10 Phrases That Can Resolve Any Conflict

One of the biggest mistakes small-business owners make is trying to avoid conflict. This is problematic because in any capitalistic economy, conflict is not only an inevitable but a necessary part of all business. Through the process of “productive conflict,” companies can grow and become more profitable. The key is to be able to resolve them effectively.

Authors of Perfect Phrases for Conflict Resolution Lawrence Polsky and Antoine Gerschel describe the perfect phrases to resolve any conflict. Try out these phrases next time you need to do so.

Conflict Resolution: Customers and Vendors

1. The last thing I want to say is no. Resolution is always easier if both sides believe their point of view is being considered. This shows what the other person has to say may change your decision.
2. Our goal is to cover our costs. At the same time, we want happy customers. Every customer knows a good company makes a profit but is also concerned about customer service. This statement highlights the current problem as a business issue and stresses the balance that everyone can understand.
3. Having no secrets between us is critical. If we can’t talk to each other, we will never be able to be productive. This emphasizes the need for clear communication. It’s an effective icebreaker to start a difficult conversation.
4. You’re right. We did increase our prices last year. However, in order to address ____________, we need to do it again. This directly tells customers why prices need to go up. Customers typically have an easier time accepting price increases if they understand the business reason behind it.
5. It seems things are not running as smoothly as they have in the past, and I would like to discuss that with you. This is a non threatening way to raise concerns to a vendor or customer. It highlights past success, expresses concerns about current problems and stresses a hope for the future.

Conflict Resolution: Employees

1. I really appreciate your input into our team. This tells them their opinion is valuable even if it’s not taken. This is important to most employees so they feel invested in the company’s future.
2. We may have a misunderstanding, since I may not have been clear about my expectations. Putting the problem first on the manager as a simple misunderstanding is an excellent way to start a conversation, so it doesn’t become combative from the beginning.
3. What held you back from meeting your commitment? As a starting point, this allows them to point to possible reasons why something wasn’t accomplished and avoid direct responsibility. It’s always much easier to start a conversation blaming other factors rather than yourself.
4. What can I do to support you? This offers help to the employee to ensure they have all the tools to be successful. It shows the manager is on the same side as them.
5. You’re saying one thing and doing another. This is a non threatening way to show they’re not getting done what they say they would do. This clearly addresses the problem of intention versus results.

Why are some people more resilient than others?

Stanford Department of Psychology professor Carol Dweck has done extensive research on what she calls "mindsets" and there are two primary types:

1. Fixed mindset: people who believe abilities are innate. You are just talented in an area or you're not.
2. Growth mindset: people who believe abilities are developed. You can learn and grow yourself.

People with a growth mindset are more resilient to challenges related to their abilities and performance than those with a fixed mindset.

As to what leads people to these different perspectives, a lot of media in recent years has cited Dweck's work on this with respect to parenting. In the American culture of positive reinforcement, praise is often the main socially acceptable way to encourage your kids. However, Dweck's studies have suggested that the type of praise you receive can strongly impact whether you end up with a fixed or growth mindset.

An excerpt where Dweck references one of her earlier papers on effects of praising innate qualities versus effort and process (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/psy...):

People can also learn these self-theories from the kind of praise they receive (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Ironically, when students are praised for their intelligence, they move toward a fixed theory. Far from raising their self-esteem, this praise makes them challenge-avoidant and vulnerable, such that when they hit obstacles their confidence, enjoyment, and performance decline. When students are praised for their effort or strategies (their process), they instead take on a more malleable theory— they are eager to learn and highly resilient in the face of difficulty.

Thus self-theories play an important (and causal role) in challenge seeking, self-regulation, and resilience, and changing self-theories appears to result in important real-world changes in how people function.

People who were praised more for their innate skills can end up focused on maintaining this "self-image," afraid to fail. These aren't those who value and become resilient.

Another excerpt from an article Dweck writes about mindsets and coping with setbacks (http://champions.stanford.edu/perspectives/the-mindset-of-a-champion/):

It will come as no surprise that the mindsets lead to different ways of coping with difficulty. Because in the fixed mindset, setbacks are seen as indicating a lack of ability, this mindset often leaves people few good ways of reacting to setbacks. In one study (Blackwell, et al, 2005), we found that those with a fixed mindset were more likely to say that if they did poorly on a test—even if it were in a new course and one they liked a lot—they would study less in the future and would seriously consider cheating. This is how people cope when they think setbacks mean they lack permanent ability. In contrast, those students with a growth mindset said they would study more or study differently. They planned to take charge of the situation and work to overcome the setback.

When the going gets rough, people in the growth framework not only take charge of improving their skills, they take charge of their motivation as well (cf. Grant, 2004). Despite setbacks—or even because of them—they find ways to keep themselves committed and interested. Instead, students with a fixed framework lose interest as they lose confidence. As the difficulty mounts, their commitment and enjoyment go down. Since all important endeavors involve setbacks sooner or later (more likely, sooner and later), it is a serious liability to lose interest and enjoyment just when you need greater effort.

Putting it all together, this means that a fixed mindset leads people to value looking good over learning, to disdain and to fear effort, and to abandon effective strategies just when they need them most. A growth mindset, on the other hand, leads people to seek challenges and learning, to value effort, and to persist effectively in the face of obstacles.

How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness

There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.”

It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know.

In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states—which, in turn, means we can strengthen them. Because as the famous saying by the Canadian scientist Donald Hebb goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind.

But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain.

Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse.

For example, more activation in the left prefrontal cortex is associated with more positive emotions. So as there is greater activation in the left, front portion of your brain relative to the right, there is also greater well-being. That’s probably in large part because the left prefrontal cortex is a major part of the brain for controlling negative emotion. So if you put the breaks on the negative, you get more of the positive.

On the other hand, people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting.

For example, adults who have had that history of stress and have lost up to 25 percent of the volume of this critically important part of the brain are less able to form new memories.

So we can see that as the brain changes, the mind changes. And that takes us to the second fact, which is where things really start getting interesting.

Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes.

These changes happen in temporary and in lasting ways. In terms of temporary changes, the flow of different neurochemicals in the brain will vary at different times. For instance, when people consciously practice gratitude, they are likely getting higher flows of reward-related neurotransmitters, like dopamine. Research suggests that when people practice gratitude, they experience a general alerting and brightening of the mind, and that’s probably correlated with more of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.

Here’s another example of how changes in mental activity can produce changes in neural activity: When college students deeply in love are shown a picture of their sweetheart, their brains become more active in the caudate nucleus, a reward center of the brain. As the mind changes—that rush of love, that deep feeling of happiness and reward—correlates with activation of a particular part of the brain. When they stop looking at that picture of their sweetheart, the reward center goes back to sleep.

Now the mind also can change the brain in lasting ways. In other words, what flows through the mind sculpts the brain. I define the mind as the flow of immaterial information through the nervous system—all the signals being sent, most of which are happening forever outside of consciousness. As the mind flows through the brain, as neurons fire together in particularly patterned ways based on the information they are representing, those patterns of neural activity change neural structure.

So busy regions of the brain start stitching new connections with each other. Existing synapses—the connections between neurons that are very busy—get stronger, they get more sensitive, they start building out more receptors. New synapses form as well.

One of my favorite studies of this involved taxi cab drivers in London. To get a taxi license there, you’ve got to memorize the spaghetti-like streets of London. Well, at the end of the drivers’ training, the hippocampus of their brain—a part very involved in visual-spatial memory—is measurably thicker. In other words, neurons that fire together wire together, even to the point of being observably thicker.

This has also been found among meditators: People who maintain some kind of regular meditative practice actually have measurably thicker brains in certain key regions. One of those regions is the insula, which is involved in what’s called “interoception”—tuning into the state of your body, as well as your deep feelings. This should be no surprise: A lot of what they’re doing is practicing mindfulness of breathing, staying really present with what’s going on inside themselves; no wonder they’re using, and therefore building, the insula.

Another region is the frontal regions of the prefrontal cortex—areas involved in controlling attention. Again, this should be no surprise: They’re focusing their attention in their meditation, so they’re getting more control over it, and they’re strengthening its neural basis.

What’s more, research has also shown that it’s possible to slow the loss of our brain cells. Normally, we lose about 10,000 brain cells a day. That may sound horrible, but we were born with 1.1 trillion. We also have several thousand born each day, mainly in the hippocampus, in what’s called neurogenesis. So losing 10,000 a day isn’t that big a deal, but the net bottom line is that a typical 80 year old will have lost about 4 percent of his or her brain mass—it’s called “cortical thinning with aging.” It’s a normal process.

But in one study, researchers compared meditators and non-meditators. In the graph to the left, the meditators are the blue circles and the non-meditators are the red squares, comparing people of the same age. The non-meditators experienced normal cortical thinning in those two brain regions I mentioned above, along with a third, the somatosensory cortex.

However, the people who routinely meditated and “worked” their brain did not experience cortical thinning in those regions.

That has a big implication for an aging population: Use it or lose it, which applies to the brain as well as to other aspects of life.

That highlights an important point that I think is a major takeaway in this territory: Experience really matters. It doesn’t matter only in our moment-to-moment well-being—how it feels to be me—but it really matters in the lasting residues that it leaves behind, woven into our very being.

Which takes us to the third fact, which is the one with the most practical import.

Fact three: You can use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better.

This is known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity refers to the malleable nature of the brain, and it’s constant, ongoing. Self-directed neuroplasticity means doing it with clarity and skillfulness and intention.

The key to it is a controlled use of attention. Attention is like a spotlight, to be sure, shining on things within our awareness. But it’s also like vacuum cleaner, sucking whatever it rests upon into the brain, for better or worse.

For example, if we rest our attention routinely on what we resent or regret—our hassles, our lousy roommate, what Jean-Paul Sartre called “hell” (other people)—then we’re going to build out the neural substrates of those thoughts and feelings.

On the other hand, if we rest our attention on the things for which we’re grateful, the blessings in our life—the wholesome qualities in ourselves and the world around us; the things we get done, most of which are fairly small yet they’re accomplishments nonetheless—then we build up very different neural substrates.

I think that’s why, more than 100 years ago, before there were things like MRIs, William James. the father of psychology in America, said. “The education of attention would be an education par excellence.”

The problem, of course, is that most people don’t have very good control over their attention. Part of this is due to human nature, shaped by evolution: Our forbearers who just focused on the reflection of sunlight in the water—they got chomped by predators. But those who were constantly vigilant—they lived.

And today we are constantly bombarded with stimuli that the brain has not evolved to handle. So gaining more control over attention one way or another is really crucial, whether it’s through the practice of mindfulness, for instance, or through gratitude practices, where we count our blessings. Those are great ways to gain control over your attention because there you are, for 30 seconds or 30 minutes, coming back to focus on an object of awareness.

Taking in the good

This brings me to one of my favorite methods for deliberately using the mind to change the brain over time for the better: taking in the good.

Just having positive experiences is not enough to promote last well-being. If a person feels grateful for a few seconds, that’s nice. That’s better than feeling resentful or bitter for a few seconds. But in order to really suck that experience into the brain, we need to stay with those experiences for a longer duration of time—we need to take steps, consciously, to keep that spotlight of attention on the positive.

So, how do we actually do this? These are the three steps I recommend for taking in the good. I should note that I did not invent these steps. They are embedded in many good therapies and life practices. But I’ve tried to tease them apart and embed them in an evolutionary understanding of how the brain works.

1. Let a good fact become a good experience. Often we go through life and some good thing happens—a little thing, like we checked off an item on our To Do list, we survived another day at work, the flowers are blooming, and so forth. Hey, this is an opportunity to feel good. Don’t leave money lying on the table: Recognize that this is an opportunity to let yourself truly feel good.

2. Really savor this positive experience. Practice what any school teacher knows: If you want to help people learn something, make it as intense as possible—in this case, as felt in the body as possible—for as long as possible.

3. Finally, as you sink into this experience, sense your intent that this experience is sinking into you. Sometimes people do this through visualization, like by perceiving a golden light coming into themselves or a soothing balm inside themselves. You might imagine a jewel going into the treasure chest in your heart—or just know that this experience is sinking into you, becoming a resource you can take with you wherever you go.

What I learned about negotiation

George Kohlresier has had a remarkable life. Now a professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD, the famed Swiss business school, George started his career as a psychologist working with the police on domestic violence. Those crises, it turns out, can sometimes turn into hostage-taking situations – and George has been taken hostage three times. Each time George was able to create an emotional connection with the hostage-taker, and negotiate a positive outcome.

As a business consultant, George sees the sense in which “hostage-taking” goes on in the workplace, as people use forms of emotional blackmail to get people to go along with their demands. When I interviewed George for my latest management training series Leadership: A Master Class, he shared some basic principles from his work that have ready lessons for any leader.

Here’s what I learned about effective negotiation skills from the master himself.

If you're not clear in saying what you want, understanding what the other wants through dialogue, then you don't have the foundation for negotiation. Many times a good heart to heart talk will eliminate the need for any hard negotiation, because you discover what the other person really feels or wants.

In harder negotiations where you're talking about logistics and so forth then you have to build a dialogue as a foundation. Then the heart of negotiation is in the concession making, the ability to use the law of reciprocity to give something to get something. That's the heart of negotiation, so the negotiator is always interested in what the other person wants as well as what they want. It’s an attitude that is there in the state of being able to trust someone.

When we look at the stages of negotiation, the first is how to create a bond. I can best negotiate with another person if I create that relationship, that bond. Many times negotiators come in and just say, What's the bottom line? What do you want? They go too fast. They don't take time to build that bond. Especially as we look at other cultures like Asia and the Middle East, bonding becomes a central part. Who are you as a person? Let's have a tea. Let's talk.

And then there’s separating the person from the problem. In a negotiation you always have to be able to understand: what's the problem? What's the focus of what we're trying to get to? And then you have to know what you want and what the other person wants: both become a part of understanding of what we're aiming for. Then be clear on your goals what your interests are -- and understanding the other's interests. What do they want? And this has to happen through a dialogue.

How do I know what you want? I ask you. And if you're not able to put it into words, I may even have to help you clarify what it is that you want. So once you create that dialogue, then you start looking for options and proposals. What's the possibility, for example, of making the pie bigger. How to think together to create a solution so that it becomes in the end a mutual gain -- we both lose something but we both get something.

That's slightly different from the frame of reference about win-win, because if win-win becomes your goal, then it’s likely you may give in too soon or you may hold out too long. Mutual gain is a better way to think about it. How do we both get what we need?

Last, the contract. How you create trust-ability. In bygone days they didn't need those contracts -- a handshake, your word was the most sacred bond that you could give. Today you create this contract, this understanding. Then the relationship continues on a positive note, and if you have to negotiate again, you're ready or starting on a positive foundation.

I've been saying that college is obsolete for a very long time. I dropped out in 2000, because even back then I could see that it was a really poor value proposition. I didn't predict this because I'm some crazy genius, but because I'm willing to discard emotional attachment and stare plainly at the facts.

School is outrageously expensive, leaving graduates with a debt (or net expenditure) of tens of thousands of dollars-- sometimes even one or two hundred thousand. There are some things that are worth that amount of money, but for many people school isn't one of them. In fact, apart from very specific cases, I think that school is a bad thing, not worth doing even if it was free.

That's not to say that school has no benefits whatsoever. It does, and although I left with zero additional skills after my three semesters there, I had a good time and benefited from the social aspect. The problem is that you can't just compare college to doing nothing at all. You have to compare it to what you COULD have done.

Let's say that when you turn eighteen, it's a good idea to take four years to develop yourself. College is one way to do that. If we were to construct an alternative way to do that, what could it look like? One of the biggest weaknesses of school is how inflexible it is, so one of the greatest benefits of designing your own curriculum is that you could come up with one that uniquely suits you. That said, here's a plan that I think would benefit many people MORE than school would. Let's call it the Hustler's MBA.

1. Learn poker. To an outsider, poker seems like a form of degenerate gambling. It can be, but that's not its nature. One of the most valuable skills I've learned in life is how to assess hundreds of factors, choose the important ones, evaluate them to make a decision quickly, and then execute that decision. Poker teaches this extremely well. So does pickup, incidentally. Poker develops your logic like nothing else I've experienced, and it develops your math skills to a lesser degree. It also teaches a skill I can't quite define, but would best describe as learning how hard you can push. I've found all of these skills to be very useful in life.

Poker will cost you money at first. Let's say $5000 in the first year. After that you'll be able to make between $45-60 per hour for the rest of your life. That's about $85,000 per year, which adjusts for inflation because as money is inflated, the stakes to keep the game interesting will go up. You will also receive "raises" because you'll always improve as a player and be able to play better stakes. If you're dedicated to poker, getting this good is virtually guaranteed. I've been through the process and it's not particularly hard. Can school guarantee you a job that pays this well?

Besides being able to make $85k/year, you could also play for six months and make $40k a year. Ultimate flexibility. I don't think that poker is the best career in the world, because it doesn't give back to society, but I do think that it's an excellent backup plan. Knowing that I can always support myself playing poker gives me the freedom to work on big projects without fear.

2. Travel a lot. For the first year, learn a foreign language that interests you. Start with three months of Pimsleur tapes, then get a local tutor. That should cost about $1000 for the first year, and will yield results FAR greater than a class in school. After the first year your self-education will be paid for by poker, so start traveling for three months every year. That should cost around $8k at the most, probably more like $5-6k. When traveling, education comes to you in the form of perspective. You understand other cultures and other people, and will get to practice your foreign language in its native setting. I would also combine travel with watching documentaries about the history of that place. I learned a lot about Rome after visiting, and now I'm kicking myself for not educating myself first.

3. Read every single day for at least an hour. Books get lumped in with other reading like magazines and blogs, but they're actually far more valuable. The amount of value an author compresses into a book is often astounding. There are books I've paid $10 for that have completely changed my life. If you read for 1-2 hours on average, you'll read around a hundred books per year. I do this now and find it to be one of the most valuable uses of my time. Read at least 50% non-fiction, but fiction is good, too. In school you would probably read 12 books a year at most.

4. Write every single day. Write blog posts, work on a book, write how you're feeling, or write short stories. I don't think it really matters. Writing every day helps you develop and refine your thoughts, as well as learn to communicate with others. Almost any field you'll go into will require communication, so you may as well get good at it. After you write, record a video yourself explaining what you wrote. This will help with public speaking and conversation. After the first year at the very latest, start publicly posting your work. This teaches you to ship and to integrate feedback.

5. Learn to program, even if you don't want to be a programmer. Programming develops logic and efficiency, amongst other things. Even an intermediate understanding of programming will allow you to be a creator. Programming languages are the languages of the future, so even if you aren't a programmer yourself, there's a good chance you'll be working with them. Speaking someone's language is nice when you're working with them, right?

6. Do something social. College is really excellent for making people social, and it's the one aspect in which don't expect my plan to exceed school. If you're a guy, consider getting into pickup. If you're a human, take group art classes, yoga, dance, or go to meetup groups. Social skills are some of the most important skills you can learn, and they can only truly be developed through social interaction. This interaction has to be in person, too... online chatting can be beneficial, but it's not enough. Traveling will help you be social as well, especially if you stay in hostels.

7. Eat healthy. When you eat healthy, your brain functions better and you're safeguarding its longevity. Developing yourself is at least as much about good habits as it is about learning skills. And like all habits, the earlier you start, the better. I'd say that the minimum to shoot for here is cutting out all sweeteners and refined grains. Besides the obvious health benefits, eating healthy will help you build discipline, which is an absolutely essential life skill.

8. Follow curiosity and spend money on it when necessary. These things that I've included so far are the baseline-- the new liberal arts education. They leave you plenty of time in your day to follow whatever you're interested in. Don't force it and try to learn investment banking because you think it would make a good career. If you're interested in butterflies, learn about butterflies. The rest of the curriculum is enough to make sure that you'll always be able to provide for yourself and will be a well rounded person, so consider this section your speculative learning. Maybe you'll find something you're passionate about, which will become your career, or maybe you'll just become a really interesting person who knows a lot about a lot of things. Either way is fine. Don't be afraid to spend money on tutors, classes, equipment, seminars, or travel.

9. Start a business after two years. With a full two years of self-education under your belt, you should have something useful to contribute to society. School makes you go from sheltered learning mode straight into real-world career mode. I think a better way is to have a transition, and to couple productivity with learning. Having that habit will ensure that you continue to perfect your craft as you get older. Your business can be anything-- a tech startup, publishing books you've written, giving speeches, making clothing and selling it online, whatever you're into. Read some business books before starting it and try to make money. One of the most common complaints I hear from graduates of traditional school is that nothing they learned was actually applicable to real life. Everything you learn from starting a business IS.

This is a modern curriculum that, on average, will produce people better prepared for real life than college. Obviously, it won't work if you want to be something that requires certification like a doctor or lawyer. The beauty of it is that it has a negative cost (you will make money due to poker, and hopefully your business), and can be funded initially with $5000 for poker. A few months into the second year, you will have paid off the poker debt and begun to self fund your life.

Will this work for you? There's no guarantee, but I see people work pretty hard at school, and if that same effort were put towards the Hustler's MBA, I think the chance of being self-sufficient and prepared for "real life" is about 90%. I'd estimate that non-lawyer/doctor college is somewhere around 50-70%. So, like anything, this plan is not totally foolproof, but I think it's a lot better and cheaper than the alternative.

There's a big taboo around telling people not to go to college. I find myself adhering to it, not ever suggesting that younger members of my family should drop out or skip school entirely. But maybe the time has come for us to look at college objectively, really quantify what goes in and what comes out, and evaluate it on its merits alone, rather than its historical value or its societal aura.

5 Health Benefits of Orgasm

Big, small, earth shattering; we love them all. I am talking about orgasms of course! It's Orgasm October, and our whole team is thinking about orgasms. They make us feel amazing, relaxed, re-energized, happy and sexy. But, besides those awesome things orgasms also have some great health benefits. Everyone loves an orgasm! Who doesn't? Not only do they feel amazing but here are some ways they improve our health!

* * *

Like you ever needed an excuse to want an orgasm? Well, now you do. Below are 5 reasons you must be having orgasms regularly. Whether it's with a partner or alone, orgasms are an excellent way to touch yourself or sex yourself healthy. Anyway you spin it, orgasms are great!

Without adieu, the 5 health benefits of orgasm:

#1 Heart health

When your man cums, take it! Swallowing semen is not only good for your teeth but it is also good for your heart. Semen helps keeps plaque levels low and rigorous sex is also a great cardio workout. Have more sex and more orgasms because it helps keep your heart strong and your teeth healthy.


#2 Stress relief

Ever notice how when you have that big "O" it feels like everything else that stresses you out just melts away? It's because of the chemicals that your brain releases, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. They all give you happy, loving feelings. Sex for your stress, anyone?

#3 Pain relief

OK, so admittedly, we did just write an article about how sex can be painful. We hope this isn't the case. If you are experiencing pain in sex, do check out that article. However, if you're experiencing pain in different areas of your body, orgasm can really alleviate that pain.

How? Orgasm works similarly to stress relief when oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins are released in the body. When these chemicals are released, they increase your tolerance to pain. So, that headache that you have can feel a little better after a nice romp. No more excuses.

#4 Orgasm fights cancer

Regular sexual activity is good for your sexual organs. Regular ejaculation helps keep prostate cancer away. Similarly, regular sexual activity and orgasm is good for the vagina because it helps to keep different uterine conditions at bay. Have more sex to keep your sexual organs healthy!

#5 Better sleep

After your orgasm, your body releases a cocktail of amazing chemicals. One of them is endorphins which not only makes you feel happy but can also have the effect of a sedative. More sex and orgasms for better sleep? Yes, please!

Having orgasms does wonders for the body and for your overall health. So, go ahead have some more.

What makes a good Dominant?

Wow, what a daunting question… “What makes a good Dominant?”  It’s like trying to describe DNA in great detail.  Being Dominant is complex, detailed, and no matter how complete the description, it falls impossibly short of reality.  Perhaps that is why so few websites have detailed descriptions of what it means to be a Dominant.  While the descriptions, duties and needs of submissives are given described in great attention, there is precious little space devoted to Dominants. 

But, for purpose of better understanding the lifestyle, and the Dominant role within it, I shall endeavor to do My best.  Here, then, in no particular order,  is My own impossibly incomplete description of what it means to be a Dominant.

Mastery of One’s Self:  A Dominant must always be in control of Him/Her Self.  As a Master/Mistress, the Dominant will take charge of a submissive.  It is impossible to take on the responsibility of Mastering another, if One can not Master Themselves.

Personal Standards:  A Dominant must set and maintain high personal standards for Themselves.  They must be an example to O/others, including Their submissive.

Self Respect:  If not given to Themselves, it can not be shown to O/others.

Self Control:  Many things in life may challenge a Dominant.  Control of One’s Self is essential when those challenges present themselves.

Self Secure:  A Dominant must know Themselves, and  feel comfortable within Their Own skin to project Themselves in a true fashion.  They will be challenged, and must be secure enough to tolerate differing opinions and views without considering them as condemnation.

Compassionate & Understanding:  A Dominant must be sensitive to the needs of O/others.  As Master/Mistress the Dominant will be responsible for the emotional well-being of a submissive that requires an open and accessible Dominant.  They must be willing to share, and actively demonstrate that sharing in return is both safe and healthy.

Communicative:  A Dominant must be able to communicate effectively in any situation, under any circumstances, in a variety of verbal and non-verbal ways.

Honesty:  This is more than a concept, or a feeling.  Honesty is expressed through actions.  And only in demonstrating honesty, will it be seen by O/others.

Teacher/Guide:  Dominants must meet the needs of a submissive for guidance.  They are responsible for the personal and lifestyle growth of Their one.  Their actions should be an example that teaches and guides E/everyone They come in contact with.

Well Rounded:  W/we often forget that D/s is a lifestyle, and a Dominant must be full and complete.  A Dominant must be romantic, happy, playful, have a sense of humor, have interests and pleasures, and all the things that make a complete human being.

 

Devoted:  A Dominant must be Someone that can be counted on to be there, and to be available.  When there is a problem, or Their submissive needs assistance, the Dominant must make every good faith effort to demonstrate that devotion.

The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Why don't successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call "the clarity paradox," which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

We can see this in companies that were once darlings of Wall Street, but later collapsed. In his book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explored this phenomenon and found that one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into "the undisciplined pursuit of more." It is true for companies and it is true for careers.

Here's a more personal example: For years, Enric Sala was a professor at the prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. But he couldn't kick the feeling that the career path he was on was just a close counterfeit for the path he should really be on. So, he left academia and went to work for National Geographic. With that success came new and intriguing opportunities in Washington D.C. that again left him feeling he was close to the right career path, but not quite there yet. His success had distracted him. After a couple of years, he changed gears again in order to be what he really wanted: an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic, spending a significant portion of his time diving in the most remote locations, using his strengths in science and communications to influence policy on a global scale. (Watch Enric Sala speak about his important work at TED). The price of his dream job was saying no to the many good, parallel paths he encountered.

What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:

First, use more extreme criteria. Think of what happens to our closets when we use the broad criteria: "Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?" The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. If we ask, "Do I absolutely love this?" then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with our career choices.

By applying tougher criteria we can tap into our brain's sophisticated search engine. If we search for "a good opportunity," then we will find scores of pages for us to think about and work through. Instead, we can conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: "What am I deeply passionate about?" and "What taps my talent?" and "What meets a significant need in the world?" Naturally there won't be as many pages to view, but that is the point of the exercise. We aren't looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for our absolute highest point of contribution.



Enric is one of those relatively rare examples of someone who is doing work that he loves, that taps his talent, and that serves an important need in the world. His main objective is to help create the equivalent of National Parks to protect the last pristine places in the ocean — a significant contribution.

Second, ask "What is essential?" and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials. At once, we have the key to unlock the next level of our lives. Get started by:

• Conducting a life audit. All human systems tilt towards messiness. In the same way that our desks get cluttered without us ever trying to make them cluttered, so our lives get cluttered as well-intended ideas from the past pile up. Most of these efforts didn't come with an expiration date. Once adopted, they live on in perpetuity. Figure out which ideas from the past are important and pursue those. Throw out the rest.
• Eliminating an old activity before you add a new one. This simple rule ensures that you don't add an activity that is less valuable than something you are already doing.

Third, beware of the endowment effect. Also known as the divestiture aversion, the endowment effect refers to our tendency to value an item more once we own it. One particularly interesting study was conducted by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (published here) where consumption objects (e.g. coffee mugs) were randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment, while the other half were given pens of equal value. According to traditional economic theory (the Coase Theorem), about half of the people with mugs and half of the people with pens will trade. But they found that significantly fewer than this actually traded. The mere fact of ownership made them less willing to part with their own objects. As a simple illustration in your own life, think of how a book on your shelf that you haven't used in years seems to increase in value the moment you think about giving it away.

Tom Stafford describes a cure for this that we can apply to career clarity: Instead of asking, "How much do I value this item?" we should ask "If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?" And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn't ask, "How much do I value this opportunity?" but "If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?"

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the "undisciplined pursuit of more," then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.

Personal Outsourcing: How to Get More than 24 Hours Out of Each Day

Outsourcing is a term borrowed from the corporate world, that refers to taking a function of a business and having it provisioned by an external company, often overseas. Applied to our personal lives, outsourcing is about taking things that we would normally have to do in our day-to-day lives, and having someone else do it at a low(ish) cost.

The first popular mention of personal outsourcing comes from AJ Jacobs of Esquire magazine. His article, written (by outsourcers) back in 2005, was a humorous look at just how much of your life could be run by a team of Indian virtual assistants at a low hourly rate.
In terms of efficiency, personal outsourcing is incredibly valuable as it allows you to get more out of the 24 hours a day that we are all given. While you are working, someone else can be doing your shopping, your taxes and life management tasks. This article is a very basic primer to the most common things that can be (and should often be) outsourced to others, freeing up your time for higher value activities.

The Premise

The important thing to remember about personal outsourcing is that you absolutely must know how much your time is worth (usually per hour). This is the only way to find out if something is worth outsourcing or not.

Let's look at an example. The average per capita income for someone living in California is $38,956 according to the US Department of Commerce. The average person works 9-5, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 52 weeks. This means they work 260 days, or 2080 work hours a year. $38,956 divided by 2080 is $18.73 per hour.

This means that an hour of that person's time, is potentially worth $18.73 per hour. Now of course, there are further considerations. Real Hourly Wage encompasses more than just working hours—it factors in commute time, time spent thinking about work, time spent at company social events, overtime and so on. But for the purposes of example and simplicity, let's go with the $18.73 per hour for the average Californian worker.

What this means, is that any task that has a cost of less than $18.73 an hour should potentially be outsourced to others. When calculating the cost of a task, you must also consider the time it takes you to complete the task compared to someone who you outsource it to. For example, it may take you the better part of two weekends to complete your taxes (assuming a minimal 20 hours, that's $374!), but it may only take your accountant a couple of days. Plus, he or she is more likely to get it right the first time and take everything into consideration. The question then becomes: well, what do you do instead of the tasks that you have outsourced?

If you are an entrepreneur this is easy – work on your business! If you are employed, it becomes a bit blurrier. You should be spending time working on tasks that have a greater value (monetary or otherwise) than what you have outsourced—whether it is furthering your education for better work prospects, starting a side business, or just spending quality time with friends and family.

Common Tasks

There are two types of outsourcing: onshore and offshore. Onshore refers to having people in your local area or city who you outsource to. Offshore refers to having people in another geography (usually another country or state) who you outsource to. You'll find that most of the examples below are for Onshore (or Local) Outsourcing. The reason for this is that there are limitations as to what your offshore outsourcers are capable of doing, and managing them would take another entire article to describe.

Here are some examples of things you can outsource.

• Laundry. Depending on your living arrangements, laundry is one of those things that can be easily outsourced. In most major American cities, people usually spend at least 1.5-2 hours each week doing their laundry (assuming a standard sized load—you may indeed have more). Thus, the opportunity cost of doing laundry (in addition to the cost of machine operation if any) would be about $28-37. In would be relatively simple to find someone on Craigslist to do your laundry for you at less than that amount.
• Grocery Shopping. When I lived in San Francisco, I used to visit the grocery store twice weekly, spending about an hour each time getting there, shopping and then unpacking once home. For a minimal cost, I could have had my groceries delivered (or even free if over a certain amount), thus freeing up my time to work on my business.
• Gardening. If you have a garden or yard, it is usually worth your while to have someone else mow the lawn or even water the yard. Plus they'll have all the proper equipment, which you would then not have to buy.
• Everyday Errands. These are errands like waiting in line at the post office, calling your credit card company or even visiting the bank. Of course, there are certain limitations (especially with financial transactions) but for the most part, you simply don't have to deal with these. Know a neighbor's teenager who wants some pocket money? Have them take your mail to the post office for you. Have to call and discuss things with your bank/credit card company? You can find an offshore virtual assistant to do that for you for $4 an hour.
• Maid or Cleaner. This is where we start to get into the more "expensive" areas of outsourcing. Having a maid or cleaner come in on a weekly basis seems like a luxury for most people, but using Craigslist or local classifieds in your area you can probably find someone to do it for you – in half the time.
• Cooking and Food. Having a chef come in and prepare meals is pretty nice, but can get pricey. A better solution is to have an arrangement with a local takeout place to deliver you food daily. Prepay them if you can, and tell them to mix and match however many dishes you want per day… and never worry about working out what to cook again.
• Driver. If you have a long commute where you are capable of being productive, this is something you should consider. See this article by the CEO of JangoMail to find out more how you outsourcing to a driver can make your business grow.

• A Blurry Line

  We've mostly looked at the simple, everyday things that you can outsource. But there is so much more. Some people ask where the line should be drawn – if you have a boring and monotonous office task at work, can you outsource that to say an assistant in India who will do it for a fraction of the cost? Well, it's really up to you. There is of course the issue of professional accountability and responsibility. Where you draw the line has become increasingly blurry in today's world.
  

  Quick Tips and Tricks

• Consider non-monetary trades and barter. Parents do this with their children all the time—do your chores and then you get to go play for an hour. You can do this with your roommates, family members, neighbours or friends – say trading waiting in a laundromat (where you can do something productive like read a book) for them picking up some groceries for you weekly.
• Try to find local people. For most tasks this is necessary due to the necessity of a physical presence, but in general, is easier due to direct face-to-face communication and there is less potential for misunderstandings.
• Clear instruction and communication. Make sure your instructions and communication with your outsourcers are crystal clear, and that there is no potential for misunderstanding. There is nothing more annoying than having to have someone repeat a task because they didn't ask a simple clarification question first.
• Get creative. There are probably a bunch of tasks (like going to the post office) that you would think that other people wouldn't do. But you'll be surprised. It may seem unconventional to you, but it may be perfectly normal for someone else. The only way to find out is to ask, and see if someone's willing to do it!

• Resources

  There are a number of resources you can use to find "outsourcers".
  For local tasks, the number one, at least in the US, is Craigslist. It will take time to filter through applicants and postings, but can be well worth it.
  For professional tasks, the most popular online marketplaces are Odesk and Elance.
  For miscellaneous remote tasks (and some fun), check out Fiverr—it is fairly amazing to see what people will do for $5.
  If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out TaskRabbit.
  

  Next Actions

• Work out how much your time is worth per hour.
• Think about the things you do weekly, but really don't like to do or would rather have someone else do.
• Post up some ads on Craigslist looking for people to fill those things.
• Start enjoying the extra time you now have—and put it to good use by doing something productive!

Are You an Over-Buyer or an Under-Buyer?

I’ve posted this quiz before, but I can’t resist putting it up again. This distinction encapsulates one of my very favorite (if not most weighty) personal insights into human nature: the difference between over-buyers and under-buyers. I also love the satisficer/maximizer distinction, but I didn’t come up with that one myself.

It’s not particularly productive to be in too deep as an over- or under-buyer; both offer certain advantages but also some definite drawbacks.

Does one of these descriptions fit you?

You’re an over-buyer if …
–You buy several summer outfits for your as-yet-unborn baby, then it turns out he outgrows those clothes before the weather warms up.
–You often lay in huge supplies of slow-moving items like shampoo or cough medicine.
–You often make a purchase, such as a tool or tech gadget, with the thought, “This will probably come in handy.”
–You have a long list of stores to visit before you travel.
–You find yourself throwing things away—milk, medicine, even cans of soup — because they’ve hit their expiration date.
–You buy items with the thought, “This will make a great gift!” without having a recipient in mind.
–You think, “Buying these things shows that I’m responsible, organized, and thoughtful.”

You’re an under-buyer if…
–You buy saline solution, which you use every morning and night, one bottle at a time.
–You often scramble to buy an item like a winter coat or bathing suit after the point at which you need it — and often, these items are sold out by the time you show up at a store.
–You’re suspicious of specialized objects and resist buying things dedicated very specific uses: suit bags, special plastic plates and cutlery for children, hand cream, rain boots, hair conditioner.
–You often need to come up with a makeshift solution, such using soap because you’ve run out of shaving cream, because you don’t have what you need.
–You often consider buying an item, then decide, “I’ll get this some other time” or “Maybe we don’t really need this.”
–If you must buy something, you buy as little as possible—say, by putting $10 of gas in the car.
–You think, “Not buying these things shows that I’m frugal and not a consumerist sucker.”

Me? I’m an under-buyer.

Under-buyers feel stressed because we don’t have the things we need. We make a lot of late-night runs to the drugstore. (I constantly run out of saline solution.) We’re surrounded with things that are shabby, don’t really work, or aren’t exactly suitable.

Over-buyers feel stressed because they’re hemmed in by stuff. They often don’t have enough storage space for everything they’ve bought, or they can’t find what they have. They feel oppressed by the number of errands they believe they need to do, and by the waste and clutter often created by their over-buying.

So under-buyers—buy what you need, without procrastination! Don’t wait for the first morning of your ski trip to buy ski gloves!
Over-buyers—think it over before you whip out your wallet! You don’t need a ten-year supply of toothpaste!

What do you think? Do you recognize yourself in either of these categories?

Are You an “Abstainer” or a “Moderator”?

I’ve posted this quiz before, but because I think it’s such a very helpful thing to know about yourself, I’m posting it again. Recognizing this distinction has been one of the most important insights that I’ve had into my own nature–more helpful, say, than understanding that I’m an under-buyer, not an over-buyer.

A piece of advice I often see is, “Be moderate. Don’t have ice cream every night, but if you try to deny yourself altogether, you’ll fall off the wagon. Allow yourself to have the occasional treat, it will help you stick to your plan.”

I’ve come to believe that this is good advice for some people: the “moderators.” They do better when they try to make moderate changes, when they avoid absolutes and bright lines.

For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation–and failing. Then I read a line from Samuel Johnson, who said, when someone offered him wine: “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”

Ah ha! Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an “abstainer.”

I find it far easier to give something up altogether than to indulge moderately. When I admitted to myself that I was eating my favorite frozen yogurt treat very often, two and even three times a day, I gave it up cold turkey. That was far easier for me to do than to eat it twice a week. If I try to be moderate, I exhaust myself debating, “Today, tomorrow?” “Does this time ‘count’?” etc. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.

There’s no right way or wrong way–it’s just a matter of knowing which strategy works better for you. If moderators try to abstain, they feel trapped and rebellious. If abstainers try to be moderate, they spend a lot of time justifying why they should go ahead and indulge.

However, in my experience, both moderators and abstainers try hard to convert the other team. A nutritionist once told me, “I tell my clients to follow the 80/20 rule. Be healthy 80% of the time, indulge within reason, 20% of the time.” She wouldn’t consider my point of view–that a 100% rule might be easier for someone like me to follow.

People can be surprisingly judgmental about which approach you take. As an abstainer, I often get disapproving comments like, “It’s not healthy to take such a severe approach” or “It would be better to learn how to manage yourself” or “Can’t you let yourself have a little fun?” On the other hand, I hear fellow abstainer-types saying to moderators, “You can’t keep cheating and expect to make progress” or “Why don’t you just go cold turkey?” But different approaches work for different people. (Exception: with an actual addiction, like alcohol or cigarettes, people generally accept that abstaining is the only solution.)

You’re a moderator if you…
– find that occasional indulgence heightens your pleasure–and strengthens your resolve
– get panicky at the thought of “never” getting or doing something

You’re an abstainer if you…
– have trouble stopping something once you’ve started
– aren’t tempted by things that you’ve decided are off-limits

Now, sometimes instead of trying to give something up, we’re trying to push ourselves to embrace something. Go to the gym, eat vegetables, work on a disagreeable project.

Perhaps this is the flip side of being an abstainer, but I’ve found that if I’m trying to make myself do something, I do better if I do that thing every day. When people ask me advice about keeping a blog, one of my recommendations is, “Post every day, or six days a week.” Weirdly, it’s easier to write a blog every day than it is to write it three or four times a week. I don’t know how moderators feel about this. (Moderators–what do you think? Is it easier to go for a half-hour walk every day, or four times a week, for you?)

So…do you identify as an abstainer or a moderator? Do these categories ring true for you?

Our languages are replete with phrases that unite words evoking a sense of cold with concepts of loneliness, social exclusion or misanthropy. When we speak of icy stares, frosty receptions and cold shoulders, we invoke feelings of isolation and unfriendliness. But cold and solitude are more than just metaphorical bedfellows; a new study shows that social exclusion can literally make people feel cold.

Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto recruited 65 students and were asked to recall a situation where they either felt included within a group or left out of it. Afterwards, they asked the students to estimate the temperature in the room under the ruse of providing information for the maintenance staff. The estimates varied wildly but volunteers who had social exclusion on their minds gave an average estimate of 21C, while those who remembered fitting in guessed an average of 24C.

So far, so interesting. But Zhong and Leonardelli were not content with simply bringing social memories to the surface; for their next trick, they created real feelings of exclusion. They recruited 52 more students who were led to a computer cubicle and told that they were taking part in an online game with three anonymous players. The object was simply to throw a virtual ball between the group but unbeknownst to the volunteers, their “partners” were computer-controlled programmes. These avatars either intermittently passed the ball to the real player throughout the game, or left them out after a few cursory passes.

Afterwards, the students completed an apparently unrelated marketing survey where they had to rate their preference for five different foods or drinks. Zhong and Leonardelli found that the behaviour of their virtual peers affected their preferences for foods, depending on their temperature! The “unpopular” students who had been left out of the ball-throwing game showed significantly stronger preferences for hot coffee or hot soup than those who had been allowed to play. On the other hand, both groups showed the same degree of preference for control foods such as Coke, apple or crackers.



So being ostracised, or even the memory of being ostracised, drums up both a literal chill and a desire for warmth. It can work the other way round too; invoking the concept of temperature can alter your opinions of another person. In an as yet unpublished study, graduate students Lawrence Williams and John Bargh asked other students to hold a cup of hot or iced coffee, before talking to another researcher. Afterwards, those who held the hot drink rated the stranger as being warmer and friendlier and were more likely to recommend them for a job.

So to speak

To Zhong and Leonardelli, studies like these are a testament to the power of metaphors. When we first learn to wield them in English lessons, we are taught that they are not meant to be taken literally, and yet psychological experiments show that many metaphors reflect fundamental ties between our social lives and our physical sensations.

Zhong and Leonardelli suggest that this close link between temperature and social closeness may be rooted in our earliest interactions with other people. When our parents held us close to them, we felt the warmth of their bodies and when they kept their distance, they deprived us of that warmth. So from an early age, temperature and distance from another person go hand-in-hand.

Indeed, people seem to have a tendency to describe complex abstract concepts using familiar physical experiences. Positive traits like generosity, friendliness or compassion are associated with warmth, while greed and desire are associated with hunger. So it is with cold and solitude. This link between the physical and the abstract isn’t just a one-way street – the two domains are so closely linked that the abstract can also invoke the physical.

I’ve previously written about another example of this, where psychologists demonstrated the bond between physical and moral cleanliness – the so-called “Lady Macbeth effect“. In that study, people who were asked to recall past misdeeds felt the physical need to clean themselves, gravitating towards cleaning-related words and preferring hygiene products over other items. Once again, clean consciences, dirty traitors and washing away your sins are more than just figurative turns of phrase. Zhong and Leonardelli’s results open a door to a large flurry of follow-up questions. Could experiencing physical warmth help to lessen the hurt of social exclusion? Could a cup of warm chicken soup be more than a metaphorical remedy “for the soul”? Could ambient temperate affect the quality of social relationships, and could manipulating one influence the other? Does social cohesion have its own thermostat? Could the depressive experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) stem just as much from the chill of winter as it does from a dearth of sunlight? Are fans of Vanilla Ice destined to a life of loneliness and despair?

Weight affects our perceptions of importance

We often use weight as a metaphor for importance, describing something as a ‘weighty issue’ or dismissing an argument as ‘not holding much weight’ but a new study suggests that this is not just a figure of speech.

A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard.

In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

Of course, this might be because of the simple association that larger amounts of money weigh more, so they looked at whether more abstract judgements about value could be affected by weight.

Subsequent studies showed that heavier clipboards led to participants placing more importance on the university listening to student opinions, and that participants were more likely to link their opinion of whether Amsterdam was a great city to the competence of the mayor.

A final study found that visitors who were stopped in the street and asked their opinion on a controversial subway were more confident in their opinion and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the plan.

The researchers link these findings with the growing field of embodied cognition that suggests that much of our experience of the world is actually mediated through how we interact with it.

Much of this research shows that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.

A cross-cultural look at our spatial understanding of numbers.
by Steven B. Jackson in Culture Conscious

In a recent post, we discussed how the cognitive processing of numbers may be rooted in the human body. It should come as no surprise then, that the way we think about numbers is deeply spatial. This phenomenon has a snappy title: The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes, or SNARC, effect.

In the seminal 1993 study that uncovered the SNARC effect, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues conducted a series of experiments on number processing. They were interested in the way we discern and distinguish even and odd numbers. In one experiment, subjects were shown numbers between 0 and 9 on a computer screen. They were asked to determine whether each number was odd or even by pressing one of two response keys, one with the left hand and one with the right.

Subjects reacted faster to small numbers like 1 and 2 when they pushed the button with their left hand. Larger numbers like 8 and 9 elicited faster responses when the right hand was doing the clicking. The researchers hypothesized that this difference has to do with spatial associations we have with numbers. We—in America, at least—orient numbers in space, with smaller integers associated with the left side of space, and larger numbers to the right. As a result, processing speed is faster when numbers are located where they “should” be. That’s the SNARC effect in a nutshell.

So where does the SNARC effect come from? Is it hardwired in all humans? Are numbers inherently spatial? Most experts agree that this is not the case.

A recent study suggests that our cognitive architecture for processing numbers is influenced by language. In 2009, Israeli researcher Samuel Shaki studied the SNARC effect across language groups. Using methodology similar to Dehaene’s 1993 study, Shaki tested the SNARC effect in subjects from three different countries. One group of subjects was Canadian, who read English words and Arabic numbers from left to right. Another group was Palestinian, who read Arabic words right to left, as well as the numbers of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The third group was composed of Israelis, who read Hebrew from right to left, but Arabic numbers from left to right.

Canadians showed a typical SNARC effect, with fast left side responses for smaller integers. Palestinians had a reversed SNARC effect, associating smaller numbers with the right side of space and larger numbers with the left side. Israelis, with their conflicting reading directions for letters and numbers, showed the weakest SNARC effect. These results strongly suggest that spatial-numerical associations are influenced by culturally specific reading and writing systems for both letters and numbers.

The SNARC effect may be culturally acquired, but it is also highly flexible. Just one year before Shaki’s cross-cultural study was published, Scottish research Martin Fischer examined the malleability of the SNARC effect. Experimenters asked participants to read cookbook recipes on a computer screen. In one group, the recipes were SNARC-congruent, with smaller numbers on the left side of the line of text and larger numbers on the right. For example: “Take 2 potatoes and fry them for 9 minutes.” In the SNARC-incongruent group, the recipe would instead read, “Take 9 potatoes and fry them for 2 minutes,” with the larger number oriented on the left side of the screen and the smaller number on the right.

After about 40 minutes of exposure to the SNARC-incongruent recipes, subjects showed a significantly diluted SNARC effect. This suggests that our spatial-numerical associations are not fixed, but are sensitive to experiences in the here and now.

To sum up: We tend to conceptualize numbers spatially. Experiments across language groups have shown that the spatial associations we make with numbers are not innate, but appear to be shaped by language. On top of that, these associations can also be influenced by stimuli in the present.

We still have a lot to learn about the SNARC effect. A particularly interesting question is how the effect manifests itself (or doesn’t) in speakers and writers of vertically written languages like Japanese and Chinese. Another question for further research is how fluency in multiple languages may moderate the potency and direction of the SNARC effect. With researchers exploring these and other questions, we may one day have a fuller understanding of our curiously spatial approach to numbers.

--------------------------------------------

Sources:

Fischer M.H., Mills R.A., & Shaki S. (2010). How to cook a SNARC: number placement in text rapidly changes spatial-numerical associations. Brain and Cognition, 72, 333-336

Shaki S., Fischer M. H., & Petrusic W. M. (2009). Reading habits for both words and numbers contribute to the SNARC effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 328–331.

Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993). The mental representation of parity and numerical magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396.

What's the single most valuable lesson you've learned in your professional life?

The fundamental difference between smart people and wise people. Smart people reach answers fast without much consideration of alternatives, and who have amazing ability to justify anything, using their big brains.  Wise people who know they are often wrong, and so can admit and learn from their mistakes, take more time to make decisions when it is not an emergency, and generally come to better solutions if they are not working. Think of the difference between oh so smart Henry Kissinger and Cho En Lai who ran rings around him when Nixon went to China for example, or in business between the ever self justifying Alan Greenspan and Alan Mullaly who actually turned round Boeing and Ford. It is better to be wise than smart. Of course the wise people also have learned the sort of lessons Edmond Lau has posted, who sounds wise and I would only add admit and learn from mistakes as a specific tool to combine with his list.

Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer

 

Focus on high-leverage activities.  Leverage is defined as the amount of output or impact produced per unit of time spent.

This lesson applies regardless of whether you love to spend many waking hours working or whether you're a subscriber of Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week philosophy [1]. At some point, you'll realize that there's more work to be done than you have time available, and you'll need to prioritize what to get done. Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.

Another rule of thumb for thinking about leverage is to consider the commonly mentioned Pareto principle [2] or the 80-20 rule -- the idea that 80% of the contributions or impact come from 20% of the effort.  That 20% of work consists of the highest leverage activities.  The 4-Hour Work Week philosophy requires taking this to the extreme -- assuming a normal 40-hour work week, what's the 10% of effort (4 hours) that you can do to achieve most of the gains?

By definition, your leverage, and hence productivity, can be increased in three ways [3]:

• By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity.
• By increasing the impact of a particular activity.
• By shifting to higher leverage activities.

Some examples of professional activities that I engage in to increase leverage include:

• Mentoring new hires.  Mentoring (and really managing) is an extremely high-leverage activity.  Over the course of a year, an employee will spend somewhere between 1880 to 2820 hours working (assuming 47 work-weeks and somewhere between 40-60 hours per week working).  Spending 1 hour every day for a month (20 hours) mentoring or training a new hire may seem like a lot of time, but it represents only about 1% of the total time the new hire will spend working his/her first year and yet can have a significant influence over the productivity and effectiveness on the other 99% of those hours.
  
• Building tools and automating repetitive work.  Coming from a software engineering background, one high-leverage activity that I tend to do is to build tools that reduce manual, repetitive work. I'm a little biased, but I'm a firm believer that everyone would benefit knowing a little bit about coding (see Computer Programming: Should most young people learn to code?), primarily because there are many fields not traditionally associated with computer science where a mindset of automation would have huge efficiency gains.  Don't do what a machine can do for you.
  
• Invest in learning and in continuously improving.  This falls in the bucket of "important and not urgent" tasks that Steven Covey describes in his time management matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4, 5].  Learning never seems like an urgent task, and it's easy -- if you don't budget time for it -- to allow unimportant interruptions to dictate your schedule.  However, learning is what lets you improve your work productivity and increase the opportunities available, so it's a big high-leverage activity.
  
• Actively prioritizing tasks based on estimated impact.  I'm currently working on user growth at Quora, and there are probably hundreds of things that I could consider working on at any given time that might move our metrics up and to the right. Deciding what I should work on next that would be the highest impact requires regularly reviewing (I try to do this at least weekly) what needs to get done and having the data to guide the decision-making.
  
• Holding tech talks and writing guides to bring new hires on board.  At Quora, we've recently started having each new hire go through a series of tech talks and also assembled a set of codelabs.  Inspired by Google's training regimen, codelabs are documents that explain core software abstractions and concepts that we use, discuss the rationale for why we designed and used them, walk through the relevant code in the codebase, and provide a set of exercises to solidify understanding.  These took many people on the team many hours to write, but they provide a scalable and reusable resource that allow new hires to start on a consistent foundation and cut down the amount of time that each individual mentor needs to spend teaching the same concepts.
  
• Pushing back on meetings without an agenda or meetings that you don't really need to be a part of.  Poorly run meetings are negative leverage because they waste people's time.  Avoid those.  A corollary to this is defining and setting agendas for meetings that you hold so that you don't waste other people's time.
  
• Spending time on interviews and improving interview processes.  Conducting interviews is a huge amount of work.  Interviews interrupt your workday, and the hours spent talking with candidates, writing up feedback, and debriefing all add up to considerable amounts.  However, making sure that we're hiring the right people, that we have a good process in place,  and that people we hire are people that I would be excited to work with is essential to building a strong team and a strong product.  There have been many weeks where I've interviewed 4 candidates per week, and I think my personal record during the height of the recruiting season was doing 20 interviews in 20 consecutive workdays.
  
• Using open-source tools when they meet your needs.  There's no sense in re-inventing the wheel if someone else has already built what you need.

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[1] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/High-Outpu...
[4] https://www.stephencovey.com/7ha...
[5] Tips & Hacks for Everyday Life: What are the top three effectiveness strategies you use?

What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

BY Laura Vanderkam

Mornings are a great time for getting things done. You’re less likely to be interrupted than you are later in the day. Your supply of willpower is fresh after a good night’s sleep. That makes it possible to turn personal priorities like exercise or strategic thinking into reality.

But if you’ve got big goals--and a chaotic a.m. schedule--how can you make over your mornings to make these goals happen?

Because I write about time management frequently, I’ve gotten to see hundreds of calendars and schedules over the years. From studying people’s morning habits, I’ve learned that getting the most out of this time is a five-part process. Follow these steps, though, and you’re on your way to building morning habits that stick.

1. Track Your Time

Part of spending your time better is knowing how you’re spending it now. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that nutritionists tell you to keep a food journal because it keeps you from eating mindlessly. It’s the same with time. Write down what you’re doing as often as you can. Use my spreadsheet, a Word document, or a pad and pen.

While measuring your mornings, try tracking your whole week. The reason? The solution to morning dilemmas often lies at other times of the day. You may be too tired because you’re staying up late. But if you look at how you’re spending your nights, you’ll notice that you’re not doing anything urgent. The Daily Show can be recorded and watched earlier--possibly while you’re on the treadmill at 6:30 a.m.

As for the mornings themselves, you can be organized but still not be spending them well. Question your assumptions. You may believe that “a man who wants to keep his job gets into the office before his boss” because that’s what your father did, but your boss may be disappointed that he doesn’t get the place to himself for an hour first! If you decide that something is a top priority, do it, but understand that we have to do few things in life.

2. Picture the Perfect Morning

After you know how you’re spending your time, ask yourself what a great morning would look like. For me, it would start with a run, followed by a hearty family breakfast. After getting people out the door, I’d focus on long-term projects like my books. Here are some other ideas for morning enrichment:

For personal growth:
Read through a religious text: Sacred texts can teach us about human nature and history, even if they’re not from a religion you subscribe to. If they are, pray or meditate and get to know your beliefs in a deeper way.
Train for something big: Aiming to complete a half-marathon, a triathlon, or a long bike ride will keep you inspired as you take your fitness to the next level.
Do art projects with your kids:. Mornings don’t have to be a death march out the door. Enjoy your time with your little ones at a time of day when you all have more patience.

For professional growth:
Strategize: In an age of constant connectivity, people complain of having no time to think. Use your mornings to picture what you want your career and organization to look like in the future.
Read articles in professional journals: Benefit from other people’s research and strategic thinking, and gain new insights into your field.
Take an online class: If a job or career change is in your future, a self-paced class can keep your skills sharp.

3. Think Through the Logistics

How could this vision mesh with the life you have? Don’t assume you have to add it on top of the hours you already spend getting ready or that you’ll have to get to work earlier. If you fill the morning hours with important activities you’ll crowd out things that are more time intensive than they need to be. Map out a morning schedule. What time would you have to get up and what time do you need to go to bed to get enough sleep? As for the mornings themselves, what would make your ritual easier? Do you need to set your easel next to your bed? Can you find a more cheerful alarm clock or one you can’t turn off so easily?

It’s easy to believe our own excuses, particularly if they’re good ones. Come up with a plan and assemble what you need, but whatever you do, don’t label this vision as impossible

4. Build the Habit

This is the most important step. Turning a desire into a ritual requires willpower. Use these fives steps to optimize your routine:
Start slowly: Go to bed and wake up fifteen minutes earlier for a few days until this new schedule seems doable.
Monitor your energy: Building a new habit takes effort, so take care of yourself while you’re trying. Eat right, eat enough, and surround yourself with supportive people who want to see you succeed.
Choose one new habit at a time to introduce: If you want to run, pray, and write in a journal, choose one of these and make it a habit before adding another.
Chart your progress: Habits take weeks to establish, so keep track of how you’re doing for at least thirty days. Once skipping a session feels like you forgot something--like forgetting to brush your teeth--you can take your ritual up a notch.
Feel free to use bribery: Eventually habits produce their own motivation, but until then, external motivations like promising yourself concert tickets can keep you moving forward. And keep in mind that your morning rituals shouldn’t be of the self-flagellation variety. Choose things you enjoy: your before-breakfast ritual has the potential to become your favorite part of the day.

5. Tune Up as Necessary

Life changes. Sometimes we have to regroup, but the goal is to replace any rituals that no longer work with new ones that make you feel like every day is full of possibility.

That is ultimately the amazing thing about mornings--they always feel like a new chance to do things right. A win scored then creates a cascade of success. The hopeful hours before most people eat breakfast are too precious to be blown on semiconscious activities. You can do a lot with those hours. Whenever I’m tempted to say I don’t have time for something, I remind myself that if I wanted to get up early, I could. These hours are available to all of us if we choose to use them.

So how would you like to use your mornings? This important question requires careful thinking. But once you decide, small rituals can accomplish great things. When you make over your mornings, you can make over your life. That is what the most successful people know.