Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we’re making smart, rational choices. But are we? In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely...
The Wander: The Last American Slave Ship and The Conspiracy that Set Its Sails “Calonius brings to life this extraordinary story, from the luxurious yacht club salons and Southern courtrooms to the Congo, in an account that reveals the complicated legacy of slave trading, one that has yet to be sorted out in contemporary America.” –Booklist On Nov. 28, 1858, a ship called theWanderer slipped silently into a coastal channel and unloaded a cargo...
How do the most extraordinary entrepreneurs create a bold vision for the future-and follow through against all setbacks? Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison are the stuff of legend. Yet we still fumble in describing what they actually do. Drawing on recent insights from neuroscience about the roles that intuition, emotional intelligence, and courage can play, Ten Steps Ahead reveals what makes visionaries tick and how they develop and use their extraordinary powers....
Similes are important thinking tools. We say that something is like something else–and in that moment we transfer our understanding of one thing to another. “This city, like a garment, wears the beauty of the morning,” wrote Shakespeare. But sometimes similes can lead us astray. Consider this: Recently Daniel Akerson, the new CEO of GM took a ride in a new GM Volt. Emerging with a smile he took to the podium to describe...
Whenever I hear people talk about starting their own business, I feel that they are missing one thing: the courage they’re going to need to get the enterprise up and flying. To be sure, some businesses take wing immediately. But most of them struggle. The real secret, though, is that the struggle is never over. You have to keep on fighting. In fact, successful people who put their businesses on autopilot are often asleep...
In the film Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character has just lost her job at a public relations firm. As she descends into the subway, she hesitates as she steps around a girl playing with a doll. From then on the story splits down two paths. In one, the momentary hesitation causes her to miss her train. She hails a taxi instead. A thug grabs her handbag. She fights back and winds up in the...
In my new book, Ten Steps Ahead, I describe the qualities that many successful business visionaries have in common. These include insight, intuition, luck. And then there is courage. When people look at the most iconic visionaries–let’s say Steve Jobs or Richard Branson–they marvel at their success, but often forget the courage those individuals had to get where they are today. Why is courage often forgotten? Because by the time we recognize these individuals...
I just returned from a short vacation to Miami, and it’s funny–when you think about visionaries–how they seem to pop up everywhere. In this case I was standing in front of a Cuban restaurant, and looking up, noticed that the name was “Larios.” Well “Larios” on Miami Beach is owned by singer Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio. That thought took me back several years, to 1987, in fact, when I was the Miami...
In an earlier post, I quoted Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was replying to a question about the nuclear reactor crisis in Japan. “My intuition is that this is a terrible situation, and it is only going to get worse,” he said on March 17. “There may not be any way to deal with it.” In the days following that prediction, the reactor situation seemed to be improving. I began...
I’ve written a lot about Steve Jobs, but this post is about another kind of apple: the juicy red kind. The kind that sometimes falls from trees–and sometimes bumps us on the head–and sometimes causes us to recognize profound thoughts. What am I talking about? Well, the apple that fell from a tree in 1666, bumped Sir Isaac Newton on the noggin and caused him to arrive at his grand theory of gravity. Newton’s...
The Goode Word reviews Ten Steps Ahead: Erik Calonius has done us all the service of interviewing an array of incredibly successful business people,analyzing the lives and choices of key visionaries among us, then comparing his findings to the latest research in brain function. The results are surprising. The folks he has observed: Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic Airways), Walt Disney, Edwin Catmull (the guy who developed the Pixar movie concept), and...
Dreamers stay in bed–and dream. But successful business visionaries get their dreams out into the world where they can become successes. How? It’s not easy. Most new ideas seem silly at first. Especially the big ones. But here’s a story that may inspire you. At the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution a young man named James Watt invented a new, improved steam engine. When he went around to sell his idea, however, he...
