Category: personal-development
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In Praise of Self-Tracking: The Data-Driven Life
It is a natural desire to strive for self-improvement and seek knowledge about oneself, but until recently it has been difficult or impossible to do so objectively and quantitatively. Now, through self-tracking systems and applications that are becoming prevalent in many of our lives thanks to a number of technological advances and sociological changes, we can,…
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After Procrastination, Self-Forgiveness Limits Further Procrastination
In a short article summarising six “surprising insights from the social sciences” we are told how those in powerful positions show little restraint when presented with food and are informed that the perceived “attractiveness advantage” of more sociable people is there simply because they groom themselves better. However I feel that the only constructive insight…
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Development Strategy: Better Than Yesterday
Excerpting from his book The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler reveals his philosophy on growth (in many contexts): small, incremental changes to reach long-term, seemingly unassailable goals. The idea is encapsulated in the question, Was today better than yesterday? Most important challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This is…
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The New Nature-Nurture Argument
As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…
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The Benefits of Side Projects
The creation of 3M’s Scotch Tape, the Declaration of Independence and Metallica: just three of the stories Ben Casnocha retells to show the importance of innovation through side projects. Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally:…
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Personal R&D
Many successful companies run expansive research and development departments, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and discover and exploit the new opportunities this speculative research often brings. Josh Kaufman suggests that we create our own personal R&D budgets–akin to those of corporations–for our personal development: What would it look like if you set aside 10-20%…
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Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky
In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…
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Fostering Innovative Thinking
By interviewing and surveying 3,500 visionary entrepreneurs over a six-year period, a pair of professors believe they have identified the five habits and skills common to ‘creative executives’ that distinguish them from the rest: Associating: the skill of connecting seemingly unrelated questions, problems and ideas. Questioning, especially “questions that challenge the status quo and open…