personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day. - Adam Grant

Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese — people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. With print, you naturally slow down at the start of a paragraph to process the core idea and use paragraph breaks and headers to chunk information.

At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious — and the higher they score on these dimensions, the more professional success they attain.

Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that kind of listening is.