Download or read book The Complexity of Greatness written by Scott Barry Kaufman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the origins of greatness? Few other questions have caused such intense debate, controversy, and diversity of opinions. In recent years, a large body of research has accumulated that suggests that the origins of greatness are extraordinarily complex. Instead of talent or practice, it's talent and practice. Instead of nature or nature, it's nature via nurture. Instead of practice, it's deliberate practice. Instead of the causes of greatness in general, it's the determinants of greatness specific to a field. The Complexity of Greatness brings together a variety of perspectives and the most cutting-edge research on genes, talent, intelligence, expertise, deliberate practice, creativity, prodigies, savants, passion, and persistence. A variety of different domains are represented, including science, mathematics, expert memory, acting, visual arts, music, and sports. This book demonstrates that the truth about greatness is far more nuanced, complex, and fascinating than any one viewpoint or paradigm can possibly reveal. Indeed, it suggests that the time has come to go beyond talent or practice. Greatness is much, much more.
Download or read book The Complexity of Greatness written by Scott Barry Kaufman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the origins of greatness? The Complexity of Greatness brings together a variety of perspectives across various domains, including science, mathematics, expert memory, acting, visual arts, music, and sports. It demonstrates that the truth about greatness is far more nuanced and complex than any one viewpoint or paradigm can reveal.
Download or read book Greatness written by Dean Keith Simonton and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1994-05-21 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking work offers the first comprehensive examination of the important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history. It discusses whether people who go down in history are different from the rest of us and whether specific personality traits predispose certain people to become world leaders, movie stars, scientific geniuses, and athletes. It sheds light on the depth of potential in everyone, yielding important clues as to how we can take advantage of our own individual personality traits. Probing the lives of a range of important figures, the book explores the full range of phenomena associated with greatness, scrutinizing the significance of everything from genetic inheritance, intuition, aesthetic appreciation, and birth order, to formal education, sexual orientation, aging, IQ, and alcohol and drug abuse. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the people and events that have helped shape the world, including mental health professionals and scholars studying psychological topics in the larger context of science, art, politics, and history. The book also serves as an engaging text for undergraduate psychology courses.
Download or read book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned written by Kenneth O. Stanley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.
Download or read book The Little Book of Talent written by Daniel Coyle and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A manual for building a faster brain and a better you! The Little Book of Talent is an easy-to-use handbook of scientifically proven, field-tested methods to improve skills—your skills, your kids’ skills, your organization’s skills—in sports, music, art, math, and business. The product of five years of reporting from the world’s greatest talent hotbeds and interviews with successful master coaches, it distills the daunting complexity of skill development into 52 clear, concise directives. Whether you’re age 10 or 100, whether you’re on the sports field or the stage, in the classroom or the corner office, this is an essential guide for anyone who ever asked, “How do I get better?” Praise for The Little Book of Talent “The Little Book of Talent should be given to every graduate at commencement, every new parent in a delivery room, every executive on the first day of work. It is a guidebook—beautiful in its simplicity and backed by hard science—for nurturing excellence.”—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit “It’s so juvenile to throw around hyperbolic terms such as ‘life-changing,’ but there’s no other way to describe The Little Book of Talent. I was avidly trying new things within the first half hour of reading it and haven’t stopped since. Brilliant. And yes: life-changing.”—Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence
Download or read book The Hidden Leader written by Scott Edinger and published by AMACOM. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book helps managers recognize hidden gems in the workplace and learn how to utilize them for their greatest impact. Think you can spot the leaders in your company? Don’t assume that you can identify them by their positions. What about those employees who consistently step up: the field agent who solves a previously intractable problem; the service rep who thinks outside the box and creates unshakeable customer loyalty. These are more than “good employees”, these are “hidden leaders” and they are critical to an organization’s long-term success. Managers today need to make the most of all their resources—and The Hidden Leader shows them how to identify and cultivate these talented but under utilized employees, who: Demonstrate integrity Lead through authentic relationships Focus on results Work from clear customer purpose Fulfill the value promise of the company Don’t settle for the traditional feedback that tells you these are “good employees” who deserve a pat on the back and a 3 percent increase at the end of the year. These hidden leaders will soon be pulled out by another organization giving them the opportunity they deserve. Supported by real-world examples of hidden leaders in action--and QR codes readers can scan for instant access to online assessments--The Hidden Leader helps managers discover these secret saviors and enable them to deliver even greater value to customers.
Download or read book Winning on Purpose written by Fred Reichheld and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great leaders embrace a higher purpose to win. The Net Promoter System shines as their guiding star. Few management ideas have spread so far and wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS). Since its conception almost two decades ago by customer loyalty guru Fred Reichheld, thousands of companies around the world have adopted it—from industrial titans such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins to tech giants like Apple and Amazon to digital innovators such as Warby Parker and Peloton. Now, Reichheld has raised the bar yet again. In Winning on Purpose, he demonstrates that the primary purpose of a business should be to enrich the lives of its customers. Why? Because when customers feel this love, they come back for more and bring their friends—generating good profits. This is NPS 3.0 and it puts a new take on the age-old Golden Rule—treat customers the way you would want a loved one treated—at the heart of enduring business success. As the compelling examples in this book illustrate, companies with superior NPS consistently deliver higher returns to shareholders across a wide array of industries. But winning on purpose isn't easy. Reichheld also explains why many NPS practitioners achieve just a small fraction of the system's full potential, and he presents the newest thinking and best practices for doing NPS right. He unveils the Earned Growth Rate (EGR): the first reliable, complementary accounting measure that can truly leverage the power of NPS. With keen insight and moving personal stories, Reichheld advances the thinking and practice of NPS. Winning on Purpose is your indispensable guide for inspiring customer love within your own teams and using Net Promoter to achieve both personal and business success.
Download or read book Immoderate Greatness written by William Ophuls and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Immoderate Greatness* explains how a civilization's very magnitude conspires against it to cause downfall. Civilizations are hard-wired for self-destruction. They travel an arc from initial success to terminal decay and ultimate collapse due to intrinsic, inescapable biophysical limits combined with an inexorable trend toward moral decay and practical failure. Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos-to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness-lest we precipitate a dark age in which the arts and adornments of civilization are partially or completely lost.
Download or read book Ungifted written by Scott Kaufman and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questioning everything we know about the childhood predictors of adult greatness, a cognitive psychologist, who was told as a child that he wasn't smart enough to graduate from high school, explores the latest research to uncover the truth about human potential.
Download or read book Denying to the Grave written by Sara E. Gorman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some parents refuse to vaccinate their children? Why do some people keep guns at home, despite scientific evidence of risk to their family members? And why do people use antibiotics for illnesses they cannot possibly alleviate? When it comes to health, many people insist that science is wrong, that the evidence is incomplete, and that unidentified hazards lurk everywhere. In Denying to the Grave, Gorman and Gorman, a father-daughter team, explore the psychology of health science denial. Using several examples of such denial as test cases, they propose six key principles that may lead individuals to reject accepted health-related wisdom: the charismatic leader; fear of complexity; confirmation bias and the internet; fear of corporate and government conspiracies; causality and filling the ignorance gap; and the nature of risk prediction. The authors argue that the health sciences are especially vulnerable to our innate resistance to integrate new concepts with pre-existing beliefs. This psychological difficulty of incorporating new information is on the cutting edge of neuroscience research, as scientists continue to identify brain responses to new information that reveal deep-seated, innate discomfort with changing our minds. Denying to the Grave explores risk theory and how people make decisions about what is best for them and their loved ones, in an effort to better understand how people think when faced with significant health decisions. This book points the way to a new and important understanding of how science should be conveyed to the public in order to save lives with existing knowledge and technology.
Download or read book Aspiring to Greatness written by Ronald L. Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II chronicles the emergence of WVU as a major land-grant institution. As a continuation of the work of Doherty and Summers in West Virginia University: Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalized State, this book focuses on the modern historical developments that elevated WVU from a small regional institution to one of national prominence. West Virginia University's growth mirrors the developmental eras that have shaped American higher education since World War II. The University's history as an innovative, pioneering force within higher education is explored through its major postwar stages of expansion, diversification, and commercialization. Institutions of higher education nationwide experienced a dramatic increase in enrollments between 1945 and 1975 as millions of returning World War II and Korean War veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. Their children, the “baby boom” generation, continued to supply the growth in college enrollment and the corresponding increase in institutional complexity until the mid-1970s. During this period WVU followed the national trend by growing from a few thousand students to nearly fifteen thousand. From 1975 to the early 1990s, expansion gave way to diversification. The traditional student population stopped growing by 1975, and “boomers” were replaced by students from nontraditional backgrounds. An unprecedented gender, racial, and ethnic diversification took place on college campuses, a trend encouraged by federal civil rights legislation. To a lesser degree WVU was no exception, although its location in a rural state with a small minority population forced the University to work harder to attract minorities than institutions in proximity to urban areas. The commercialization of higher education became a full-fledged movement by the 1990s. Major changes, such as globalization, demographic shifts, a weak economy, and the triumph of the “market society,” all accelerated the penetration of business values and practices into university life. Like other public universities, WVU was called upon to generate more of its own revenues. The University's strategic responses to these pressures reconstructed the state's leading land grant into the large complex institution of today. As the only modern history of West Virginia University, this text reaches into the archives of the President's Office and makes exhaustive use of press accounts and interviews with key individuals to produce a detailed resource for alumni, friends, and supporters of WVU, as well as administrators and specialists in higher education.
Download or read book Why Didn t I Think of That written by Charles W. McCoy and published by Prentice Hall Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical thinking, proactive decision-making, and dynamic creativity are thinking skills essential to success in our professional and personal endeavors. Few of us, however, know how to maximize these skills at critical moments. In Why Didn't I Think of That? Charles McCoy, who honed his critical thinking techniques on the bench of the Los Angeles Superior Court, shows you how to sharpen your left-brain power -- observation, accuracy, and analysis -- to achieve optimum results. McCoy creatively entertains as he teaches, offering insight gained from prominent cases over which he has presided. He draws examples from catastrophic events (Exxon Valdez oil spill, Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster), real business problems encountered by major corporations and government agencies (Pepsi, Citibank, the U.S. Marines, NASA), the civil rights struggles of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as fictional events (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and It's a Wonderful Life).
Download or read book Lloyd George and Churchill written by Richard Toye and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two most significant British political figures of the twentieth-century, Churchill and Lloyd George were political rivals but personal friends. Between them their ministerial careers spanned seventy years and two world wars. Althought they could not have been more different temperamentally, and often disagreed violently about politics, theirs was 'the longest political friendship in the life of Great Britain' and Churchill was the only person outside his family to call Lloyd George 'David'. Richard Toye's book is a dynamic account of their relationship. Drawing on diaries and letters, some never before published, (there are more than 1,000 pieces of correspondence between the two men), he explores their long-standing friendship and rivalry, the impact they had on each other's careers, and the fate of their respective reputations, arguing that Lloyd George's major achievements have been undeservedly overshadowed, in part as a consequence of Churchill's later mythmaking. It is a major work from a brilliant young historian.
Download or read book Ungifted written by Scott Barry Kaufman and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Child prodigies. Gifted and Talented Programs. Perfect 2400s on the SAT. Sometimes it feels like the world is conspiring to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Those children tapped as possessing special abilities will go on to achieve great things, while the rest of us have little chance of realizing our dreams. Right? In Ungifted, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman—who was relegated to special education as a child—sets out to show that the way we interpret traditional metrics of intelligence is misguided. Kaufman explores the latest research in genetics and neuroscience, as well as evolutionary, developmental, social, positive, and cognitive psychology, to challenge the conventional wisdom about the childhood predictors of adult success. He reveals that there are many paths to greatness, and argues for a more holistic approach to achievement that takes into account each young person's personal goals, individual psychology, and developmental trajectory. In so doing, he increases our appreciation for the intelligence and diverse strengths of prodigies, savants, and late bloomers, as well as those with dyslexia, autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD. Combining original research, anecdotes, and a singular compassion, Ungifted proves that anyone—even those without readily observable gifts at any single moment in time—can become great.
Download or read book Second Act written by Henry Oliver and published by John Murray One. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Henry Oliver is a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful. SECOND ACT showcases his wide reading, deep understanding and playful prose style. Read this book to discover why it's never too late for a second act in your own life." HELEN LEWIS, author of Difficult Women Have you ever dreamed that you might be far more successful than you are today? Our society tells us over and over that if we're going to achieve anything, we'd better do it while we're young. But whether you're at the start of your career, sensing you're on the wrong path, or feeling unsettled later in life, you're likely wondering just how to reinvent yourself? Have you left it too late? This book has answers. Late bloomers - individuals who experience significant success later in life - offer lessons for people who feel frustrated. This book encourages people to think about themselves as potential late bloomers and to discover and encourage and advocate for late blooming in others. After all, it's never too late to discover our hidden talents and our accomplish our goals - the road to success is never as straightforward as we are lead to believe. Julia Child didn't discover that she loved to cook until she was thirty-seven. Vera Wang started her design business at forty. And Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in his sixties. This inspiring, passionate book combines wonderful storytellingwith fascinating new research, to shift expectations around our life trajectories. You'll discover a range of blueprints for self-reinvention, pairing the newest insights from psychology and neuroscience with late bloomers' remarkable life stories, from Penelope Fitzgerald to Samuel Johnson, from Frank Lloyd-Wright to Malcolm X.
Download or read book Wired to Create written by Scott Barry Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the ten things highly creative people do differently. Is it possible to make sense of something as elusive as creativity? Based on psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s groundbreaking research and Carolyn Gregoire’s popular article in the Huffington Post, Wired to Create offers a glimpse inside the “messy minds” of highly creative people. Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking. Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes— like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration – to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity. Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people: Imaginative Play * Passion * Daydreaming * Solitude * Intuition * Openness to Experience * Mindfulness * Sensitivity * Turning Adversity into Advantage * Thinking Differently With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity – and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives.
Download or read book Extreme Intelligence written by Sonja Falck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extreme intelligence is strongly correlated with the highest of human achievement, but also, paradoxically, with higher relationship conflict, career difficulty, mental illness, and high-IQ crime. Increased intelligence does not necessarily increase success; it should be considered as a minority special need that requires nurturing. This book explores the social development and predicaments of those who possess extreme intelligence, and the consequent personal and professional implications for them. It uniquely integrates insights and knowledge from the research fields of intelligence, giftedness, genius, and expertise with those from depth psychology, emphasising the importance of finding ways to talk effectively about extreme intelligence, and how it can better be supported and embraced. The author supports her arguments throughout, reviewing the academic literature alongside representations of genius in history, fiction, and the media, and draws on her own first-hand research interviews and consulting work with multinational high-IQ adults. This book is essential reading for anyone supporting or working with the highly gifted, as well as those researching or interested by the field of intelligence.
