding of the potential risks regarding coastal living are not. Indeed, even at a time when human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions were not exponentially altering the climate, warming the oceans, and leading to rising seas, our ancestors knew how to better listen to and respect the many movements and warnings of the seas, thus settling farther inland. For instance, along Japan's coast, hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, were put in place to warn people not to build homes below a certain point. Over the world, moon and tides, winds, rains and hurricanes were naturally guiding humans' settlement choice.

We like to make a show of how much our decisions are based on rational considerations, but the truth is that we are largely governed by our emotions, which continually influence our perceptions. What this means is that the people around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires. Yesterday they were in love with your idea; today they seem cold. This will confuse you and if you are not careful, you will waste valuable mental space trying to figure out their real feelings, their mood of the moment, and their fleeting motivations. It is best to cultivate both distance and a degree of detachment from their shifting emotions so that you are not caught up in the process.

Although humans have been drinking coffee for centuries, it is not clear just where coffee originated or who first discovered it. However, the predominant legend has it that a goatherd discovered coffee in the Ethiopian highlands. Various dates for this legend include 900 BC, 300 AD, and 800 AD. Regardless of the actual date, it is said that Kaldi, the goatherd, noticed that his goats did not sleep at night after eating berries from what would later be known as a coffee tree. When Kaldi reported his observation to the local monastery, the abbot became the first person to brew a pot of coffee and note its flavor and alerting effect when he drank it. Word of the awakening effects and the pleasant taste of this new beverage soon spread beyond the monastery. The story of Kaldi might be more fable than fact, but at least some historical evidence indicates that coffee did originate in the Ethiopian highlands.

As you set about to write, it is worth reminding yourself that while you ought to have a point of view, you should avoid telling your readers what to think. Try to hang a question mark over it all. This way you allow your readers to think for themselves about the points and arguments you're making. As a result, they will feel more involved, finding themselves just as committed to the arguments you've made and the insights you've exposed as you are. You will have written an essay that not only avoids passivity in the reader, but is interesting and gets people to think.

Nothing is trash by nature. Anthropologist Mary Douglas brings back and analyzes the common saying that dirt is "matter out of place." Dirt is relative, she emphasizes. "Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave pots and pans in the bedroom, or food all over clothing; similarly, bathroom items in the living room; clothing lying on chairs; outdoor things placed indoors; upstairs things downstairs, and so on." Sorting the dirty from the clean ― removing the shoes from the table, putting the dirty clothing in the washing machine ― involves systematic ordering and classifying. Eliminating dirt is thus a positive process.

It's important that you think independently and fight for what you believe in, but there comes a time when it's wiser to stop fighting for your view and move on to accepting what a trustworthy group of people think is best. This can be extremely difficult. But it's smarter, and ultimately better for you to be open-minded and have faith that the conclusions of a trustworthy group of people are better than whatever you think. If you can't understand their view, you're probably just blind to their way of thinking. If you continue doing what you think is best when all the evidence and trustworthy people are against you, you're being dangerously confident. The truth is that while most people can become incredibly open-minded, some can't, even after they have repeatedly encountered lots of pain from betting that they were right when they were not.

Vegetarian eating is moving into the mainstream as more and more young adults say no to meat, poultry, and fish. According to the American Dietetic Association, "approximately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, are nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases." But health concerns are not the only reason that young adults give for changing their diets. Some make the choice out of concern for animal rights. When faced with the statistics that show the majority of animals raised as food live in confinement, many teens give up meat to protest those conditions. Others turn to vegetarianism to support the environment. Meat production uses vast amounts of water, land, grain, and energy and creates problems with animal waste and resulting pollution.

Diversity, challenge, and conflict help us maintain our imagination. Most people assume that conflict is bad and that being in one's "comfort zone" is good. That is not exactly true. Of course, we don't want to find ourselves without a job or medical insurance or in a fight with our partner, family, boss, or coworkers. One bad experience can be sufficient to last us a lifetime. But small disagreements with family and friends, trouble with technology or finances, or challenges at work and at home can help us think through our own capabilities. Problems that need solutions force us to use our brains in order to develop creative answers. Navigating landscapes that are varied, that offer trials and occasional conflicts, is more helpful to creativity than hanging out in landscapes that pose no challenge to our senses and our minds. Our two million-year history is packed with challenges and conflicts.

Sometimes it is the simpler product that gives a business a competitive advantage. Until recently, bicycles had to have many gears, often 15 or 20, for them to be considered high-end. But fixed-gear bikes with minimal features have become more popular, as those who buy them are happy to pay more for much less. The overall profitability of these bikes is much higher than the more complex ones because they do a single thing really well without the cost of added complexity. Companies should be careful of getting into a war over adding more features with their competitors, as this will increase cost and almost certainly reduce profitability because of competitive pressure on price.

Many evolutionary biologists argue that humans developed language for economic reason. We needed to trade, and we needed to establish trust in order to trade. Language is very handy when you are trying to conduct business with someone. Two early humans could not only agree to trade three wooden bowls for six bunches of bananas but establish rules as well. What wood was used for the bowls? Where did you get the bananas? That business deal would have been nearly impossible using only gestures and confusing noises, and carrying it out according to terms agreed upon creates a bond of trust. Language allows us to be specific, and this is where conversation plays a key role.

Understanding how to develop respect for and a knowledge of other cultures begins with reexamining the golden rule. "I treat others in the way I want to be treated." This rule makes sense on some level; if we treat others as well as we want to be treated, we will be treated well in return. This rule works well in a monocultural setting, where everyone is working within the same cultural framework. In a multicultural setting, however, where words, gestures, beliefs, and views may have different meanings, this rule has an unintended result; it can send a message that my culture is better than yours. It can also create a frustrating situation where we believe we are doing what is right, but what we are doing is not being interpreted in the way in which it was meant. This miscommunication can lead to problems.

Most people have no doubt heard this question: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it fall, does it make a sound? The correct answer is no. Sound is more than pressure waves, and indeed there can be no sound without a hearer. And similarly, scientific communication is a two-way process. Just as a signal of any kind is useless unless it is perceived, a published scientific paper (signal) is useless unless it is both received and understood by its intended audience. Thus we can restate the axiom of science as follows: A scientific experiment is not complete until the results have been published and understood. Publication is no more than pressure waves unless the published paper is understood. Too many scientific papers fall silently in the woods.

The interaction of workers from different cultural backgrounds with the host population might increase productivity due to positive externalities like knowledge spillovers. This is only an advantage up to a certain degree. When the variety of backgrounds is too large, fractionalization may cause excessive transaction costs for communication, which may lower productivity. Diversity not only impacts the labour market, but may also affect the quality of life in a location. A tolerant native population may value a multicultural city or region because of an increase in the range of available goods and services. On the other hand, diversity could be perceived as an unattractive feature if natives perceive it as a distortion of what they consider to be their national identity. They might even discriminate against other ethnic groups and they might fear that social conflicts between different foreign nationalities are imported into their own neighbourhood.

We think we are shaping our buildings. But really, our buildings and development are also shaping us. One of the best examples of this is the oldest-known construction: the ornately carved rings of standing stones at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Before these ancestors got the idea to erect standing stones some 12,000 years ago, they were hunter-gatherers. It appears that the erection of the multiple rings of megalithic stones took so long, and so many successive generations, that these innovators were forced to settle down to complete the construction works. In the process, they became the first farming society on Earth. This is an early example of a society constructing something that ends up radically remaking the society itself. Things are not so different in our own time.

Many people are terrified to fly in airplanes. Often, this fear stems from a lack of control. The pilot is in control, not the passengers, and this lack of control instills fear. Many potential passengers are so afraid they choose to drive great distances to get to a destination instead of flying. But their decision to drive is based solely on emotion, not logic. Logic says that statistically, the odds of dying in a car crash are around 1 in 5,000, while the odds of dying in a plane crash are closer to 1 in 11 million. If you're going to take a risk, especially one that could possibly involve your well-being, wouldn't you want the odds in your favor? However, most people choose the option that will cause them the least amount of anxiety. Pay attention to the thoughts you have about taking the risk and make sure you're basing your decision on facts, not just feelings.

A key to engagement and achievement is providing students with relevant texts they will be interested in. My scholarly work and my teaching have been deeply influenced by the work of Rosalie Fink. She interviewed twelve adults who were highly successful in their work, including a physicist, a biochemist, and a company CEO. All of them had dyslexia and had had significant problems with reading throughout their school years. While she expected to find that they had avoided reading and discovered ways to bypass it or compensate with other strategies for learning, she found the opposite. "To my surprise, I found that these dyslexics were enthusiastic readers... they rarely avoided reading. On the contrary, they sought out books." The pattern Fink discovered was that all of her subjects had been passionate in some personal interest. The areas of interest included religion, math, business, science, history, and biography. What mattered was that they read voraciously to find out more.

Sensory nerves have specialized endings in the tissues that pick up a particular sensation. If, for example, you step on a sharp object such as a pin, nerve endings in the skin will transmit the pain sensation up your leg, up and along the spinal cord to the brain. While the pain itself is unpleasant, it is in fact acting as a protective mechanism for the foot. Within the brain, nerves will connect to the area that controls speech, so that you may well shout 'ouch' or something rather less polite. They will also connect to motor nerves that travel back down the spinal cord, and to the muscles in your leg that now contract quickly to lift your foot away from the painful object. Sensory and motor nerves control almost all functions in the body ─ from the beating of the heart to the movement of the gut, sweating and just about everything else.

Maybe you've heard this joke: "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer is "one bite at a time." So, how do you "build" the Earth? That's simple, too: one atom at a time. Atoms are the basic building blocks of crystals, and since all rocks are made up of crystals, the more you know about atoms, the better. Crystals come in a variety of shapes that scientists call habits. Common crystal habits include squares, triangles, and six-sided hexagons. Usually crystals form when liquids cool, such as when you create ice cubes. Many times, crystals form in ways that do not allow for perfect shapes. If conditions are too cold, too hot, or there isn't enough source material, they can form strange, twisted shapes. But when conditions are right, we see beautiful displays. Usually, this involves a slow, steady environment where the individual atoms have plenty of time to join and fit perfectly into what's known as the crystal lattice. This is the basic structure of atoms that is seen time after time.