Po Bronson Quotes

We've all lost something along the way.

If you want to give yourself a fair chance to succeed, never expect too much too soon

Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.

Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed my life.

Interests evolve into hobbies or volunteer work, which grow into passions. It takes time, more time than anyone imagines.

I used to use business to make money. But I've learned that business is a tool. You can use it to support what you believe in.

But I'd rather help than watch. I'd rather have a heart than a mind. I'd rather expose too much than too little. I'd rather say hello to strangers than be afraid of them. I would rather know all this about myself than have more money than I need. I'd rather have something to love than a way to impress you.

I learned that it was in hard times that people usually changed the course of their life; in good times, they frequently only talked about change. Hard times forced them to overcome the doubts that normally gave them pause.It surprised me how often we hold ourselves back until we have no choice.

I used to want to change the world. Now I'm open to letting it change me.

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust

‎It's not easy. It's not supposed to be easy. Most people make mistakes. Most people have to learn the hardest lessons more than once.

The more controlling the parent,” Caldwell explained, “the more likely a child is to experience boredom.

In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.

There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice.

educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.

Might our culture-wide perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?

When we changed the channel from violent television to tamer fare, kids just ended up learning the advanced skills of clique formation, friendship withdrawal, and the art of the insult.

I think when a reader reads a whole book - which takes six to ten hours - that’s kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I’m grateful for it.

Researchers have found that the more people focus on their odds of winning, the less likely they’ll go for it. But the more they focus on what they’ll win if they succeed, the more likely they’ll go for it.

Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.

Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.

How often a mother initiated a conversation with her child was not predictive of the language outcomes—what mattered was, if the infant initiated, whether the mom responded.

(Even for adults, seeing someone’s lips as he speaks is the equivalent of a 20-decibel increase in volume.)

And the rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division between students.

It bears repeating: the mental states needed to compete are not always socially palatable.

siblings between the ages of three and seven clash 3.5 times per hour, on average. Some of those are brief clashes, others longer, but it adds up to ten minutes of every hour spent arguing.

In one study, Cummings found that children’s emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between the parent and child.

Merry Christmas to all, and y'all sleep tight.

The moral is to not set yourself goals which don’t leave you any freedom to maneuver.

Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their child’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t actually care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.

Parents often fail to address early childhood lying, since the lying is almost innocent—their child’s too young to know what lies are, or that lying’s wrong. When their child gets older and learns those distinctions, the parents believe, the lying will stop. This is dead wrong, according to Dr. Talwar.

She found that obese kids watch no more television than kids who aren’t obese. All the thin kids watch massive amounts of television, too. There was no statistical correlation between obesity and media use, period.

All the studies point in the same direction: on average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more. This isn’t just here, in America—scholars all around the world are considering it, because children everywhere are both getting fatter and getting less sleep.

Sanskrit describes five layers of self, or mind: Physical, feeling, perception, intention, and consciousness.

This variable, how a parent responds to a child’s vocalizations—right in the moment—seems to be the most powerful mechanism pulling a child from babble to fluent speech.

every time I am about to follow my heart, I am offered enormous temptation.

Breathing is key to accessing the unconscious neural code that controls us. “As the breath moves, so does the mind” is ancient Indian wisdom. We can add to that, “and the body.

Practicing is greater than knowing.” Not better than knowing. Greater.

But replacing workers and making the remaining ones more productive are literally the same thing. If

The biggest lie of all is the notion that robots don’t take jobs, they create jobs. The robots don’t do that— the humans do.

Around the world, every week, 3 million people move from rural areas into cities. That’s a San Francisco every two days! That isn’t a future statistic. That’s a today statistic.

Nobody is in sales anymore; they’re in customer relationship management. Nobody is in marketing, they’re in customer engagement.

The insula is the heart of subjective emotional experience. It’s the brain region where our perception of what’s happening to us matters more than what’s really happening to us. The

When you act, you learn. That kind of wisdom beats the knowledge you read in a book, every time. To really seek answers, you need to act. To really develop your mind, run more experiments.

Rather than improving trust, crypto has tried to minimize the need for trust. To create a system that requires no trust. To build a world that will still function even when all trust is eroded.

Don’t buy clothes at department stores—just take the clothes into the dressing room, post a photo of yourself on Instagram wearing them, and leave as the likes start accumulating by the hundreds.

The emphasis on winning is preventing kids from learning how to pass, which is the skill they ultimately need at the highest levels. The proposed solution is for top youth players to play fewer games.

Saying that genetics could be dangerous is like saying fire is hot. Warning that soon everyone will be able to hack the genome is like predicting, back in early caveman days, that soon everyone will have fire.

We are all writing the story of our life. We want to know what it’s “about,” what are its themes and which theme is on the rise. We demand of it something deeper, or richer, or more substantive. We want to know where we’re headed __not to spoil our own ending by ruining the surprise, but we want to ensure that when the ending comes, it won’t be shallow. We will not have done something. We will not have squandered our time here.

Another way to characterize it is that our chances of finding a habitable planet are roughly equal to the chances that Christopher Columbus, sailing east, would accidentally discover the Americas. It’s not a question of if. It’s only a question of when.

What it adds up to is stunning: Worker wages could have been 60 percent higher today, if we had kept health care costs in check. Another way to say it is: American workers will never see another pay raise if health care costs keep siphoning off the money.

Exactly why having more cognitive complexity makes a species live longer isn’t totally decided by science yet. But the simplest answer is probably the best answer: The species is using its intelligence to survive. Smart animals figure things out. They solve problems and learn to avoid predators.

At IndieBio, I quickly learned there was no such master plan— but more than that, it was wrong to think this period we face could be planned out at all. It was fast, blind, and dense. Nobody is an expert in the unknown. Planning wasn’t the way to solve it. Experimenting was. There is no plan, just a way.

The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution are intertwined much like all chicken-and-egg problems. One couldn’t have happened without the other. Social change sometimes triggers technological change; sometimes it’s the other way around. But they always go hand in hand. No technological revolution fails to be directly connected to a social revolution, either just before or just after.

It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, black or white, healthy or ill. Across every cohort, controlling for all variables, if you had “a sense of purpose” you stayed healthy, and if you didn’t have a sense of purpose, you didn’t stay healthy. It was more powerful for your health than exercising every day. It was more important than smoking or drinking. It was pretty much the strongest determinator of your future health.

It’s not AI we have to fear. I’m aware there’s a vague sense of chaos in the world. But I don’t think AI created that. People did. Sowing chaos was just their game plan. AI is just good at finding hidden patterns. And it surfaced patterns we humans had kept hidden. AI is just a mirror. It showed in the mirror who we really were. It didn’t make people hate. It found the hate we were trying to hide. It didn’t manipulate people into being mean. Their mean streak was simmering all along.

They want to find work they’re passionate about. Offering benefits and incentives are mere compromises. Educating people is important but not enough—far too many of our most educated people are operating at quarter-speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing too little to the productive engine of modern civilization, still feeling like observers, like they haven’t come close to living up to their potential. Our guidance needs to be better. We need to encourage people to find their sweet spot. Productivity explodes when people love what they do. We’re sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity, which we could tap into if we got all the square pegs in the square holes and round pegs in round holes. It’s not something we can measure with statistics, but it’s a huge economic issue. It’s a great natural resource that we’re ignoring.

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas is one of them, and he likes belonging. Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.) Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

According to an extensive study comparing identical twins to fraternal twins, headed by University of New Mexico’s Dr. Philip Dale, only 25% of language acquisition is due to genetic factors.

Life, though, really means a cell membrane. In biology, what defines life is the ability to self-reproduce. And only things with cell membranes can reproduce on their own.

The randomness of cancer is often very hard to accept.

Cancer is caused by mutations. Mutations that pile up until runaway cell division occurs. We have random DNA damage happening in our bodies all the time.

Rather than “Survival of the Fittest”—which wasn’t from Charles Darwin; it was a philosopher interpreting Darwin in 1864— we might have had the opposite, “Survival of the Most Cooperative.

intelligence is a human construct, not a biological thing),

So in most people, all these intelligence genes add and subtract against each other, to result in, on average, a single IQ point. The intelligence genes do not determine your IQ.

Stars don’t just shoot out energy and light. When they’re young, they shoot out amino acids and nucleotides— the raw material of DNA, RNA, and proteins. These are carried by the solar wind throughout the solar system. The building blocks of life come from suns. Earth wasn’t just extremely lucky to have these incredibly elegant Legos here. Early in the formation of a solar system, all the planets get showered with them, especially the rocky planets near the sun. Earth isn’t special.

Fish can pass memories between generations. But maybe the better way to say it is that fish can pass experience learning through generations.

They make the money cheap to borrow, and then that debt turns the borrower into a weapon against change. As long as the world doesn’t change, the bonds are paid off.

Bacteria don’t just make yogurt. They can bind carbon to silicon. They can make electricity. They can absorb gamma radiation. They can eat minerals and excrete acids, or eat acids and secrete minerals. They can emit light. They can make superglue. They can eat electrons and breathe out metals. They can align themselves like a compass to Earth’s magnetic field. They can process gold ores into tiny gold nuggets. They can turn sunlight into bioplastic. There’s even a bacteria that eats rock and poops out sand. Nice, coarse, gritty sand.

Science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have found that ethnic pride is an important element of self-esteem for other races but they draw the line at whites: “It’s horrifying to imagine kids being ‘proud to be white’. ” Many intellectuals believe whites are collectively guilty. As James Traub of The New Yorker wrote, when it comes to any discussion about race, whites must acknowledge that they are the offending party: “One’s hand is stayed by the knowledge of innumerable past hurts and misdeeds. The recognition of those wrongs, along with the acceptance of the sense of collective responsibility—guilt—that comes with recognition is a precondition to entering the discussion [about race].” Joe Klein, in New York Magazine, wrote that any conversation about race must begin with a confession: “It’s our fault; we’re racists.” “Black anger and white surrender have become a staple of contemporary racial discourse,” writes another commentator. Most blacks endorse this view. James Baldwin wrote that any real dialogue between the races requires a confession from whites that is nothing less than “a cry for help and healing.” Popular culture casually denigrates whites. Jay Blumenfield, an executive producer for the Showtime cable network, was working in 2004 on a reality program tentatively titled “Make Me Cool,” in which a group of blacks were to give “hipness makeovers” to a series of “desperately dweebie” whites. Why whites? Mr. Blumenfield explained that the purpose of the program was to correct “uncoolness,” and that “the easiest way to express that is they’ll be white.” Gary Bassell, head of an advertising agency that specializes in reaching Hispanics explained that “we’ve been shaped by an American pop culture today that increasingly proves that color is cool and white is washed out.” Miss Gallagher noted above that there are “few things more degrading than being proud to be white.” The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) agrees. In 2005, it refused to grant a trademark on the phrase “White Pride Country Wide.” It explained that “the ‘white pride’ element of the proposed mark is considered offensive and therefore scandalous.” The USPTO has nevertheless trademarked “Black Power” and “Black Supremacy,” and apparently finds nothing scandalous in “African Pride,” “Native Pride!” “Asian Pride,” “Black Pride,” “Orgullo Hispano” (Hispanic Pride), “Mexican Pride,” and “African Man Pride,” all of which have been trademarked.

Some people are born into their passions. Some never get them and don't care. But I think if you're really struggling to find it - and I think you have, I mean, you've gone all over the country to find it - it's almost certainly for a reason. I think the depth of your struggling is the sign there's something there. Something in you that's trying to get out. People who don't have passions don't struggle.

It's when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.

People who had been through a lot reported that they changed their life, or got clarity, when they became conscious of what kind of person a certain job/industry/lifestyle was turning them into.

A calling is not something you know, it's something you grow into, through trials and mistakes... Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are...Failure's hard, but success at the wrong thing can lock you in forever.

From our deepest wounds come our greatest gifts.

You want to know where your fears are hiding? Tell me what you know about yourself. Tell me what you can't live without.

child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.

Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.

And while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every one time a child seeks a parent for help, there were fourteen other instances when he was wronged and did not run to the parent for aid.

Children are not passive absorbers of knowledge; rather, they are active constructors of concepts

... luck is no match for the power of social comparison. Nobody wants to be the one guy who can't do well.

Why was I bent on encouraging people to change their lives? Because I've watched my generation stop reading books, stop reading the newspaper, stop voting in local elections? Because I've watched money/salary become a proxy for respect, and then a synonym for respect, and then the only kind of respect that counts? Because I have seen us judge books we have not read, politicians we have not heard, musicians we have not listened to, referendums we have not debated, and fellow citizens we have not met? Because I have seen us torn apart by jealousy for what others our age have accomplished, rather than celebrating those accomplishments? Because I have seen us glorify those who make decisions over those who enact decisions, prefer being a consultant to being fully engaged, being an investor to being invested in, being an advisor over being politically involved, being an expert over being partisan, being a news analyst over being a news gatherer--all in fear of the inflexible boredom of commitment?

I asked him if Buddhists believe we all get a specific destiny. “We don’t think there’s a specific place in your life to go. Everybody’s destiny is to become an enlightened being and reach the everlasting state of mind.

We have mixed feelings about the seductive notion of destiny. There’s a persistent tension between wanting our life’s purpose to be revealed to us by some higher power and wanting to scrap and fight for it against all odds—to earn it without help. We think about destiny sort of like how we feel about inheritance—we covet its fruit but it’s sweeter if we earned it ourselves.