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With thousands of moving parts, pianos are expensive to repair, requiring long hours of labor by skilled technicians whose numbers are diminishing. Excellent digital pianos and portable keyboards can cost as little as several hundred dollars. Low-end imported pianos have improved remarkably in quality and can be had for under $3,000.

Piano dealers also blame other changes in society for a lack of demand in the used-piano market: cuts in music education in schools, competition for practice time from other pursuits, a drop in spending on home furnishings with the fall of the housing market.

Whatever the reason, people in the piano world agree that disposals are mounting.

So sad :(

If you want to be more successful — at anything — than you are right now, you need to know yourself and your skills. And when you fall short of your goals, you need to know why. This should be no problem; after all, who knows you better than you do?

And yet your own ratings of your personality traits — for instance, how open-minded, conscientious, or impulsive you are — correlate with the impressions of other people (who know you well) at around .40. In other words, how you see yourself and how other people see you are only very modestly correlated.

In his fascinating book Strangers to Ourselves, psychologist Timothy Wilson summarizes decades of research on what he calls our adaptive unconscious, showing us just how much of what we do during every moment of every day — what we think, how we feel, the goals we pursue and the actions we take — is happening below our conscious awareness. Some of it we can notice if we engage in a little self-reflection, but much of it we simply cannot — it’s not directly accessible to us at all.

You certainly don’t need to take my diagnostic to figure out how where your weaknesses lie. The point is that you will absolutely need feedback — the kind you can trust — because trying to figure it all out on your own is close to impossible. Relying on our intuitions alone for self-knowledge is dangerous, because thanks to the nature of the adaptive unconscious, they are often no more accurate than a shot in the dark.

[E]vidence shows that managers are giving up far too soon on their disgruntled employees, making them less productive than they could be, exposing their companies to unnecessary risks from thefts and leaks in the process, and inflating turnover costs.

Our results suggest a clear path forward for bringing disgruntled employees back into the fold. In particular, the unhappy group in our survey strongly agreed on six major areas in which they felt (and we agree) that their leaders needed to improve:

• Encourage me more…
• Trust me more…
• Take an interest in my development…
• Keep me in the loop…
• Be more honest with me…
• Connect with me more…

A third of a person’s life is spent in the workplace, sometimes more. When the environment is created by an extraordinary leader who cares about everyone’s development, it leaves employees with little room to complain.

Good advice for business leaders and employers.

Our main job as psychotherapists, in fact, was to “re-parent” our patients, to provide a “corrective emotional experience” in which they would unconsciously transfer their early feelings of injury onto us, so we could offer a different response, a more attuned and empathic one than they got in childhood.

At least, that was the theory. Then I started seeing patients.

Instead, these patients talked about how much they “adored” their parents. Many called their parents their “best friends in the whole world,” and they’d say things like “My parents are always there for me.” Sometimes these same parents would even be funding their psychotherapy (not to mention their rent and car insurance), which left my patients feeling both guilty and utterly confused. After all, their biggest complaint was that they had nothing to complain about!

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

I’m not a parent, and my parents were definitely not the helicopter type. For example, I had to walk up to 4km to play junior football.  On the plus side, I was given a lot of independence and freedom to make my own mistakes.  So I guess I became a bit jealous of the kids of my relatives and peers who seem to have everything they want handed to them on a plate.  Perhaps I should pity them instead?  Parenting is a hard gig.

See also: Did Your Parents Love You Too Much?:

Kids need the depth of attention that comes from a parent not doing things, but being with them. Listening to their day, hearing about their mistakes and successes is essentially telling them that who they are becoming is perfect.

New research, he says, “empirically documents how our resistance to uncertainty makes the ‘old ways’ far stickier than they should be given the practical benefits of creative, new solutions.

“Once again, the biases built into our minds leave us simultaneously moving in opposite directions; we like creativity but avoid creative ideas because creative ideas are too, in a word, creative.”

In her post Why Creative People Are Rarely Seen as Leaders,  Susan Cain  says  Jennifer Mueller , assistant professor of management at Wharton and lead author of the study, “speculates that out-of-the-box thinkers tend not to do the things that traditional leaders do: set goals, maintain the status quo, exude certainty.”

One issue she notes is that people “who like to spend time alone are decidedly at odds with today’s team-based organizational culture. Introverts are much less likely than extroverts to be groomed for leadership positions, according to management research, even though another Wharton study led by Professor Adam Grant found that introverted leaders outperform extroverted ones when managing proactive employees — precisely because they give them the freedom to dream up and implement new ideas.”

See also: Why Society Doesn’t Change: The System Justification Bias.