Category: personal-development
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Life Advice Through Management Theory and Business Strategy
When Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 invited professor Clayton Christensen (expert on disruptive technology and innovation, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) to address them, they requested he talk on how to apply management theory principles to one’s personal life. Christensen responded by answering three questions: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy…
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Recognising Bad Advice and Expertise Failure
Why do we blindly follow experts when their advice is so often so wrong*? How can we differentiate between good advice and bad? These are just two of the questions David Freedman attempts to answer in Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us (a book that sounds like it could be a nice complement to Kathryn…
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Letting Go of Goals
Designed to help you find focus and tackle “the problems we face as we try to live and create in a world of overwhelming distractions” is focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction. This is Leo Babauta‘s latest book and he is producing it iteratively online. One issue I have is that…
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Essential Startup Essays
Om Malik presents what he believes are the ten essential startup essays of 2009: Paul Graham: What Startups Are Really Like Sean Ellis: Milestones to Startup Success Eric Ries: Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich Venture Hacks: What Is the Minimum Viable Product? Mike Speiser: The Power of Continuous Improvement Mike Speiser: Getting Comfortable With…
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The Keynote MBA
Truth is, the great value in most MBA and JD programs can be boiled down to 5 to 10 talks, presentations, classes and conversations that changed the way you experienced the world. Following up on this comment, Jonathan Fields presents The Seven Keynote MBA: seven keynote speeches, from a diverse group of people, that together…
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Nine Diet and Lifestyle Tips for Longevity
By studying the world’s Blue Zones–“communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age”–Dan Buettner and team discovered a set of common behavioural traits in their subjects. In his TEDxTC talk Buettner discusses what he discovered to be the myths of living longer and the nine common diet and lifestyle habits of those…
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More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise
“There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark. While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10…
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Scientifically-Proven Ways to Improve Creativity
Fourteen acts or mindsets that have been shown–using science!–to increase creativity, from a two-article series on scientifically-proven methods to increase your creativity: Psychological distance: Imagine your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. Chronological distance: Project yourself or the task forward in time. Absurdist stimulation: Read some Kafka: absurdity is a ‘meaning threat’,…
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Complexity and Autonomy Key to Workplace Satisfaction
Work complexity and autonomy are the two largest factors in deciding workplace satisfaction, suggested findings reported in a 1985 article in The New York Times. The findings came from research by Dr. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Dr. Melvin L. Kohn and seems to agree with a more recent discussion on the three keys to programmer…
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Askers, Guessers and the ‘Disease to Please’
Saying No to seemingly unreasonable requests and unwanted invitations is easy for some and a gruelling mental challenge for others. This disparity between responses can be explained by looking at the behavioural differences between Askers and Guessers: In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything–a favour, a pay rise–fully realising the…