Tag: personal-development
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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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How to Be Interesting
Russell Davies offers ten activities that will lead to you being more interesting; including Start a blog, Keep a scrapbook, and Read. I believe you can sum them up into one piece of advice: Do something. Davies compiled the ten activities, believing they will make a person more interesting, based on two assumptions. However I believe the two assumptions…
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Perceived Complexity and Will Power
While willpower and dedication matter considerably in sustaining a resolution and reaching a desired goal, the perceived complexity of the process can have a big influence on whether we are likely to achieve that goal or not. This conclusion comes from a study showing how the subjective “cognitive complexity” of a diet was a major factor…
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Self-Awareness and the Importance of Feedback
It comes as no surprise to hear that we are poor at perceiving how others view us and are poor at recognising the true personality traits of those we observe, but it’s the extent to which this is true and methods we can use to overcome these ‘personality blind spots’ that I find interesting. When…
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Fixed-Schedule Productivity: Fix the Schedule, Don’t Compromise
In a guest post for I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Cal Newport of Study Hacks discusses fixed-schedule productivity: a productivity system whereby you set a schedule of work (and play) between certain hours and stick to it ruthlessly. Tim Ferriss aficionados will note that this system relies on a premise that Ferriss heavily depends…
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The 50th Law
Power is greater than happiness, contends Robert Greene in an online discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky about Fear, Power and Mortality (quality summary thereof), as happiness is fleeting and unremitting. Also discussed in this conversation is strategist Robert Greene’s latest book, The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness, which is the result of an unlikely collaboration with hip…
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Time Needed to Form a Habit
How long does it take to form a habit? By studying 96 people as they each attempt to start a new habit, the answer comes out as between 18 to 254 days, with a mean of 66. Some good news and caveats: Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit. A…
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Life Advice
Not from a life coach, personal development guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actually worth paying attention to: those older than you. First is Life Advice From Old People (via Kottke)–a video blog containing nothing but interviews with a wide range of ‘old’ people, including…
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The Five Whys
Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows: My car…