“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?â€
It’s rarely about difficulty or enthusiasm.  I’ve found that it’s usually about other things, things I can manage, change, or otherwise control.
Read the whole thing. Â It may change your perspective on why you feel this way, and how you can remedy it.
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 on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they’d lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 — a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.
When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. “They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses,†wrote Keysar and colleagues.
The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.
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. Â Misdeeds are greatly diminished if a witness is always standing near intending doers.
The personality should be provided with someone it can revere, someone whose influence can make even its private, inner life more pure. Â Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts! Â And happy too, is the person who can so revere another as to adjust and shape his own personality in the light of recollections, even, of that other. Â A person able to revere another thus will soon deserve to be revered himself.
So choose yourself a Cato – or, if Cato seems too severe to you, a Laelius. Â Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Â Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. Â There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Â Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.
– Seneca, Letter XI
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 all the other details of life, the time you actually get to do what you want may be vanishingly small.
This feeling of being out of control of your own life can be depressing.  And it can be made even worse depending on what you like to do during your free time.  If you’re an avid surfer who has lived on the North Shore your entire life, and you are suddenly forced to move to Kansas, you’re gonna be unhappy.  The thing you like to do most is no longer possible.  Similarly, if the thing that makes you happiest is playing 8-hour long games Risk, you’re going to be unhappy if you’re ever employed.  There’s just no time to do it.
Because time constraints are inevitable, the key is to learn to take pleasure in the small stuff. Â (This is completely learnable.) Â If you can learn to love your afternoon walk or run, or the time you spend cooking dinner, or whatever short activity it is you do every day, you will be immensely happier. Â If you can fit a couple of these happiness capsules into your day, you’ve now gone from never being able to do the thing you love to knocking out 3 or 4 things you love doing every single day. Â Even though the total time you spend doing something you love is less than you’d prefer, you’ll feel happier and more accomplished than if you were able to spend that big chunk of time on just one thing.
We’re taught to think that brainstorming is an effective way to generate ideas and spur creative thought. Â The key to successful brainstorming, it was thought, was lack of a lack of criticism. Â This makes sense: if people aren’t afraid that their ideas will be criticized, they won’t be afraid to share their ideas. Â Once shared, ideas can be bandied about, the best will flow to the top, be improved upon, and the group will be better off for it.
There’s one small problem with this idea.  It’s completely wrong.  It turns out, that people generate far more ideas when they do so alone.  Those ideas tend to be better, too.  Traditional brainstorming actually hurts creativity.
Why? Â Jonah Lehrer explains:
We naturally assume that negative feedback stifles the imagination. Â But it turns out we’re tougher than we thought. Â The imagination is not meek. Â It doesn’t wilt in the face of conflict. Â Instead, it is drawn out, pulled from it’s usual hiding place. Â The reason criticism leads to new ideas is that it encourages us to fully engage with the work of others. Â We think about their concepts because we want to improve them. Â It’s the imperfection that leads us to really listen.
In contrast, when everybody is right, when all new ideas are equally useful, as in a brainstorming session, we stay within ourselves. Â There is no incentive to think about someone else’s thoughts or embrace unfamiliar possibilities. Â And so the problem remains impossible. Â The absence of criticism has kept us all in the same place.
Criticism is essential to creativity.
But, there’s a balance to be struck. Â Tearing someone’s idea apart just for the sake of criticism isn’t terribly useful, and can destroy a team pretty quickly. Â Instead, take a page from the team at Pixar, who ensure their daily critique sessions don’t destroy morale by utilizing “plussing”, the technique that allows people to improve ideas without using harsh or judgmental language:
The goal is simple: whenever work is criticized, the criticism should contain a “plus”, a new idea that builds on the flaws in a productive manner. Â We try to make sure that criticism is mixed with a little something else, a new idea that allows us to immediately move on, to start focusing not on the mistake, but on how to fix it.
This kind of criticism is doubly effective. Â Not only does the group snowball ideas, but members keep thinking about those ideas afterwards. Â Nobody can simply walk out of a session feeling proud that their idea was written on a whiteboard and might someday be implemented. Â Instead, their ego forces them to mull over the idea, and the criticisms, and come up with a better solution. Â The plussing process continues long after the meeting is over.
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 make it difficult for people to try to pilfer your stuff should you lose your phone.
But for the most part, the world is filled with honest people. Â So say you lose your phone. Â Now what? Â Chances are, an honest person is going to find it and try to get it back to it’s owner.
But you have a lock on it. Â What is that honest person supposed to do? Â He can’t scroll through your contacts to try and find a friend or relative to get your phone back to you.
Why not have an icon on the lock screen that a user can assign a “lost phone number” to. Â An icon that, when pressed, will call your home phone, or your office line, or your buddy’s number, or whatever you choose. Â On the iphone, there’s already the “Emergency Call” call button that will let you place a call without the code. Â All you need is one more little icon.
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 to go do something else isn’t any sacrifice at all.  But it still feels like a sacrifice because one, we overvalue what we have, and two, we’re so scared of the unknown.
Will Wilkinson, in announcing a career move from political pundit to fiction writer, explains:
I think the most important thing I took away from all that time with my nose in happiness research and behavioral econ is that we overestimate the value of what we already have and so underestimate the upside of taking a chance, leaving something behind, and making a big change. Most of us end up where we are through a sort of drift. Sometimes that works out splendidly. And drift hasn’t not worked out for me. I really like what I do. But, alas, I don’t really love it. I never wanted to be a pundit or a “public intellectual.†I always wanted to be an artist of some sort and I still want that. I want to make awesome shit people love. It’s my new motto: make awesome shit people love. So here we go!
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Human beings are such easily influenced creatures. Â The way we laugh is influenced by our parents. Â The way we talk is influenced by our hometown. Â The things we find funny are influenced by the friends we had growing up and the movies we watched. Â The things we like and buy are influenced by the ads we see. Â Unsurprisingly, the habits we cultivate mirror the habits of those around us.
You often hear celebrities say that keeping their hometown friends around them helped keep their grip on reality and their ego in check. Â This is probably good advice for people who are lavished with money and fame for looking great and playing make believe.
But, what if your friends are barely employable?  What if  your friends sit around all day eating junk food or getting drunk or high or watching tv?  What if your friends are losers?  You certainly don’t have to abandon them, but make sure you spend a lot more time with people who are already the way you want to be, not the people who are exactly what you don’t want to be.
People become more likely to lie or cheat when they see others lie or cheat, explains Dan Ariely:
…we gave participants 5 minutes to solve as many mathematical problems as possible (where they were instructed to find which two numbers out of 12 add up to 10).
In the control, where no cheating was allowed, the average student solved 7 problems, which gave them a pay off of $3.50 out of a maximum of $10 (if they solved all 20 problems). To see how witnessing and act of dishonesty would affect participants, we had one student—a confederate named David—stand up after only a minute and claim he’d solved all 20 matrices. The experimenter merely responded that in that case he could take his earnings and go. So how did the participants respond to this display when asked to self-report the number of matrices they solved? By cheating a whole lot: they claimed an average of 15 correct answers, more than twice the average score when cheating was not allowed.
But, when Dan ran the same experiment with one slight tweak, dishonesty decreased dramatically:
This time, instead of looking like all the other participants, who were students at Carnegie Mellon University, we had our confederate wear a sweatshirt that located him within a different social group. This time he was wearing a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt (Carnegie Mellon’s neighboring and rival university). When the dishonest act was committed by a person from an out-group, we found that cheating decreased dramatically to the lowest level in all the experiments (participants claimed “only†9 correct problems).
So if you want people to stop being dishonest, stop rewarding dishonesty. Â If this is impossible, segregate people into tranches, so that the effects of any dishonesty in one tranche will be least likely to spread to another.
- Ben Franklin
- Ezra Pound
- Emily Dickinson
- Marcel Proust
- Dave Eggers
- Thomas Paine
- Jane Austen
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Walt Whitman
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Stephen Crane
- Nikki Giovanni
- Virginia Woolf
The question isn’t whether or not you should wait to be picked, the question is whether you care enough to pick yourself.
Good advice from Seth Godin. Â As the world moves further and further away from large institutions controlling distribution, this list will only get longer.
The modern Hollywood approach was to put together a team for one project and then disband the team when production was finished. Â We thought that was dumb. Â When it comes down to it, the only way to make a good movie is to have a good team. Â The current view in Hollywood, in contrast, is that movies are all about ideas. Â That a good idea is rarer and more valuable than good people. Â That’s why there are so many copycat movies. Â Everyone is chasing the same concept. Â But that’s a fundamentally misguided approach. Â The mediocre team will screw up a good idea. Â But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, and let them work together, they’ll find a way to succeed.
-Ed Catmull, President of Pixar
Generally, business school is a poor investment. If you want to go to a top 20 school, you’re going to spend at least $100,000 and two years of your life (easily another $100,000 or $200,000 in lost earnings). Realistically, your opportunity cost is approaching a third of a million dollars. You’re going to need a substantial income boost in order to justify that kind of outlay. Unfortunately, studies indicate that MBAs, even from top schools, don’t provide this kind of boost:
There is scant evidence that the MBA credential, particularly from non-elite schools, or the grades earned in business courses—a measure of the mastery of the material—are related to either salary or the attainment of higher level positions in organizations. These data, at a minimum, suggest that the training or education component of business education is only loosely coupled to the world of managing organizations.
– The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye
What color should you paint that room? Â It depends on what you want to do there. Â If you need to pay close attention to detail oriented work, paint it red. Â If you want to maximize the chance for creative insight, paint it blue.
Or consider this 2009 experiment, published in Science. The psychologists, at the University of British Columbia, were interested in looking at how the color of interior walls influence the imagination. They recruited six hundred subjects, most of them undergraduates, and had them perform a variety of basic cognitive tests displayed against red, blue or neutral colored backgrounds.  Jonah Lehrer summarizes the 2009 study published in Science:
The differences were striking. When people took tests in the red condition – they were surrounded by walls the color of a stop sign – they were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory. According to the scientists, this is because people automatically associate red with danger, which makes them more alert and aware.
The color blue, however, carried a completely different set of psychological benefits. While people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on those requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy out of simple geometric shapes. In fact, subjects in the blue condition generated twice as many “creative outputs†as subjects in the red condition. That’s right: the color of a wall doubled our imaginative power.
What accounts for this effect? According to the scientists, the color blue automatically triggers associations with the sky and ocean. We think about expansive horizons and diffuse light, sandy beaches and lazy summer days. This sort of mental relaxation makes it easier for us daydream and think in terms of tangential associations; we’re less focused on what’s right in front of us and more aware of the possibilities simmering in our imagination.
Why would anyone constrain themselves to writing poetry in Haiku?
Why would Shakespeare force himself to write entire plays in iambic pentameter? Â This makes no sense. Â Think about how much harder it would be to write a play where each line has ten syllables and rhymes with every other line. Â It’s a daunting challenge in itself. Â Now write a dozen of them, and make them into some of the best stories ever told.
But, perhaps part of the reason Shakespeare was so good was precisely because he forced himself into these positions:
Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line.  They’ll be stuck with cliches and conventions with predictable adjectives and boring verbs.  This is why poetic forms are so important.  When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables, or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections.  The difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.
You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
~ Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
While at first this sounds counter-intuitive, it shouldn’t be that surprising. Â We’ve all experienced this with deadlines, thinking of something great at the last minute just because we had to. Â We’ve all experienced it with wordplay, when someone says a particular word or phrase and you associate it or twist it into something completely different.
So, force yourself into some constraints. Â It’s uncomfortable, and you’ll struggle, but when you finally succeed, you’ll actually have produced something new.
There’s a lot of career advice out there that implores you to make yourself indispensable. Â Taken the right way, this is clearly good advice. Â But I’ve seen this misinterpreted any number of times. Â Making yourself indispensable or irreplaceable in terms of the one specific task you perform isn’t a great plan. Â Yes, it may work out well sometimes. Â But other times, you get replaced by three workers for half the price oversees, or a robot, or a new system, or…
The best way to make yourself indispensable is to learn how to make yourself redundant.  Figure out how to optimize whatever it is you do so that the job that used to take you all day now takes half as much time, or a quarter as much time, or none of your time at all.  Think about how indispensable that person becomes.  Who’s going to fire the guy who just figured out how to save someone 25 or 50 or 100 thousand dollars a year?  The person with that skill will have a job for life.  Even if you actually do streamline your way out of a job, how hard is it going to be to find a job when you can show someone exactly how valuable you were to your old company?  Not very.
For some great stories about a guy who did just this, head over to Rob Ousbey’s site.
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