Susan David Quotes

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?

Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

In Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, written during his year in a one-room cabin with few possessions, is this quote: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life that is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Courage is not the absence of fear but fear walking.

The most effective way to transform your life, therefore, is not by quitting your job and moving to an ashram, but, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, by doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down. Simply

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life

We still don’t like the things we don’t like –we just cease to be at war with them. And once the war is over, change can begin.

In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

That's the function of big brothers... to help their little sisters when their worlds are collapsing.

Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. We’re taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (“Crybaby!”), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives. In a study of more than seventy thousand people, Harvard psychologist Dr. Susan David found that one-third of us judge ourselves for having “negative” emotions such as sadness and grief.

The parent who praises a child’s accomplishment by saying, ‘You studied hard!’ promotes a growth mindset. The parent who says, ‘Look at your A, son! You’re a genius!’ promotes a fixed mindset.

One of the more gratifying things about guilt is that it makes us feel important.

Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.

Our contract with life is a contract that is brokered with fragility, and with sadness, and with anxiety. And if we’re going to authentically and meaningfully be in this world, we cannot focus on one dimension of life and expect that focusing on that dimension is going to then give us a well-rounded life.

the orchid hypothesis” by David Dobbs in a wonderful article in The Atlantic. This theory holds that many children are like dandelions, able to thrive in just about any environment. But others, including the high-reactive types that Kagan studied, are more like orchids: they wilt easily, but under the right conditions can grow strong and magnificent.

In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives.

And what about for the first eight, ten years of his life, when loving parents encouraged his obsession with dragons and secret worlds and animals in vests who poured tea and drove motorcars and who gave him to read Tolkien and Susan Cooper and the Brothers Grimm and Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis? Is a boy supposed to leave his imagination on the side of the road when he boards the bus to manhood?

Staying emotionally agile requires us to find the equilibrium between overcompetence on the one hand and overchallenge on the other. This is the teeter-totter principle.

Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system.

Who’s in charge—the thinker or the thought?” Are we managing our own lives according to our own values and what is important to us, or are we simply being carried along by the tide?

Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking—or

Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply “whelmed.” And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values.

Please,” David said, “we’re British—we adore animals. It’s children we can’t stand. That’s why we invented boarding schools. More tea?

People frequently die in fires or crash landings because they try to escape through the same door they used when they entered.

Emotions pass. They are transient. There is nothing in mental experience that demands an action.

Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, “Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.

In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

Of course, determing what you truly care about is only half the process of walking your why. Once you've identified your values, you then have to take them out for a spin. This requires a certain amount of courage, but you can't aim to be fearless. Instead, you should aim to walk directly into your fears, with your values as your guide, toward what matters to you. Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.

After a few minutes I stopped David and asked each group to tell him what they had “heard.” The content group fed his words back to him almost verbatim. David nodded. The emotion group picked up on his frustration, embarrassment, and helplessness. David acknowledged all of this. The group listening for intent delivered the blow: “You aren’t going to do anything about this. Right now, it’s all just words.” David blanched and disagreed with their assessment. On the very next break, he helped himself to brownies. David had given us the usual rhetoric that most of us hear and even say ourselves when trying to lose weight: “I’ve got to get a handle on this. I’m going to watch what

Emotions are data, they are not directives

The ultimate goal of emotional agility is to keep a sense of challenge and growth alive and well throughout your life.

expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

One way to start doing this is to answer a single question, in writing, each night before bed: “As I look back on today, what did I do that was actually worth my time?

Nature favors evolution, not revolution. Studies from many different fields have demonstrated that small shifts over time can dramatically enhance our ability to thrive.

Only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to start identifying your values: - Deep down, what matters to me? - What relationships do I want to build? - What do I want my life to be about? - How do I feel most of the time? What kind of situations make me feel most vital?

Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative.

god's grace didn't mean life skipped over the hard parts. Grace meant that when life threatened to drown him, in those catastrophic moments, God enclosed him in the pocket of His embrace. Noah had learned that the onlyl way to discover God's sufficient grace was to let the storm buffet, then cling to God, like David said in Psalm 62:5,"I wait quietly before God, for my hope is in Him."

These micro-moments of intimacy or neglect create a culture in which the relationship either thrives or withers. The tiny behaviours feed back on themselves and compound with time, as every interaction builds on the previous interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. Each person's moments of pettiness and anger, or generosity and lovingness, create a feedback loop that makes the overall relationship either more toxic or happier.

As the people of Ein Hod were marched into despossession, Moshe and his comrades guarded and looted the newly emptied village. While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family's survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sand "Hatikva," and shouted, "Long live Israel!

Give grace to your children today by speaking of sin and mercy. Tell Susan that she can relax into God’s loving embrace and stop thinking that she has to perform in order to get her welcoming Father to love her. Tell David that he can have hope that even though he really struggles, he’s the very sort of person Jesus loved being around. Dazzle them with his love.

Emotional agility means being aware and accepting of all your emotions, even learning from the most difficult ones. It also means getting beyond conditioned or preprogrammed cognitive and emotional responses (your hooks) to live in the moment with a clear reading of present circumstances, respond appropriately, and then act in alignment with your deepest values.

What psychologists call “the need for intimacy” is present in introverts and extroverts alike. In fact, people who value intimacy highly don’t tend to be, as the noted psychologist David Buss puts it, “the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert.” They are more likely to be someone with a select group of close friends, who prefers “sincere and meaningful conversations over wild parties.

Our hidden demons are simply the residue of perfectly ordinary and almost universal insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure. Maybe you still resent your sister for flirting with your boyfriends in high school. Maybe you feel undervalued by your new boss. This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you.

For many introverts like David, adolescence is the great stumbling place, the dark and tangled thicket of low self-esteem and social unease. In middle and high school, the main currency is vivacity and gregariousness; attributes like depth and sensitivity don’t count for much.

And if something feels new, difficult, or even slightly incoherent, fear kicks in. And while fear comes in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes it appears in disguise (as procrastination, perfection, shutting down, unassertiveness, or excuses), it speaks only one word: no, as in "No, I'll just screw it up." "Nah, I wouldn't know anyone there." "Nope, that will look awful on me." "Nuh-uh, thanks; I'll sit this one out.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

A child’s sense of secure attachment—this idea that I, in all my glory, as well as all my stinkiness and imperfection, am loved and accepted—allows him not only to take risks in the world but also to take risks with his own emotions. Knowing he will not be invalidated, rejected, punished, or shamed for feeling whatever he feels, he can test out sadness, happiness, or anger and figure out how to manage or respond to each of these emotions in turn.

Our civilization overflows with charity—which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help—just wages for honest labor—there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She

Luckily, scientists have uncovered a few secrets to help make the process of creating habits easier. In their bestselling book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein show how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called “choice architecture.” You

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

3. The precommitment: Anticipate obstacles and prepare for them with “if-then” strategies.

1. The no-brainer: Switch up your environment so that when you’re hungry, tired, stressed, or rushed, the choice most aligned with your values is also the easiest.

2. The piggyback: Add a new behavior onto an existing habit.

4. The obstacle course: Offset a positive vision with thoughts of potential challenges.

Norman Mailer once wrote that there is a cruel but just law of life that says we must change or pay an increasing cost for remaining the same.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. —SUSAN B. ANTHONY

When we lack compassion, we see the world as just as unforgiving as we are, so the very idea of failure is crippling.

Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.

Emotions are information, not instructions.

change is a process, not an event.

When we have a reduced sense of our own agency and effectiveness, it weakens the “readiness potential” in our brains.

Acceptance is a prerequisite for change.

Oh, don't get me started! I love fantasy, I read it for pleasure, even after all these years. Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley are probably my favorite writers in the field, in addition to all the writers in the Endicott Studio group - but there are many others I also admire. In children's fantasy, I'm particularly keen on Philip Pullman, Donna Jo Napoli, David Almond and Jane Yolen - though my favorite novels recently were Midori Snyder's Hannah's Garden, Holly Black's Tithe, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. I read a lot of mainstream fiction as well - I particularly love Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Sara Maitland, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks, and Elizabeth Knox. There's also a great deal of magical fiction by Native American authors being published these days - Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife, Alfredo Vea Jr.'s Maravilla, Linda Hogan's Power, and Susan Power's Grass Dancer are a few recent favorites. I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope - I re-read Jane Austen's novels in particular every year.Other fantasists say they read Tolkien every year, but for me it's Austen. I adore biographies, particularly biographies of artists and writers (and particularly those written by Michael Holroyd). And I love books that explore the philosophical side of art, such as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, or David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous. (from a 2002 interview)

Grit embodies—but is not the same as—resilience, ambition, and self-control. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth defines it as passion and sustained persistence in trying to achieve a goal over the very long haul, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. Resilience is about overcoming adversity; ambition, at some level, suggests a desire for wealth, fame, and/or power; self-control can help you resist temptations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re persistently pursuing a long-term goal.

We each have a particular way of shaping ourselves in the world. To take on someone else’s conversational style and to keep repeating other people’s questions as if they were our own is to exhaust ourselves. It doesn’t matter if it is the thoughts of Socrates or Susan Sontag. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of "perfect" and "vile," / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness

Choices,' the philosopher Ruth Chang said, 'are chances for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition.. that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people we are.

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect.

where we stumble is where our treasure lies. For many introverts like David, adolescence is the great stumbling place, the dark and tangled thicket of low self-esteem and social unease. In middle and high school, the main currency is vivacity and gregariousness; attributes like depth and sensitivity don’t count for much. But many introverts succeed in composing life stories much like David’s: our Charlie Brown moments are the price we have to pay to bang our drums happily through the decades.

In the same way, our suffering, our disengagement, our relationship challenges, and our other difficulties are almost never solved by thinking in the same old, automatic way. Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now.

Ми хочемо, щоб життя було якомога більш яскравим і менш болісним. А життя має свій спосіб принизити нас, і лихо вписане в угоду зі світом. Ми молоді, доки наша молодість не закінчиться. Ми здорові, доки є здоров'я. Ми з тими, кого любимо, доки ми любимо. Краса життя невід'ємна від її крихкості.

In fact, people who value intimacy highly don’t tend to be, as the noted psychologist David Buss puts it, “the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert.” They are more likely to be someone with a select group of close friends, who prefers “sincere and meaningful conversations over wild parties.

The dominant experience is sadness,” explains Bonanno, in a podcast interview with Dr. David Van Nuys, “and there are also some other emotions….There’s anger, sometimes contempt, or shame, where people are having all kinds of memories and difficult experiences….So rather than this elaborate, steady state of months of deep sadness, it’s really much more of an in and out kind of an oscillatory state, and this sadness is punctuated at times by positive states and smiling, laughter and connection to other people.” For many people, says Bonanno, these “periods of sadness…gradually get less intense.

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don’t assert themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behavior.

In our relationships, creative lives, personal development, and work, we can promote this advancement in two ways-- expanding our breadth (what we do: the skills we acquire, the topics we talk about, the avenues we explore) and our depth (how well we do what we do: the quality of our listening, our level of engagement with the world).

fly.” Meaning that, yes, the mind creates its own universe; but no, we can’t solve our problems through affirmations and positive thinking alone. And the fact is, New Agey solutions that put smiley-face stickers over our problems can make those problems worse. So the question for us going forward is: Who’s in charge—the thinker or the thought?

The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.

confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

People frequently die in fires or crash landings because they try to escape through the same door they used when they entered. In their panic, they rely on an established pattern instead of thinking of another way out. In the same manner, our suffering, our disengagement, our relationship challenges, and our other life difficulties are almost never solved by thinking in the same old, automatic way.

David?" she asked as they approached an elevator. She was a little uncertain about doors that opened and closed by themselves and little boxes that went up and down. She supposed she'd just have to cope. "Yes?" he asked. She rested her head on his shoulder. "How should we celebrate our eight hundredth wedding anniversary?" "Hmm? How about with a good night's sleep?" "Suits me." Together they walked into the little moving box.

The curse of comfort--defaulting to the familiar and accessible--wouldn't matter so much if the only place it led you was down the supermarket aisle, past the unfamiliar and difficult-to-pronounce exotic foods, and straight to your favorite brand of peanut butter. Its impact, though, is much more insidious and far-reaching. It can lead to mistakes that waste our time and keep us from getting where we want to go--sometimes literally.

In an article offering a law enforcement perspective on allegations of ritual abuse, Lanning (1992, A law-enforcement perspective on allegations of ritual abuse) fails to give a precise definition of the term. Although he is quoted as having conducted a seven-year study FBI study that gives evidence that ritual abuse does not exist, when Noblitt and Perskin (2000, Cult and ritual abuse) requested a copy of his study from the FBI, “the bureau responded in writing that no such study existed.” (p. 179).

Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for introverted leadership. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, carried out a pair of studies of their own. In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent. In

The lesson: Once our minds slip into default mode, it takes a great deal of flexibility to override this state. This is why specialists are often the last ones to notice commonsense solutions to simple problems, a limitation economist Thorstein Veblen called the “trained incapacity” of experts. Inflated confidence leads old hands to ignore contextual information, and the more familiar an expert is with a particular kind of problem, the more likely he is to pull a prefabricated solution out of his memory bank rather than respond to the specific case at hand.

Of course his name would be Dominic. It meant "gift from God." AKA a life-support system for an ego. Still, that didn't mean he wasn't fun to stare at. Dominic Rossi looked like a dream, the kind of dream no woman in her right mind would want to wake from. She had always been susceptible to male beauty, ever since the age of ten, when her mother had taken her to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. She recalled staring at that huge stone behemoth, all lithe muscles and gorgeous symmetry, indifferent about his nudity, his member inspiring a dozen questions her mother brushed aside.

When you’re a teenager, everybody is waiting for you to be something or someone else - your friends, your parents, your teachers. Sometimes you lose track. Are you the shy kid in the back of the room who apologizes for even accidentally touching Susan Childress’s arm, or the guy making bombs in the backyard? Are you the helpless nerd with the backpack on hoping you don’t get the snot beat out of you by the school bully, or the helpless nerd with the mask on, hoping you don’t get the snot beat out of you by the town’s newest supervillain? Or maybe you’re just the helpless nerd staring at the helpless nerd in the mirror, talking to yourself, wondering which one of you needs more help.

In April, millions of flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the " gods had left confetti". In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts, and black eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a cigarette, and observed, “Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.” “And what did the cow think of him?” Venning mumbled to Susan, who immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful young man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he probably wasn’t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.

By thinking about what was important to them individually, they unleashed their true potential, regardless of cultural scepticism about their ablities. We are on this planet for only a limited time, and it makes sense to try to use that time wisely, in a way that will add up to something personally meaningful. And study after study shows that having a strong sense of what matters leads to greater happiness, as well as better health, a stonger marriage and a greater academic and professional success. When we make choices based on what we know to be true for ourselves, rather than being led by others telling us what is "right" or "wrong", important or cool, we have the power to face almost any circumstance in a constructive way.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a cigarette, and observed, “Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.” “And what did the cow think of him?” Venning mumbled to Susan, who immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful young man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he probably wasn’t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter. “Wasn’t it Wilde who discovered

today’s psychologists tend to agree on several important points: for example, that introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo. “Other people are very arousing,” says the personality psychologist David Winter, explaining why your typical introvert would rather spend her vacation reading on the beach than partying on a cruise ship. “They arouse threat, fear, flight, and love. A hundred people are very stimulating compared to a hundred books or a hundred grains of sand.

On the one hand, according to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics. The most low-reactive kids, for example, court danger from the time they’re toddlers, so that by the time they grow up they don’t bat an eye at grown-up-sized risks. They “climb a few fences, become desensitized, and climb up on the roof,” the late psychologist David Lykken once explained in an Atlantic article. “They’ll have all sorts of experiences that other kids won’t. Chuck Yeager (the first pilot to break the sound barrier) could step down from the belly of the bomber into the rocketship and push the button not because he was born with that difference between him and me, but because for the previous thirty years his temperament impelled him to work his way up from climbing trees through increasing degrees of danger and excitement.

Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What? Got the answer to that?

American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, confined to the home, took on qualities such as passivity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. To be sure, as Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter show, the ideal of the angelic, submissive housewife was purveyed in many novels and advice manuals. But partly in response to the forces driving women to domesticity and debility, more vigorous roles for women were defined. Nina Baym and others have noted the sturdiness often exhibited by the heroines of domestic novels, and Jane P. Tompkins stresses the power and cultural work achieved by popular writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frances B. Cogan shows that to counteract signs of sickliness and passivity among women, antebellum health advisers and popular writers held up the ideal of the tough, active woman—what Cogan calls the Real Woman. In health literature, this movement flowered in works like Dr. Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children (1863). In popular fiction, it gave rise to spirited heroines with the physical capabilities of men. For

...the prose tradition had died two centuries before and the recreation of a full canon of all-purpose Scots was beyond even Scott's skill, nor did he attempt it, except, perhaps in the magnificent Wandering Willie's Tale. He took the only course open to him, of writing his narrative in English and using Scots only for those who, given their social class, would still be speaking it: daft Davie Gellatley in Waverley, the gypsies and Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering, the Headriggs in Old Mortality, Edie Ochiltree and the fisher-folk of Musselcrag in The Antiquary, Andrew Fairservice in Rob Roy, the Deanses in The Heart of Midlothian, Meg Dods in St. Ronan's Well, and so on. The procedure gave reality to the Scots characters whose ways and ethos it was Scott's main purpose to portray, and the author in his best English, which lumbered along rather badly at times, did little more than lay out the setting for the action and act as impressario for the characters as they played their roles... ...Scott's felicity in conveying character and action through their Scots speech inspired his imitators for the next hundred years - Susan Ferrier, Hogg, Macdonald, Stevenson, Barrie, Crockett, Alexander, George Douglas, and John Buchan. The tradition of narrative in standard English and dialogue in various degrees of dialect has been the usual procedure since.

In a 1997 showdown billed as the final battle for supremacy between natural and artificial intelligence, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue evaluated two hundred million positions per second. That is a tiny fraction of possible chess positions—the number of possible game sequences is more than atoms in the observable universe—but plenty enough to beat the best human. According to Kasparov, “Today the free chess app on your mobile phone is stronger than me.” He is not being rhetorical. “Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.