Breakthrough Important Quotes

Stop worrying about what others think of you. Base your thoughts, your decisions, and your goals on what you want and what is important in your life.

It's very important to choose our words very carefully because miscommunication leads to misunderstanding, which rarely leads to anything good.

What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to listen.

I don't know if it is important to tell you all this, but at the time, it felt like a “breakthrough”.

The importance of curiosity in reinforcement learning algorithms suggests that a brain designed to learn through reinforcement, such as the brain of early vertebrates, should also exhibit curiosity.

My biggest personal breakthrough came after realizing that my life was less important than my mission.

God is in people. Miracles and blessings happen through people

The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers. It is to find the right question. - Peter Drucker

that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us.

Holding back when you still have steam in you might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting important things done, but in fact, this kind of restraint is key to breakthrough productivity.

The late literary giant Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.” This is a key difference between those who learn more quickly than others.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Experiencing empathy, the freedom to explore, trust, and insight can reset your default reactions to a more curious, tolerant, and confident stance. Because our brains are plastic, consistently positive experiences do stimulate existing neurons to adapt and connect in different pathways. Nurturing relationships help us grow psychologically and neurally in ways that are not possible in nonnurturing relationships. As adults, our most important opportunity for a nurturing relationship comes through committed partnership. It’s a breakthrough to realize that the purpose of committed relationship is not to be happy, but to heal. And then you will be happy!

Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.

Every child’s metaphorical hand includes one very important wild card—a person whose influence is unpredictable and whose qualities are uncertain.

Adrenaline management," as I perceive it, is important for all of us, regardless of our basic personality type.

It is not the amount of friends that is important, but the amount of integrity, sincerity, and love in your friends

Ask yourself why the question you chose seemed important. Then ask why the reason you just gave is important. and so on.

Parsons’ story reassures us that at the heart of all scientific advances is the imagination—that what we perceive as perverse eccentricities can be the key to important breakthroughs.

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn’t see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.

It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.

Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps.

one of the most important things a leader can do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep reflection and questioning.

The reality is that most of us grow up strapped in an educational system that favors obedience over independent thinking. We’re rewarded for trusting authority, and punished for challenging it. We focus on memorizing the stuff other people came up with—formulas in math, grammar rules in English, theories in physics, cell functions in biology—rather than grasping the logic behind our most important breakthroughs and tracing the footsteps of their discovery. We answer test questions with what we think our teacher wants to hear. We chase grades instead of knowledge. And worst of all, we leave the classroom woefully unequipped with the thinking skills that matter most: how to balance open-mindedness with skepticism, how to identify bias, and how to challenge assumptions—including our own—in a way that’s truly objective.

It is more important to move on to positive actions without stopping to wallow in anger about injustices -- including the unjust suppression of inventors. Exposing the skeletons in the closet serves to enlighten, but getting off-message with retribution will be counter-productive.

The most important thing to do is to take risks. The risks are where breakthroughs happen, and big shifts take you to new places and create opportunities. They can be really scary and intimidating, but that means it is taking you out of your comfort zone. All designers look at life through a

Although the breakthrough of using fire at all would have been the biggest culinary leap, the subsequent discovery of better ways to prepare the food would have led to continual increases in digestive efficiency, leaving more energy for brain growth. The improvements would have been especially important for brain growth after birth, since easily digested weaning foods would have been critical contributors to a child’s energy supply. Advances in food preparation may thus have contributed to the extraordinary continuing rise in brain size through two million years of human evolution—a

It was how all human history occurred.  Important events creating ripple effects through an unfathomably complex minefield of social and political consequences.  Ending with what could only be described as unexpected and unpredictable results.  Only to be recorded later, by thoughtful but biased individuals, as “history.

The danger of tolerating any hurtful behavior is that it can all too quickly become the norm. If we allow ourselves to "get away" with anything we know to be destructive - such as slapping a child or partner in the face - without taking responsibility for the gravity of what we have done, we are that much more likely to minimize the offense: "I may have overreacted, but she's got to learn not to set me off like that." . . . "because the partner is perceived as the cause of the violence, the perpetrator feels justified in using it." Once the actions are justified, they are more likely to be repeated. It is also important to remember that, in most relationships, both parties engage in some form of the abuses listed above. Angry remarks or mildly aggressive actions - insulting someone's intelligence, throwing a plate of food against the wall - can both provoke and be used to justify retaliatory actions that may be more dangerous, like pushing and shoving someone down the stairs. On the other hand, one sort of abuse does not necessarily lead to another. Rather, whether or not the violence escalates depends on the person committing it.

History’s most unusual and momentous news continues to be the message that the holy God provides sinful man a way of escape from the damning consequences of sin, and proffers him a new kind of life fit for both time and eternity. This ongoing global news is more important than the Allies’ rollback of Hitler and the Nazis, or modern technology’s putting a man on the moon, or scientific research’s latest medical breakthrough.

When contemplating humanity’s potential future technologies and their use and effect on our world, we should bear in mind that the coming mutation will directly affect the way we think. Since our primary awareness is shifting to the solar plexus area, all future insights and breakthroughs in science will come from this awareness rather than from our logical mind. This will entirely change scientific approach. Instead of beginning with doubt and then working to resolve that doubt through scientific method, we will begin with certainty and use logic to confirm and deepen that certainty. This will give birth to a new era of science and technology, and the future science will be a science of synthesis. Science will work hand in hand with art, music, mythology, and psychology and, of particular importance, it will be rooted in the physical structure and understanding of the body.

One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room.

Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests.

Dataism is most firmly entrenched in its two mother disciplines: computer science and biology. Of the two biology is the more important. It was biology’s embrace of Dataism that turned a limited breakthrough in computer science into a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition.

I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3. Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.

In life, as in chess, learning must be constant - both new things and fresh ways of learning them. The process will invariably involve a certain degree of unlearning, and possessing the readiness to that is utterly important. If your way of doing things isn't working, clinging to your conclusions is only going to hold you back. You have to get to the root of a snag in order to make a breakthrough, because it's possible that what you thought you knew isn't actually the way it is. Unlearning is perhaps the hardest thing to do, but it is a necessity if growth and success are your goals.

The Chemical Society of London was not founded until 1841 and didn’t begin to produce a regular journal until 1848, by which time most learned societies in Britain—Geological, Geographical, Zoological, Horticultural, and Linnaean (for naturalists and botanists)—were at least twenty years old and often much more. The rival Institute of Chemistry didn’t come into being until 1877, a year after the founding of the American Chemical Society. Because chemistry was so slow to get organized, news of Avogadro’s important breakthrough of 1811 didn’t begin to become general until the first international chemistry congress, in Karlsruhe, in 1860.

This tends to make us uncomfortable: After all, how can AI, a machine, generate something new and creative? The issue is that we often mistake novelty for originality. New ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on existing concepts. Innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. Breakthroughs often happen when people connect distant, seemingly unrelated ideas. To take a canonical example, the Wright brothers combined their experience as bicycle mechanics and their observations of the flight of birds to develop their concept of a controllable plane that could be balanced and steered by warping its wings.

Much of the literature on creativity focuses on how to trigger these moments of innovative synthesis; how to drive the problem phase toward its resolution. And it turns out that epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment. The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge. As the poet Julia Cameron put it: “I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.”8 The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others. When Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, went to look at how scientific breakthroughs actually happen, for example (he took cameras into four molecular biology labs and recorded pretty much everything that took place), he assumed that it would involve scientists beavering away in isolated contemplation. In fact, the breakthroughs happened at lab meetings, where groups of researchers would gather around a desk to talk through their work. Why here? Because they were forced to respond to challenges and critiques from their fellow researchers. They were jarred into seeing new associations.

Like representative government, soccer has been imported from England and democratized in the United States. It has become the great social and athletic equalizer for suburban America. From kindergarten, girls are placed on equal footing with boys. In the fall, weekend soccer games are a prevalent in suburbia as yard sales. Girls have their own leagues, or they play with boys, and they suffer from no tradition that says that women will grow up professionally to be less successful than men. 'In the United States, not only are girls on equal footing, but the perception now is that American women can be better than American men,' said Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. 'That's a turning point, a huge breakthrough in perception.

When the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed its database of major flight accidents, it found that 73 percent occurred on a flight crew’s first day working together. Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved, with no surprises. When the path is unclear—a game of Martian tennis—those same routines no longer suffice. “Some tools work fantastically in certain situations, advancing technology in smaller but important ways, and those tools are well known and well practiced,” Andy Ouderkirk told me. “Those same tools will also pull you away from a breakthrough innovation. In fact, they’ll turn a breakthrough innovation into an incremental one.

The New World Order Following the Thirty Years’ War (1648) On its surface, the Thirty Years’ War pitted Protestant countries against Catholic ones; however, the full story was more complicated with wider geopolitical interests related to wealth and power playing a role of who lined up with whom. At the end of the war the new order was laid out at the Peace of Westphalia. The most important breakthroughs that came from it were the establishment of geographic borders and the sovereign rights of the people within those borders to decide what happens in their domains. Like most periods after major wars and the establishment of new orders, there was an extended time of peace between countries, with the Dutch emerging from the chaos as the leading global economic power.

healthy deep limbic pathways. Then a bond or connectedness between the parents and the baby can begin to grow. Without love and affection, the baby does not develop appropriate deep limbic connectedness and thus never learns to trust or connect. He feels lonely and insecure, and becomes irritable and unresponsive. Touch is critical to life itself. In a barbaric thirteenth-century experiment, German Emperor Frederick II wanted to know what language and words children would speak if they were raised without hearing any words at all. He took a number of infants from their homes and put them with people who fed them but had strict instructions not to touch, cuddle, or talk to them. The babies never spoke a word. They all died before they could speak. Even though the language experiment was a failure, it resulted in an important discovery: Touch is essential to life. Salimbene, a historian of the time, wrote of the experiment in 1248, “They could not live without

People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.

So, will deep learning eventually become “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), matching human intelligence in every way? Will we encounter “singularity” (see chapter 10)? I don’t believe it will happen by 2041. There are many challenges that we have not made much progress on or even understood, such as how to model creativity, strategic thinking, reasoning, counter-factual thinking, emotions, and consciousness. These challenges are likely to require a dozen more breakthroughs like deep learning, but we’ve had only one great breakthrough in over sixty years, so I believe we are unlikely to see a dozen in twenty years. In addition, I would suggest that we stop using AGI as the ultimate test of AI. As I described in chapter 1, AI’s mind is different from the human mind. In twenty years, deep learning and its extensions will beat humans on an ever-increasing number of tasks, but there will still be many existing tasks that humans can handle much better than deep learning. There will even be some new tasks that showcase human superiority, especially if AI’s progress inspires us to improve and evolve. What’s important is that we develop useful applications suitable for AI and seek to find human-AI symbiosis, rather than obsess about whether or when deep-learning AI will become AGI. I consider the obsession with AGI to be a narcissistic human tendency to view ourselves as the gold standard.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Although parents and teachers are forever telling children to “grow up,” maturation cannot be commanded. One cannot teach a child to be an individual or train a child to be his own person. This is the work of maturation and maturation alone. We can nurture the process, provide the right conditions, remove the impediments, but we can no more make a child grow up than we can order the plants in our garden to grow. Dealing with immature children, we may need to show them how to act, draw the boundaries of what is acceptable, and articulate what our expectations are. Children who do not understand fairness have to be taught to take turns. Children not yet mature enough to appreciate the impact of their actions must be provided with rules and prescriptions for acceptable conduct. But such scripted behavior mustn't be confused with the real thing. One cannot be any more mature than one truly is, only act that way when appropriately cued. To take turns because it is right to do so is certainly civil, but to take turns out of a genuine sense of fairness can only come from maturity. To say sorry may be appropriate to the situation, but to assume responsibility for one's actions can come only from the process of individuation. There is no substitute for genuine maturation, no shortcut to getting there. Behavior can be prescribed or imposed, but maturity comes from the heart and mind. The real challenge for parents is to help kids grow up, not simply to look like grownups. If discipline is no cure for immaturity and if scripting is helpful but insufficient, how can we help our children mature? For years, develop-mentalists puzzled over the conditions that activated maturation. The breakthrough came only when researchers discovered the fundamental importance of attachment. Surprising as it may be to say, the story of maturation is quite straightforward and self-evident. Like so much else in child development, it begins with attachment.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R& B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers. Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great. From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school. The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University, was involved in the study of Bakhshali Manuscript. He realises the importance of the text and says[86], ‘Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.

In sharing early versions of an idea with the world at large, one is likely to receive negative feedback—which some people interpret as evidence of a failure. But that’s not necessarily true, says Harvard’s Paul Bottino, who points out that when it comes to feedback, “dissonance can actually be more valuable than resonance.” As people push back on your idea, it can be a good indication that you’re entering uncharted, potentially important territory—because you’re more likely to get negative feedback (“That could never work!”) on ideas that challenge common assumptions. “Dissonance is the most misunderstood kind of feedback,” Bottino says. “We really should welcome it and learn to make the most of it.

At the same time, as Yamashita points out, it’s just as important to look forward when asking big questions about purpose. He urges clients to work on Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.

The most important thing business leaders must do today is to be the ‘chief question-asker’ for their organization,” says the consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. However, Patnaik adds a cautionary note: “The first thing most leaders need to realize is, they’re really bad at asking questions.

Importantly, the professor was also “willing to ask questions without knowing the answer. Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers. But students find it really liberating to have a teacher say, ‘I don’t know the answer—so let’s figure this out together.

And perhaps questions, by their very nature, invite and allow for more participation by more kids throughout the class. You don’t have to know the answer to ask a question, so the smart kids don’t dominate. Rothstein thinks it also has something to do with the students’ tendency to quickly become invested in the questions they’ve thought of on their own. “The ‘ownership’ part of this is very important,” he said. “We’ve had kids say that when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.

we can’t necessarily control the brain’s search for remote connections—much of which happens in the unconscious mind—but we can provide impetus and help guide that search by focusing on a problem to be solved, a challenging question to be answered. “Having that goal or that question you’re working on is very important,” Zhong confirms. If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.

For a questioner, it’s important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By “living with” a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.

Immelt wanted division heads to generate imaginative new product and service concepts, which in turn would generate the new organic revenue on which his vision depended. It was a tall order: a handful of product ideas that would each pull in $100 million in new sales for each business. More important, Immelt wanted these “breakthrough” sessions to be led by each unit’s marketing department—to have the division that usually dictated advertising and branding stepping into the role that had been the province of product engineers. Immelt’s inspiration for the directive was an article he read about a smaller industrial conglomerate called Danaher Corporation that had formed an internal incubator to develop new ideas that could drive revenues and profits. Its CEO was a young whiz named Larry Culp who, at age thirty-seven, was even younger than Immelt had been when he took the reins.

I met with Chad Logan a few days after our first get-together. I told him that I would explain my point of view and then let him decide whether he wanted to work with me on strategy. I said: I think you have a lot of ambition, but you don’t have a strategy. I don’t think it would be useful, right now, to work with your managers on strategies for meeting the 20/20 goal. What I would advise is that you first work to discover the very most promising opportunities for the business. Those opportunities may be internal, fixing bottlenecks and constraints in the way people work, or external. To do this, you should probably pull together a small team of people and take a month to do a review of who your buyers are, who you compete with, and what opportunities exist. It’s normally a good idea to look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition. You should open things up so there are as many useful bits of information on the table as possible. If you want, I can help you structure some of this process and, maybe, help you ask some of the right questions. The end result will be a strategy that is aimed at channeling energy into what seem to be one or two of the most attractive opportunities, where it looks like you can make major inroads or breakthroughs. I can’t tell you in advance how large such opportunities are, or where they may be. I can’t tell you in advance how fast revenues will grow. Perhaps you will want to add new services, or cut back on doing certain things that don’t make a profit. Perhaps you will find it more promising to focus on grabbing the graphics work that currently goes in-house, rather than to competitors. But, in the end, you should have a very short list of the most important things for the company to do. Then you will have a basis for moving forward. That is what I would do were I in your shoes. If you continue down the road you are on you will be counting on motivation to move the company forward. I cannot honestly recommend that as a way forward because business competition is not just a battle of strength and wills; it is also a competition over insights and competencies. My judgment is that motivation, by itself, will not give this company enough of an edge to achieve your goals. Chad Logan thanked me and, a week later, retained someone else to help him. The new consultant took Logan and his department managers through an exercise he called “Visioning.” The gist of it was the question “How big do you think this company can be?” In the morning they stretched their aspirations from “bigger” to “very much bigger.” Then, in the afternoon, the facilitator challenged them to an even grander vision: “Think twice as big as that,” he pressed. Logan

an expensive trip.” “Which means it was either a very important

Everyone is now so eager to see the government "reveal" this long-awaited information that no one questions the reality of the basic facts and the political motivations that could inspire a manipulation of those facts. Trying to outsmart the CIA and the Pentagon has become such a national pastime that lawsuits against federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act have begun to accumulate. All that has been shown so far is that these agencies were involved – often covertly – in many aspects of the UFO problem. I suspect that they are still involved. Discovering the secret of the UFO propulsion mechanism could be such a military breakthrough that any research project connected with it would enjoy the highest level of classification. But these UFO enthusiasts who are so anxious to expose the government have not reflected that they may be playing into the hands of a more sophisticated coverup of the real situation. Because of their eagerness to believe any indication that the authorities already possess the proof of UFO reality, many enthusiasts provide an ideal conduit for anyone wishing to spread the extraterrestrial gospel. The purpose of such an exercise need not be complex or strategically important. It could be something as mundane as a political diversion, or a test of the reliability of information channels under simulated crisis conditions, or a decoy for paramilitary operations. None of these rumors is likely to lead us any closer to a solution that can only be obtained by careful, intelligent, and perhaps tedious scientific research. The truth is that the UFOs may not be spacecraft at all. And the government may simply be hiding the fact that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on air defense, it has no more clues to the nature of the phenomenon today than it did in the forties when it began its investigations.

provided an important benefit. This conviction was based on intuition, not on evidence, and it had apparent limitations. Not every patient with short runs of PVCs goes on to develop more worrisome patterns; the antiarrhythmics had never been evaluated for this particular use; and any medication

I would love to see more women in the area of digital transformation. If women have improved access to skills development in this area, I believe it will have a positive impact for many generations to come. The skills acquired in digital transformation are transferrable to other sectors as well. The skills are practical and can lead to scientific breakthroughs. Because of this I believe there can be a generational impact. The generational impact is important because we live in an age of commoditized information. As a society, we are relatively new to this reality and while cyber threats are the root of information security challenges, information security challenges are increasingly becoming the root of global threats. There needs to be increased involvement of more international stakeholders with the goal of improving digital transformation skills for everyone. These skills are powerful and for that reason I will continue to promote cyber knowledge-sharing and greater access to cybersecurity education. For more women to enjoy the digital world full of surprises and rewards!

wisdom on a global level takes a very long time.  You and your team have achieved a giant step forward for your people.  You have broken the barrier of communication that has kept you isolated for so very long.  You have regained an ability you once had natively, but have since lost.  Your breakthrough may prove to be the most important turning point for your race in understanding the world around you.  An understanding that will reveal your world as more than just a planet of resources.  Life is not simply a matter of breathing or thinking.  Life is connectedness on a planetary scale.

The King’s Ghost,” said Clay. “That’s right.  The King’s Ghost.  Lost—or rather scrubbed from the history books when it returned with something vitally important, which turned out to be the part of the alien ship itself likely found by the Inca or Maya.

King Solomon comes in because he built the first temple in Jerusalem for the sole purpose of housing the Tabot, or Ark, to preserve and worship both its importance and its power.  That is, until it up and vanished.

It is mentioned over two hundred times in the Hebrew Bible until the end of Solomon’s reign.  Then it vanishes, not just from existence, but from the scriptures themselves.  The most prominent and important item in the history of mankind, the very embodiment of God, simply dropped from testament as though it never existed.  No mention of it again.

Not only had Miller and Langford unleashed the greatest political firestorm in intelligence history, but they had also exposed the very underbelly of the world’s most important government spy agency and forced Hayes himself directly into the spotlight.

Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

P1 - Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

To those who are grateful, more is given. To those who are not, more is taken away. Having gifts taken away as a result of ingratitude helps you wake up to the importance of being grateful. Nothing has ever happened or can happen to you that is not a gift and a blessing, but it’s difficult to be thankful until you find the hidden benefit in what may seem at first to be a negative event.

is vitally important to avoid repeated imagination of a crash, or of a panic attack. Be vigilant. As soon as you notice imagination of disaster, immediately use the 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise. Use it to regain your ability to focus your mind as you choose.

What is it that we really want? What’s really important to us? How are we going to get it? What is preventing us from having it? And how will we know that we have it?

As much as it burned me inside to miss my sister’s big day, I had to put my mental health first, and there was no way I was about to undo my hard work for anything. And that is exactly what I did from that point forward. My mental health was the most important thing to me. If I wasn’t feeling how something was making me feel, I let it go, whether it was people, jobs, places. I stopped entertaining things that were draining me.

When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren’t fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

Before he could start writing Kilby’s application, though, Mosher had to resolve a fundamental tactical question. Anyone who applies for a patent has to decide whether he needs it for offensive or for defensive purposes—whether, to use lawyers’ favorite metaphor, he wants his patent to be a sword or a shield. The decision usually turns on the novelty of the invention. If somebody has a genuinely revolutionary idea, a breakthrough that his competitors are almost sure to copy, his lawyers will write a patent application they can use as a sword; they will describe the invention in such broad and encompassing terms that they can take it into court for an injunction against any competitor who tries to sell a product that is even remotely related. In contrast, an inventor whose idea is basically an extension of or an improvement on an earlier idea needs a patent application that will work as a shield—a defense against legal action by the sword wielders. Such a defensive patent is usually written in much narrower terms, emphasizing a specific improvement or a particular application of the idea that is not covered clearly in earlier patents. Probably the most famous sword in the history of the patent system was the sweeping application filed on February 14, 1876, by a teacher and part-time inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. That first telephone patent (No. 174,465) was so broad and inclusive that it became the cornerstone—after Bell and his partners had fought some 600 lawsuits against scores of competitors—of the largest corporate family in the world. In the nature of things, though, few inventions are so completely new that they don’t build on something from the past. The majority of patent applications, therefore, are written as shields—as improvements on some earlier invention. Some of the most important patents in American history fall into this category, including No. 586,193, “New and Useful Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses,” granted to Guglielmo Marconi in 1898; No. 621,195, “Improvements in and Relating to Navigable Balloons,” granted to Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1899; No. 686,046, “New and Useful Improvements in Motor Carriages,” granted to Henry Ford in 1901; and No. 821,393, “New and Useful Improvements in Flying Machines,” granted to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1906.

In life, as in chess, learning must be constant - both new things and fresh ways of learning them. The process will invariably involve a certain degree of unlearning, and possessing the readiness to that is utterly important. If your way of doing things isn't working, clinging to your conclusions is only going to hold you back. You have to get to the root of a snag in order to make a breakthrough, because it's possible that what you thought you knew isn't actually the way it is. Unlearning is perhaps the hardest thing to do, but it is a necessity if growth and success are your goals.

What’s most important is that the world get serious once again about advancing the field of nuclear energy. It’s just too promising to ignore

In general, poor PFC function leads people to make repetitive mistakes. Their actions are not based on experience, or forethought, but rather on the moment. The moment is what matters. This phrase comes up over and over with my ADD patients. For many people with ADD, forethought is a struggle. It is natural for them to act out what is important to them at the immediate moment, not two moments from now or five moments from now, but now! A person with ADD may be ready for work a few minutes early, but rather than leave the house and be on time or a few minutes early, she may do another couple of things that make her late. Likewise, a person with ADD may be sexually attracted to someone he just met, and even though he is married and his personal goal is to stay married, he may have a sexual encounter that puts his marriage at risk. The moment was what mattered. In the same vein, many people with ADD take what I call a crisis management approach to their lives. Rather than having clearly defined goals and acting in a manner consistent to reach them, they ricochet from crisis to crisis. In school, people with ADD have difficulty with long-term planning. Instead of keeping up as the semester goes along, they focus on the crisis in front of them at the moment—the next test or term paper. At work they are under continual stress. Deadlines loom and tasks go uncompleted. It seems as though there is a need for constant stress in order to get consistent work done. The constant stress, however, takes a physical toll on everyone involved (the person, his or her family, coworkers, employers, friends, etc.).

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 2 Corinthians 2:14 ESV Notice in this verse that God always leads us into triumph, and maintaining a thankful heart—an attitude of gratitude—is a vital part of trusting Him, especially while we’re waiting for our breakthrough to come. In fact, being thankful is so important that I want to

Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but, importantly, YOU ARE NOT THE RAIN.

While these reports did tell of a new drug that was superior to the old class of antidepressants, this still was not a narrative of a “breakthrough” medication. There was no sense of why this drug worked better, but as FDA approval for fluoxetine neared, a new “fact” began to appear in the scientific reports. In a 1987 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Sidney Levine wrote that “studies have shown that [serotonin] deficiency plays an important role in the psychobiology of depressive illness.”25 While this was not what had actually been found—Levine had apparently missed the 1984 NIMH report that “elevations or decrements in the functioning of serotonergic systems per se are not likely to be associated with depression”—this article set the stage for fluoxetine to be touted as a drug that fixed a chemical imbalance. Two years later, University of Louisville psychiatrists surveyed the fluoxetine literature in order to provide “prescribing guidelines for the newest antidepressant,” and they wrote that “depressed patients have lower than normal concentrations of [serotonin metabolites] in their cerebrospinal fluid.” A delusional belief was now spreading through the medical literature, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Kentucky psychiatrists concluded that fluoxetine, which theoretically raised serotonin levels, was “an ideal drug for the treatment of depression.”26

This distinction is important — but, when we critique copy, it is often forgotten. Even experienced marketers sometimes forget that the goal is not to measure the copy against some qualitative ideal but to determine if it will perform well in the marketplace.

The steering group that charters and integrates the breakthroughs becomes the principal orchestrator of the change. The number of teams is important. Setting up too many teams will fragment the problem and fail to confront the real issues of organizational complexity and distance. Too few teams will overwhelm each team with an impossible charter. Breakthrough teams should be set up to succeed.

For a company to innovate, it must create products and services that let consumers perform a job faster, better, more conveniently, and/or less expensively than before. To achieve this objective, companies must know what outcomes customers are trying to achieve (what metrics they use to determine how well a job is getting done) and figure out which technologies, products, and features will best satisfy the important outcomes that are currently underserved.

Becoming a good steward is more important than you getting your own breakthrough.

Every company is becoming a software company because the products that people are using have some element of software in them," says Jim DuBois, CIO of Microsoft. "This makes the integration between IT and the product organization much more important for disruptive breakthroughs; there is very little that IT or product can do alone.

A big philosophical breakthrough for me was the realization that my own freedom was not only possible, but far more important than the establishment of a free society.

We’re multiplying our capabilities as a civilization and yet we still accept the notion that important societal progress, like combating inequality and crime—or even innovating in government and medicine—must take generations. Despite leaps in what we can do, most of us still follow comfortable, pre-prescribed paths. We work hard, but hardly question whether we’re working smart. On

ACTION WILL BE YOUR LEGACY “He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon…” – Marcus Aurelius We can’t escape the fact that we wish to leave the world with a reminder that we were here, too, once. On some level it doesn’t make much sense—the mind that is wishing to be remembered will probably be gone…it won’t even have a chance to think about being remembered! Some people can afford to put their name on football stadiums or tall buildings. Some people have left large tombs. Some have left autobiographies. Some have left massive fortunes. Some have left scientific breakthroughs. Some glorious son-of-a-gun out there left us the PB&J sandwich. These are great contributions. However, the accumulation of interactions you have with other people will certainly be greater. The way you are in the world matters more than what you make in the world. This is important. You spread whatever you are. If you are decisive, emotionally stable, and optimistic, then you will give others the permission to be the same. When you free yourself from overthinking and commit to action you will free others. Not by spreading the word or talking about this book (although that would be great!) but by just being that way. Think of a time when you’ve been afraid to make a leap. You look around for others who have made the leap. Then you see it’s a possibility. When you smile at someone instead of worrying about what they’re thinking about you, you make their day better—and your day better. When you do the thing you’re embarrassed to do you provide relief for everyone around who was too scared. When you believe the actions you take are more important than an abstract purpose, you may pull an onlooker out of an existential crisis with you. If you can do it, they can too. These moments multiply. The person you smiled at while waiting in line at the grocery store was planning on committing suicide later that day. Now they are second-guessing it. They may continue to live and provide good for others, who will then provide more good for others. Staying calm in the midst of an emergency will give solace to others. Now others will gain solace from them. It’s been called the butterfly effect. We, as humans, are terrible at believing what isn’t right in front of us. We sometimes feel like we’re doing nothing, like our lives don’t matter. This is impossible. If you think you can’t create any change, then you will create change by spreading the idea of hopelessness. Everything you do matters. Act accordingly.

IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing actors playing characters, and the amusing, confusing jumble of fiction and reality. Stoppard knew he was onto something new and important. “I have a feeling,” he said at the time, “that almost everybody today is more trying to match himself up with an external image he has of himself, almost as if he’s seen himself on a screen.

Showing appreciation is the single most important action to maintain a healthy relationship or resuscitate a sick one.

The irony was not wasted on Clay, or the President, for that matter. Without the first nuke, they would not have needed the second. But, more importantly, this would be the first time a nuclear explosion was used to save lives.

All of the mathematicians in this study worked on more than one problem at a given moment. This is consistent with the investment theory view of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). The mathematicians invested an optimal amount of time on a given problem, but switched to a different problem if no breakthrough was forthcoming. All the mathematicians in this study considered this as the most important and difficult stage of creativity. The prolonged hard work was followed by a period of incubation where the problem was put aside, often while the preparatory stage is repeated for a different problem; and thus, there is a transition in the mind from conscious to unconscious work on the problem. One mathematician cited this as the stage at which the "problem begins to talk to you." Another offered that the intuitive side of the brain begins communicating with the logical side at this stage and conjectured that this communication was not possible at a conscious level.

It is inevitable that as we develop a critical analysis of the various axes of identity--race, gender, class, ability, and more--we will experience deeply personal and political moments of self-realization--about ourselves and our relationships with others as well as about the way this culture functions. It is important and positive that we make those kinds of developments in identifying how oppression works, internally and externally. Yet we must not get so caught up in our own self-discoveries that we unthinkingly put the emotional weight of those breakthrough moments on others who live daily with he realities we are just beginning to understand. (A Critique of Ally Politics)

Milner’s $100 million project “Breakthrough Listen.” It’s important not to be overly anthropocentric when searching for advanced life: if we discover an extraterrestrial civilization, it’s likely to already have gone superintelligent. As Martin Rees put it in a recent essay, “the history of human technological civilization is measured in centuries—and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve, for billions of years. … We would be most unlikely to ‘catch’ it in the brief sliver of time when it took organic form.