Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World

by Yuval Noah Harari

growing up is even harder for humans because we’re not sure what we need to learn. Lions run and hunt zebras, dolphins swim and catch fish, eagles fly and build nests — what do humans do?

Humans have so many options! That’s why being a human is really confusing.

But no matter what you end up doing, it’s good to know why humans have so many options in the first place. It’s because we rule planet Earth.

This is one of the big laws of life: small changes that nobody notices accumulate over time and become big changes.

Each single drop makes only a tiny difference, but after millions of drops, it turns out that persistent water is stronger than solid rock.

Eagles fly because they have wings. Humans fly because they know how to cooperate in large numbers. This is what makes us so powerful.

our superpower is something we use all the time. We just don’t think of it as a superpower. Many people even see it as a weakness. It is — drumroll, please! — our ability to dream up stuff that isn’t really there and to tell all kinds of imaginary stories. We’re the only animals that can invent and believe in legends, fairy tales and myths.

Well, the useful thing about stories is that no matter how ridiculous they are, they help large numbers of people cooperate. If thousands of people believe in the same story, then they’ll all follow the same rules, which means they can cooperate effectively, even with strangers. Thanks to stories, Sapiens cooperate much better than Neanderthals or chimpanzees or ants.

people need stories in order to cooperate, and they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe. That’s why we’re far more powerful than ants. That’s our superpower.