How often do you actually achieve results while you are busy? Not too often, I bet. Switch your focus from being busy to being productive, so that you can accomplish more, see tangible results, and have time for fun.
Here are three things you can start with:
- Have a to-do list for things that MUST get done today
- Learn Single Tasking
- Keep A Productivity Journal
Who hasn’t at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn’t date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed. I heard it, and a gate flew open and I walked through. But does music constantly provide revelation—or does it have some other effects, maybe less desirable?
Music does sometimes kick a door open inside the mind, but it also sometimes insulates the house, secures it from all wayward feelings and thoughts. And when a song does seem to kick a door open, we frequently listen to it over and over again until it loses its power and all of its passion is spent.
[P]erhaps music lovers feel alive only when they are plugged in to their tunes: The rest of the time they have only themselves, and they are, in themselves, insufficient.
Does music save their lives? No, it preserves them, much as it did mine. Music allows you to tolerate dullness, muted, icy boredom. Music is a balm—a cortisone spread.
An interesting article, though I object to the term “Music Geek”: the description sounds more like a hipster than a geek.
Related: What Function Music?
This article describes what I had been suspecting for a while about the Anglo-centric media in Australia, USA and America…
This dominance of English language carries with it an accompanying perspective of Europe, both in terms of stereotypes and in terms of relevance (or lack of) to the Anglo-Saxon world. This often puts European businesses and countries at a serious disadvantage that they are too little aware of, and are hardly addressing. But it also disadvantages businesses in the English-speaking world, which are perhaps not aware that they are receiving an abbreviated picture of innovation in Europe. This article is about the non-English disadvantage and what we can do about it.
Too often, the Italy that the international media portrays is one of scandals and economic depression, alternatively picturesque or run down. This kind of broad-brushstrokes look at an entire country fails the locals who go about living, inventing and doing business much like anywhere else in the world. That is another Italy, however, and one which the English-language world is not really being given access to.
Most people who have never experienced a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) session, or at least read about it, tend to share the notion that what psychologists do is pretty much listen to your problems, sometimes offer advice and different points of view, and make you think about your feelings, actions, and emotions. In this popular view of therapy, the patient (or client) is a rather passive subject, and the therapist is the one doing the work. Personally, I don’t think there has been a more profound revolution in the study of human psychology as the cognitive behavioral revolution.
Related:
“Creativity can help us tell better stories — stories that allow us to be even more dishonest but still think of ourselves as wonderfully honest people.”
We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.
Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not.
Over the past half-century, pop hits have become longer, slower and sadder, and they increasingly convey “mixed emotional cues,” according to a study just published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
[I]t seems that reading fiction improves your sensitivity to and appreciation of complex human situations; it provides a richer ‘toolkit’ of understanding from which to pull when making decisions and building relationships.
Jules Evans is Policy Director at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, where he runs the Well-Being Project. He has worked with organisations including the new economics foundation, the RSA, the School of Life and the Rockefeller Foundation on philosophy and well-being. He also writes for publications including The Spectator, The Times, The Wall Street Journal and Psychologies, and for his own blog, www.philosophyforlife.org. He is co-organiser of the London Philosophy Club, and the founder of www.thephilosophyhub.com, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to research and promote philosophy groups worldwide. He is the author of Philosophy for Life And Other Dangerous Situations.
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He writes the Head Case column for the Wall Street Journal and regularly appears on WNYC’s Radiolab. His writing has also appeared in Nature, the New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. Jonah graduated from Columbia University and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
The author of two previous books, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and The Decisive Moment; his latest is Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Why are all great achievers willing to go through all the pain? Small genetic advantages might make the difference.