Synchronizing Metronomes
I think the video speaks for itself, but in case you haven’t been around these types of metronomes lately, they are light enough that energy around them can affect their undulations. There’s a deeper explanation by a physicist here.
A particular resiliency framework that has been used for eons is still helpful for us today. This process is known as initiation.
There are three parts to an initiation:
Separation
The young person is physically separated out from the tribe to face the adult world on his* own.
The Ordeal
Tribal elders often set up challenges for the young person to face which, while sometimes harrowing, elicit the person’s Core Gift and usher the youngster into adulthood.
The Homecoming
The young person returns to the village and a great celebration is held to honor his return. The tribe sings and dances with joy because a new adult has joined the village with a Gift that will strengthen and bless the tribe.
Three steps in using initiations to bounce back in life:
1. Assess where you are.
If times are a little rough for you right now, check to see if you might be in one of the inevitable initiations of life.
2. Remember that it’s a good thing.
Even though initiations can be painful, remember that the end result is a new person who is stronger and wiser than before and more in touch with her unique Gift she brings to the world.
3. Give yourself a homecoming.
It is essential that the initiation is completed with a homecoming. Without a homecoming, the process never completes and you must go through it again until a homecoming is provided.
Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need conveys a number of principles about the world of work that everyone should take note of.
Why? Though Pink doesn’t bog the story down with academic research, all of his core ideas are backed up by plenty of studies, many of which I’ve posted about in the past.
The rules/lessons:
Read the article for more info.
Aristotle’s 12 Virtues and The Path to Happiness
[…] a diluted interpretation of his compiled thoughts and books on ethics referred to as Nicomachean Ethics, which originally consisted of ten separate scrolls, and is understood to be based on notes from his lectures at the Lyceum, which were either edited by or dedicated to his son, Nicomachus.
Meet the hexaflexagon. It’s about to blow your mind.
Remember the first time you saw a Möbius strip (the ring-shaped surface with only one side) and it felt like your world had been turned upside down? The hexaflexagon tends to have a similar effect. Only more so.
In this, her latest video, fast-thinking, faster-talking YouTube-maths-wizard Vi Hart presents us with the topologically fascinating hexaflexagon. First discovered in the 1930s by a daydreaming student named Arthur H. Stone, flexagons have attracted the curiosity of great scientists for decades, including Stone’s friend and colleague Richard Feynman. Here, the ever-capable Hart introduces the folding, pinching, rotating, multifaceted geometric oddity with her signature brand of rapid-fire wit and exposition. She even shows you how to make your own.
I define a strong mind as having a great capacity to face challenges. Being strong means having the resources, the mental skills, and the physical capabilities to confront difficulties of all kinds. When a person is strong-minded, they have the energy and stamina to face a challenge without being robbed of inner strength.
Mental toughness gives us the courage to grow from the stress we experience in life. It is a mindset comprised of several qualities and attitudes.
Five tips to building a strong mind:
Confidence
Confidence is a belief in yourself and your ability to meet your goals.Courage
Courage is the tendency to see life’s obstacles as challenges to be met rather than threats to be avoided.Commitment
As Jim Collins once said,The best form of commitment comes from a single-minded passion for what they do and an unwavering desire for excellence in the way they think and work.”
Control
Control is having a certainty that you are able to shape your destiny rather than passively accepting events as they come along.Purpose
Strong-minded people have a dedication that comes from a purpose that’s in alignment with their deepest values.
We do honestly believe we’ll be happier if we make more money […]
Money actively discourages enjoyment of whatever it purchases […]
Buying experiences brings more happiness than buying stuff […]
Pursuing intrinsic goals leads to longer-term satisfaction […]
High-income families are more likely to report happiness […]
The happiest countries are the most economically developed countries […]
12. The happiest people drop out of school and earn lower salaries […]
As a new review of past research concludes, “mud” sticks — and, worse, attempts to correct erroneous beliefs can backfire, reinforcing the very misrepresentations they aim to erase. The main problem, the research reveals, is that rejecting information takes more mental effort than accepting it, and given our social environment, most people’s default position is to believe what others tell them. “For better or worse,” the authors write, “the acceptance of information as true is favored by tacit norms of everyday conversational conduct.” Indeed, some research even suggests that in order for the brain to process incoming information at all, it must initially assume that the information is correct.
In multiple studies included in the new review, researchers presented people with a fictitious news report about a warehouse fire that was initially thought to have been caused by negligent storage of gas cylinders and oil paints. The participants were then offered an explicit retraction of the information about the cause of the fire, but even after reading the correction, only about half of those in the study reported that the initial news account was wrong. The finding suggests that the original false belief may stick 50% of the time, despite a correction.
The problem becomes even more extreme when political beliefs are involved. People have a tendency to believe information that supports their existing worldview and to reject data that threatens it.
So, what can be done to solve this problem?
Presenting the new information as part of a coherent story seems to help, by filling the gap in explanation that arises from simply negating a statement.
In cases involving political misinformation, providing new data that is congruent with someone’s preexisting beliefs also helps […]
Similarly, giving correct information while making people feel good about themselves through self-affirmation also helps them cope with the new info that would otherwise threaten their identity […]
It’s also helpful to simply spending more time debunking myths in detail: this doesn’t backfire like brief debunking does. A study found that a psychology course aimed at correcting misconceptions about the field was more successful when it directly refuted myths in depth than when it simply presented accurate information, without addressing common untruths.
Finally, presenting correct information coherently in the simplest way that is accurate, strengthening the message through repetition and, if possible, warning people that misinformation is about to be presented can help prevent it from sticking, though it may be hard to maintain constant vigilance over one’s data diet.
The authors conclude: “Widespread awareness of the fact that people may ‘throw mud’ because they know it will ‘stick’ is an important aspect of developing a healthy sense of public skepticism that will contribute to a well-informed populace.”
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen explains how successful companies with well-established products are constantly being threatened by newcomers. Winners, he argues, don’t lose when new rivals attack from the high end of market. They lose when start-ups attack from below. This, of course, was precisely what 37signals was trying to do to Microsoft. And it was working. Needless to say, I became a passionate fan.
Here Christensen is talking about the “job to be done” concept:
At one point in our talk, Christensen quoted Theodore Levitt, a legendary professor of marketing at Harvard: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill,” Levitt argued. “They want a quarter-inch hole.”
I understood what he was getting at. To most consumers, the hole matters a lot more than the drill. Yet the people who manufacture drills generally do not think this way. They can’t say enough about their drills, about features, technology, why this drill is “drillier” than that one. That’s the standard approach to marketing most products, and it’s myopic. It made me think about our own marketing. Do we talk too much about features and technology?
Later, Christensen discussed something he calls the trap of marginal thinking. Again, he began with a quote, this one by Henry Ford: “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”
The point is that when an established company weighs the cost of new technology or talent against what it already has, it usually sticks with what’s familiar. Why? Because the marginal costs of using what you have are almost always lower than the full costs of investing in something new.
But that’s a trap–and one that companies that are young and hungry don’t get caught in, because they don’t think in terms of marginal costs. Rather than basing such selection on costs, start-ups tend to pick what’s best for the job. It’s a key reason newbies displace the old guard: They have better tools.
Christensen said one last thing that has really stuck in my head. It’s often said that someone can’t be taught until he or she is ready to learn. He put it differently: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit,” he said. “If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off.”
Whoa, I thought. It’s like Velcro. The loop side of the Velcro can’t stick to itself; it needs the hook side to latch on to. Questions are hooks; answers are loops. Thanks, Clay. I needed that.
We can all name the benefits of sleep, but saying what sleep accomplishes is a far cry from identifying what sleep is meant to do. The distinction is important. If the point of sleep is that being inactive frees up our energy for other tasks (say, recovering from a cold), we might expect lying in bed with our eyes closed – what some studies call “quiet wakefulness” – to accomplish much the same thing.
Researchers are growing increasingly confident, though, that sleep evolved specifically to recharge the brain. Dr. Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has been studying the difference between sleep and quiet wake in humans. She says that while we’re awake, all of our neurons are constantly firing, but that when we’re asleep, the neurons revert to an “up-and-down” state in which only some are active at a given time. During some stages of sleep, all neuron activity goes silent. And that’s likely when the restful part of sleep takes place.
[…] it’s not until we get access to real, deep sleep that we get a cognitive boost from rest. In other studies, test subjects who were made to identify letters flashed on a screen for several hundred milliseconds at a time generally did worse at the exam over the course of a day. Those who got to take a nap halfway through showed more cognitive recovery than those who simply rested quietly, suggesting that there’s a unique benefit to sleep that you don’t get with quiet wakefulness, microsleep, or unihemispheric sleep.
Lying down isn’t completely useless – it does help your muscles and other organs relax. But you’d get the same results just from reclining on the couch. So sleep is still your best friend.
The useful takeaway is that your best move, if you’ve been in bed for 20 minutes and still aren’t dozing off, is to get up and engage in a low-light, low-stress activity like reading until you begin to feel tired. Taking your mind off of “Why am I not sleeping?! I need to sleep!” is crucial. When you do get up, though, don’t use your computer or phone or watch TV – the blue-colored light from the screens tricks your body into thinking it’s daytime and not releasing melatonin. Sweet, sweet melatonin.
