"Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell … - Jonah Lehrer

There is something scary about letting ourselves go. It means that we will screw up, that we will relinquish the possibility of perfection. It means that we will say things we didn’t mean to say and express feelings we can’t explain. It means that we will be onstage and not have complete control, that we won’t know what we’re going to play until we begin, until the bow is drawn across the strings. While this spontaneous method might be frightening, it’s also an extremely valuable source of creativity…the lesson about letting go is that we contain our own creativity. We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all.

t. He decided to raise the next generation of baby
monkeys with two different pretend mothers. One was a wire
mother, formed out of wire mesh, while the other was a mother
made out of soft terry cloth. Harlow assumed that all things being
equal, the babies would prefer the cloth mothers, since they
would be able to cuddle with the fabric. To make the experiment
more interesting, Harlow added a slight twist to a few of the
cages. Instead of hand-feeding some babies, he put their milk bottles in the hands of the wire mothers. His question was simple:
what was more important, food or affection? Which mother
would the babies want more?
In the end, it wasn't even close. No matter which mother held
the milk, the babies always preferred the cloth mothers. The
monkeys would run over to the wire mothers and quickly sate
their hunger before immediately returning to the comforting folds
of cloth.

Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the
profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests
$4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive
than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?