How to Identify Adaptable People

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How can you determine whether a job candidate is willing to constantly revise their understanding and reconsider problems they thought they'd already solved?" Ask: “Tell me about a goal you didn't manage to achieve. What happened? What did you do as a result?" 

Most candidates will take responsibility for failing. (People who don't are people you definitely don't want to hire.) Good candidates don't place the blame on other people or on outside factors. They recognize that few things go perfectly, and a key ingredient of success is having the ability to adjust.   

Smart people take responsibility. And they also learn key lessons from the experience, especially about themselves. They see failure as training. That means they can describe, in detail what perspectives, skills, and expertise they gained from that training. And they can admit where they were wrong -- and how they were willing and even eager to change their minds.     

Jeff Haden writing in Inc.

Finding Yourself is not how it works

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“Finding yourself” is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten dollar bill in last year’s winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you. 

Emily McDowell

The Right Man for the Job

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His writing talents were never in doubt. Certainly not after he authored a well-written pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. However, the tall red-headed, Virginian was so quiet during debates that some questioned his strength. The real power of that critically important Congress of 1776 was John Adams of Massachusetts.  His bull-necked honesty and enthusiastic zeal made him a power center in that legislative body. It was natural that Adams be a principal choice to prepare the key policy paper on the future of the 13 colonies. Three others joined him to form a committee: Ben Franklin, a Connecticut merchant and a New York lawyer. Another man was added to give place to the importance of Virginia. When the committee met to do its work, it was naturally expected that John Adams would be the primary architect of the writing. But Adam suggested instead that the quiet Virginian draw up the first draft for the committee’s consideration. “I’m too obnoxious,” he said. So, almost by accident, the new man had the job. “I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing,” he said.  He first draft was received without change by the committee and approved later by the entire Congress. Written almost by chance by just the right man…Thomas Jefferson. And the document— the Declaration of Independence

You Have Your Truth, I have Mine

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Some people.. maintain that morality is not dependent on the society but rather the individual. “Morality is in the eye of the beholder.” They treat morality like taste or aesthetic judgments, person relative. 

On the basis of (moral) subjectivism Adolf Hitler and serial murderer Ted Bundy could be considered as a moral as Gandhi, as long as each lived by his own standards, whatever those might be. 

Although many students say they espouse subjectivism, there is evidence that it conflicts with other of their moral views. They typically condemn Hitler as an evil man for his genocidal policies. A contradiction seems to exist between subjectivism and the very concept of morality. 

Louis Pojman, Ethical Theory

Disney Princess theology

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White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For the citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when it is studying Scripture, is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society- and it has made them blind and utterly ill equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.      

Erna Kim Hackett 

Shadows from the Past

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Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood - particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past.

An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us - strong attraction or strong aversion - totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer.

We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person - the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh or some other feature - recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure.

Armand Nicholi, The Question of God

Starbucks to open its first sign language store in Japan

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#GOODNEWS

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Starbucks Coffee is opening its first store in Japan with baristas who know sign language. The store will open on Saturday in Kunitachi, a city in the western part of Tokyo. Nearly the entire staff of 25 is deaf. This will be the fifth "signing store" for the company Others are located in Malaysia, the US and China. Read more here.(image from Starbucks)

Keep Asking Questions

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A few years ago, I got a call  (on my communication device) from a Pittsburgh author named Chip Walter. He was co-writing a book with William Shatner (a.k.a Kirk) about how scientific breakthroughs first imagined on Star Trek foreshadowed today’s technological advances. Captain Kirk wanted to visit my virtual reality lab at Carnegie Mellon. Shatner stayed for three hours and asked tons of questions. A colleague later said to me: “He just kept asking and asking. He doesn’t seem to get it.” But I was hugely impressed. Kirk, I mean, Shatner was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn’t know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn’t want to leave until he understood. That’s heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

The Risk of Independence

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All life itself represents a risk, and the more lovingly we live our lives the more risks we take. Of the thousands, maybe even millions, of risks we can take in a lifetime the greatest is the risk of growing up. Growing up is the act of stepping from childhood into adulthood. Actually it is more of a fearful leap than a step, and it is a leap that many people never really take in their lifetimes. Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even successful adults, perhaps the majority of “grown-ups” remain until their death psychological children who have never truly separated themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have over them.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled