You need to create a 30-minute buffer between the end of your work time and sleep time.

Few people make a living as a public speaker but many people build it into their career. A career is like a suit of clothes: to look its best, it must be tailored and accessorized. So whatever career you choose, let's say it's social work - you can, for example, ask your boss - if you can give talks at housing project community centers about the social services available.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

Behaviorism is sometimes criticized as encouraging unethical behavior. For example, most organizations offer rewards for increasing revenue and threat of punishment, perhaps firing if you don't "make your number."

We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

As a writer, you have control: You can play around with your own thoughts and when you find those insufficient, draw upon others': their wisdom, their humor, their failings.

I'm one of the many people for whom coffee helps but often, inattention is a symptom of something else: for example, that you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep.