Tag: personal-development
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Questioning (Not Telling) Ourselves is the Best Call-to-Action
Thinking about whether we will do a task or not (“Will I…?”) rather than focusing on actually performing the task (“I will….”) has been shown to increase both the probability of us eventually undertaking the task and how successfully we will perform it. The idea seems that “interrogative self-talk”, rather than declarative statements, leads to…
-
Self Affirmations Boost Self-Control
I’ve written before on positive self-affirmations and how they are not of much use, but now it seems that if we are succumbing to temptation and we want to exercise self-control but are finding it difficult to do so, we should recite positive self-affirmations to help us resist. A novel experiment has now shown that positive self-affirmations…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:…