What is it about Mondays? Must they always be like this?
his bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert points to research showing we overestimate how unhappy Mondays make us: We overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays, we underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings, and we make these mundane but erroneous predictions again and again, despite their regular disconfirmation. The research is pretty consistent: Mondays are never that bad and Fridays aren't that great. And traffic isn't worse on Mondays. Tim Harford…
2 minutes
Would you be happier homeless in Fresno, California or homeless in Calcutta, India?
bsp; Calcutta, hands down. I've posted before that the downtrodden of Calcutta are far happier than you'd think, given their circumstances. It demonstrates how relatively unimportant money can be to individual well-being. This takes it further, showing how even in a rich country, life can feel much worse when we lack the things that are really key to enjoying life. Via Authentic Happiness: Common sense would have us believe that Calcutta's poor are overwhelmingly dissatisfied. Astonishingly this is not so.…
1 min read
Is anything on Twitter worth paying attention to?
bsp; Via Harvard Business Review: Just how valuable are these proliferating 140-character messages? To find out, three researchers set up a website and asked 1,443 users to rate the quality of 43,738 tweets. They then ranked a subset (4,220) in eight categories.* Their most striking finding: Only 36% of tweets were “worth reading”—a lower number than you might expect, since Twitter users choose whom to follow. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 5 things you…
1 min read
Is there an upside to trusting nobody?
bsp; Might make you more creative: Intuitively, as well as in light of prior research, distrust and creativity appear incompatible. The social consequences of distrust include reluctance to share information, a quality detrimental to creativity in social settings. At the same time, the cognitive concomitants of distrust bear resemblance to creative cognition: Distrust seems to foster thinking about nonobvious alternatives to potentially deceptive appearances. These cognitive underpinnings of distrust hold the provocative implication that distrust may foster creativity. Mirroring these…
1 min read
What is creativity?
cellent Charlie Rose interview with Jonah Lehrer. Jonah's book is Imagine: How Creativity Works. I highly recommend it. Click the image below to watch. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 10 proven ways to be more creative Does brainstorming for new ideas really work? Are you more creative when you're drunk?
1 min read
What are the two qualities great salespeople must have?
bsp; Empathy: Essential to understanding the customer and what they need. Ego drive: The ability to push forward and close. Via The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life: In 1964, three years after McMurry fired his salvo against the sales industry, two young academics, David Mayer and Herbert Greenberg, refined his ideas. On the basis of seven years of field research, much of it among insurance agents, they wrote that successful salesmen must…
2 minutes
Does brainwashing work? How? Who is more susceptible?
bsp; Via Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons: No, it doesn't usually work. You can take off the tin foil hat now: In the case of many Korean War prisoners, brainwashing proved to be more playing along to avoid torture than actual conversion to communist values. When it does work, what does it involve? No matter the intention and results, the method remains largely the same: The first and most important requirement is absolute…
2 minutes
How can you improve your ability to judge life’s risks and rewards?
bsp; Watch less TV. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news. That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus…
1 min read
