How to Make a Difference: Part 1

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. It's an old saying, but it captures a fundamental truth about human nature. How often have you come by people who fail to seize the opportunities in front of them, who decline to make the most of the privileges they've been given? If you're a parent or a teacher, you may have sometimes felt like saying to a kid, I can't make you want it.

If you're a manager, perhaps you have told an employee, there's a ladder over here, but you have to be the one to climb it. Sometimes the thing that needs to be seized is not an opportunity, but a lifeline. Do you know people stuck in bad situations, unhappy marriages, dead-end jobs, soul-crushing living conditions? who seem unwilling to escape even when the chance presents itself? Does that describe you?

Today on the show, and in a follow-up episode next week, why do some people act on the possibilities before them while others believe that nothing they do can make a difference. How to discover or rediscover your ability to change things for the better this week on Hidden Brain. Every day, life presents us with small moments of possibility, a conversation that could change the course of a career, a relationship that could be repaired, a job posting that could become the start of something new. Some people step toward those moments almost instinctively, others turn away without even trying.

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