Category: ideas

“No part of the bottle is wasted for these subliminal mind tricks. Even that little piece of metal at the top of the bottle gets jazzed up with a fancy print, a sophisticated stripe or subtle sparkles”

“The reason why adverts manage to imprint brand names on our brains is that our lips and the tongue automatically simulate the pronunciation of a new name when we first hear it.” But not if we’re eating popcorn.

“Our brains can make cognitive leaps when we are not completely obsessed with a challenge, which is why good ideas sometimes come to us while we are in the shower, or taking a walk or a long drive.”

“How does someone not yet often online, but likely to be soon, regard technological threats to his or her privacy? Do new users of digital technologies have less fluency with digital norms, and less facility with privacy protections?”

“Certainly, there is always a possibility to turn creative thoughts into successful ventures, but more often than not it takes a hefty amount of struggle, talent, persistence, money, connections, some luck, and a good, original idea to realize that success. This Horatio Alger-esque belief that all it takes is personal willpower to overcome life’s obstacles is endearing, but it often has little to do with reality.”

“The pursuit of cool winds up an exhausting chase for a quick high, with trendsetters and tastemakers forced to jump from one drug to the next. … Cool is a sword to live and die by, a binary system that pits you against others. It requires not only love, but hate: a rejection of the mainstream. Or the alternative. Whatever.”

“For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard’s more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It’s clear, though, that students are also lured in by [the professor’s] bold promise: ‘This course will change your life.’ His students tell me it is true” – which may be why the course is the third most popular at the entire university.

“Researchers found that participants were more likely to prefer choices in situations in which they had previously received positive performance feedback or felt competent because of prior experience. The results provided evidence of a relationship between competence and choice.”

“But what is cool in 2013, and why are we still using this term for what scholar Peter Stearns pegged as ‘a twentieth-century emotional style’? … You’d be unlikely to use other decades-old slang – groovy or rad or fly – to endorse any current cultural object, at least with a straight face, but somehow cool remains evergreen.

“What we’re seeing now is literally a shift in the way that people do business–a shift from hierarchical architectures to networked architectures.”