One of the key fears we all have is fear that this is the wrong time to start whatever our project is, and we should wait until the time is right. Tim Ferriss, author of the bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek, has this to say about timing: For all the most important things, the timing is always wrong. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. 'Someday' is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it's important to you and you want to do it 'eventually,' just do it and correct course along the way. If you wait for the timing to be right before you make a move, you may never make a move at all.

The biggest game-changer in our future is life prolongation. It works for mice and worms, and surely it will work for the rest of us some day. Biologists are now tinkering with so-called anti-aging substances, trying to get you the benefit of life prolongation. But, life gets its edge from the possibility of its ending. What will life be like when we live forever? No one dies. No one gets older. No more evolution. No need to hurry. If you want something done, give it to a busy man, but nobody needs to be busy when you have forever. Who is going to do the real work, then? Chosen people who will volunteer or be volunteered to be mortal. Life without death changes absolutely everything. If we want things to stay as they are, then things will have to change.

In Western culture, playing the masculine role has traditionally required traits such as independence, assertiveness, and dominance. Females are expected to be more nurturing and sensitive to other people. Are these masculine and feminine roles universal? Could biological differences between the sexes lead inevitably to gender differences in behavior? In 1935, anthropologist Margaret Mead compared the gender roles adopted by people in three tribal societies on the island of New Guinea, and her observations are certainly thought-provoking. In the Arapesh tribe, both men and women were taught to play what we would regard as a feminine role: They were cooperative, non-aggressive, and sensitive to the needs of others. Both men and women of the Mundugumor tribe were brought up to be aggressive and emotionally unresponsive to other people - a masculine pattern of behavior by Western standards. Finally, the Tchambuli tribe displayed a pattern of gender-role development that was the direct opposite of the Western pattern: Males were passive, emotionally dependent, and socially sensitive, whereas females were dominant, independent, and assertive.

In college, McCormack was a pretty amazing golfer. One day, he had the good fortune to play against future golfing legend Arnold Palmer. After his collegiate golf days, McCormack got a law degree, and his friend Palmer turned to him for legal advice. At the time, athletes were not the constant presence in pop culture and advertising as they are today. But McCormack noticed that professional athletes were like actors. And he recognized that they had adoring fans who wanted to meet them in person and, possibly, use the products they used. As a lawyer, he understood how agencies helped get endorsements for their actors. Using that model, he arranged for Palmer to play golf with heads of companies to connect his image with products just like actors did. Before long, Palmer's income jumped. Other golfers signed on, and McCormack created IMG, the first major sports management agency.

William H. Whyte turned video cameras on a number of spaces in New York City, watching to see how people used the spaces. He made a number of fascinating findings, and he had the video evidence to back them up. Even in the crowded city, he found that many urban spaces were usually deserted; people flocked to a few busy plazas even when they were planning to sit alone. Why? The most common activity among people observed by Whyte turning out to be watching other people. And it was also found that people liked to be watched! Whyte expected lovers to be found in private, isolated spaces, but most often they sat or stood right in the center of things for everyone to see. Further, people having private conversations would stand in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to step around them.

The decline in manufacturing will inevitably bring about a new protectionism. The first reaction to a period of turbulence is to try to build a wall that shields one's own garden from the cold winds outside. But such walls no longer protect businesses that do not meet world standards. It will only make them more vulnerable. The best example is Mexico, which had a deliberate policy of building its domestic economy independent of the outside world. It did this not only by building high walls of protectionism to keep foreign competition out, but by practically forbidding its own companies to export. This attempt to create a purely Mexican economy failed. Mexico actually became increasingly dependent on imports from other countries. It was finally obliged to open itself to the outside world.

The above graph shows the number of patent applications from China, the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Patent Office from 1990 to 2011. Between 1990 and 2005, Japan had the largest number of patent applications while the United States had the second largest. However, the United States overtook Japan in 2006, and had more than 400,000 patent applications. The combined number of patent applications in South Korea and the European Patent Office in 2011 was smaller than the number of patent applications in the United States in the same year. While the European Patent Office had the third largest number of patent applications in 1990, it had the least number of patent applications in 2011. What is noticeable is that the number of patent applications in China soared dramatically from 2003 to 2011, surpassing that of the United States in 2011.

Without question saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. Out of 100,000 to 250,000 handpicked plants, one pound of saffron is yielded. First found in the Near East in Asia Minor, it was used by the Persians as both a flavor enhancer and dye. The blue-violet and lily shaped flowers of the plant appear in autumn. At the center of these flowers are three blood-red stigmas, which are the saffron threads that form the spice. It is better to buy the stigma rather than powdered saffron because the powder may be already mixed with other ingredients. Very little should be used, not only because of the expense, but because too much can emit a medicinal taste. In Indian cooking it is used in pilafs and biryani dishes. Saffron is also found on the foreheads of Indian women denoting their social class.

The relationship between physical products and individual ownership is undergoing a profound evolution. We don't want the CD; we want the music it plays. We don't want the disc; we want the storage it holds. We don't want the answering machine; we want the messages it saves. We don't want the DVD; we want the movie it carries. In other words, we want not the stuff but the needs or experiences it fulfills. As our possessions dematerialize into the intangible, our preconceptions of ownership are changing, creating a dotted line between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. This shift is fueling a world where usage has more value than possession, and as Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, puts it, where access is better than ownership.

Scientists and educators have long sought to understand the emergence of expertise, artistic and otherwise. Many researchers have argued that exceptional achievement can simply come down to hard work. Studies of eminent scientists in the 1950s supported this view by underscoring the individuals' capacity for endurance, concentration and commitment to effortful practice. Benjamin Bloom, an education psychologist, wrote in 1985 that none of his subjects achieved expertise without a supportive environment and a long and intensive period of training. This education came first from encouraging instructors and later from demanding master teachers. A few years later psychologist K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University conducted studies of experts in piano, violin, chess, or athletics. The investigations revealed that a person's level of achievement correlated strongly with the amount of practice put in.

In the command-and-control management model, plans were considered destiny. Top management formulated exacting plans for every aspect of operations and then kept everything under tight control to meet the plan. All too often, however, plans were derailed by unanticipated events. Planning is no longer the exclusive domain of top management; it now typically involves those who carry out the plans because they are closer to the customer. Planning experts, who recommend strategic agility, say managers need to balance planned action with flexibility to take advantage of opportunities. A good analogy of this would be an improvisational comedy act. The standup comic has a plan for the introduction, structure of the act, some tried-and-true jokes, and closing remarks. Within this planned framework, the comic will play off the audience's input and improvise as necessary.

Let's think about flipping a coin. If you get ten heads in a row, what is the likelihood that the next flip will be heads? Don't be fooled ― it's 50 percent, the same as it is on any single coin flip. Most people think the chances of getting heads will actually be lower than 50 percent ― the opposite of momentum. They know they should see roughly the same number of heads as tails (50-50), so they feel that if they have seen ten heads in a row, they are due for a tails. A tails has to emerge. But it doesn't. There is no law of averages. If the process is random, there is no predictability. This is also what drives the gambler's fallacy. Gamblers on losing streaks erroneously believe they are due for a win and keep gambling, thinking that their luck has to even out. But if the whole thing is random, you aren't due for anything. Your chances haven't changed at all.

If you have ever had a sip of the bitters, you would probably frown just thinking about it. According to a study from researchers at Brooklyn College, the horrible taste does more than that. Researchers had fifty-seven students rate their moral distaste for several morally dubious acts, such as politicians taking bribes, students cheating on tests, and the like. Before they started rating the acts, the students drank shots of one of three drinks: bitter tasting liquid, sweet beverage, or water. On a 100point scale, with 100 being the worst rating for a morally reprehensible act, the students who drank the bitter liquid gave the acts an average rating of 78; those who drank the sweet beverage gave an average of 60; and the water group gave an average of 62. The ratings of the sweet beverage and water groups were statistically the same, but the bitter liquid group rating was significantly higher. This study suggests that the bad taste increases people's moral disapproval.

When a certain word which is to be defined crops up in its own definition, we call it a circular definition. The point of defining a term is to explain its meaning; this obviously cannot be achieved if you need already to understand the meaning of the term in order to understand the definition. Circular definitions, then, miss the point of definition. For example, to define stress as the physiological and psychological responses to stressful situations would be to give a circular definition. This is because stressful situations are presumably only recognizable from the fact that they tend to produce stress: but the meaning of stress is the very thing which someone requesting the definition is seeking to understand, and so should not be presupposed in the definition. To define philosophy as the activity carried out by philosophers would be another example of a circular definition.

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. For instance, feeling secure is an important component of happiness. The sense of security can be improved by installing strong locks on the front door, moving to a safer neighborhood, or exerting political pressure on city hall for more police protection. All these different responses are aimed at bringing conditions in the environment more in line with our goals. On the other hand, we can feel more secure by modifying our definition of security. If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of spoiling happiness.

In 1985, Garold Stasser and William Titus conducted a study that challenged the idea that group decisions are more informed than individual decisions. They created four-person groups and asked them to make a decision. The scholars compared the team decision quality with the choices made by individuals given the same information. When all team members possessed the same information, the group decision exceeded the quality of individual choices. However, the scholars then created a scenario in which each member possessed unique information that his or her colleagues did not have. To arrive at the optimal decision, individuals needed to share their privately held information. The results showed that groups were more likely to endorse an inferior option after discussion than were their individual members before discussion. The scholars surmised that the groups must have had difficulties surfacing all privately held information.

Because of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities. Attributes and values are passed down from parents to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA, but also through shared cultural norms. Language, for example, is usually vertical, since most people who speak Greek raise their children to speak Greek, too. Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group, which is called a horizontal identity. Such identities may reflect recessive genes, or values and preferences that a child does not share with his ancestors. Criminal behavior is often horizontal; most criminals are not raised by gangsters and must invent their own deceptive character. So are conditions such as autism and intellectual disability.

Drawing a line is making a distinction between two categories which only differ in degree. Where there is a continuum, such as that between rich and poor, for some purposes, such as deciding who should be eligible for tax relief, it is necessary to draw a line between what is to count as rich and what as poor. Sometimes the fact that a line could have been drawn elsewhere is taken as evidence that we should not draw a line at all, or that the line that has been drawn has no force; in most contexts this view is wrong. For example, in Britain the speed limit in builtup areas is 30 miles per hour (mph); it could have been fixed at 25 mph or 35 mph. However, it in no way follows from this that we should ignore the speed limit, once the line between speeding and driving safely has been set.

For years, Switzerland had been trying to find a place to store radioactive nuclear waste. One location designated as a potential nuclear waste site was the small village of Wolfenschiessen. In 1993, some economists surveyed the residents of the village, asking whether they would vote to accept a nuclear waste repository, if the Swiss parliament decided to build it there. Although the facility was widely viewed as an undesirable addition to the neighborhood, a slim majority (51 percent) of residents said they would accept it. Apparently their sense of civic duty outweighed their concern about the risks. Then the economists added a sweetener: suppose parliament offered to compensate each resident with an annual monetary payment. Then would you favor it? The result: support went down, not up. Adding the financial incentive cut the rate of acceptance in half, from 51 to 25 percent. Even when the economists increased the monetary offer, the result was unchanged. Why would more people accept nuclear waste for free than for pay? Standard economic analysis suggests that offering people money to accept a burden would increase, not decrease their willingness to do so. But the economists who led the study point out that the price effect is sometimes invalidated by ethical considerations. For villagers, willingness to accept the nuclear waste site reflected public spirit ―a recognition that the country as a whole depended on nuclear energy and that the nuclear waste had to be stored somewhere. Against the background of this civic commitment, the offer of cash to residents of the village felt like a bribe, an effort to buy their vote.