Shrink the Change

Our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.

A sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

If you’re leading a change effort… rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over.

If you want a reluctant elephant to get moving, you need to shirk the change.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

the old and the new

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better." -William R. Inge

What Google searches Teach us

You may not be a data scientist. You may not know how to code in R or calculate a confidence interval. But you can still take advantage of big data and digital truth serum to put an end to envy — or at least take some of the bite out of it.

Any time you are feeling down about your life after lurking on Facebook, go to Google and start typing stuff into the search box. Google’s autocomplete will tell you the searches other people are making. Type in “I always …” and you may see the suggestion, based on other people’s searches, “I always feel tired” or “I always have diarrhea.” This can offer a stark contrast to social media, where everybody “always” seems to be on a Caribbean vacation.

As our lives increasingly move online, I propose a new self-help mantra for the 21st century, courtesy of big data: Don’t compare your Google searches with other people’s Facebook posts.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writing in the New York Times

Just the Right Amount of Practice

Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out. To succeed, students must “avoid exhaustion” and “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

How do students marked for greatness make the most of limited practice time? The rhythm of their practice follows a distinctive pattern. They put in more hours per week in the practice room or playing field, but they don’t do it by making each practice longer. Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about 80 to 90 minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.

Add these several practices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Darwin spent every day doing his hardest work, Hardy (G.H. Hardy was one of Britain’s leading mathematicians in the first half of the 20th century) and Littlewood (Hardy’s longtime collaborator John Littlewood) spent doing math, Charles Dickens and Stephen King spent writing. Even ambitious young students in one of the world’s best schools, preparing for an notoriously competitive field, could handle only four hours of really focused, serious effort per day.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writing in Nautilus

this is success

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.  -Winston Churchill

off his guard

Surely what a man does when taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is.  –CS Lewis

bricks

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.  -David Brinkley

the secret

The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

illusions

Our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease. And the illusions of others, when they take on lives of their own, are even more dangerous. -Nicholas Christopher

rising

Rising above the fray is a grown up thing to do.

We're all a Mess

I have spent the past five years peeking into people’s insides. I have been studying aggregate Google search data. Alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media.

While spending five years staring at a computer screen learning about some of human beings’ strangest and darkest thoughts may not strike most people as a good time, I have found the honest data surprisingly comforting. I have consistently felt less alone in my insecurities, anxieties, struggles and desires.

Once you’ve looked at enough aggregate search data, it’s hard to take the curated selves we see on social media too seriously. Or, as I like to sum up what Google data has taught me: We’re all a mess.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writing in the New York Times

sometimes

Sometimes a nation abolishes God, but fortunately, God is more tolerant.

Selfishness and Self-love

If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue and not a vice-to love myself since I am a human being too. There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included. A doctrine which proclaims such an exclusion proves itself to be intrinsically contradictory. The idea expressed in the Biblical “Love thy neighbor as thyself!” implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, can not be separated from respect for and love and understanding of another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other self.

The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.

The selfish person.. can see nothing but himself; he judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him; he is basically unable to love. Does not this prove that concern for others and concern for oneself are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness and self-love were identical. But.. selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites.

Eric Fromm, Man for Himself

Attributes of a high-performing Leader

A decade long study published in Harvard Business Review set out to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs: 

Our findings challenged many widely held assumptions. For example, our analysis revealed that while boards often gravitate toward charismatic extroverts, introverts are slightly more likely to surpass the expectations of their boards and investors.

We were also surprised to learn that virtually all CEO candidates had made material mistakes in the past, and 45% of them had had at least one major career blowup that ended a job or was extremely costly to the business. Yet more than 78% of that subgroup of candidates ultimately won the top job.

We discovered that high-performing CEOs do not necessarily stand out for making great decisions all the time; rather, they stand out for being more decisive. They make decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction. They do so consistently—even amid ambiguity, with incomplete information, and in unfamiliar domains. In our data, people who were described as “decisive” were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs.

Read more about the CEO Genome Project in the Harvard Business Review

obliquely

Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely at an angle. - Andre Gide

simple

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs

Desire and Love

To love is an act. To be in love is a state.

Desire says Fidelity is passive. Love says Fidelity is active.

Eros is a love that sees and then desires. Agape is a love that knows and then grows.

Eros wants to use you. Agape wants to know the person.

Eros seeks love and desire itself. Agape seeks the beloved’s best.

Eros seeks to be in love. Agape seeks to love.

Eros says desire is love. Agape says desire’s place is within the process of love.

Stephen Goforth

fail with honor

Rather fail with honor than success by fraud.  – Sophocles

A Puritan

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.  H. L. Mencken

the quest for truth

The quest for truth, at least the truth about the most important things, cannot be divorced from the quest to become the kind of person we need to become.  C. Stephen Evans