Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn't a chance.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.

I don't think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.

But the rational mind usually doesn't decide what emotions we "should" have !

There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. The word is 'pizzled': it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off.