1. long-term planning
2. expressive
3. reasonable
4. loyal
5. flexible
6. patient
7. intuitive
8. passionate
9. empathetic
10. selfless
20151219
20151106
What Is the Smallest Thing in the Universe?
The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside. These too, seemed like fundamental particles, before scientists discovered that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each.
"This time we haven't been able to see any evidence at all that there's anything inside quarks," said physicist Andy Parker. "Have we reached the most fundamental layer of matter?"
And even if quarks and electrons are indivisible, Parker said, scientists don't know if they are the smallest bits of matter in existence, or if the universe contains objects that are even more minute.
Parker, a professor of high-energy physics at England's Cambridge University, recently hosted a television special on the U.K.'s BBC Two channel called "Horizon: How Small is the Universe?"
Strings or points?
In experiments, teensy, tiny particles like quarks and electrons seem to act like single points of matter with no spatial distribution. But point-like objects complicate the laws of physics. Because you can get infinitely close to a point, the forces acting on it can become infinitely large, and scientists hate infinities.
An idea called superstring theory could solve this issue. The theory posits that all particles, instead of being point-like, are actually little loops of string. Nothing can get infinitely close to a loop of string, because it will always be slightly closer to one part than another. That "loophole" appears to solve some of these problems of infinities, making the idea appealing to physicists. Yet scientists still have no experimental evidence that string theory is correct.
Another way of solving the point problem is to say that space itself isn't continuous and smooth, but is actually made of discrete pixels, or grains, sometimes referred to as space-time foam. In that case, two particles wouldn't be able to come infinitely close to each other because they would always have to be separated by the minimum size of a grain of space.
A singularity
Another contender for the title of smallest thing in the universe is the singularity at the center of a black hole. Black holes are formed when matter is condensed in a small enough space that gravity takes over, causing the matter to pull inward and inward, ultimately condensing into a single point of infinite density. At least, according to the current laws of physics.
But most experts don't think black holes are really infinitely dense. They think this infinity is the product of an inherent conflict between two reigning theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — and that when a theory of quantum gravity can be formulated, the true nature of black holes will be revealed.
"My guess is that [black hole singularities] are quite a lot smaller than a quark, but I don't believe they're of infinite density," Parker told LiveScience. "Most likely they are maybe a million million times or even more than that smaller than the distances we've seen so far."
That would make singularities roughly the size of superstrings, if they exist.
The Planck length
Superstrings, singularities, and even grains of the universe could all turn out to be about the size of the "Planck length."
A Planck length is 1.6 x 10^-35 meters (the number 16 preceded by 34 zeroes and a decimal point) — an incomprehensibly small scale that is implicated in various aspects of physics.
The Planck length is far and away too small for any instrument to measure, but beyond that, it is thought to represent the theoretical limit of the shortest measureable length. According to the uncertainty principle, no instrument should ever be able to measure anything smaller, because at that range, the universe is probabilistic and indeterminate.
This scale is also thought to be the demarcating line between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
"It corresponds to the distance where the gravitational field is so strong that it can start to do things like make black holes out of the energy of the field," Parker said. "At the Planck length we expect quantum gravity takes over."
Perhaps all of the universe's smallest things are roughly the size of the Planck length.
"This time we haven't been able to see any evidence at all that there's anything inside quarks," said physicist Andy Parker. "Have we reached the most fundamental layer of matter?"
And even if quarks and electrons are indivisible, Parker said, scientists don't know if they are the smallest bits of matter in existence, or if the universe contains objects that are even more minute.
Parker, a professor of high-energy physics at England's Cambridge University, recently hosted a television special on the U.K.'s BBC Two channel called "Horizon: How Small is the Universe?"
Strings or points?
In experiments, teensy, tiny particles like quarks and electrons seem to act like single points of matter with no spatial distribution. But point-like objects complicate the laws of physics. Because you can get infinitely close to a point, the forces acting on it can become infinitely large, and scientists hate infinities.
An idea called superstring theory could solve this issue. The theory posits that all particles, instead of being point-like, are actually little loops of string. Nothing can get infinitely close to a loop of string, because it will always be slightly closer to one part than another. That "loophole" appears to solve some of these problems of infinities, making the idea appealing to physicists. Yet scientists still have no experimental evidence that string theory is correct.
Another way of solving the point problem is to say that space itself isn't continuous and smooth, but is actually made of discrete pixels, or grains, sometimes referred to as space-time foam. In that case, two particles wouldn't be able to come infinitely close to each other because they would always have to be separated by the minimum size of a grain of space.
A singularity
Another contender for the title of smallest thing in the universe is the singularity at the center of a black hole. Black holes are formed when matter is condensed in a small enough space that gravity takes over, causing the matter to pull inward and inward, ultimately condensing into a single point of infinite density. At least, according to the current laws of physics.
But most experts don't think black holes are really infinitely dense. They think this infinity is the product of an inherent conflict between two reigning theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — and that when a theory of quantum gravity can be formulated, the true nature of black holes will be revealed.
"My guess is that [black hole singularities] are quite a lot smaller than a quark, but I don't believe they're of infinite density," Parker told LiveScience. "Most likely they are maybe a million million times or even more than that smaller than the distances we've seen so far."
That would make singularities roughly the size of superstrings, if they exist.
The Planck length
Superstrings, singularities, and even grains of the universe could all turn out to be about the size of the "Planck length."
A Planck length is 1.6 x 10^-35 meters (the number 16 preceded by 34 zeroes and a decimal point) — an incomprehensibly small scale that is implicated in various aspects of physics.
The Planck length is far and away too small for any instrument to measure, but beyond that, it is thought to represent the theoretical limit of the shortest measureable length. According to the uncertainty principle, no instrument should ever be able to measure anything smaller, because at that range, the universe is probabilistic and indeterminate.
This scale is also thought to be the demarcating line between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
"It corresponds to the distance where the gravitational field is so strong that it can start to do things like make black holes out of the energy of the field," Parker said. "At the Planck length we expect quantum gravity takes over."
Perhaps all of the universe's smallest things are roughly the size of the Planck length.
20150805
The $1 Per Use Rule
Assess everything on a “$1 per use” basis.
I have my mother to thank for this one. Everything I buy — clothes, shoes, household items — is assessed on the basis of, “Will I wear/use this enough to only cost me $1 per wear/use?” Now, obviously, things like wedding dresses, for example, don’t fall into this category. But, next time you go to buy that trendy, ephemeral “must have” item, break its cost down into realistic uses. Often, you’ll find that what seemed like a deal is actually a waste of money, and, it will find its way to the back of your closet after a few brief wears.
20150724
The best way to win an argument
How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to.
You are, I'm afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I'll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I'm right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It's also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon "the illusion of explanatory depth". They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the "cognitive miser" theory.
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It's a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you'll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don't truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other "I didn't really understand this until I had to teach it". Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: "I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something".
Explain yourself
Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you're trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there's a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
You are, I'm afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I'll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I'm right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It's also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon "the illusion of explanatory depth". They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the "cognitive miser" theory.
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It's a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you'll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don't truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other "I didn't really understand this until I had to teach it". Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: "I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something".
Explain yourself
Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you're trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there's a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
The hidden tricks of powerful persuasion
Are we always in control of our minds? As David Robson discovers, it’s surprisingly easy to plant ideas in peoples’ heads without them realising.
Are we all just puppets on a string? Most people would like to assume that they are free agents – their fate lies in their own hands. But they’d be wrong. Often, we are as helpless as a marionette, being jerked about by someone else’s subtle influence. Without even feeling the tug, we do their bidding – while believing that it was our idea all along.
“What we’re finding more and more in psychology is that lots of the decisions we make are influenced by things we are not aware of,” says Jay Olson at McGill University in Quebec, Canada – who recently created an ingenious experiment showing just how easily we are manipulated by the gentlest persuasion. The question is, can we learn to spot those tricks, and how can we use them to our own advantage?
Olson has spent a lifetime exploring the subtle ways of tricking people’s perception, and it all began with magic. “I started magic tricks when I was five and performing when I was seven,” he says.
As an undergraduate in psychology, he found the new understanding of the mind often chimed with the skills he had learnt with his hobby. “Lots of what they said about attention and memory were just what magicians had been saying in a different way,” he says.
One card trick, in particular, captured his imagination as he set about his research. It involved flicking through a deck in front of an audience member, who is asked to pick a card randomly. Unknown to the volunteer, he already worked out which card they would choose, allowing him to reach into his pocket and pluck the exact card they had named – much to the astonishment of the crowd.
The secret, apparently, is to linger on your chosen card as you riffle through the deck. (In our conversation, Olson wouldn’t divulge how he engineers that to happen, but others claim that folding the card very slightly seems to cause it to stick in sight.) Those few extra milliseconds mean that it sticks in the mind, causing the volunteer to pick it when they are pushed for a choice.
As a scientist, Olson’s first task was to formally test his success rate. He already knew he was pretty effective, but the results were truly staggering – Olson managed to direct 103 out of 105 of the participants.
Unsurprisingly, that alone has attracted a fair amount of media attention – but it was the next part of the study that was most surprising to Olson, since it shows us just how easily our mind is manipulated.
For instance, when he questioned the volunteers afterwards, he was shocked to find that 92% of the volunteers had absolutely no idea that they’d been manipulated and felt that they had been in complete control of their decisions. Even more surprisingly, a large proportion went as far as to make up imaginary reasons for their choice. “One person said ‘I chose the 10 of hearts because 10 is high number and I was thinking of hearts before the experiment started’,” says Olson – despite the fact that it was really Olson who’d made the decision. What’s more, Olson found that things like personality type didn’t seem to have much influence on how likely someone was to be influenced – we all seem equally vulnerable. Nor did the specific properties of the cards – the colour or number – seem to make success any less likely.
The implications extend far beyond the magician’s stage, and should cause us to reconsider our perceptions of personal will. Despite a strong sense of freedom, our ability to make deliberate decisions may often be an illusion. “Having a free choice is just a feeling – it isn’t linked with the decision itself,” says Olson.
Subtle menu
Don’t believe him? Consider when you go to a restaurant for a meal. Olson says you are twice as likely to choose from the very top or very bottom of the menu – because those areas first attract your eye. “But if someone asks you why did you choose the salmon, you’ll say you were hungry for salmon,” says Olson. “You won’t say it was one of the first things I looked at on the menu.” In other words, we confabulate to explain our choice, despite the fact it had already been primed by the restaurant.
Or how about the simple task of choosing wine at the supermarket? Jennifer McKendrick and colleagues at the University of Leicester found that simply playing French or German background music led people to buy wines from those regions. When asked, however, the subjects were completely oblivious to the fact.
It is less clear how this might relate to other forms of priming, a subject of long controversy. In the 2000 US election, for instance, Al Gore supporters claimed the Republicans had flashed the word “RATS” in an advert depicting the Democrat representative.
Gore’s supporters believed the (alleged) subliminal message about their candidate would sway voters. Replicating the ad with a made-up candidate, Drew Westen at Emory University, found that the flash of the word really did damage the politician’s ratings, according to subjects in the lab. Whether the strategy could have ever swayed the results of an election in the long term is debatable (similarly, the supposed success of subliminal advertising is disputed) but it seems likely that other kinds of priming do have some effect on behaviour without you realising it.
In one striking result, simply seeing a photo of an athlete winning a race significantly boosted telephone sales reps’ performance – despite the fact that most people couldn’t even remember seeing the picture. And there is some evidence showing that handing someone a hot drink can make you seem like a “warmer” person, or smelling a nasty odour can make you more morally “disgusted” and cause you to judge people more harshly.
How to spot manipulation
Clearly, this kind of knowledge could be used for coercion in the wrong hands, so it’s worth knowing how to spot others trying to bend you to their will without you realising.
Based on the scientific literature, here are four manipulative moves to watch out in your colleagues and friends in everyday life:
1) A touch can be powerful
Simply tapping someone on the shoulder, and looking them in the eye, means they are far more open to suggestion.
It’s a technique Olson uses during his trick, but it also has been shown to work in various everyday situations – such as persuading people to lend money.
2) The speed of speech matters
Olson says that magicians will often try to rush their volunteers so they choose the first thing that comes to mind – hopefully the idea that you planted there. But once they have made their choice, they switch to a more relaxed manner.
The volunteer will look back and think they had been free to make up their mind in their own time.
3) Be aware of the field-of-view
By lingering on his chosen card, Olson made it more “salient” so it stuck in the volunteers’ minds without them even realising it.
There are many ways that can done, from placing something at eye level, to moving something slightly closer to a target. For similar reasons, we often end up taking away the first thing offered to us.
4) Certain questions will plant ideas
For example, “Why do you think this would be a good idea?” or “What do you think the advantages would be?” It sounds obvious, but letting someone persuade themselves will mean they are more confident of their decision in the long term – as if it had been their idea all along.
We may all be puppets guided by subtle influences – but if you can start to recognise who’s pulling the strings, you can at least try to push back.
Are we all just puppets on a string? Most people would like to assume that they are free agents – their fate lies in their own hands. But they’d be wrong. Often, we are as helpless as a marionette, being jerked about by someone else’s subtle influence. Without even feeling the tug, we do their bidding – while believing that it was our idea all along.
“What we’re finding more and more in psychology is that lots of the decisions we make are influenced by things we are not aware of,” says Jay Olson at McGill University in Quebec, Canada – who recently created an ingenious experiment showing just how easily we are manipulated by the gentlest persuasion. The question is, can we learn to spot those tricks, and how can we use them to our own advantage?
Olson has spent a lifetime exploring the subtle ways of tricking people’s perception, and it all began with magic. “I started magic tricks when I was five and performing when I was seven,” he says.
As an undergraduate in psychology, he found the new understanding of the mind often chimed with the skills he had learnt with his hobby. “Lots of what they said about attention and memory were just what magicians had been saying in a different way,” he says.
One card trick, in particular, captured his imagination as he set about his research. It involved flicking through a deck in front of an audience member, who is asked to pick a card randomly. Unknown to the volunteer, he already worked out which card they would choose, allowing him to reach into his pocket and pluck the exact card they had named – much to the astonishment of the crowd.
The secret, apparently, is to linger on your chosen card as you riffle through the deck. (In our conversation, Olson wouldn’t divulge how he engineers that to happen, but others claim that folding the card very slightly seems to cause it to stick in sight.) Those few extra milliseconds mean that it sticks in the mind, causing the volunteer to pick it when they are pushed for a choice.
As a scientist, Olson’s first task was to formally test his success rate. He already knew he was pretty effective, but the results were truly staggering – Olson managed to direct 103 out of 105 of the participants.
Unsurprisingly, that alone has attracted a fair amount of media attention – but it was the next part of the study that was most surprising to Olson, since it shows us just how easily our mind is manipulated.
For instance, when he questioned the volunteers afterwards, he was shocked to find that 92% of the volunteers had absolutely no idea that they’d been manipulated and felt that they had been in complete control of their decisions. Even more surprisingly, a large proportion went as far as to make up imaginary reasons for their choice. “One person said ‘I chose the 10 of hearts because 10 is high number and I was thinking of hearts before the experiment started’,” says Olson – despite the fact that it was really Olson who’d made the decision. What’s more, Olson found that things like personality type didn’t seem to have much influence on how likely someone was to be influenced – we all seem equally vulnerable. Nor did the specific properties of the cards – the colour or number – seem to make success any less likely.
The implications extend far beyond the magician’s stage, and should cause us to reconsider our perceptions of personal will. Despite a strong sense of freedom, our ability to make deliberate decisions may often be an illusion. “Having a free choice is just a feeling – it isn’t linked with the decision itself,” says Olson.
Subtle menu
Don’t believe him? Consider when you go to a restaurant for a meal. Olson says you are twice as likely to choose from the very top or very bottom of the menu – because those areas first attract your eye. “But if someone asks you why did you choose the salmon, you’ll say you were hungry for salmon,” says Olson. “You won’t say it was one of the first things I looked at on the menu.” In other words, we confabulate to explain our choice, despite the fact it had already been primed by the restaurant.
Or how about the simple task of choosing wine at the supermarket? Jennifer McKendrick and colleagues at the University of Leicester found that simply playing French or German background music led people to buy wines from those regions. When asked, however, the subjects were completely oblivious to the fact.
It is less clear how this might relate to other forms of priming, a subject of long controversy. In the 2000 US election, for instance, Al Gore supporters claimed the Republicans had flashed the word “RATS” in an advert depicting the Democrat representative.
Gore’s supporters believed the (alleged) subliminal message about their candidate would sway voters. Replicating the ad with a made-up candidate, Drew Westen at Emory University, found that the flash of the word really did damage the politician’s ratings, according to subjects in the lab. Whether the strategy could have ever swayed the results of an election in the long term is debatable (similarly, the supposed success of subliminal advertising is disputed) but it seems likely that other kinds of priming do have some effect on behaviour without you realising it.
In one striking result, simply seeing a photo of an athlete winning a race significantly boosted telephone sales reps’ performance – despite the fact that most people couldn’t even remember seeing the picture. And there is some evidence showing that handing someone a hot drink can make you seem like a “warmer” person, or smelling a nasty odour can make you more morally “disgusted” and cause you to judge people more harshly.
How to spot manipulation
Clearly, this kind of knowledge could be used for coercion in the wrong hands, so it’s worth knowing how to spot others trying to bend you to their will without you realising.
Based on the scientific literature, here are four manipulative moves to watch out in your colleagues and friends in everyday life:
1) A touch can be powerful
Simply tapping someone on the shoulder, and looking them in the eye, means they are far more open to suggestion.
It’s a technique Olson uses during his trick, but it also has been shown to work in various everyday situations – such as persuading people to lend money.
2) The speed of speech matters
Olson says that magicians will often try to rush their volunteers so they choose the first thing that comes to mind – hopefully the idea that you planted there. But once they have made their choice, they switch to a more relaxed manner.
The volunteer will look back and think they had been free to make up their mind in their own time.
3) Be aware of the field-of-view
By lingering on his chosen card, Olson made it more “salient” so it stuck in the volunteers’ minds without them even realising it.
There are many ways that can done, from placing something at eye level, to moving something slightly closer to a target. For similar reasons, we often end up taking away the first thing offered to us.
4) Certain questions will plant ideas
For example, “Why do you think this would be a good idea?” or “What do you think the advantages would be?” It sounds obvious, but letting someone persuade themselves will mean they are more confident of their decision in the long term – as if it had been their idea all along.
We may all be puppets guided by subtle influences – but if you can start to recognise who’s pulling the strings, you can at least try to push back.
20150721
The Best Way to Win an Argument
You are, I'm afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I'll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I'm right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It's also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon "the illusion of explanatory depth". They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the "cognitive miser" theory.
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It's a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you'll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don't truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other "I didn't really understand this until I had to teach it". Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: "I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something".
Explain yourself
Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you're trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there's a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It's also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon "the illusion of explanatory depth". They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the "cognitive miser" theory.
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It's a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you'll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don't truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other "I didn't really understand this until I had to teach it". Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: "I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something".
Explain yourself
Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you're trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there's a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
20150717
People Who Curse All The Time Are Hotter, Confident And Less Stressed
The most dramatic, effective and beautiful expressions in any language come in the form of curse words.
Swearing is dramatic because it often occurs in dramatic situations that call for blunt forwardness. Curses are easily the most effective of words because there is no denying the intention of anyone using them.
When we curse, we’re usually saying exactly what is on our minds, without fear of the repercussions.
It may come off as harsh, but if there is cursing involved, the message will be read loud and clear.
But, more importantly, curse words are some of the most beautiful words that can possibly be used in daily conversation.
As a language enthusiast, I’ve spent years studying Mandarin Chinese, as well as the nuances of English and Spanish. What I’ve found is that swearing in any culture or country often conveys the highest form of passion.
I tend to curse much more than my mother thinks I should.
But you can’t blame me: I’m one of the most dedicated people I know, and when I’m invested in a project, or even just a thought or opinion, I tend to take it very seriously.
If you’re like me, then you have quite the dirty mouth. But rejoice, potty mouths: Those of us who swear by cursing have a lot more going for us than the straight-laced goody goodies.
I’m cursing my ass off because I’m confident about my sh*t, motherf*cker.
Researchers at Keele University in Staffordshire have been studying the links between cursing and mental behavior for years now, and they recently presented their information at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference.They found that cursing is most often associated with angry attitudes and emotions toward certain subjects and is used as an emotional coping mechanism.
Dr. Richard Stephens, one of the researchers for the study, tells the Daily Mail,
We want to use more taboo words when we are emotional. We grow up learning what these words are and using these words while we are emotional can help us to feel stronger.It seems as though cursing allowed the study’s participants to feel a sense of empowerment after airing out their dirty mouths.
I may have been raised somewhat unconventionally, but certain swear words in my home weren’t necessarily considered “taboo.”
But it was extremely important for my brothers and me to practice diligence with our swearing. We didn’t dare curse at our mother, and we definitely weren’t allowed to curse at our friends’ homes.
Still, if I felt extremely confident or passionate about something, I could use the occasional curse word to emphasize that.
Eventually, this escalated to me swearing at least every hour, but only in situations I feel super passionate about — which, apparently, is everything.
There’s nothing like a bad bitch with a dirty mouth.
Girls and guys alike agree: There’s nothing sexier than someone who uses words as bold and demanding of attention as they are.Not only do we feel more confident when we curse, but apparently it makes us a whole lot more attractive, too.
One survey finds that both men and women think swearing is a turn-on, but only when done in appropriate contexts.
One participant says,
Not all people can curse equally. Some people are just better equipped for it — kind of like guys wearing muscle shirts or girls bearing midriffs.What’s more interesting is that guys and girls both find members of the opposite sex even hotter when they’re swearing under the sheets.
Apparently, men find it extra attractive when a woman loses her sh*t while romping in the sack.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? There’s nothing sexier than someone who uses language the right way while having sex — because using it the wrong way is just plain creepy.
People who curse aren’t bottling up their stress and emotions.
It’s a known fact that people who vent their frustrations and explain what’s on their minds are often in healthier mental states than those who prefer to bottle up their thoughts and concerns.Think about it: Your worries and fears are like a can of soda, and by opening up that can of frustrations, you’re letting out all of the little bubbles that were consuming you. I know, a brilliant f*cking analogy.
But, by being able to truly express your genuine emotions once the feels hit you where it hurts, an immediate sense of relief comes over you.
There’s seriously no bigger stress eraser than screaming “F*CKING F*CK!” at the top of your lungs on a rooftop for the entire world to hear (trust me, I know).
When we curse, we’re not only explaining how strongly we feel in certain situations, but we’re also relieving ourselves from the stress and anger attached to that thought. By letting go of it, there is an acute therapeutic effect that definitely has a lasting impact in our mentality.
Prevention reports that by expressing our true emotions through the form of an occasional outburst or tantrum, we actually prevent our brains from releasing too much cortisol in the long run, which is the stress hormone that makes you feel all types of horrible.
So there you have it. Those of us with the dirty mouths shouldn’t be looking to clean them up too soon. Instead, swearing should come out of the taboo closet and be used by everyone on a daily basis.
If you don’t agree with me, just try channeling your inner rage regarding that assh*le at work who won’t leave you alone, the boss who you can’t stand or that paper you just can’t seem to finish. Afterward, stand on the nearest rooftop and shout every single swear in the book.
You’ll thank me when you’re done.
7 Habits Of People With Remarkable Mental Toughness
First the definition:
“The ability to work hard and respond resiliently to failure and adversity; the inner quality that enables individuals to work hard and stick to their long-term passions and goals.”
Now the word:
Grit.
The definition of grit almost perfectly describes qualities every successful person possesses, because mental toughness builds the foundations for long-term success.
For example, successful people are great at delaying gratification. Successful people are great at withstanding temptation. Successful people are great at overcoming fear in order to do what they need to do. (Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t scared — that does mean they’re brave. Big difference.) Successful people don’t just prioritize: They consistently keep doing what they have decided is most important.
All those qualities require mental strength and toughness — so it’s no coincidence those are some of the qualities of remarkably successful people.
Here are ways you can become mentally stronger — and as a result more successful:
The same premise applies to luck. Many people feel luck has a lot to do with success or failure. If they succeed, luck favored them, and if they fail, luck was against them.
Most successful people do sense that good luck played some role in their success. But they don’t wait for good luck or worry about bad luck. They act as if success or failure is completely within their control. If they succeed, they caused it. If they fail, they caused it.
By not wasting mental energy worrying about what might happen to you, you can put all your effort into making things happen. (And then if you get lucky, hey, you’re even better off.)
You can’t control luck, but you can definitely control you.
For some people it’s politics. For others it’s family. For others it’s global warming. Whatever it is, you care … and you want others to care.
Fine. Do what you can do: Vote. Lend a listening ear. Recycle and reduce your carbon footprint. Do what you can do. Be your own change — but don’t try to make everyone else change.
(They won’t.)
Then let it go.
Easier said than done? It depends on your perspective. When something
bad happens to you, see it as an opportunity to learn something you
didn’t know. When another person makes a mistake, don’t just learn from
it — see it as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding.
The past is just training; it doesn’t define you. Think about what went wrong but only in terms of how you will make sure that next time you and the people around you know how to make sure it goes right.
Resentment sucks up a massive amount of mental energy — energy better applied elsewhere.
When a friend does something awesome, that doesn’t preclude you from doing something awesome. In fact where success is concerned, birds of a feather tend to flock together — so draw your unsuccessful friends even closer.
Don’t resent awesomeness. Create and celebrate awesomeness, wherever you find it, and in time you’ll find even more of it in yourself.
So if something is wrong, don’t waste time complaining. Put that mental energy into making the situation better. (Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you’ll have to make it better.)
So why waste time? Fix it now. Don’t talk about what’s wrong. Talk about how you’ll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.
And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don’t just serve as a shoulder they can cry on. Friends don’t let friends whine; friends help friends make their lives better.
(Sure, superficially they might seem to like you, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship not based on substance is not a real relationship.)
Genuine relationships make you happier, and you’ll form genuine relationships only when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.
And you’ll have a lot more mental energy to spend on the people who really do matter in your life.
Think about what you do have. You have a lot to be thankful for. Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?
Feeling better about yourself is the best way of all to recharge your mental batteries.
“The ability to work hard and respond resiliently to failure and adversity; the inner quality that enables individuals to work hard and stick to their long-term passions and goals.”
Now the word:
Grit.
The definition of grit almost perfectly describes qualities every successful person possesses, because mental toughness builds the foundations for long-term success.
For example, successful people are great at delaying gratification. Successful people are great at withstanding temptation. Successful people are great at overcoming fear in order to do what they need to do. (Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t scared — that does mean they’re brave. Big difference.) Successful people don’t just prioritize: They consistently keep doing what they have decided is most important.
All those qualities require mental strength and toughness — so it’s no coincidence those are some of the qualities of remarkably successful people.
Here are ways you can become mentally stronger — and as a result more successful:
1. Always act as if you are in total control.
There’s a saying often credited to Ignatius: “Pray as if God will take care of all; act as if all is up to you.” (Cool quote.)The same premise applies to luck. Many people feel luck has a lot to do with success or failure. If they succeed, luck favored them, and if they fail, luck was against them.
Most successful people do sense that good luck played some role in their success. But they don’t wait for good luck or worry about bad luck. They act as if success or failure is completely within their control. If they succeed, they caused it. If they fail, they caused it.
By not wasting mental energy worrying about what might happen to you, you can put all your effort into making things happen. (And then if you get lucky, hey, you’re even better off.)
You can’t control luck, but you can definitely control you.
2. Put aside things you have no ability to affect.
Mental strength is like muscle strength — no one has an unlimited supply. So why waste your power on things you can’t control?For some people it’s politics. For others it’s family. For others it’s global warming. Whatever it is, you care … and you want others to care.
Fine. Do what you can do: Vote. Lend a listening ear. Recycle and reduce your carbon footprint. Do what you can do. Be your own change — but don’t try to make everyone else change.
(They won’t.)
3. See the past as valuable training … and nothing more.
The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.Then let it go.
The past is just training; it doesn’t define you. Think about what went wrong but only in terms of how you will make sure that next time you and the people around you know how to make sure it goes right.
4. Celebrate the success of others.
Many people — I guarantee you know at least a few — see success as a zero-sum game: There’s only so much to go around. When someone else shines, they think that diminishes the light from their stars.Resentment sucks up a massive amount of mental energy — energy better applied elsewhere.
When a friend does something awesome, that doesn’t preclude you from doing something awesome. In fact where success is concerned, birds of a feather tend to flock together — so draw your unsuccessful friends even closer.
Don’t resent awesomeness. Create and celebrate awesomeness, wherever you find it, and in time you’ll find even more of it in yourself.
5. Never allow yourself to whine. (Or complain. Or criticize.)
Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems always makes you feel worse, not better.So if something is wrong, don’t waste time complaining. Put that mental energy into making the situation better. (Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you’ll have to make it better.)
So why waste time? Fix it now. Don’t talk about what’s wrong. Talk about how you’ll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.
And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don’t just serve as a shoulder they can cry on. Friends don’t let friends whine; friends help friends make their lives better.
6. Focus only on impressing yourself.
No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all “things.” People may like your things — but that doesn’t mean they like you.(Sure, superficially they might seem to like you, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship not based on substance is not a real relationship.)
Genuine relationships make you happier, and you’ll form genuine relationships only when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.
And you’ll have a lot more mental energy to spend on the people who really do matter in your life.
7. Count your blessings.
Take a second every night before you turn out the light and, in that moment, quit worrying about what you don’t have. Quit worrying about what others have that you don’t.Think about what you do have. You have a lot to be thankful for. Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?
Feeling better about yourself is the best way of all to recharge your mental batteries.
20150703
Minimize Obstacles First, Make Improvements Later to Stick to Habits
When you’re starting a new habit (or even sticking to an old one), the more things that are in your way, the more opportunities you have to break it. Rather than trying to start the habit in its best form possible, focus on removing obstacles first.
As life improvement blog Riskology points out, obstacles are the enemy of the habit. You want to start working out, but that can mean buying working out clothes (which you don’t have money for) and finding a gym (which you don’t have time for). Except, it doesn’t have to. Rather than trying to get the most optimized version of the habit right off the bat, take the minimum amount of steps necessary to get started. Once it’s a routine, you can start improving the habit as you need to:
I’m successful with my running habit (and wildly unsuccessful with others) because I’ve decided that the only thing that will stop me from getting my runs in (repetition) and improving my streak (momentum) is illness. Not waiting to get a good deal on running gear. Not feeling too busy. Not bad weather. None of these potential failure points are a part of the habit-maintenance process for me. If I’m alive and feeling at least reasonably well, I’m running on a pre-determined schedule.This might mean that your habits aren’t revolutionary changes right off the bat. If you do ten push ups every day on your lunch break, that alone probably isn’t going to get you in shape. It can, however, get you used to thinking about working out and, once you’ve got that down, you can start adding exercises, or building on your routine. The important thing is momentum.
20150702
"I’d like to raise my IQ. Where do I start?"
Dear Dumbass: I’d like to raise my IQ. Where do I start?
Do you want to raise your IQ or actually become smarter? They’re not the same thing.
IQ tests are designed to be taken cold, with no training, like the SAT (which was originally intended to be an IQ-type test). These days, of course, most people prep for the SAT, and similarly, you can get better at IQ tests by practicing.
But why would you want to? High IQ doesn’t carry much prestige. Bragging about IQ is about as likely to help someone hook up as posing with a tiger cub on Tinder.
Let’s assume you have good reason to look into this. Maybe your kid needs to hit a certain percentile on an IQ test to qualify for a gifted education program – that’s how the LA public schools do it. If so, try to find out which test your kid will be given – LA used to use Raven’s Progressive Matrices – and go online to find practice versions. Have a couple of half-hour practice sessions with your kid to familiarize her with the format and what kinds of solutions to look for. A little practice when you know what test is coming can be worth 20 IQ points.
Likewise, you can beat the SAT with many dozens of practice sessions over months and years. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on tutors, take a huge series of practice tests. The makers of the SAT used to claim that you can’t study for it, but this was based on people not studying enough. They don’t claim that anymore.
To be good at the SAT, become familiar with everything they might throw at you. This can mean going through thousands of problems. Use books of old official SATs, which you can buy on Amazon or eBay. (Unofficial SAT problems are often too slapdash to use.) Start taking practice tests early – ninth or tenth grade or even earlier. Your total score should gradually increase by hundreds of points. I know people who’ve taken 20, 30, even 80 practice tests. It’s a lot of work but effective; hardcore preppers get into kick-ass schools. Many test prep companies offer free diagnostic SATs. Or you can take a free practice PSAT, which won’t waste as much of your Saturday. The SAT has been redesigned for 2016, but most of it has stayed the same.
Back to IQ. Googling “free IQ test” returns links to more than 20 tests of varying quality. Try a few quick tests; don’t buy the deluxe diagnostics they try to sell you, and take the results with a grain of salt. Games and sites such as Brain Age, Lumosity and Big Brain Academy offer timed practice on tasks which are similar if not identical to many of the tasks used to measure IQ on professionally administered tests such as the WAIS, WISC and Stanford-Binet. If you train diligently for these tasks, your IQ scores should go up. Does this reflect a real increase in intelligence? Probably not to any great extent. Will doing leg presses every day make you a better figure skater? Maybe, but there’s so much more involved in a triple Lutz.
What if you’d like to do more than just beat IQ tests? I think you can gradually increase your actual intelligence. The primary way to do this is to get in the habit of thinking and analyzing. Most people believe they’re always thinking whenever they’re awake. But there’s a difference between thinking and perceiving. If you’re just letting life wash over you, as when you’re numbly watching Wheel of Fortune without trying to solve the puzzles, you’re not really thinking.
You may have noticed the difference in brain function between normal perception and that wrapped-in-cotton feeling you get when you’re drunk or high or exhausted. That’s kind of like the difference between active thinking and passive perceiving.
Here are some ways to nudge yourself into doing more thinking:
Do you want to raise your IQ or actually become smarter? They’re not the same thing.
IQ tests are designed to be taken cold, with no training, like the SAT (which was originally intended to be an IQ-type test). These days, of course, most people prep for the SAT, and similarly, you can get better at IQ tests by practicing.
But why would you want to? High IQ doesn’t carry much prestige. Bragging about IQ is about as likely to help someone hook up as posing with a tiger cub on Tinder.
Let’s assume you have good reason to look into this. Maybe your kid needs to hit a certain percentile on an IQ test to qualify for a gifted education program – that’s how the LA public schools do it. If so, try to find out which test your kid will be given – LA used to use Raven’s Progressive Matrices – and go online to find practice versions. Have a couple of half-hour practice sessions with your kid to familiarize her with the format and what kinds of solutions to look for. A little practice when you know what test is coming can be worth 20 IQ points.
Likewise, you can beat the SAT with many dozens of practice sessions over months and years. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on tutors, take a huge series of practice tests. The makers of the SAT used to claim that you can’t study for it, but this was based on people not studying enough. They don’t claim that anymore.
To be good at the SAT, become familiar with everything they might throw at you. This can mean going through thousands of problems. Use books of old official SATs, which you can buy on Amazon or eBay. (Unofficial SAT problems are often too slapdash to use.) Start taking practice tests early – ninth or tenth grade or even earlier. Your total score should gradually increase by hundreds of points. I know people who’ve taken 20, 30, even 80 practice tests. It’s a lot of work but effective; hardcore preppers get into kick-ass schools. Many test prep companies offer free diagnostic SATs. Or you can take a free practice PSAT, which won’t waste as much of your Saturday. The SAT has been redesigned for 2016, but most of it has stayed the same.
Back to IQ. Googling “free IQ test” returns links to more than 20 tests of varying quality. Try a few quick tests; don’t buy the deluxe diagnostics they try to sell you, and take the results with a grain of salt. Games and sites such as Brain Age, Lumosity and Big Brain Academy offer timed practice on tasks which are similar if not identical to many of the tasks used to measure IQ on professionally administered tests such as the WAIS, WISC and Stanford-Binet. If you train diligently for these tasks, your IQ scores should go up. Does this reflect a real increase in intelligence? Probably not to any great extent. Will doing leg presses every day make you a better figure skater? Maybe, but there’s so much more involved in a triple Lutz.
What if you’d like to do more than just beat IQ tests? I think you can gradually increase your actual intelligence. The primary way to do this is to get in the habit of thinking and analyzing. Most people believe they’re always thinking whenever they’re awake. But there’s a difference between thinking and perceiving. If you’re just letting life wash over you, as when you’re numbly watching Wheel of Fortune without trying to solve the puzzles, you’re not really thinking.
You may have noticed the difference in brain function between normal perception and that wrapped-in-cotton feeling you get when you’re drunk or high or exhausted. That’s kind of like the difference between active thinking and passive perceiving.
Here are some ways to nudge yourself into doing more thinking:
- Read extensively and pursue topics across multiple sources. The internet has changed how we read. We now retrieve facts quickly and narrowly, which is convenient but not sufficient for building robust thinking skills. Widen your pursuit of information. Read the entire Wikipedia article. Click on some of the links. Get a library card.
- Find big, tough questions that require long-term thought. What will daily life be like 50 years from now? How might we prove or disprove the existence of God? How can I become more effective in interpersonal interactions? Are people basically good? Take some aspect of your life about which you have a little curiosity, and see if you can pull some big questions out of it. Return to these questions whenever your brain isn’t otherwise occupied (during traffic jams or bad sex, for instance).
- Play “What if?” games. I like to pretend I’m Ben Franklin or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Jane Austen, suddenly experiencing the world through my senses. Each imaginary historical figure has to figure out when, where, and who their new host body is and what the world has turned into. This is weird, but so is NFL players high-stepping through tires. Hypotheticals imposed on everyday life are mental pushups.
- If you’re always on the internet or social media, look for mental challenges there. You can try tweeting. Twitter forces users to express their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Follow people who use Twitter to express actual thoughts, not just reports on moods or meals or 20%-off deals. Looking at the world and asking yourself “Is there a tweet in this?” forces you to make observations.
- Build up your analogy muscles. Geniuses and comedians and poets and pundits make connections between different areas of experience. Paul Cooijmans, who theorizes about intelligence, calls this “associative horizon.” It’s being good at saying “This is like that.”
- Be healthy. If your body works like crap, so does your brain. Exercise, get enough sleep, eat less junk. Take a baby aspirin every day. Floss. Try brain-boosting drugs if you want – the only one I know that works for sure is coffee. (Doesn’t make you smarter, just more alert.)
- Stay abreast of tech. Natural-born intelligence becomes less important as we become smarter via our devices. Future people will be smarter than us because they’ll have smarter devices. Tech enables not-so-smart people to stupidly text in the middle of crosswalks but also helps smart people get even smarter. Eventually we’ll have tech installed in our bodies, and people will brag about their machine brain/meat brain ratio. The tech-savvy will have more and more of an advantage.
- Learn to think like a genius. Instead of letting experience just flow over you, get in the habit of asking yourself “Why?” and “How?” Geniuses like to say they’re not smarter than other people, they just ask more questions and work more persistently to answer those questions. (This is the genius equivalent of supermodels saying they were ugly in middle school.)
20150626
Invest in yourself
- Create your own specific plan of action on what you want in life. A good one helps you define your preferred future (your dream life), clarifies your life’s purpose, evaluates your current reality in the basic areas of life (financial, family, career, health, spiritual, etc.), reveals your personal values for each life area (the beliefs that are important to you), sets well-defined goals, and creates a specific plan of action.
- Be a lifelong learner. Read amazing books and resources personal growth. Take classes (formal or informal). Subscribe to industry blogs. Attend webinars and listen to podcasts. But don’t stop there – you’ve got to apply what you read and hear, and take action!
- Surround yourself with excellence. It’s been said that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. In other words, who you spend time with influences the person you become.
- Don’t spend your precious time with people who don’t believe in you or your goals. We all need to have positive people in our lives. And maybe you need a mentor or coach who can help you take action on your goals.
- Keep improving your communication skills. Buffett mentioned this in one of the interviews. Communication skills are extremely important today. And not just in how to be a great speaker, but also a great listener. And a good writer. If you intend to share what you learn with your audience, communicate better by writing your most amazing pieces of ideas and thoughts.
- Discover your true needs. No two people have the exact same needs. Establish what’s most important for you to gain, have, and keep in your life, e.g., what you truly need as opposed to what you simply want.
- Raise your self-worth. Even if you think you already possess a healthy dose of self-esteem, work to improve your opinion of yourself. This calls for a remorseless disposal of fears and perceived insecurities as well as the healing of old wounds once and for all.
- Create a bigger version of yourself. Don’t settle on a self-imposed plateau; always aim a bit higher than before. Visualize your ideal life — regardless of how unattainable it may seem now — and act to manifest it one element at a time.
- Create a bigger version of yourself. Don’t settle on a self-imposed plateau; always aim a bit higher than before. Visualize your ideal life — regardless of how unattainable it may seem now — and act to manifest it one element at a time.
- Do what you love. Oftentimes it is the simplest things that deliver the most profound joy, yet we barely find time for these precious activities. Don’t postpone your simple pleasures, whether you like to read or sing or hike. Perform actions grounded in a deep seat of love every day.
- Never go against your intuition. Your intuition knows more than you think. Learn to trust your inner voice without hesitation; reason may tell you one thing, but your instinct tells you the right thing, always.
20150621
How to Use the 5 Apology Languages
The power of apologies is legendary. At least, it is if you've listened to my episodes on how to repair relationships, on how to take responsibility when you screw up, and on how to criticize someone without looking like a jerk.
But they've got to be done right, or the other person won't even hear them. In the workplace, a proper apology might make the difference between being seen as a team player or being considered "that guy" (or "that girl" or "that intersex").
Bernice and Melvin are not having a good morning. They just finished taking inventory for Bernice's plant store, Green Growing Things. Melvin, in his glee, went to close the inventory program. When the program asked, "Do you really want to exit without saving the data?" he clicked Yes by habit. Oops. An entire day's work, lost.
Bernice is going ballistic. Melvin is trying his best to apologize, but nothing's working.
"I promise I'll do the inventory on my own this weekend," he cries.
"Yes, but you aren't even sorry!" she yells.
"I am too! Please forgive me!"
"Forgive you? Forgive you? Why should I forgive you when you aren't sorry?"
"But I am sorry!"
And round and round it goes.
From the outside, it sure seems that Melvin is offering an apology, and that Bernice is refusing to accept it. But that's not what's happening at all. They just recognize apologies differently. In the book When Sorry Isn't Enough, Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas share the results of a study they did of how people give and receive apologies. The bad news: There are 5 different ways people apologize. The good news: There are only 5.
Sponsor: You'll never be sorry with Stamps.com. Stamps.com makes it easy for small businesses to save money. No more Post Office trips! Save time, postage, gas, parking, and general hassle. You'll never need to wait in line again! Try Stamps.com risk-free! Plus you'll get a free digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. Go to Stamps.com, before you do anything else, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in GET IT DONE. That’s Stamps.com, enter GET IT DONE
Apology Language #1: Expressing Regret
Expressing Regret is Bernice's primary apology language. To her, an apology is first and foremost emotional. Someone truly feels bad about what they've done. An apology must show that someone sincerely feels regretful, guilty, or ashamed.
Melvin says "I'm sorry," but his voice tone says "Panic!" Bernice is picking up on his tone, not his words. She wants to know there's real regret behind his apology, not just that he can say the words. Expressing Regret sounds like, "I feel awful about what I've done." (said in an appropriate tone of voice)
Apology Language #2: Accepting Responsibility
Bernice's secondary apology language is Accepting Responsibility. She wants to hear that the other person knows it's their fault. This is as simple as saying "I was wrong." But as simple as it sounds, many of us just can't say those words. We can say "You were wrong." We can say "Politicians are wrong." But we can't quite say "I was wrong."
But that's all that someone with the Accepting Responsibility apology language wants to hear, a simple admission of fault. Melvin's apologizing, but he's not saying that he was wrong. Accepting responsibility sounds like, "I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was my fault."
Apology Language #3: Genuine Repentance
Genuine Repentance is similar to Expressing Regret in that it must come from the heart. But it must also come with a promise to change, so the problem doesn't happen again.
Even though Melvin may plan to change going forward—perhaps by re-reading every dialog box twice before clicking a button—if he doesn't say so to Bernice, she won't know that. Genuine Repentance sounds like, "I'm sorry. It won't happen again. Next time I'll re-read the dialog box twice before clicking a button. And I'll turn on auto-save. And make backups."
Apology Language #4: Requesting Forgiveness
Requesting Forgiveness asks the injured person to forgive. It lets them know they were wronged, that forgiveness is needed to repair the relationship. Even though you may believe that a request for forgiveness is implied in any apology, someone whose apology language is Requesting Forgiveness needs to hear it out loud.
An apology can be as simple as saying "I was wrong."
Keep in mind that a request for forgiveness won't necessarily be granted. The apology shows that you recognize the need to be forgiven. Whether or not the forgiving happens, however, is up to the person receiving the apology. Requesting Forgiveness sounds like, "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
Apology Language #5: Making Restitution
Finally, we come to Making Restitution. Making Restitution involves justifying the wrong, and finding a way to make amends. You gotta make up for what you did. How you make up for it depends on the person. You have to make up for it in a way that the other person values. If you say "I'm so sorry. Here is a pair of tickets to the game Sunday evening" to someone who prefers cooking to sports, you're not making amends. "Here is a pair of tickets to the filming of Iron Chef Sunday evening" will work much better.
Making Restitution might mean doing what's needed to fix what you screwed up. It's probably the most labor-intensive apology language. It also happens to be my #1 apology language. Making Restitution sounds like, "I'm sorry. I was sloppy. I'd be glad to help with the marketing report so you can go home early tonight."
Match Their Apology Language, Not Yours
Since our primary apology language is how we recognize apologies, we tend to give apologies in the same language. After all, if "I'm sorry" means "I'll make restitution," then we'll be tempted to make restitution when we want to apologize, even if the other person doesn't care about restitution, but does care about hearing us say, "I was wrong."
Melvin's top two apology languages are Making Restitution and Requesting Forgiveness. He's saying "I'll fix the problem. Please forgive me." Those aren't a match for Bernice. Her top apology languages are Expressing Regret and Accepting Responsibility. She just wants Melvin to say, sincerely, "I feel really ashamed of my screwup. It was my fault." She'll say "Of course I accept your apology! It's all right! Let's go down to the soda shop and share a Tofutti eclaire to make up." She doesn't even need him to fix the problem.
When making an apology, use the other person's apology language, so they really hear you. If you don't know someone's apology language, try all 5: "I'm sorry. I feel awful about what happened. I was wrong and I take full responsibility. Here's what I'll do differently in the future, and here's how I'll make it right, now. Can you forgive me?"
When you're receiving an apology, be sensitive to all 5 languages, not just your own. Even if someone isn't using your preferred apology language, they may be quite sincere, using their own. Listen for it. An apology is a special act, meant to make things better. Learn to give and receive apologies in a way that people can hear, and that repairs and strengthens your relationship.
But they've got to be done right, or the other person won't even hear them. In the workplace, a proper apology might make the difference between being seen as a team player or being considered "that guy" (or "that girl" or "that intersex").
Bernice and Melvin are not having a good morning. They just finished taking inventory for Bernice's plant store, Green Growing Things. Melvin, in his glee, went to close the inventory program. When the program asked, "Do you really want to exit without saving the data?" he clicked Yes by habit. Oops. An entire day's work, lost.
Bernice is going ballistic. Melvin is trying his best to apologize, but nothing's working.
"I promise I'll do the inventory on my own this weekend," he cries.
"Yes, but you aren't even sorry!" she yells.
"I am too! Please forgive me!"
"Forgive you? Forgive you? Why should I forgive you when you aren't sorry?"
"But I am sorry!"
And round and round it goes.
From the outside, it sure seems that Melvin is offering an apology, and that Bernice is refusing to accept it. But that's not what's happening at all. They just recognize apologies differently. In the book When Sorry Isn't Enough, Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas share the results of a study they did of how people give and receive apologies. The bad news: There are 5 different ways people apologize. The good news: There are only 5.
Sponsor: You'll never be sorry with Stamps.com. Stamps.com makes it easy for small businesses to save money. No more Post Office trips! Save time, postage, gas, parking, and general hassle. You'll never need to wait in line again! Try Stamps.com risk-free! Plus you'll get a free digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. Go to Stamps.com, before you do anything else, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in GET IT DONE. That’s Stamps.com, enter GET IT DONE
Apology Language #1: Expressing Regret
Expressing Regret is Bernice's primary apology language. To her, an apology is first and foremost emotional. Someone truly feels bad about what they've done. An apology must show that someone sincerely feels regretful, guilty, or ashamed.
Melvin says "I'm sorry," but his voice tone says "Panic!" Bernice is picking up on his tone, not his words. She wants to know there's real regret behind his apology, not just that he can say the words. Expressing Regret sounds like, "I feel awful about what I've done." (said in an appropriate tone of voice)
Apology Language #2: Accepting Responsibility
Bernice's secondary apology language is Accepting Responsibility. She wants to hear that the other person knows it's their fault. This is as simple as saying "I was wrong." But as simple as it sounds, many of us just can't say those words. We can say "You were wrong." We can say "Politicians are wrong." But we can't quite say "I was wrong."
But that's all that someone with the Accepting Responsibility apology language wants to hear, a simple admission of fault. Melvin's apologizing, but he's not saying that he was wrong. Accepting responsibility sounds like, "I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was my fault."
Apology Language #3: Genuine Repentance
Genuine Repentance is similar to Expressing Regret in that it must come from the heart. But it must also come with a promise to change, so the problem doesn't happen again.
Even though Melvin may plan to change going forward—perhaps by re-reading every dialog box twice before clicking a button—if he doesn't say so to Bernice, she won't know that. Genuine Repentance sounds like, "I'm sorry. It won't happen again. Next time I'll re-read the dialog box twice before clicking a button. And I'll turn on auto-save. And make backups."
Apology Language #4: Requesting Forgiveness
Requesting Forgiveness asks the injured person to forgive. It lets them know they were wronged, that forgiveness is needed to repair the relationship. Even though you may believe that a request for forgiveness is implied in any apology, someone whose apology language is Requesting Forgiveness needs to hear it out loud.
An apology can be as simple as saying "I was wrong."
Keep in mind that a request for forgiveness won't necessarily be granted. The apology shows that you recognize the need to be forgiven. Whether or not the forgiving happens, however, is up to the person receiving the apology. Requesting Forgiveness sounds like, "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
Apology Language #5: Making Restitution
Finally, we come to Making Restitution. Making Restitution involves justifying the wrong, and finding a way to make amends. You gotta make up for what you did. How you make up for it depends on the person. You have to make up for it in a way that the other person values. If you say "I'm so sorry. Here is a pair of tickets to the game Sunday evening" to someone who prefers cooking to sports, you're not making amends. "Here is a pair of tickets to the filming of Iron Chef Sunday evening" will work much better.
Making Restitution might mean doing what's needed to fix what you screwed up. It's probably the most labor-intensive apology language. It also happens to be my #1 apology language. Making Restitution sounds like, "I'm sorry. I was sloppy. I'd be glad to help with the marketing report so you can go home early tonight."
Match Their Apology Language, Not Yours
Since our primary apology language is how we recognize apologies, we tend to give apologies in the same language. After all, if "I'm sorry" means "I'll make restitution," then we'll be tempted to make restitution when we want to apologize, even if the other person doesn't care about restitution, but does care about hearing us say, "I was wrong."
Melvin's top two apology languages are Making Restitution and Requesting Forgiveness. He's saying "I'll fix the problem. Please forgive me." Those aren't a match for Bernice. Her top apology languages are Expressing Regret and Accepting Responsibility. She just wants Melvin to say, sincerely, "I feel really ashamed of my screwup. It was my fault." She'll say "Of course I accept your apology! It's all right! Let's go down to the soda shop and share a Tofutti eclaire to make up." She doesn't even need him to fix the problem.
When making an apology, use the other person's apology language, so they really hear you. If you don't know someone's apology language, try all 5: "I'm sorry. I feel awful about what happened. I was wrong and I take full responsibility. Here's what I'll do differently in the future, and here's how I'll make it right, now. Can you forgive me?"
When you're receiving an apology, be sensitive to all 5 languages, not just your own. Even if someone isn't using your preferred apology language, they may be quite sincere, using their own. Listen for it. An apology is a special act, meant to make things better. Learn to give and receive apologies in a way that people can hear, and that repairs and strengthens your relationship.
How to Criticize (Without Looking Like a Jerk)
Sometimes it's really obvious when someone else screwed up. And of course, we just have to correct them. Otherwise, the world as we know it will stop.
So right there at the team meeting, we put on our best diplomacy hat and say, "You know, your user interface design really was confusing. I'll send you a memo telling you what you did wrong and how to fix it later this afternoon."
Your target smiles and says, "Thank you for your offer."
The next day, your goldfish are floating upside down in your fish tank, your car tires seem to be missing some air, and your hard drive accidentally reformats itself.
Coincidence? I think not.
The problem is that despite your extraordinary attempt at diplomaticy, you pointed out to someone that they screwed up.
This happens with colleagues and also with strangers. Have you ever tried to cross a crosswalk? Cars are supposed to stop behind the Stop line to let pedestrians walk across. And yet, often some driver (not you, I'm sure) will stop right in the middle of the crosswalk and pedestrians have to walk around their car in order to cross.
Everyone Is an Ogre
The driver never actually looks like an inconsiderate, law-breaking oaf with no respect or consideration for other people. They always look like a nice person. Then you tap their window and say, politely, "Excuse me, you're blocking the crosswalk. Please stop behind the line next time." They look at you and start to get red in the face. Their formerly curly hair start to straighten out and stand on end. Steam comes out of their ears. They puff out their cheeks, and they yell, "You asshole! Get your fucking butt out of the street before I drive over you and don't ever fucking talk to me again!!!"
They are clearly in the wrong. They are breaking the law, being inconsiderate, and generally being a lousy prom date. But when you politely point out that they are wrong, they act like a great ape deprived of its favorite banana. Because in fact, they are.
People Value Their Self-Image
You see, no one appreciates being confronted with immediate, obvious, incontrovertible, undeniable evidence of their own wrong-doing. Our favorite banana is our self-image. And most of us have self-images that we're upstanding angels who are perfect and have good reasons for the things we do.
Science, of course, has thoroughly debunked that. All of us are a mix of admirable and icky qualities. As shocking as it may be for you to consider, please realize that even I am not perfect. (I know, unbelievable, right?)
Just ask me to cook. I use pre-prepared ingredients, like pre-marinated chicken, reheatable pierogies, and chocolate craze Balance Bars. It's my personal version of mole sauce.
When you make someone realize they're wrong, you're taking away their self-image banana and replacing it with a rotten turnip. They're mad about trading their banana for a turnip. It really has nothing to do with you. You're just the catalyst for their self-realization and an easy target for when they go postal about it.
Frame Your Criticism as a Best Interest
All is not lost, however. You can still communicate the all-important corrective message, just frame it as being in their best interest.
Think about the good thing that will happen if they realize they're wrong and follow your advice. Then frame your message as if their current state of affairs is good, and you're helping them go from good to better.
So let's take the example from the beginning of this episode. Instead of saying "Your user interface made our users throw up on the keyboard," ask yourself what good will come from a better UI. A better UI will make your product a joy to use, reduce support costs, and maybe win the user interface designer a design award.
There's no guarantee they'll take your advice.
To that end, say something like, "You know, the user interface is key to making our users joyous, reducing support costs, and, of course, winning industry awards. I have some ideas that might help bring out the brilliance in your design even more. If you'd like to hear them, let me know."
This way, you're acknowledging the value of what they do, the happy consequences of them doing it right, and then simply offering to help their existing amazingness be even more amazing.
They May So "No"
There's no guarantee that they'll agree to listen to your ideas. Or that they'll take your advice even if they do listen. But if you offer help sincerely, at least they won't get mad.
Probably.
Just to make sure, practice your voice tone. Think of someone who really wants your help. Someone you love, like your niece or nephew (with that hair, and a name like "Sage," you don't necessarily know).
Now practice offering them help out loud. "Sage, I have some ideas that can help with your advanced topology homework. Want to work on it together?" Listen to yourself carefully. Now take that same tone of voice with your work colleague. "Teammate, I have some ideas that can help with the next UI interface. Want to work on it together?"
Apologize
Sometimes you can streamline things by apologizing.
For example, when someone misses an appointment, I'll start out a follow-up conversation by apologizing. "I'm sorry we missed each other. Your confirmation email must have gotten lost in my spam folder." When other people unfairly blame you, it's bad. But when you take responsibility yourself, you can quickly shift the conversation back to scheduling, rather than getting into a useless debate about who dropped the ball. We're all overloaded these days. We all drop the ball sometimes. And even though you're apologizing to take the pressure off them, sometimes you'll find their confirmation email did end up in your spam folder.
Apologies can also be useful when someone turns in an inadequate deliverable. "I'm sorry I screwed up by not giving you the full specifications. We need the proclamation of Oreo Ice Cream Cake as the official Olympics health food printed on parchment paper, not newsprint. Could you reprint it? Thanks!"
I'll only do this when the stakes are low, however. Also, if I have responsibility for the person's professional development, even if I apologize, I'll add, "Next time, how can you be sure to get the full specifications, even if I don't think to give them to you?" That way, I'm acknowledging my part of the situation, while making it clear that it's still their responsibility going forward. If someone's mistake incurred extra cost, then we may, indeed, have to have a difficult conversation about who will pay the price. And difficult conversations are a topic for another time.
People don't like being told they're wrong, especially when they are. It hurts their self-image. So when you need to correct them, do it by offering to improve what's already good, not by pointing out that what they did was bad. Use a genuinely helpful voice tone, and apologize if that would help. Even if you apologize, though, you can make it clear that just because you screwed up, doesn't mean that they can't account for that in the future.
So right there at the team meeting, we put on our best diplomacy hat and say, "You know, your user interface design really was confusing. I'll send you a memo telling you what you did wrong and how to fix it later this afternoon."
Your target smiles and says, "Thank you for your offer."
The next day, your goldfish are floating upside down in your fish tank, your car tires seem to be missing some air, and your hard drive accidentally reformats itself.
Coincidence? I think not.
The problem is that despite your extraordinary attempt at diplomaticy, you pointed out to someone that they screwed up.
This happens with colleagues and also with strangers. Have you ever tried to cross a crosswalk? Cars are supposed to stop behind the Stop line to let pedestrians walk across. And yet, often some driver (not you, I'm sure) will stop right in the middle of the crosswalk and pedestrians have to walk around their car in order to cross.
Everyone Is an Ogre
The driver never actually looks like an inconsiderate, law-breaking oaf with no respect or consideration for other people. They always look like a nice person. Then you tap their window and say, politely, "Excuse me, you're blocking the crosswalk. Please stop behind the line next time." They look at you and start to get red in the face. Their formerly curly hair start to straighten out and stand on end. Steam comes out of their ears. They puff out their cheeks, and they yell, "You asshole! Get your fucking butt out of the street before I drive over you and don't ever fucking talk to me again!!!"
They are clearly in the wrong. They are breaking the law, being inconsiderate, and generally being a lousy prom date. But when you politely point out that they are wrong, they act like a great ape deprived of its favorite banana. Because in fact, they are.
People Value Their Self-Image
You see, no one appreciates being confronted with immediate, obvious, incontrovertible, undeniable evidence of their own wrong-doing. Our favorite banana is our self-image. And most of us have self-images that we're upstanding angels who are perfect and have good reasons for the things we do.
Science, of course, has thoroughly debunked that. All of us are a mix of admirable and icky qualities. As shocking as it may be for you to consider, please realize that even I am not perfect. (I know, unbelievable, right?)
Just ask me to cook. I use pre-prepared ingredients, like pre-marinated chicken, reheatable pierogies, and chocolate craze Balance Bars. It's my personal version of mole sauce.
When you make someone realize they're wrong, you're taking away their self-image banana and replacing it with a rotten turnip. They're mad about trading their banana for a turnip. It really has nothing to do with you. You're just the catalyst for their self-realization and an easy target for when they go postal about it.
Frame Your Criticism as a Best Interest
All is not lost, however. You can still communicate the all-important corrective message, just frame it as being in their best interest.
Think about the good thing that will happen if they realize they're wrong and follow your advice. Then frame your message as if their current state of affairs is good, and you're helping them go from good to better.
So let's take the example from the beginning of this episode. Instead of saying "Your user interface made our users throw up on the keyboard," ask yourself what good will come from a better UI. A better UI will make your product a joy to use, reduce support costs, and maybe win the user interface designer a design award.
There's no guarantee they'll take your advice.
To that end, say something like, "You know, the user interface is key to making our users joyous, reducing support costs, and, of course, winning industry awards. I have some ideas that might help bring out the brilliance in your design even more. If you'd like to hear them, let me know."
This way, you're acknowledging the value of what they do, the happy consequences of them doing it right, and then simply offering to help their existing amazingness be even more amazing.
They May So "No"
There's no guarantee that they'll agree to listen to your ideas. Or that they'll take your advice even if they do listen. But if you offer help sincerely, at least they won't get mad.
Probably.
Just to make sure, practice your voice tone. Think of someone who really wants your help. Someone you love, like your niece or nephew (with that hair, and a name like "Sage," you don't necessarily know).
Now practice offering them help out loud. "Sage, I have some ideas that can help with your advanced topology homework. Want to work on it together?" Listen to yourself carefully. Now take that same tone of voice with your work colleague. "Teammate, I have some ideas that can help with the next UI interface. Want to work on it together?"
Apologize
Sometimes you can streamline things by apologizing.
For example, when someone misses an appointment, I'll start out a follow-up conversation by apologizing. "I'm sorry we missed each other. Your confirmation email must have gotten lost in my spam folder." When other people unfairly blame you, it's bad. But when you take responsibility yourself, you can quickly shift the conversation back to scheduling, rather than getting into a useless debate about who dropped the ball. We're all overloaded these days. We all drop the ball sometimes. And even though you're apologizing to take the pressure off them, sometimes you'll find their confirmation email did end up in your spam folder.
Apologies can also be useful when someone turns in an inadequate deliverable. "I'm sorry I screwed up by not giving you the full specifications. We need the proclamation of Oreo Ice Cream Cake as the official Olympics health food printed on parchment paper, not newsprint. Could you reprint it? Thanks!"
I'll only do this when the stakes are low, however. Also, if I have responsibility for the person's professional development, even if I apologize, I'll add, "Next time, how can you be sure to get the full specifications, even if I don't think to give them to you?" That way, I'm acknowledging my part of the situation, while making it clear that it's still their responsibility going forward. If someone's mistake incurred extra cost, then we may, indeed, have to have a difficult conversation about who will pay the price. And difficult conversations are a topic for another time.
People don't like being told they're wrong, especially when they are. It hurts their self-image. So when you need to correct them, do it by offering to improve what's already good, not by pointing out that what they did was bad. Use a genuinely helpful voice tone, and apologize if that would help. Even if you apologize, though, you can make it clear that just because you screwed up, doesn't mean that they can't account for that in the future.
20150614
14 Psychological Facts
Feeling stressed? Wish you knew some secrets for feeling happier, lighter, and freer?
While the complexities of the human condition are, of course, a little too deep to be reduced to a list, there are actually a few tips you can use every day to help shake off some of the drudgery that might be dragging you down. There are also some weird little facts that might not help you personally, but might help you be a little more understanding towards other people. In the end, these new bits of knowledge will actually help you a lot in the long run.
1. If you tell people your goals, you're less likely to achieve them.
People have been studying this phenomenon since the 1930s, and it's been proven time and again. So the next time you get the urge to pester someone with questions about what their goals are, remember that you might not be helping.
2. Smart people tend to underestimate themselves, while the more ignorant tend to think they're brilliant.
The more informed you are, the more possibilities you're aware of, including the one where you might be wrong. Everyone's confidence in their intelligence ebbs and flows depending on the situation, but don't get too cocky.
3. Your thinking and decision making will be more rational if you think or speak it in another language.
A study at the University of Chicago found that Korean exchange students made more rational, less biased decisions if they first translated all their information into English. This might be because translating forces you to be deliberate and consider each word, and thus come to a more level-headed solution. So the next time you're worried you're not being rational, dust off that language you studied in high school and see if it helps.
4. When you remember something, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered it, rather than the event itself.
This one is a little mind-boggling, but this is why people's memories get distorted over time -- it's like playing a years-long game of telephone with yourself.
5. Kids today are more stressed out than the average psych ward patient of 1950.
The 1950s had plenty of problems, but at least no one was auditioning for preschool. There's also the fact that we now have a better knowledge of mental health and illness, so it's easier to diagnose issues that might have flown under the radar earlier. However, with everything that's happened in the past 65 years, people have very different things to stress out over.
6. 18-to-33-year-olds are the most stressed out people.
Having to deal with education, figuring out a career path, and entering the work world full time makes for a terrible combination that results in a lot of stress. Combine that with the fact that none of us are going to get Social Security, like, ever, and you have the perfect storm.
7. Music can change your outlook.
The soundtrack of your life can drastically alter your perception of events, even if you're not aware of it. Why do you think such attention is paid to movie soundtracks? If you don't believe this, put on your favorite movie with the sound off, and play the same scene with different songs in the background. You'll see how quickly your perception of the visuals changes.
8. Your favorite song(s) are probably linked to an emotional event.
Just like music can change your perception of the present, a specific song can bring you back to a very different time. Just hearing it will give you a little emotional reminder of the first time you heard it. Of course, the more you hear it in different settings, the more that association might fade.
9. Money can actually buy happiness.
Yeah, it's true. People who struggle financially will, naturally, be more stressed out. Have you ever heard a poor person say that money can't buy happiness? Didn't think so.This has a cap, though. Once people reach the income of about $75-$80,000, their happiness levels don't change, even if they make more money. Basically, if they can feed themselves and have a home without worrying about running out of money, people will be happy.
10. Spending money on other people makes you happy.
Therapy shopping for yourself is often a hollow happiness, like drinking alone, but when you buy gifts for other people, it can actually make you happier. We're not saying you should blow your money irresponsibly, but buying (or making) gifts for other people is like a gift to yourself, too.
11. Spending money on experiences rather than objects makes you happier.
Getting to do or see something exciting makes for a better memory than just getting a thing and looking at it from time to time. After all, you'll have more to talk about, and the action of going and doing something is more fulfilling than simply obtaining an object.
12. Meditation and prayer can cut stress.
You don't have to be religious to meditate, and studies show it's good for you to sit quietly on a regular basis. You might not think you have time, but the next time you feel like vegging out in front of the TV, try slow, even breathing and clearing your mind for a while.
13. You can convince your brain that you slept well, even if you didn't.
Take a few deep breaths and think about how well you slept last night. If you can convince yourself of that, you'll feel a little boost of energy. It's called "placebo sleep," but don't use this as a regular excuse to not get actual sleep. You still need that.
14. Surrounding yourself with happy people makes you happy.
You know that one friend you have who complains all the time and takes no joy in everything? You know how you feel after hanging out with them? Exactly. Spending time with people who are positive and content will rub off on you and lift your mood. Likewise, don't be that negative friend -- be someone else's positive buddy!
While the complexities of the human condition are, of course, a little too deep to be reduced to a list, there are actually a few tips you can use every day to help shake off some of the drudgery that might be dragging you down. There are also some weird little facts that might not help you personally, but might help you be a little more understanding towards other people. In the end, these new bits of knowledge will actually help you a lot in the long run.
1. If you tell people your goals, you're less likely to achieve them.
People have been studying this phenomenon since the 1930s, and it's been proven time and again. So the next time you get the urge to pester someone with questions about what their goals are, remember that you might not be helping.
2. Smart people tend to underestimate themselves, while the more ignorant tend to think they're brilliant.
The more informed you are, the more possibilities you're aware of, including the one where you might be wrong. Everyone's confidence in their intelligence ebbs and flows depending on the situation, but don't get too cocky.
3. Your thinking and decision making will be more rational if you think or speak it in another language.
A study at the University of Chicago found that Korean exchange students made more rational, less biased decisions if they first translated all their information into English. This might be because translating forces you to be deliberate and consider each word, and thus come to a more level-headed solution. So the next time you're worried you're not being rational, dust off that language you studied in high school and see if it helps.
4. When you remember something, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered it, rather than the event itself.
This one is a little mind-boggling, but this is why people's memories get distorted over time -- it's like playing a years-long game of telephone with yourself.
5. Kids today are more stressed out than the average psych ward patient of 1950.
The 1950s had plenty of problems, but at least no one was auditioning for preschool. There's also the fact that we now have a better knowledge of mental health and illness, so it's easier to diagnose issues that might have flown under the radar earlier. However, with everything that's happened in the past 65 years, people have very different things to stress out over.
6. 18-to-33-year-olds are the most stressed out people.
Having to deal with education, figuring out a career path, and entering the work world full time makes for a terrible combination that results in a lot of stress. Combine that with the fact that none of us are going to get Social Security, like, ever, and you have the perfect storm.
7. Music can change your outlook.
The soundtrack of your life can drastically alter your perception of events, even if you're not aware of it. Why do you think such attention is paid to movie soundtracks? If you don't believe this, put on your favorite movie with the sound off, and play the same scene with different songs in the background. You'll see how quickly your perception of the visuals changes.
8. Your favorite song(s) are probably linked to an emotional event.
Just like music can change your perception of the present, a specific song can bring you back to a very different time. Just hearing it will give you a little emotional reminder of the first time you heard it. Of course, the more you hear it in different settings, the more that association might fade.
9. Money can actually buy happiness.
Yeah, it's true. People who struggle financially will, naturally, be more stressed out. Have you ever heard a poor person say that money can't buy happiness? Didn't think so.This has a cap, though. Once people reach the income of about $75-$80,000, their happiness levels don't change, even if they make more money. Basically, if they can feed themselves and have a home without worrying about running out of money, people will be happy.
10. Spending money on other people makes you happy.
Therapy shopping for yourself is often a hollow happiness, like drinking alone, but when you buy gifts for other people, it can actually make you happier. We're not saying you should blow your money irresponsibly, but buying (or making) gifts for other people is like a gift to yourself, too.
11. Spending money on experiences rather than objects makes you happier.
Getting to do or see something exciting makes for a better memory than just getting a thing and looking at it from time to time. After all, you'll have more to talk about, and the action of going and doing something is more fulfilling than simply obtaining an object.
12. Meditation and prayer can cut stress.
You don't have to be religious to meditate, and studies show it's good for you to sit quietly on a regular basis. You might not think you have time, but the next time you feel like vegging out in front of the TV, try slow, even breathing and clearing your mind for a while.
13. You can convince your brain that you slept well, even if you didn't.
Take a few deep breaths and think about how well you slept last night. If you can convince yourself of that, you'll feel a little boost of energy. It's called "placebo sleep," but don't use this as a regular excuse to not get actual sleep. You still need that.
14. Surrounding yourself with happy people makes you happy.
You know that one friend you have who complains all the time and takes no joy in everything? You know how you feel after hanging out with them? Exactly. Spending time with people who are positive and content will rub off on you and lift your mood. Likewise, don't be that negative friend -- be someone else's positive buddy!
20150528
The Health Perks of Being a Narcissist
Narcissists are not the most pleasant people to have in your life, but there are, it seems, some health perks to the personality trait, according to a paper published recently in Personality and Individual Differences. In it, Peter K. Jonason of the University of Western Sydney reports on the health implications of some of the nastier characteristics of human nature: narcissism, Machiavellianism (a manipulative personality, basically), and psychopathy, a trio psychologists call the Dark Triad. Of these, only narcissism was associated with few physical or mental illnesses, and, according to self-reports, the trait is also linked with a stronger subjective sense of well-being.
The researchers used a variety of indicators to measure the physical and mental health of 1,389 undergraduates at an American university, plus 2,023 high-school students and 280 British undergrads. The study participants took questionnaires to assess Dark Triad traits, admitting how strongly they agreed with statements like "I tend to want others to admire me" or "I have used deceit or lied to get my way." The students also answered surveys designed to measure psychological health and social skills, as well as a survey asking about their physical health ("Compared to others your age, how would you rate your health?").
Overall, Jonason and his team found few links between narcissism and physical- or mental-health issues; narcissists even tended to report higher subjective well-being than those who scored lower in narcissism. Psychopathy and Machiavellianism, on the other hand, were linked to worse health overall, including mental ailments like depression.
The authors explain their findings this way:
The researchers used a variety of indicators to measure the physical and mental health of 1,389 undergraduates at an American university, plus 2,023 high-school students and 280 British undergrads. The study participants took questionnaires to assess Dark Triad traits, admitting how strongly they agreed with statements like "I tend to want others to admire me" or "I have used deceit or lied to get my way." The students also answered surveys designed to measure psychological health and social skills, as well as a survey asking about their physical health ("Compared to others your age, how would you rate your health?").
Overall, Jonason and his team found few links between narcissism and physical- or mental-health issues; narcissists even tended to report higher subjective well-being than those who scored lower in narcissism. Psychopathy and Machiavellianism, on the other hand, were linked to worse health overall, including mental ailments like depression.
The authors explain their findings this way:
Narcissism may be unique from the other traits in its "social" orientation; characterized by a tendency to seek external validation and attention and high emotional intelligence. Unlike psychopathy and Machiavellianism that may be associated with a tendency to distance oneself from others, narcissism may facilitate the active and passive accrual of a social network. This may act as a buffer from the deleterious health outcomes that the other traits are linked to.Psychopathy and Machiavellianism, in other words, are traits that tend to result in social isolation. Narcissists, on the other hand, live for the validation of other people, and this social aspect of the trait may end up protecting their health. (Though it could also be that narcissists, full of themselves as they are, gave themselves all A-pluses in this series of self-reports.) Irritating as they are, this finding suggests that narcissists may win in the end.
20150526
Fear Hack: Short-Circuit Fear With The 3 Second Rule
The three second rule. You may have heard of it (no, not that one). It’s an approach strategy conceived by pick up artists.
The rule is, if you see someone you’re attracted to, make your move within three seconds. Wait any longer and fearful thoughts will creep into your mind like a courage-stealing thief.
Once that happens, the probability of you making a move dwindles to practically zero.
Keep in mind that the three second rule isn’t exclusive to the dating realm. It applies to any situation where fear interferes with doing. The rule works because it prevents conscious thinking, the kind of thinking that manufactures fear and suffering.
Remove time, and you remove fear.
Nick Taylor
February 11, 2011 at 1:57 am
Yea – for some reason I tend to get myself into lots of situations where “individuals from the class do something in front of the class”. Drama classes mainly, but there are others.
Always be first.
I find if I leave it until other people have had a go, it becomes impossibly stressful. If you’re “in first” as a matter of principle, nervousness simply doesn’t get a foothold.
20150524
How to Optimize Your Environment for Creativity with The Perfect Temperature, Lighting and Noise Levels
There’s so much going on in the brain during creativity that science is still trying to pin down exactly how it all works.
What we do know is which three parts of the brain work together to help us create and come up with new ideas:
The Attentional Control Network helps us with laser focus on a particular task. It’s the one that we activate when we need to concentrate on complicated problems or pay attention to a task like reading or listening to a talk.
The Imagination Network as you might have guessed, is used for things like imagining future scenarios and remembering things that happened in the past. This network helps us to construct mental images when we’re engaged in these activities.
The Attentional Flexibility Network has the important role of monitoring what’s going on around us, as well as inside our brains, and switching between the Imagination Network and Attentional Control for us.
You can see the Attentional Control Network (in green) and the Imagination Network (in red) in the image below.
Understanding how important connections are to creativity has also made a difference to how I try to generate new ideas. Once we have a lot of knowledge, we need to spend time making connections between it all—this is where creativity comes in.
I’ve shared some ideas in my previous post about creativity to help you come up with new ideas, such as putting yourself in challenging situations, criticizing your own ideas and being open to having lots of (bad) ideas in order to find just a few great ones—something Seth Godin is a fan of:
Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, “none.”These tips are handy, but I’ve found that my environment makes a big difference to how productive I am, and how easily I can brainstorm new, creative ideas.
It turns out, environmental factors like noise levels, temperature and lighting can make a big difference to how creative we are. Here’s what the research says about setting up your environment for optimal levels of creativity.
Sound — ambient noise levels are best for creativity
As I found in my research on how music affects the brain, loud music is not necessarily the best option for creative work.Far from blasting music through out headphones, it turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Ambient noise gets our creative juices flowing unlike silence, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.
Here’s how it works: moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. Or, in other words, when we struggle just enough to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.
In high noise levels, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently. I know I’ve felt this when it’s lunchtime in my co-working space, or my neighbors are renovating their apartment while I’m trying to work.
A University of Chicago study found that ambient noise was the optimal level for creativity, whereas extreme quiet sharpens our focus, making it hard for us to think creatively.
Another study about ambient noise showed that when it comes to being distracted by the conversations of others, phone calls where we can only hear one side of the conversation are the worst offenders.
After a survey showed that up to 82% of people find overhearing cellphone conversations annoying, Veronica Galván, a cognitive psychologist at the University of San Diego, looked into why these are so distracting.
In the study, participants completed puzzles while they overheard either one side of a mundane phone conversation or an entire conversation as it took place between two people in the room.
Those who heard the one-sided phone conversation found it more distracting than those who heard both people speaking. They also remembered more of the conversation, showing that it had grabbed their attention.
So if you’re heading to a co-working space, open office or coffee shop to get some work done, keep in mind that phone conversations will dampen your creativity.
Temperature — keep your office warm
A study from Cornell University tested different office temperatures at a large Florida insurance company and found the following:When temperatures were low (68 degrees or 20 degrees Celsius) employees made 44% more mistakes than at optimal room temperature (77 degrees or 25 degrees Celsius).The problem isn’t just being uncomfortable in cold temperatures, but rather that you are more distracted. If you are feeling cold, you are using a substantial amount of your energy to simply keep warm.
Thus, a lot less energy goes towards concentration on creative work.
Increasing the temperature in your office, adding more clothing layers or bringing a portable heater to work could make all the difference when it comes to increasing your creativity. Be careful not to make it too warm though, as being hot decreases productivity as much as being cold does:
Lighting — turn down the lights for more creativity
An important point to remember when you’re optimizing for creativity is that the process of creative work goes through different stages. When I’m editing a blog post, for instance, I’m less worried about generating creative ideas than I am when I’m brainstorming topics or mapping out the structure of a post.So optimizing your environment could call for different situations depending on the phase of work—e.g. remember how I mentioned earlier than silence is best for concentration?
When it comes to lighting, keeping the lights down low can be beneficial for generating creative ideas, though you might want to adjust the brightness when you need to focus at a later stage of your work! This infographic from PayScale has some tips on lighting for productivity:
Research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology looked at the difference in creativity levels in brightly-lit and dimly-lit environments over six studies.
The research found that dim lighting helps us to feel less constrained and free to explore and take risks. Two of the studies tested this feeling in particular, and found that “darkness elicits a feeling of being free from constraints and triggers a risky, explorative processing style.”
So when you’re gearing up for a brainstorming session, try turning down the lights before you get started.
Space — keep a separate, messy desk
One of my favorite talks about creativity is this one by John Cleese. I can’t think of many people more suited to speaking on this topic, and he doesn’t disappoint.One of the main points John makes is that your creativity is like a tortoise: It pokes its head out nervously to ensure the environment is safe before it fully emerges. Your creativity won’t show up when you’re nervous or stressed, busy or surrounded by hustle and bustle. It’s a very particular kind of thinking.
John says to help your “tortoise mind” emerge, you need to create an oasis for it, amongst the craziness of modern life, where it feels safe:
You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.Removing yourself from your normal work environment—i.e. your “busy” space—to a free, creative space sends a signal to your brain. And if you do this consistently, your tortoise brain will learn to recognize the place as a safety zone for creative thinking. If you can, add the suggestions of optimal temperature, lighting and noise levels to your creative space, and do your “busy work” elsewhere.
Research has shown that a messy space is more conducive to creativity than a tidy one, so separating your clean and tidy work desk and a messy creative space could be optimal for switching between the two modes of work.
Writer Austin Kleon does exactly this in his work space, with one analog desk for creative work and one digital desk for “busy” work:
20150325
One glass of wine makes you sexier
Drinking just one glass of wine makes you appear more attractive than when you’re sober, according to British researchers who caution that drinking more makes the effect go away.
In the study, a group made up of 20 men and 20 women were asked to rate the attractiveness of people in a series of photos.
The models in the photos were depicted after drinking either 250 ml of wine or 500 ml of wine.
Regardless of the case, all models had also been photographed sober.
Study participants rated the models as being more attractive after drinking one glass of wine — 250 ml — than they were in their sober photos.
Yet the models who had drank more than one glass didn’t bring in the same high rankings, at least not when compared to their sober photos.
To explain their results, the research team presumes the increased allure comes from increased blood flow that brings on facial flushing.
Light drinking could also boost the spirits in a manner that becomes visible in subtle smiles and increased relaxation.
The study was published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.
In the study, a group made up of 20 men and 20 women were asked to rate the attractiveness of people in a series of photos.
The models in the photos were depicted after drinking either 250 ml of wine or 500 ml of wine.
Regardless of the case, all models had also been photographed sober.
Study participants rated the models as being more attractive after drinking one glass of wine — 250 ml — than they were in their sober photos.
Yet the models who had drank more than one glass didn’t bring in the same high rankings, at least not when compared to their sober photos.
To explain their results, the research team presumes the increased allure comes from increased blood flow that brings on facial flushing.
Light drinking could also boost the spirits in a manner that becomes visible in subtle smiles and increased relaxation.
The study was published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.
20150315
Oblique Strategies
Abandon desire
Abandon normal instructions
Accept advice
Adding on
A line has two sides
Always the first steps
Ask people to work against their better judgement
Ask your body
Be dirty
Be extravagant
Be less critical
Breathe more deeply
Bridges -build -burn
Change ambiguities to specifics
Change nothing and continue consistently
Change specifics to ambiguities
Consider transitions
Courage!
Cut a vital connection
Decorate, decorate
Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing
Discard an axiom
Disciplined self-indulgence
Discover your formulas and abandon them
Display your talent
Distort time
Do nothing for as long as possible
Don't avoid what is easy
Don't break the silence
Don't stress one thing more than another
Do something boring
Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable
Do the last thing first
Do the words need changing?
Emphasize differences
Emphasize the flaws
Faced with a choice, do both (from Dieter Rot)
Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
Give the game away
Give way to your worst impulse
Go outside. Shut the door.
Go to an extreme, come part way back
How would someone else do it?
How would you have done it?
In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
Is it finished?
Is something missing?
Is the style right?
It is simply a matter or work
Just carry on
Listen to the quiet voice
Look at the order in which you do things
Magnify the most difficult details
Make it more sensual
Make what's perfect more human
Move towards the unimportant
Not building a wall; making a brick
Once the search has begun, something will be found
Only a part, not the whole
Only one element of each kind
Openly resist change
Pae White's non-blank graphic metacard
Question the heroic
Remember quiet evenings
Remove a restriction
Repetition is a form of change
Retrace your steps
Reverse
Simple Subtraction
Slow preparation, fast execution
State the problem as clearly as possible
Take a break
Take away the important parts
The inconsistency principle
The most easily forgotten thing is the most important
Think - inside the work -outside the work
Tidy up
Try faking it (from Stewart Brand)
Turn it upside down
Use an old idea
Use cliches
Use filters
Use something nearby as a model
Use 'unqualified' people
Use your own ideas
Voice your suspicions
Water
What context would look right?
What is the simplest solution?
What mistakes did you make last time?
What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?
What were you really thinking about just now?
What wouldn't you do?
What would your closest friend do?
When is it for?
Where is the edge?
Which parts can be grouped?
Work at a different speed
Would anyone want it?
Your mistake was a hidden intention
Accept advice
Adding on
A line has two sides
Always the first steps
Ask people to work against their better judgement
Ask your body
Be dirty
Be extravagant
Be less critical
Breathe more deeply
Bridges -build -burn
Change ambiguities to specifics
Change nothing and continue consistently
Change specifics to ambiguities
Consider transitions
Courage!
Cut a vital connection
Decorate, decorate
Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing
Discard an axiom
Disciplined self-indulgence
Discover your formulas and abandon them
Display your talent
Distort time
Do nothing for as long as possible
Don't avoid what is easy
Don't break the silence
Don't stress one thing more than another
Do something boring
Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable
Do the last thing first
Do the words need changing?
Emphasize differences
Emphasize the flaws
Faced with a choice, do both (from Dieter Rot)
Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
Give the game away
Give way to your worst impulse
Go outside. Shut the door.
Go to an extreme, come part way back
How would someone else do it?
How would you have done it?
In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
Is it finished?
Is something missing?
Is the style right?
It is simply a matter or work
Just carry on
Listen to the quiet voice
Look at the order in which you do things
Magnify the most difficult details
Make it more sensual
Make what's perfect more human
Move towards the unimportant
Not building a wall; making a brick
Once the search has begun, something will be found
Only a part, not the whole
Only one element of each kind
Openly resist change
Pae White's non-blank graphic metacard
Question the heroic
Remember quiet evenings
Remove a restriction
Repetition is a form of change
Retrace your steps
Reverse
Simple Subtraction
Slow preparation, fast execution
State the problem as clearly as possible
Take a break
Take away the important parts
The inconsistency principle
The most easily forgotten thing is the most important
Think - inside the work -outside the work
Tidy up
Try faking it (from Stewart Brand)
Turn it upside down
Use an old idea
Use cliches
Use filters
Use something nearby as a model
Use 'unqualified' people
Use your own ideas
Voice your suspicions
Water
What context would look right?
What is the simplest solution?
What mistakes did you make last time?
What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?
What were you really thinking about just now?
What wouldn't you do?
What would your closest friend do?
When is it for?
Where is the edge?
Which parts can be grouped?
Work at a different speed
Would anyone want it?
Your mistake was a hidden intention
20150212
The Whole Point of Every Relationship (is probably not what you think it is).
Via Natasha Blank
I’m not an expert on relationships, but I’ve had a bunch and learned from them.
At least enough to gain some intellectual insight that (hopefully) translates over time into a living breathing shift of being.
Turns out, it’s not about making each other happy, or any other kind of imagined perfection. It’s about helping the person in front of you be everything they truly are.
Here are some ways to do that.
1. Hold each other accountable.
Understand the gift she is here to give this world.
2. Call bullshit.
Reflect when she isn’t giving it.
3. Let go.
Trust in his separate journey, even when what he’s doing makes zero sense to you.
4. Remember that your job is not to make your partner happy.
It’s to allow her the space to find her own happiness—when you’re together, and when you’re apart.
5. Be honest.
One hundred percent. The permission you give yourself to be all of who you are is what creates that space.
6. Fight well.
You’re both on the same team. Your opposition is the misunderstanding—not each other.
7. Embrace attraction to others.
It’s there. Communicate, be clear (with everyone, including yourself), and enjoy your fabulous human existence.
8. Do your work.
It’s usually not about him, or her. Your partner is a flashlight illuminating where you’ve still got work to do. Those feelings of jealousy, resentment and hurt? They’re showing you all the places in you that need your own healing.
9. Remember that you’re a mirror, too.
Reflect back all the beauty that lives in him. Especially when he forgets.
10. Enjoy the ride, man!
Seriously. You’re never going to figure it all out, so you might as well just love everybody.
I’m not an expert on relationships, but I’ve had a bunch and learned from them.
At least enough to gain some intellectual insight that (hopefully) translates over time into a living breathing shift of being.
Turns out, it’s not about making each other happy, or any other kind of imagined perfection. It’s about helping the person in front of you be everything they truly are.
Here are some ways to do that.
1. Hold each other accountable.
Understand the gift she is here to give this world.
2. Call bullshit.
Reflect when she isn’t giving it.
3. Let go.
Trust in his separate journey, even when what he’s doing makes zero sense to you.
4. Remember that your job is not to make your partner happy.
It’s to allow her the space to find her own happiness—when you’re together, and when you’re apart.
5. Be honest.
One hundred percent. The permission you give yourself to be all of who you are is what creates that space.
6. Fight well.
You’re both on the same team. Your opposition is the misunderstanding—not each other.
7. Embrace attraction to others.
It’s there. Communicate, be clear (with everyone, including yourself), and enjoy your fabulous human existence.
8. Do your work.
It’s usually not about him, or her. Your partner is a flashlight illuminating where you’ve still got work to do. Those feelings of jealousy, resentment and hurt? They’re showing you all the places in you that need your own healing.
9. Remember that you’re a mirror, too.
Reflect back all the beauty that lives in him. Especially when he forgets.
10. Enjoy the ride, man!
Seriously. You’re never going to figure it all out, so you might as well just love everybody.
20150129
New study finds that closing your eyes boosts memory recall
In a new study, published in the journal Legal and Criminology Psychology, researchers from the University of Surrey have found further evidence to suggest that eyewitnesses to crimes remember more accurate details when they close their eyes. The team also discovered that building a rapport with witnesses also helped them to remember more.
178 participants took part across two studies. In the first experiment, participants watched a film depicting an electrician entering a property, carrying out jobs and stealing items. Each participant was then randomly assigned one of four conditions, either eyes closed or open, and having built up a rapport with the interviewer or not. They were then asked a series of questions about the film, such as 'what was written on the front of the van?' The team found that closing their eyes led participants to answer 23 per cent more of the questions correctly. Building rapport also increased the number of correct answers, however, closing their eyes was effective regardless of whether rapport had been built or not.
The second experiment took the memory task one step further, by asking witnesses about things they had heard, as well as things they had seen. This time, participants watched a clip from Crimewatch, showing a reconstruction of a burglary where an elderly man was attacked in his home. Results showed that closing their eyes helped participants recall both audio and visual details, both when they had built rapport and when they had not.
Across both experiments, participants who did not build rapport said they felt less comfortable when they closed their eyes, compared to when they kept their eyes open. In contrast, participants who built rapport felt more comfortable when they closed their eyes.
"It is clear from our research that closing the eyes and building rapport help with witness recall," said lead author Dr Robert Nash from the University of Surrey.
"Although closing your eyes to remember seems to work whether or not rapport has been built beforehand, our results show that building rapport makes witnesses more at ease with closing their eyes. That in itself is vital if we are to encourage witnesses to use this helpful technique during interviews."
178 participants took part across two studies. In the first experiment, participants watched a film depicting an electrician entering a property, carrying out jobs and stealing items. Each participant was then randomly assigned one of four conditions, either eyes closed or open, and having built up a rapport with the interviewer or not. They were then asked a series of questions about the film, such as 'what was written on the front of the van?' The team found that closing their eyes led participants to answer 23 per cent more of the questions correctly. Building rapport also increased the number of correct answers, however, closing their eyes was effective regardless of whether rapport had been built or not.
The second experiment took the memory task one step further, by asking witnesses about things they had heard, as well as things they had seen. This time, participants watched a clip from Crimewatch, showing a reconstruction of a burglary where an elderly man was attacked in his home. Results showed that closing their eyes helped participants recall both audio and visual details, both when they had built rapport and when they had not.
Across both experiments, participants who did not build rapport said they felt less comfortable when they closed their eyes, compared to when they kept their eyes open. In contrast, participants who built rapport felt more comfortable when they closed their eyes.
"It is clear from our research that closing the eyes and building rapport help with witness recall," said lead author Dr Robert Nash from the University of Surrey.
"Although closing your eyes to remember seems to work whether or not rapport has been built beforehand, our results show that building rapport makes witnesses more at ease with closing their eyes. That in itself is vital if we are to encourage witnesses to use this helpful technique during interviews."
20150113
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
By MANDY LEN CATRON
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but a rather clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but a rather clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
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