Don’t Work. Be Hated. Love Someone.

Posted on April 14, 2012 by AJ Kessler

A commencement speech full of contrarian advice, some of it totally wrong, but definitely worth reading and thinking about:

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process”and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

Read the full speech here.

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Big Money

Posted on April 13, 2012 by AJ Kessler

There’s a not-so-strange tendency for people make really poor financial decisions when there’s a lot of money involved.

If you’re buying a $50,000 car that comes with 17″ aluminum wheels, but the salesman offers you the fancy 18″ chrome wheels for only $500 more, a lot of people would accept.  After all, you’re getting the better product for only $500.  What’s an extra $500 when you’re already spending $50,000?

People do this with colleges as well.  The fancy private school is going to charge you (or your parents) $250,000 for a diploma.  The State school one county over will sell you an equivalent diploma for free, on a scholarship.  And yet, thousands of people choose to spend a quarter of a million dollars for the fancy private school degree.  What’s going on?

There are a couple different things at play here, but here’s two of the most interesting.

First, we have a problem with large numbers.  What is $50,000?  What is $250,000?  None of us have ever held that much cash in our hands before.  We have a vague idea of what it could buy, but it’s not a relatable amount of money.  It’s just a number.

Second, we have a problem thinking in terms of percentages.  And extra $500 on a $50,000 purchase is a lousy 1%.  Who cares right?  When we abstract it, it becomes meaningless.  But it’s still $500.  It’s still an amount of money you wouldn’t ordinarily spend on Amazon without doing some serious research about whatever it is your buying.  But, in the context of the $50,000 purchase, it’s pretty easy to justify the 1% impulse buy.  Dealerships are counting on it.

The easiest way to avoid these money traps is to break the amounts down into relatable figures.  The $500 chrome wheels aren’t 1%, they’re $500.  They’re that super fancy new espresso maker you’ve been wanting, or that weekend in San Francisco you’ve been planning.  That $250,000 isn’t a number in a bank account.  That’s your own Subway franchise, a brand new BMW, and three years rent.  That’s two and a half years of traveling around the world, spending $250 each and every day.

If you keep this in mind, you won’t be left struggling to decide between what you think you want and some abstract number in a bank account.  You’ll be deciding between one version of the thing you want with another version.

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How To Beat Distraction

Posted on April 12, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Everyone gets distracted.  We’re wired to.  Those of us who weren’t didn’t get to pass their genes along.  Everyone can be sucked into procrastination mode, even if you really love what you do.  (Which is why you should schedule your way around that.)  It’s going to happen.  Here’s two techniques I’ve recently found that, counter-intuitively, seem to eliminate my fixation on whatever is distracting me:

1. Close your eyes.  Breathe.  Focus on your breath.  How the air passes through your nostrils, in through your nose.  Past your throat.  Try to notice every detail.  Feel your chest expand.  Listen to the sounds your body makes as your lungs fills with air.  Exhale.  Repeat, committing all of your focus to every aspect of your breath.  This should take about 10 seconds, though you can stretch it out if what you really need is a mental break.

2.  Focus on your toes.  (Note that this is pretty tough to do without mentally sweeping all the way through your body, starting with your head.  That’s sort of the point.)  What are they doing?  What are they feeling?  Move them, wiggle them, touch them if you want.  How does it feel?  This only takes a few seconds, but it gets you very focused on the physical sensations you’re experiencing, and it pulls you right out of whatever was distracting you.

Either one of these techniques will rip you away from whatever it was you were distracting yourself with, and remind you to focus on what you want to accomplish.  I’ve found them to be pretty effective to get me back on track.  If you’re more prone to constant distraction, you may consider a plaque, or a post-it, or some form of digital reminder to be useful.

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Psychology of Morality

Posted on April 11, 2012 by AJ Kessler

At least one study shows that our default setting might be to cheat.  Only when we have a bit of time for reflection does our penchant for morality kick in:

Dr Shalvi, Dr Eldar and Dr Bereby-Meyer gave each of 76 volunteers a six-sided die and a cup. Participants were told that a number of them, chosen at random, would earn ten shekels (about $2.50) for each pip of the numeral they rolled on the die. They were then instructed to shake their cups, check the outcome of the rolled die and remember this roll. Next, they were asked to roll the die two more times, to satisfy themselves that it was not loaded, and, that done, to enter the result of the first roll on a computer terminal. Half of the participants were told to complete this procedure within 20 seconds while the others were given no time limit.

The researchers had no way of knowing what numbers participants actually rolled, of course. But they knew, statistically, that the average roll, if people reported honestly, should have been 3.5. This gave them a baseline from which to calculate participants’ honesty. Those forced to enter their results within 20 seconds, the researchers found, reported a mean roll of 4.6. Those who were not under any time pressure reported a mean roll of 3.9. Both groups lied, then. But those who had had more time for reflection lied less.

The lesson: If you want a better shot at an honest answer, don’t make people answer you on the spot.  Give them some time to reflect.

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Plodding Wins The Race

Posted on April 10, 2012 by AJ Kessler

The hare was once boasting of his speed before the other animals.

“I have never yet been beaten,” he said.  “I challenge anyone here to race with me.”

The Tortoise said quietly, “I accept your challenge.”

“That’s funny,” said the Hare.  “I could dance around you all the way!”

“Keep your boasting until you’ve won,” answered the Tortoise.  “Shall we race?”

The course was fixed.  The Hare and the Tortoise both lined up at the start.  The Hare darted out of sight almost immediately, but soon stopped and, to show his contempt for the Tortoise, laid down to have a nap.

The Tortoise plodded on and plodded on.

The Hare awoke, saw the Tortoise had scarcely come to the halfway point, and decided to have a leisurely breakfast.  His full belly soon made him sleepy again, so he shut his eyes once again.  As the day grew later, the Hare awoke only to see the Tortoise just near the finish line.  The Hare, summoning all of his speed, had too much ground to make up.

The Tortoise had won.

There’s a reason this seemingly silly fable, not to mention the thousands of derivative tales, has been retold for the last 2500 years: it hides two of the most fundamental principals of success.

First, pride and arrogance can lead even the most capable to failure.

Second, diligent work, over time, leads to success.  Even if you’re the tortoise, racing against a Hare who is just as diligent as you are, you may not beat him to the finish line.  But you’ll still get there.

Plodding wins the race.

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Mystery

Posted on April 9, 2012 by AJ Kessler

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

– Albert Einstein

It’s no coincidence that we’re so driven by mystery: the unknown is what scares us most.  And so we work to answer those mysteries.  It’s the reason we invent myths and tales.  It’s why we bury our heads in books or escape in movie theaters.  But it’s also why we study the world, and why we’ve been able to answer some phenomenal questions and overcome some tremendous problems.

Mystery can be our biggest impediment or our strongest motivator.  Fearing it can lead you to lock yourself in your room, to stick to what you know in order to avoid any discomfort, or worse, inventing answers as quickly as possible in order to “solve” those mysteries.  The ironic part is that, in attempting to run from these mysteries, you end up being mighty uncomfortable in the end.  An old man living a boy’s life, only without the time to do anything about it.

Embracing mystery can only lead to a fuller life (there are endless mysteries to solve, after all).  You will certainly have more uncomfortable experiences along the way, but you won’t be full of regret at the end.

So use mystery to your advantage.  Recognize all those times where you don’t have answers, and embrace them.  Don’t rush to find psudo-answers to cling to until you can jam your head back into the sand.  Not knowing what’s going to happen is the most beautiful experience you can have, precisely because that’s the fundamental emotion that stands at the intersection of true art and true science.  It’s where all the best stuff happens.

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Create More Than You Consume

Posted on April 8, 2012 by AJ Kessler

It’s very easy to consume.  We’ve created a culture that glamorizes it.  Television and internet access alone are unending conveyer belts, delivering as much distraction and escapism as you can possibly guzzle.  But we also have magazines, books, movie theaters, playhouses, casinos, ball parks, shopping malls, arcades, amusement parks . . . the list doesn’t end.

But if you were to tell someone that your goal in life was to watch every second of every network television show that’s ever aired, people would laugh at you.  What a worthless goal, they’d say.  There’s a big disconnect here: people recognize that mindless consumption is a waste, but then they do it themselves.  They may not watch hours of television each day, but they aimlessly click around the web for workdays at a time, or devour romance novels, or play video games all night, or do whatever it is they’ve deluded themselves into thinking isn’t really a complete waste of time.  It’s easy enough to do (“It’s not a waste, this is how I connect with all my friends!”)

To keep this tendency at bay, let’s use a simply mantra, asked each day (include it in your time tracking):

Did I create more than I consumed today?

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Happiness Obligation

Posted on April 7, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Other people don’t have an obligation to make you happy.

You have an obligation to those around you to be happy.  Even if you’re not, you have an obligation to appear happy.  Fake it, if necessary.

Don’t bum out your family, friends, coworkers, and people you bump into throughout your daily life.

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On Luck, Part 2

Posted on April 6, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Yesterday we discussed why successful people actually consider themselves lucky (not because random events tend to directly benefit them, but because they find ways to exploit the random events, good or bad, that they do encounter).

With this philosophy in mind, we shouldn’t overlook how lucky we actually are:

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves

HT: Brainpickings

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On Luck

Posted on April 5, 2012 by AJ Kessler

Luck is an interesting concept.  Many of the successful people I know consider themselves lucky.  Not just from a “I’m lucky to have been successful” standpoint, but from a “chance events usually seem to benefit me” standpoint.  Part of this is undoubtedly self-fulfilling: no matter what happens, winners see opportunities and have the fortitude to exploit those opportunities for their benefit.  (And, on the other side, losers see the impediments and have cultivated the attitude of accepting things they could change if they had a different outlook.)

It should be obvious then that winners don’t really count on luck at all.  Whether everything goes perfectly, or everything blows up in their face, they will find the opportunity in it,  find out how to use it, and eventually be “lucky”.

This concept is totally different from truly believing you’re lucky, in the sense that chance events are going to benefit you or that one day, the gods will smile upon you.   That’s dangerous.  This is the attitude that leads people to believe that the life they’ve always wanted is just one lottery ticket away.

It’s much better to believe that you’re unlucky.  That random, chance events will never benefit you, and to know, in your gut, that the only way you’re going to succeed is to work hard, to slog through the disappointments until you finally get it right.

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Creativity and the Importance of Disappointment

Posted on April 4, 2012 by AJ Kessler

I’m just diving into Jonah Lehrer’s new book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works.  We’ve discussed creativity here extensively, and even addressed how to be creative, but I hope to share some new insights from this book soon.  In the meantime, the trailer for the book is pretty cool:

When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible to solve.  Because such failures contradict the romantic version of events (there is nothing triumphant about a false start), we forget all about them.  The failures also remind us of how close we came to having no stories to tell.  Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. We tell the happy endings first.

The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration, the act of being stumped, is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we probably even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost.  Because it’s only after we’ve stopped searching for the answer that the answer arrives.  The imagination has a wicked sense of irony.

 

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How To Write, Part 2

Posted on April 3, 2012 by AJ Kessler

John Steinbeck, in a lengthy interview with the Paris Review (all of which is worth reading) shares some thoughts on writing:

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

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The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe

Posted on April 2, 2012 by AJ Kessler

You may have seen Neil deGrasse Tyson’s quote about what he considers to be the most astounding fact about the universe, but it’s even more impressive when mashed up by Max Schlickenmeyer:

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How To Break A Habit

Posted on April 1, 2012 by AJ Kessler

We’ve talked before about building habits.  That’s important.  But so is breaking habits.  Luckily, unlike forcing yourself to repeatedly do something new and scary, breaking existing habits isn’t nearly as hard.  One of the easiest ways is simply to substitute another habit instead.  Charles Duhigg explains:

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Worthy Ideals?

Posted on March 31, 2012 by AJ Kessler

[E]verybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

– Albert Einstein

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