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When your attempt rate is high, each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.
Few people know or care about your missteps—romantic or otherwise. Ultimately, it’s your successes that stand out.
Accepting failure doesn’t just make risk-taking easier. In a surprising number of instances, it’s the only reliable path to success.
The more solutions you generate, the more likely you are to stumble upon a winning combination that lives on, because it is considered both novel and useful.
When practice is effortless, Coyle argues, learning stops. It’s by walking the precipice between your current abilities and the skills just beyond your reach that growth happens.
Failure, per se, is not enough. The important thing is to mine the failure for insight that can improve your next attempt.
When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout.
When the consequences of reporting failure are too severe, employees avoid acknowledging mistakes altogether. But when a work environment feels psychologically safe and mistakes are viewed as a natural part of the learning process, employees are less prone to covering them up. The fascinating implication is that fearful teams avoid examining the causes of their blunders, making it all the more likely that their mistakes will be repeated again in the future.
Sometimes the best way to minimize failure is to embrace it with open arms.
Small, frequent pleasures can keep us happy longer than large, infrequent ones.
the mere exposure effect and argue that our minds are designed to distrust the unfamiliar.
As writer C. S. Lewis once observed, “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with another person, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
Entering an organization is like joining a party that has been going on without you for years.
Shared activities catalyze workplace friendships in ways few interactions can. They foster proximity between employees who rarely meet, boost their level of familiarity with one another, highlight similarity of interests, and leverage informal, nonwork environments to prompt self-disclosure.
when we experience a rush of adrenaline in the company of others, we like them more, and even find them more attractive.
Superordinate goals
Shared celebrations over a recent marriage engagement, a major birthday, or a recent promotion can magnify positive emotions and strengthen the fabric of a group’s bond. The occasional order of cupcakes won’t break the bank.
reactance. It’s what happens when you feel your freedom or control is threatened. You’re motivated to try and restore it, often by defying the very instructions you have been given.
our memory and concentration tend to be sharpest in the morning and that we are better at seeing abstract connections between ideas later in the day, when we are fatigued. We know that hand-eye coordination and physical strength peak in the late afternoon. We know that the human mind is not very good at focusing for an extended period of time and that ninety minutes pushes the limit of what we can comfortably absorb.
One reason that recognition is vital to doing good work is that it feeds our need for competence. When we receive positive feedback, we experience an emotional rush. Competence is inherently motivating, which is why feeling like you’re good at your job leads you to invest even more of yourself in your work.
Grow people’s experience of competence and you’ll inevitably grow their engagement.
Our interests flow from our successes.
feedback is most effective when it is provided immediately.
Organizational Culture and Leadership, Schein
For behaviors that are worthy of acknowledgment but are inconsistent with the ideal workplace culture, use private recognition.
The more attuned employees are to their organization’s story—past and future—the easier it is for them to take pride in playing a role.
