You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right? - Malcolm Gladwell

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.

You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.