Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between intellectual curiosity and money? These are two of the most powerful forces in the world, and in my lifetime they've become significantly more aligned. How could you not be fascinated to watch something like this happening in real time?

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill. The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation.

Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently. If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were.

Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Dat wil zeggen: vergeving is niet alleen een geschenk, het is ook een goede deal. Want wie vergeeft, hoeft minder energie te verspillen aan haat en nijd. Die kan gaan leven. Die bevrijdt zichzelf.

Deze leefregel wordt ook wel de ‘Platinum Leefregel’ genoemd. De Ierse toneelschrijver George Bernard Shaw vatte hem eens mooi samen. ‘Doe niet voor anderen wat je wilt dat zij voor jou zouden doen’, schreef hij. ‘Ze zouden weleens een andere smaak kunnen hebben.’

Wat was er aan de hand? Psychologen noemen Ricards houding ook wel ‘compassie’. En in tegenstelling tot empathie kost compassie geen energie. Integendeel, de monnik voelde zich er een stuk beter door. Compassie is beheerster, afstandelijker en constructiever. Het laat je niet delen in het lijden van de ander, maar helpt je wel diens leed te zien, en vervolgens in actie te komen. Compassie geeft energie.

Eigenlijk hebben we het hier over dé paradox van dit boek. Ik heb betoogd dat de mens is geëvolueerd als door en door vriendelijk wezen, maar soms is die vriendelijkheid juist het probleem.

Het enige wat we moeten beseffen, is dat die vreemdelingen, ver weg, óók familie hebben van wie ze houden. Dat zij net zo goed mensen zijn.

Haidt noemt deze emotie ‘elevation’. De mens is zo bedraad dat een simpel blijk van goedheid al tintelingen over ons hele lijf kan bezorgen. En het fascinerende is: dit effect kan zelfs optreden als we zulke verhalen uit tweede hand horen. Dan is het net alsof er op een mentale resetknop wordt gedrukt, waardoor onze gevoelens van cynisme verdampen en we weer helder naar de wereld kunnen kijken.

When we play as orcs and we opt into violence, then, let us do so to upend imperialist instruments of subjugation. If the colonizing mind’s predatory, dehumanizing tendencies created orcish violence, let us redirect that violence into liberation. They tried to give us orcs who were uncivilized; we will return to them orcs who are decolonized. If orcs originate in settler-colonial fantasies, who better than orcs to comprehend the following: Orcish violence is the violence necessary for decolonization. Orcish anger is the righteous indignation of the downtrodden and unheard. Orcish hatred is the hatred of systemic oppression.

Your team will likely have a combination of idealists and realists. Harness the vision of the idealists to see where the team should move towards, but use the realists to help create the steps needed to get to that destination. A pragmatic balance of idealism and realism creates an actionable plan that moves in the right direction over time.

A balancing act We need optimism without credulity, skepticism without pessimism, and a balance of idealism and realism. Where do you naturally sit in the matrix? What about the individuals in your team? What about the team as a whole? Is the group dynamic different to the sum of the individuals? Why do you think that is? Are you able to change your position to counter-balance extreme opinions within the team, even if that mindset is not the natural one in which you reside? Also, are you able to notice when your own default position can cause biases in your own judgement?

“I thought if I win this tournament that then I’ll be happy,” he said. “And I won, and I was happy. And then the same stress and pressure and emptiness returned.”

“Affective forecasting is our ability to predict how events will make us feel,” Dr. Gruman said. He pointed to a study from 2000 that showed that college sports fans overestimated how happy they would be a few days after their team won a big game. “We tend to be pretty good at knowing what things are going to make us happy and unhappy,” he said, “but we’re not very good at predicting the intensity and the duration of the effect of events.” That can leave us feeling let down after the fact. Achievements also come with consequences we may not always see coming. The tendency to fixate only on the upside is called focalism, Dr. Gruman said. As he tells the students in his business management courses: “You guys want so badly to be managers, but you know what? It’s probably going to be very different than what you think it’s going to be. You know what? You might not even like it.” The same is true of people who gain visibility in most fields.

cooperation and community may contribute more to happiness in wealthy societies than income or other metrics. If relationships make us happy, the fact that many of us neglect our relationships in pursuit of career success may further squelch our joy. Focusing on a career at the expense of, say, a marriage, could ultimately leave us feeling lonely and unmoored.

His advice is to lay out multiple concurrent goals, both in and out of your work life. This was probably one of my problems. I had focused so intently on finishing one project that I had scrubbed my calendar clean of any other distractions. And the term “goal” can be applied loosely. Even just aiming to spend more quality time with your children or make new friends through volunteer work counts.

Schooling Purposely Destroy Inner Guidance and Ambition Schools purposely teach children to sit passively, quietly and consume their education in preparation for a life as a good worker and consumer. Schooling is NOT Learning School was invented in the 1800s to fill a need in society to create a literate workforce who could obey orders and be competent factory workers. It was also created for day care for children of these workers. The wealthy rarely sent their children to these schools. In 1899, William T. Harris, the US Commissioner of Education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.” For the past 170 years, we have taken children and required that they attend a “school” that is separated from the rest of the world in order to “educate” them. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Peter Gray and many other erudite folks make a good case that schooling has always been about social engineering and control.

Youth leave 18+ years of school dazed and confused, many with no sense of inner calling or purpose. They wander around aimlessly for many years — going to college, getting a job, climbing the corporate ladder until they wake up in their 30s, 40s or 50s and wonder what the purpose of life really is.

Waarom geen school voor relaties? Dat betekent niet dat mannen in Perels praktijk niet aangepakt worden met de haar typerende combinatie van scherpzinnigheid, humor en tough love. ‘Ik vraag het aan bijna alle mannen: tell me something, wanneer is de laatste keer dat je iets leerde over hoe je een goede minnaar kunt zijn? Was het iets anders dan porno?’ ‘En vertel me, als je een huis koopt, een nieuwe auto, een aandelenpakket, doe je dan niet eerst uitgebreid onderzoek? Hoe denk je dat je zo zonder onderzoek een relatie kunt overleven? En dan zeg ik: ik zie je over twee weken en dan wil ik dat je minstens drie dingen hebt geleerd over hoe je in een relatie wil zijn.’ Perel: ‘We leren onszelf alles, maar het is nooit bij iemand opgekomen om een school voor relaties te beginnen. Dat heeft er onder meer mee te maken dat relaties eeuwenlang gedefinieerd werden door plicht en regels. Je deed wat je moest doen en niemand vroeg of je dat graag deed.’

Waarom we dit niet weten? Het antwoord is simpel: we focussen steevast op de uitzonderingen. Op school gaat de geschiedenisles week in week uit over oorlog, oorlog en nog eens oorlog (en als er een keer vrede is, noemen we die periode het interbellum). Het nieuws gaat iedere dag over aanslagen en geweld - niet over de miljarden mensen die de zoveelste dag in vrede hebben geleefd.

His paper made few waves, but in the 1990s a number of researchers working in social sciences such as psychology showed how our decision-making at the individual or societal level can be modelled and even predicted using a quantum formalism. This grew into the field of quantum cognition and later quantum social science

Because it starts from different assumptions and uses different methods than mainstream economics, the quantum version also comes to very different conclusions and predictions. Instead of assuming that market forces drive prices towards a stable equilibrium, it sees the economy as driven by complex feedback loops, including those that affect the creation and destruction of money by private banks. One conclusion is that the risk models currently taught in universities and business schools, and relied upon by businesses and financial institutions, are not fit for purpose (as many guessed after the last crisis).

One lesson from the crisis was that economists were heavily implicated in the financial system that they were responsible for regulating, for example through highly paid consulting gigs; as in quantum physics, the observer is never separate from the system.

And while neoclassical economics treats ‘market failures’ such as economic inequality and environmental degradation as aberrations or externalities, from a quantum perspective they appear more to reflect the conflict inherent in money between numeric price and real value, as manifested in a debt-based financial system that prioritises growth above all else.