Category: personal-development
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How To Be Happy in Business
‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram. Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly…
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Teaching Children to Argue
With a primer on each of the “three basic tools of argument” (logos, ethos and pathos), Jay Heinrichs gives a cogent argument for why you should teach your children to argue. I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas…
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Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…
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Advice from Hoehn’s Year
One year after setting his personal goals Charlie Hoehn takes a look back at his achievements and offers some fantastic advice: Your friends who don’t care or are stupid will use Monster, CareerBuilder, and Craigslist (I was one of these stupid people for a few weeks). They will compete with hundreds of people for mediocre…
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25+ Etiquette
Bringing to mind something I wrote about last week (The Quarterlife Crisis), this advice to those 25 and over is more etiquette lesson than antidote to the 20-something malaise. It is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest…
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Option Paralysis: The Quarterlife Crisis
Kate Carraway sums up that modern existential angst experienced by countless twentysomethings: The Quarterlife Crisis, a somewhat disabling mix of akrasia, apathy and ennui brought on by a number of realisations. This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and…
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The Longevity of Our Work
I’m not a Flash designer, but Jonathan Harris’ inspiring and rousing speech from Flash on the Beach 2008 really got me thinking about the longevity of my work. It appears that some attendees of the conference felt Harris was admonishing the Flash community. However, after reading this speech I feel inspired and I can’t help…
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Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius
I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…
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Testing Rationality and Bias
How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…
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Procrastination as Newton’s First Law
There’s a lot I identify with in this article of Joel Spolsky’s where he talks of using the Fire and Motion strategy to cope with workplace procrastination. There have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m…