Author: Lloyd Morgan
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The Wadsworth Constant: Ignore 30% of Everything
I’ll start with a story. Last year my girlfriend and I watched the pilot episode of a new TV show and were immediately hooked. The pilot episode was refreshingly complex and forced us to guess missing plot details continuously: it’s adventurous to make your audience work so hard during a pilot, we surmised. We later…
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Personal Pronouns as Relationship and Company Indicators
The personal pronouns used by couples during “conflictive marital interactions” are reliable indicators of relationship quality and marital satisfaction, according to a study tracking 154 couples over 23 years. The study showed that ‘We-words‘ (our, we, etc.) were indicative of a more positive relationship than ‘Me- and You-words‘ (I, you, etc.) (doi). Using We-ness language…
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Strangers and Friends: A Shared History and Less Graciousness
Ryan Holiday asks a very good question: why do we extend patience and tolerance to strangers, while simultaneously treating those closest to us less graciously? It’s an interesting question with some equally interesting possible answers (is it a subconscious and inefficient way of attempting to ease our daily lives by telling those we spend the…
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Entrepreneurship and the Possibility of Real Failure
In 2007 Vinicius Vacanti quit his highly-paid job in finance to take on life as an entrepreneur. In a short post describing his reasons for doing so, Vacanti says that most of us haven’t faced the possibility of real failure, and entrepreneurship is a way to test your limits by attempting to create something of…
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Together, Unconscious: We All Sleep
One constant that connects us all in some way is that–at the end of our day–we lie down and slowly slip into a state of reduced or absent consciousness and become at the mercy of our fellow man. Every day we fall asleep: we have done so for millions of years and will continue to…
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Dark Patterns for Marketers, or: Practical Behavioural Economics
Taking a systematic approach to implementing findings from behavioural economics into a sales cycle can “unlock significant value”, according to McKinsey’s Ned Welch. To help business do exactly that, Welch–in what, at times, reads a bit like a ‘dark patterns guide for marketers’–has written an article looking at four practical techniques from behavioural economics that marketers should use…
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The ‘Bad Version’ and How to Tax the Rich
A ‘bad version’ is a technique used by television writers to inspire creativity when experiencing a creative block. The technique involves writing a purposefully awful section of plot as a way of helping the writer find creativity and, eventually, the ideal solution: it’s a way of “nudging your imagination to someplace better”. In The Wall…
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Common Cooking Mistakes
We all make mistakes when cooking, right? Cooking Light says that “the creative cook can often cook her way out of a kitchen error, but the smart cook aims to prevent such creativity from being necessary”. In order to help you along your way to “smart cook” status, Cooking Light compiled a list of forty-three common…
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Common Misconceptions About Publishing and Writing
After realising that “many people don’t have the first clue about how the publishing business works — or even what it is“, the somewhat prolific science fiction writer Charlie Stross decided to do something about it. The result was a series titled Common Misconceptions About Publishing. This is admittedly only one author’s viewpoint and set of opinions,…
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The Intricacies and Joys of Arabic
I imagine that most people with a passing interest in linguistics read Maciej Cegłowski’s short essay in praise of the Arabic language when it was ‘rediscovered’ by popular social networks a few months ago. As one who has studied Arabic (albeit MSA and only for nine months or so), the essay brought back fond memories of struggling…