Work and Productivity
Extrinsic Motivation: when outside recognition gives you the push
You perform better when there's a clear reward or recognition involved: goals, incentives or outside validation give you the push you need.…
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Blog: page 4
Work and Productivity
Intrinsic Motivation: when interest moves you, not the reward
Intrinsic motivation moves you through interest and meaning in the task itself, more than through any external reward it might bring. When…
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Work and Productivity
Mixed Motivation: When Genuine Interest and Recognition Combine
Both genuine interest and outside recognition sustain you. It's a common result: almost nobody runs on a single type of motivation.
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Emotional Intelligence
Personal Motivation: Using Your Emotions to Pursue Goals
Almost everyone starts out keen. What sets apart the people who make it to the end is rarely more enthusiasm.
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Emotional Intelligence
How to Read Wounded Pride Without Saying a Word: Talleyrand's Lesson
Talleyrand staged two fake hunts, one right after the other, to play a joke on the most powerful man in France. According to the most widel…
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Business and Decisions
Accommodating Negotiator: Prioritizing the Relationship Over the Outcome
The accommodating negotiator style prioritizes the relationship over the outcome: it yields easily to keep the peace with the other party.…
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Business and Decisions
Collaborative Negotiator: Solutions That Benefit Both Sides
The collaborative negotiator style looks for solutions that benefit both sides: it understands the other party's interests before proposing…
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Business and Decisions
Competitive Negotiator: Prioritizing Your Own Outcome
The competitive negotiator style prioritizes its own outcome: it defends its position firmly, even at the cost of some tension. Negotiation…
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Business and Decisions
Compromising Negotiator: Looking for a Reasonable Middle Ground
The compromising negotiator style looks for a reasonable middle ground for both sides: it gives up something in exchange for the other side…
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Business and Decisions
Avoidant Negotiator: Dodging Conflict Rather Than Facing It
The avoidant negotiator style prefers to dodge conflict: it postpones or avoids negotiation rather than facing it directly. Research calls…
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Big Five
Neuroticism: The Personality Trait Behind Emotional Reactivity
Neuroticism, or its flip side, emotional stability, is the personality dimension that describes how often and how intensely someone experie…
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Big Five
Openness: The Personality Trait Behind Curiosity and Imagination
Openness to experience is one of the five dimensions of the Big Five. It's the trait that defines originality, the breadth and complexity o…
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Love Languages
Words of Affirmation: Loving Out Loud
Words of affirmation: when love is said out loud For people whose main language is words of affirmation, explicitly hearing what's valued a…
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Self-Awareness
Self-Oriented Perfectionism: When You Set the Bar Yourself
Selforiented perfectionism: exigency pointed inward Selforiented perfectionism describes people who set themselves a higher bar than they s…
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Self-Awareness
Other-Oriented Perfectionism: When Your Own Yardstick Becomes Everyone Else's
Otheroriented perfectionism: the same exigency, pointed outward Otheroriented perfectionism is the second of the three dimensions described…
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Self-Awareness
Socially Prescribed Perfectionism: The Pressure of Feeling Everyone Expects Perfection From You
Socially prescribed perfectionism: when the pressure comes (or seems to come) from outside Socially prescribed perfectionism is the third d…
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Business and Decisions
Analytical Profile: Needing Information Before Taking On Risk
The analytical profile doesn't shy away from risk: it needs to understand it before taking it on, and only decides once the picture is reas…
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Business and Decisions
Risk-Taker Profile: When Uncertainty Feels More Appealing Than Certainty
The risktaker profile prefers the possibility of a big gain over the certainty of a small one: uncertainty doesn't paralyze it, it energize…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Leaning Toward Caution: When Expecting the Worst Prepares You Better
Leaning toward caution: anticipating the worst as strategy, not defeat Imagining the worst isn't always pessimism. Sometimes it's the strat…
3 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Conservative Profile: Why Avoiding Loss Outweighs Gaining
The conservative profile puts safety ahead of the chance to gain more: avoiding loss weighs more heavily in the decision than the opportuni…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
The Balanced Profile: Moving Between the Plan and Improvisation
The balanced profile: when a plan helps and when it gets in the way The balanced profile describes people whose need for certainty, what ps…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Leaning Toward Spontaneity: Why You Feel at Ease Without a Fixed Plan
The spontaneous profile: uncertainty doesn't paralyze For many people, leaving a decision open causes anxiety. For this profile, much less…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Leaning Toward Structure: Why You Need a Plan to Feel Settled
Calm arrives after the plan If there's a clear plan on the table, you breathe easy. If there isn't, the first thing you do, almost without…
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Self-Awareness
The Flexible Profile: High Standards Without Perfectionism's Rigidity
The flexible profile: exigency that drives you instead of paralyzing you The flexible profile is the fourth possible result of our perfecti…
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Business and Decisions
Moderate Profile: Finding the Balance Between Safety and Opportunity
The moderate profile isn't indifference: it's an active management of risk that spreads and adjusts according to context, instead of always…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
The Optimistic Profile: Expecting Things to Work Out, Without Naivety
The stable expectation that you'll manage The optimism in this profile isn't about denying problems. It's the stable expectation that, in g…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Leaning Toward Realism: Building Expectations From the Data
Letting the data set the expectation You don't decide in advance whether something will go well or badly. You'd rather wait and see the dat…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Future-Oriented Perspective: You Organize Your Present Around Your Goals
What you do today looks ahead Almost nothing you do today lacks a reason that points further down the road. The futureoriented perspective…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Past-Positive Perspective: When the Past Keeps Shaping Your Present
The past as an active source of meaning For you, the past isn't a closed archive you check now and then. It's a source of meaning that keep…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Present-Focused Perspective: Living the Now With Intensity
Where life happens For many people, the present is just the required passage to something else: the goal, the result, the after. Not for yo…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Reflective Perspective: Learning From the Past Without Letting It Hold You Back
The past doesn't hold you back, it informs you There's a subtle but important difference between getting stuck in what went wrong and learn…
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Lifestyle and Attitudes
Phubbing: Why Ignoring Someone for Your Phone Weighs More Than We Think
Being always connected and, at the same time, at a distance from the person right beside us: that's the paradox the word "phubbing" names t…
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Work and Productivity
Steady Planner: low procrastination and sustained progress
Your tendency to procrastinate is low: you tend to start with room to spare and move forward steadily, without relying on lastminute pressu…
3 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
Name It to Tame It: Putting Words to What You Feel
Psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel and psychotherapist Tina Payne Bryson, in The WholeBrain Child (2011), describe a simple technique for handli…
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Attachment Style
Why Can Swapping 'I Need You' for 'I Prefer You' Help You Out of a Dependent Relationship?
"I'm sorry, but you are not my happiness. No, you're not, and that's why I'm setting myself free.
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Relationships and Social Life
Why Telling Your Partner Everything Isn't Always an Act of Love, According to Walter Riso
"Honesty is the foundation of a good relationship" is one of the least questioned lines about romantic love. Walter Riso gathers several re…
6 min readRead
Attachment Style
Why You Think This Pain Will Last Forever (And Why It Almost Never Does)
Why You Think This Pain Will Last Forever In the middle of a recent breakup, it's almost impossible to believe that this will ever hurt les…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Selective Honesty: The Sincere Gesture That Disarmed Al Capone
In 1926, a man who introduced himself as a count asked Al Capone for 50,000 dollars. Two months later he walked back into Capone's office a…
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Relationships and Social Life
Why God Told Moses He Had No Name, According to Erich Fromm
When Moses asks God what he should call him before his people, the answer he gets, according to Erich Fromm, marks one of the most importan…
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Self-Awareness
Why Two Strangers Raised in the Same House End Up Nothing Alike in Intelligence
Two identical twins, separated at birth and raised by families that never met, end up more alike in IQ than two ordinary siblings who grew…
6 min readRead
Love Languages
Why 69% of Relationship Conflicts Never Really Get Solved
Two types of conflict, not one John Gottman, after years of following real couples in his research at the University of Washington, arrived…
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Learning Style
Why the Adult Brain Keeps Making New Neurons
The short answer is that, at least in one region of the brain, the hippocampus, most of the data indicate that neurons do keep forming in a…
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Learning Style
Why Stress Blocks Memory
Anyone who has ever blanked on an important exam, or struggled to recall something obvious in the middle of a tense argument, has experienc…
7 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Why the End of Summer Hits Your Brain Harder Than Winter Itself
In late September, long before any real cold arrives, something starts to shift inside the brain. And according to a recent scientific revi…
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Business and Decisions
Why Praise Seems to Backfire and Scolding Seems to Work
A veteran flight instructor once told Daniel Kahneman that his praise made cadets worse and his yelling made them better. Kahneman recounts…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Why Even Isaac Newton Lost a Fortune in the First Great Stock Market Bubble
In the summer of 1720, the most traded stock in England represented no real business at all: it represented public debt disguised as opport…
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Business and Decisions
Does Reading Words About Old Age Really Make You Walk Slower?
In 1996, psychologist John Bargh published an experiment in which forming sentences with words related to old age made twentyyearold studen…
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Attachment Style
Does Rushing to Fill the Void Sabotage Grief After a Breakup? (The Empty Valley of the Tao Te Ching)
Does Rushing to Fill the Void Sabotage Grief? The first impulse after a breakup is almost never to sit still with the emptiness: it's to co…
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Self-Awareness
Why Did Science Find That Narcissists Don't Secretly Hate Themselves?
For years, the commonsense explanation for narcissism was that, deep down, every narcissist hates themselves. The research Kristin Neff rev…
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Relationships and Social Life
Why Winning a World Cup Moves Us So Much, Explained by Psychology
July 19, 2026, minute 106 of the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Ferran Torres pokes a loose ball home inside the box, Sp…
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