A Small Difference

Behaviors of People Who Make a Positive Difference In the World

Look around you and you’ll see three kinds of people — those who hate their work, and complain bitterly,

those who just tolerate their work and see it as a paycheck and aren’t looking for more (or feel they can’t have more), and finally, those who love their work, and relish it.

The third category is a small subset of all professionals globally, but this group stands out because these are, most often, the people who change the world for the better.

That people differ from each other is obvious.

How and why they differ is less clear and is the subject of the study of Individual differences

Although to study individual differences seems to be to study variance, how are people different, it is also to study central tendency, how well can a person be described in terms of an overall within-person average.

Indeed, perhaps the most important question of individual differences is whether people are more similar to themselves over time and across situations than they are to others

, and whether the variation within a single person across time and situation is less than the variation between people.

A related question is that of similarity, for people differ in their similarities to each other.

Questions of whether particular groups (e.g., groupings by sex, culture, age, or ethnicity) are more similar within than between groups are also questions of individual differences.

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