Young Artist Sees People in Whole New Light

In his book My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok's main character is an awakening artist, beginning to see the world with a different perspective. The author ...

Blacksmith's Ancient Swords Illustrate Excellence

In his book Deep Work, author Cal Newport provides an example of excellence—a blacksmith from Wisconsin named Ric Furrer. Furrer specializes in ...

Your Heart Always Follows Your Money

Suppose you buy shares of General Motors. What happens? You suddenly develop interest in GM. You check the financial pages. You see a magazine article ...

Leonardo da Vinci—How to Be Insatiably Curious

The human brain weighs three pounds. It is the size of a softball, and yet with it we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute ...

What Actors Have Done to Prepare for a Role

For her role in Black Swan, Natalie Portman trained with New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers for eight hours a day, six days a week for the ...

Mozart Worked Hard to Be Creative

In 1815, Germany's General Music Journal published a letter in which allegedly Mozart described his creative process:

When I am, as it were, completely ...

Novelist John Grisham's Road to Writing

American novelist John Grisham was an attorney who hated his job. He wanted to become an author, but he didn't know where to begin. Finally, he decided ...

Pet Rock Inventor Regrets Invention

In the mid-'70s, an unknown editor named Gary Dahl was talking with his friends, who were complaining about all the work involved in caring for pets—feeding ...

Workers Fake Happiness Around the Boss

An article in The Wall Street Journal points to research that proves what many workers already know: employees fake a positive outlook when the boss is ...

Why a Popular Cheer Often Backfires

One of today's most popular sports cheers was first chanted in 1999 during the fourth quarter of an Army-Navy football game. The six-word cheer—I ...