Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ by Daniel Goleman. 

4/5 rating.

Book #118 of 2019. Read October 10, 2019. 

This book is a modern-day psychology classic. It introduced the idea of emotional intelligence into the mainstream as an even more telling metric for future success in life than IQ. I implore ANYONE who deals with children to read this as it could have a huge impact on their lives. 

High emotional intelligence can help people in: 

1) emotional self-awareness 

2) managing emotions 

3) harnessing emotions productively 

4) empathy 

5) handling relationships. 

Everyone could use some help in these areas. Read this book and you can get some grasp of these concepts and how to improve them!

Quotes:

“All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb ‘to move,’ plus the prefix ‘e-‘ to connote ‘move away,’ suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion.”

“‘Love,’ wrote Stendhal, ‘is like a fever that comes and goes independently of the will.’”

“To be sure, there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference.”

“‘The time has come,’ Gardner told me, ‘to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We’ve completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor. And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.’”

“Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of ‘the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,’ among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a ‘dank joylessness’ with ‘gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.’ Then there are the intellectual marks: ‘confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,’ and, at a later stage, his mind ‘dominated by anarchic distortions,’ and ‘a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.’ There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, ‘a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,’ along with a ‘fidgety restlessness.’ Then there is the loss of pleasure: ‘Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.’ Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the ‘gray drizzle of horror’ took on a despair so palpable it was like a physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution.”

“In fact, specific issues such as how often a couple has sex, how to discipline the children, or how much debt and savings a couple feels comfortable with are not what make or break a marriage. Rather, it is how a couple discusses such sore points that matters more for the fate of their marriage. Simply reaching an agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival; men and women have to overcome the innate gender differences in approaching rocky emotions.”

“For example, Williams found that those physicians who had had the highest scores on a test of hostility while still in medical school were seven times as likely to have died by the age of fifty as were those with low hostility scores – being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of dying young than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.”

“As with depression, there are medical costs to pessimism – and corresponding benefits from optimism. For example, 122 men who had their first heart attack were evaluated on their degree of optimism or pessimism. Eight years later, of the 25 most pessimistic men, 21 had died; of the 25 most optimistic, just 6 had died. Their mental outlook proved a better predictor of survival than any medical risk factor, including the amount of damage to the heart in the first attack, artery blockage, cholesterol level, or blood pressure.”

“Isolation itself, a 1987 report in Science concluded, ‘is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and lack of physical exercise.’ Indeed, smoking increases mortality risk by a factor of just 1.6, while social isolation does so by a factor of 2.0, making it a greater health risk.”

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