Why do life-threatening situations make some people more calm?
e heart rates of the best bomb disposal experts actually drop when they're in the danger zone. Why? Confidence. Via The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success: Back in the 1980s, Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman found something similar with bomb-disposal operatives. What, Rachman wanted to know, separated the men from the boys in this high-risk, high-wire profession? All bomb-disposal operatives are good. Otherwise they’d be dead. But what did the stars have that the…
2 minutes
Are puppies the secret to productivity?
iewing cute images improved performance on tasks that required carefulness," researchers concluded. Via Bodyodd: "Viewing cute images improved performance on tasks that required carefulness," researchers concluded. Earlier experiments found that people did a better job playing the game Operation after viewing photos of puppies and kittens. Researchers speculated that the cute images made subjects more attuned to being careful because baby animals suggest vulnerability... This means anyone who has to do work that requires careful attention, such as copyediting or accounting, could benefit. And: So go…
1 min read
The Two Word Trick For Becoming More Creative
order to innovate in a way that is both practical and effective you need to make "little bets." What's a little bet? A small experiment that tests a theory. It's just big enough to give you the answer you need but not so big that it wastes too much precious time, money or resources. Rather than going all-in on the first idea you have and risk losing everything, a little bet allows you to break out of your comfort…
5 minutes
Why do we play?
y do we play? We play in order to learn: Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul: Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents. How does this work? When something is fun, it commands our full attention and provides an emotional reward, two things that are key to strengthening memory:…
4 minutes
6 things that will make you more productive:
u're only productive at work three days out of the week: People work an average of 45 hours a week; they consider about 17 of those hours to be unproductive (U.S.: 45 hours a week; 16 hours are considered unproductive). So how can you improve that? Make It Automatic The secret to getting more done is to make things automatic. Decisons exhaust you: The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require…
5 minutes
What are the secrets of improving learning and memory?
ve already posted a research round-up on becoming an expert at anything. That was focused on the big picture of how to master something over a period of years. This time let's get less macro and focus more on the nitty-gritty of what you need to do when you sit down, roll up your sleeves and try to learn something new. Yeah, It's Gonna Take Effort No, I'm not going to lecture you like Grandpa about the virtues of…
3 minutes
What’s the best way to learn from a book?
n't keep reading it over and over. Read it and write a one page summary. Via Daniel Coyle's excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills: Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book— a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash…
1 min read
How good are the best?
high complexity jobs like professional and sales roles, the top 10% produce 80% more than average and 700% more than the bottom 10%. Via 80,000 hours (hat tip - Andy McKenzie): ...how much do different employees typically differ in output? There have been many studies looking at this very question, across a wide range of jobs, which are summarised in a meta-study by Hunter, Schmidt and Judiesch (6). Output is measured in a variety of ways. For salespeople, it’s the…
2 minutes
