Category Archives: Food For Thought

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments of Teaching

Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might … Continue reading

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Leading With Lollipops

Inspiring video:

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How To Make Work Miserable

From The Progress Principle: Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. … What we discovered is that the … Continue reading

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If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, You’re Not Spending It Right

This sentiment that money can’t buy happiness is lovely, popular, and almost certainly wrong: Money allows people to live longer and healthier lives, to buffer themselves against worry and harm, to have leisure time to spend with friends and family, and to control the … Continue reading

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Sleep on Concrete

Something Sebastian Marshall said to me a long while back has really stuck with me: sleep on concrete. Anyone who has travelled a lot has literally done this at least once.  Baggage handlers go on strike and the airport shuts … Continue reading

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Share

For several hundred years now, most businesses have fought to keep things secret.  Ingredients, techniques, processes, suppliers, you name it.  Anything that might be a competitive advantage would attempt to be shielded from competitors and the public.  In fact, the … Continue reading

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Disciplined Mindwandering, or The Benefits of Daydreaming

Jonathan Schooler, the psychologist who helped pioneer the study of insight, has recently begun studying the benefits of daydreams.  His lab has demonstrated that people who consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity.  To evaluate … Continue reading

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Lies, Happiness, and The Tyranny of the Biographer

Being happy in your life and being happy about your life are very different concepts. This is a result of the fact that you have, in a sense, two selfs. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present, … Continue reading

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It’s Hard And I’m Just Not Passionate About It…

“It’s hard, and I’m just not passionate about it, and I’m thinking of giving up – will you tell me it’s OK to give up, so I’ll feel better about it in the morning?” It’s rarely about difficulty or enthusiasm. … Continue reading

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Language and Rationality

Thinking in a different language may lead to more rational decisions: Keysar’s team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet … Continue reading

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On Role Models

We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.  Misdeeds … Continue reading

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How To Be 10x Happier In Just 60 Minutes A Day

If you have a job, chances are most of your waking hours are not your own.  Most of all your hours may not be your own.  Between the time it takes you to get ready in the morning, your commute, and … Continue reading

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How Criticism Encourages Creativity

We’re taught to think that brainstorming is an effective way to generate ideas and spur creative thought.  The key to successful brainstorming, it was thought, was lack of a lack of criticism.  This makes sense: if people aren’t afraid that … Continue reading

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Steal This Idea: Lock Screen Emergency Contact

You, like many people, have a lock on your phone. This is smart: by requiring the user to type in a code or swipe a pattern in order to access the part of the phone that stores sensitive data, you … Continue reading

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Overvaluing What We Have

One of the worst tricks we manage to play on ourselves is overvaluing what we already have and undervaluing what we don’t.  This is especially sad since most of us don’t have all that much anyway, and taking the chance … Continue reading

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