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Our disaster personalities are more complex and ancient than we think. But they are also more malleable.
Amanda Ripley -
The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.
Amanda Ripley
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In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone. The lesson wasn't that sports couldn't coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education.
Amanda Ripley -
Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.
Amanda Ripley -
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.
Amanda Ripley -
If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable...,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative... That search is a survival mechanism.
Amanda Ripley -
People help way more than we expect, way more than makes sense. But when you talk to people called heroes, they often say they did it for themselves. In one case, a hero said that the cost of not doing it is so great, the sense of shame, when he knew that he was strong enough, that the fear of not doing anything was more frightening than the fear of dying.
Amanda Ripley -
Narrative is the beginning of recovery.
Amanda Ripley
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It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.
Amanda Ripley -
Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country—every one—still had work to do.
Amanda Ripley