In 1986, as I prepared for life beyond graduate school, I read an article in the newspaper about plans for the San Jose Technology Museum. It sounded like a fascinating place to work and, after endless calls, I managed to get an interview. I arrived for the lunch meeting, sat down and opened my menu. ...

Trying new things requires a willingness to take risks. However, risk taking is not binary. You probably feel comfortable taking some types of risks and find other types quite uncomfortable. In fact, you might not even see the risks that are comfortable for you to take, discounting their riskiness, but are likely to amplify the ...

Most of our interactions with others are essentially a series of negotiations, and we do ourselves a huge disservice by not knowing the basic tenets. We negotiate with our friends about what to do on Saturday night, we negotiate with our family about who does the dishes and who pays the bills, we negotiate with ...

Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, has studied luck and found that lucky people share traits that tend to make them luckier than others. First, lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them ...

As someone who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford, I know a great deal about what it takes to start a new venture. And, based on the years when I changed my boyfriends like my socks, I now realize that these are the same tools that are required to launch a new relationship. First, you ...

It is all in your head; that is, the way we each see the world around us is determined by how we engage with it. This message was driven home to me in an unexpected way. A few years ago I took a creative writing class in which the professor asked us to describe the ...