Can one personality trait determine your future?
search is pointing to conscientiousness as the one-trait-to-rule-them-all in terms of future success, both career-wise and personal. Via How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character: "It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness," Roberts told me. "But at this point it's emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how people do." What is it? Basically,…
3 minutes
Are hope and despair both self-fulfilling prophecies?
ldiers faced a difficult "final exam" of a march across the desert in full gear. "The study manipulated the soldiers' hopes - and fears - about the difficulty of the march. The goal was to determine what, if any, impact their psychological state had on their physical performance." Via Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom: ...I developed the idea of manipulating hope to understand how optimism and pessimism affect the brain. The result was a large-scale study that…
3 minutes
Flow: The #1 Secret To Enjoying Your Work
u want to be experiencing "flow." It's when you're so wrapped up in what you're doing that the world fades away: Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity... The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described... as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even…
3 minutes
How To Increase Happiness, Bravery And Your Attention Span
ditation. I listed it as one of the 10 things should you do every day to improve your life. It can boost happiness. Via Shawn Achor’s The Happiness Advantage: Take just five minutes each day to watch your breath go in and out. While you do so, try to remain patient. If you find your mind drifting, just slowly bring it back to focus. Meditation takes practice, but it’s one of the most powerful happiness interventions. Studies show that in the minutes right after…
3 minutes
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
Here’s The Magic Number That Leads To Happiness
w much happiness does it take to make up for the sadness in life? A ratio of 3 to 1. Via Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook: Psychologist Barbara Frederickson is an expert on flourishing and has been an advocate of finding ways to bring more positive emotions into our lives. In her research she discovered a critical 3 to 1 ratio, indicating that we need to have…
3 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
