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Don’t simply “communicate” with others, but find ways to authentically connect with others.
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Use the right toolkit of people skills, conceptual skills, judgement and character that helps them succeed in finding new opportunities and re-framing setbacks to their advantage.
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Swing for the fences when a big, fat pitch of opportunity comes their way.
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Know when to lighten up and maintain perspective.
Loneliness is the brain telling you to be more social
In one study from 2009, researchers used fMRIs to test whether lonely brains were more sensitive to threats. Twenty-three participants were placed in an MRI and shown a series of pictures, some of them pleasant, such as money and a rocket lifting off, and others unpleasant, including human conflict. They found that lonely brains respond less positively to pleasant images than non-lonely brains, and more strongly to images of violence and unpleasant social situations. Loneliness spurs the brain into a hyper-vigilant state, unable to relax. The lonely brain doesn’t passively take the world in, but actively interprets it as an unfriendly place.[Source: Nautilus]Hawkley found that lonely individuals take longer to fall asleep, wake up more during the night, and sleep less deeply. “The lonely person’s feeling of not being safe, socially safe, could contribute to disrupted sleep,” she says.
Your willpower might be unlimited
The common idea is that willpower is limited. After 4 hours studying mathematics, you are likely to feel like entering a coma-like state on your couch and binge on Netflix.
However, Carol Dweck and team believe otherwise:
It appears ego depletion may be just another example of the way belief drives behavior. Thinking we’re spent makes us feel worse, while rewarding ourselves with an indulgence makes us feel better. It’s not the sugar in the lemonade that produces the sustained mental stamina, but rather the placebo effect at work.
Maybe willpower is an emotion?
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t 'run out' of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel. Viewing willpower through this lens has profound implications.
Are you addicted to your cell phone?
A superb illustrated read about your (and mine) smartphone addiction. You should read it all, it's on Nautilus.
Pro tip: reward yourself “variably” when doing an analog (i.e not tech) activity such as seeing friends or walking outside. By variably I mean don't reward for a 1:1 ratio. The deal with Facebook is that you scroll aimlessly and then at some point you're going to get a notification but you don't know when. This motivates you to scroll more than if they gave you a reward (notification) every time you scrolled.
Most people can't give a convincing alibi if accused of a crime
This excerpt is from this paper and was tweeted by Rolf Degen.
How to make someone fall in love with you
Eric Barker from a June 2014 Time article:
Two factors appeared to exercise the greatest influence on personal relationships: the location of the apartments and the distances between them. The most important factor in determining who would be emotionally close to whom was the distance between their apartments.
What underlies this? Obviously, you have to meet, but there’s something else going on: repeated exposure.
As marketers know very well (and anyone looking for love should learn about marketing), repeated exposure makes us like almost anything.
You're actually a terrible lie detector, but here's how to get better
Art Markman for Fast Company:
So if you're in a high-stakes situation, it makes sense to try and be more vigilant about whether you're hearing the truth. But even then, many of us look for the wrong signals. In fact, researchers have found that when we consciously try to catch someone in a lie, we get much worse at it. Our unconscious lie-detection instincts are more reliable than our conscious ones.
Oddly enough, I really thought the inverse was true.
The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber
There is a guy named Alex Honnold, he free solo climbs mountains and his brain is not wired like ours. J.B. MacKinnon for Nautilus:
Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone. On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Just watching a video of Honnold climbing will trigger some degree of vertigo, heart palpitations, or nausea in most people, and that’s if they can watch them at all. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film.
So obviously, they put his brain through an fMRI and:
‘Maybe his amygdala is not firing—he’s having no internal reactions to these stimuli,’ says Joseph. ‘But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.’
The article is interesting throughout.
James Gleick on our anxiety about Time, the origin of the term “type A,” and the curious psychology of elevator impatience
Maria Popova back at it again with a great review of a book written in 2000 when smartphones, Facebook and the like did not yet exist. Here's a quote from the book:
We have a word for free time: leisure.
Leisure is time off the books, off the job, off the clock. If we save time, we commonly believe we are saving it for our leisure. We know that leisure is really a state of mind, but no dictionary can define it without reference to passing time. It is unrestricted time, unemployed time, unoccupied time. Or is it? Unoccupied time is vanishing. The leisure industries (an oxymoron maybe, but no contradiction) fill time, as groundwater fills a sinkhole. The very variety of experience attacks our leisure as it attempts to satiate us. We work for our amusement."
Words for emotions we didn't know we had
It’s a funny thing about house guests. While they’re in your home and you’re tripping over the extra shoes and suitcases that are suddenly littered about your living room, you start dreaming about how nice it will be when they leave. Yet, after they do, your place often feels too empty. To the Baining people of Papua New Guinea, Smith writes, this feeling is so prevalent that it gets a name all to itself: awumbuk, or the feeling of ‘emptiness after visitors depart.’
Melissa Dahl, for New York Magazine, has had an interesting talk with Tiffany Watt Smith, who's writing a book about emotions. She recounts the conventional wisdom that is to name your emotions, so as to help you understand them.
Her book, The Book of Human Emotions, is basically a list of very specific emotions that are different from the major ones (fear, happiness, etc.).
Why it's so irritating when people use periods in their texts
Nicolas DiDomizio, writing for Mic:
'When using [a period] in a text message, it's perceived as overly formal,' Collister wrote. 'So when you end your text with a period, it can come across as insincere or awkward, just like using formal spoken language in a casual setting like a bar..
"Text [messages] and many other online forms of communication are intended to be brief, and adding a period which signals 'the end' is for many users a conscious choice and can communicate a message like, 'I'm really done talking about this,'" she said.
The problem with goals
Collective wisdom tells us to set goals and reach them.
But what happens then? And what if such a dogmatic view can lead to counterproductive results? And what if, because of these goals, we miss out on auxiliary discoveries that may turn out to be better?
Here's an example, from Kottke:
One illuminating example of the problem concerns the American automobile behemoth General Motors. The turn of the millennium found GM in a serious predicament, losing customers and profits to more nimble, primarily Japanese, competitors. As the Boston Globe reported, executives at GM's headquarters in Detroit came up with a goal, crystallized in a number: 29. Twenty-nine, the company announced amid much media fanfare, was the percentage of the American car market that it would recapture, reasserting its old dominance. Twenty-nine was also the number displayed upon small gold lapel pins, worn by senior figures at GM to demonstrate their commitment to the plan. At corporate gatherings, and in internal GM documents, twenty-nine was the target drummed into everyone from salespeople to engineers to public-relations officers.
Yet the plan not only failed to work-it made things worse. Obsessed with winning back market share, GM spent its dwindling finances on money-off schemes and clever advertising, trying to lure drivers into purchasing its unpopular cars, rather than investing in the more speculative and open-ended-and thus more uncertain-research that might have resulted in more innovative and more popular vehicles.
Be sure to read Nathan Bashaw's Hardbound story on goals. He tells the tale of Ken Stanley, a guy who wanted to create software that evolves random images into meaningful pictures — moving from a weird dot to something that'd look like an eye, for instance.
The software, Picbreeder, never did what Ken wanted it to do, so he opened Picbreeder to the public and saw that humans evolved images in a much smarter way.
One day, he started with a picture that looked like an alien and it finally became a car (you'll understand what I say if you read the Hardbound story linked above).
He realised then that great discoveries are possible but only if we abandon the need to control what they will be.
It's something that you may have thought of intuitively. It keeps happening with scientific discoveries, time and time again (the telephone, for instance).
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
Over at Farnam Street, an excellent introduction to Kahneman’s work.
How successful people make themselves luckier
How successful people make themselves luckier
Among the lessons in the book, the luckiest people:
Interesting stuff. The book is called Be Luckier in Life by Craig Forman.
Why first-person shooters are so enjoyable
Why first-person shooters are so enjoyable
It’s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. These are features of many video games today. But the first-person shooter combines them in a distinct way: a virtual environment that maximizes a player’s potential to attain a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—a condition of absolute presence and happiness.
Indeed:
“Flow,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “is the kind of feeling after which one nostalgically says: ‘that was fun,’ or ‘that was enjoyable.’ ” Put another way, it’s when the rest of the world simply falls away. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is mostly likely to occur during play, whether it’s a gambling bout, a chess match, or a hike in the mountains. Attaining it requires a good match between someone’s skills and the challenges that she faces, an environment where personal identity becomes subsumed in the game and the player attains a strong feeling of control. Flow eventually becomes self-reinforcing: the feeling itself inspires you to keep returning to the activity that caused it.
All these years I’ve waited for someone to scientifically explain why Halo was such an awesome game, and they did it.
How you move gives a lot away. Maybe too much, if the wrong person is watching. We think, for instance, that the way people walk can influence the likelihood of an attack by a stranger. But we also think that their walking style can be altered to reduce the chances of being targeted.
Have you ever been sitting in a bar, an airport, a library, or browsing in a bookstore when a stranger tried to start a conversation with you? Did you feel awkward or on your guard? The conversation itself is not necessarily what caused the discomfort. The discomfort was induced because you didn’t know when or if it would end. For this reason, the first step in the process of developing great rapport and having great conversations is letting the other person know that there is an end in sight, and it is really close.
Establishing artificial time constraints is one of the 10 techniques for building quick rapport with anyone by Robin Dreeke, the head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program.
Interesting.
When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he’ll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?
Why do we cheat?
The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova explores various research related to this subject.
Ex-racists explain their conversions
Ex-racists explain their conversions
I was sitting on the bus on my way home one day. I was listening to some good music in my headphones. It was a cloudless autumn day and everything was a healthy yellow and orange color and blue sky. At a stop a african man and a young boy, maybe 5-6 years, got on. The man was tall and had bad clothes, he looked like he did not have much. They sat in front of me. I immediately became annoyed and started to think about how I hated them, fucking immigrants coming to my country, he is poor and I pay taxes so he can get welfare. I thought about how his son is going to become a lousy shit and rape white women. I started to get mad and decided to beat him up, I was going to follow him when he got off the bus.
I saw him press the button and got ready at the next stop, and just before we stopped I was about to get up and the man turned to his son and said something in a heavy accent that I will never forget in my life.
“I love you my son, be good.”
He then gave him a big, hard hug and the boy got off the bus alone. He waved good bye and sat back down, with his hands on his face. I just stared out the window where his son had been standing. My world view came crashing. He was just a father who wanted his son to be good, he loved him just like my father loved me. For some reason this changed everything for me. I know this is a very small thing but I started to think about how he wanted a better life for his son.
He was a man that had changed everything for his family. I sat on that bus for hours, it kept going around. I thought about how wrong it was to do the things I had done. I left that city the next day and started over. I am much happier now. I dont feel the hate in my heart every day anymore.
There is this amazing thread on Reddit where ex-Nazis, skinheads and all changed their minds on racism. This is taken from Kottke’s blog but the link will return you to the Reddit thread.
Five cognitive distortions of people who get stuff done
Five cognitive distortions of people who get stuff done
Interesting list, although I am quite skeptical of people’s capacity for correct overgeneralization; making universal judgements from limited observations and being right a lot of the time.
Enclothed Cognition is the idea that the clothes that you are wearing change your behaviour.
A fascinating short video by Dave McRaney, the guy behind You Are Not So Smart.
A list of useful mental models
Mental models are mind devices you can use to explain things.
Over the years, I have developed a few models that may be useful. I don't know whether they attach to existing ones but here goes:
Here's an example (Hanlon's Razor) from Gabriel Weinberg's list (he is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, “the search engine that doesn't track you”).