"He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? [...]
“Teachers are losing the education war because our adolescents are distracted by the social world. Naturally, students don’t see it that way. It wasn’t their choice to get endless instruction on topics that don’t seem relevant to them. They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn [...]
“That is how learning to read begins—first people read to you, then they read with you, and finally they give up because you have taken control of your own reading and don’t want anyone else to interfere. Usually it happens remarkably quickly, so smoothly that it is rarely noticed. [...]
“It is amazing how easy it is to influence people’s behavior using these friendship tools [the eyebrow flash, the authentic smile and the head tilt]. Alone or in combination, they allow you to make people feel better about themselves and, in turn, encourage them to make you feel better [...]
“Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain. That is, scientists have discovered a particular kind of nerve fiber in people’s skin—especially [...]
“… the most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech.” p. viii “Given that verbs typically account for 20 percent of all words in a language, this [focusing on just the most frequent verbs] may be a good strategy. Also, a focus on function words may be equally [...]