impostor syndrome
/None of the right people have impostor syndrome. -Natalia Imperatori-Lee
Conditional Acceptance
/Too often we claim that we accept others for what they are when we truly mean that we accept them as long as they do what we want them to. When we truly accept others the way they are we no longer have to take unnecessary responsibility for others’ emotions an behaviors, we maintain emotional balance at a time when it is most needed, and we encourage the other person to be more responsible for his own emotions and behaviors.
Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control
Nothing is easier
/Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. -Demosthenes
Self-handicapping
/The fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you “really” are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. A shocking number of successful people (particularly women), believe that they haven’t really earned their spots, and are at risk of being unmasked as frauds at any moment. Many people deliberately seek out easy tests where they can shine, rather than tackling harder material that isn’t as comfortable.
If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn’t expect to do well on. “Instead of studying,” writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, “a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying.”
Megan Mcardle writing in the Atlantic
I just hate them
/“I just hate them,” says one woman when asked why she refused to put one on. “I think I hate them because you have to wear them, and I think it’s more of a ‘you’ve got to wear it’, so I don’t want it.”
“I think, whether you’re male or female, it’s a dominance thing,” replies the man next to her. “I’m in charge, you don’t tell me what to do.”
The interviewees were British drivers who admitted to not wearing their seat belts while in cars in 2008, despite it being a legal requirement in the UK to wear one in the front seat of a vehicle since 1983 and in the back seat since 1991.
William Park writing in BBC Future
The things that you care about
/Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you. -Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Slow to Anger
/Learning to be slow to anger gives us the time and freedom of mind to decide how we should solve our problems or how we should express our anger. Being slow to anger allows us to respond to conviction, to confess our sins of anger, and to rise above hate to forgive those who have offended us.
Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger
Stretching
/My own happiest times have not been when all was secure but rather when I was stretching to learn to fulfill a task which called for more than I have to give – and I was trying to give it.
Virtual Leaders are Doers
/New data shows that the confidence, intelligence and extroversion that have long propelled ambitious workers into the executive suite are not enough online, because they simply don’t translate into virtual leadership. Instead, workers who are organised, dependable and productive take the reins of virtual teams. Finally, doers lead the pack – at least remotely.
The study shows that, instead of those with the most dynamic voices in the room, virtual teams informally anoint leaders who actually do the work of getting projects done. “They are the individuals who help other team members with tasks, and keep the team on schedule and focused on goals,” says lead author Radostina Purvanova,
As expected, the face-to-face teams chose leaders with the same confident, magnetic, smart-seeming extroverted traits that we often see in organisational leaders. “The people who portray themselves as organised, dependable and reliable look to us like effective leaders,” says Purvanova. But those chosen as remote leaders were doers, who tended towards planning, connecting teammates with help and resources, keeping an eye on upcoming tasks and, most importantly, getting things done. These leaders were goal-focused, productive, dependable and helpful.
In other words, virtually, the emphasis shifts from saying to doing.
Arianne Cohen writing for BBC WorkLife
My optimism
/My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud. – Henry Rollins
Being a selfish jerk doesn’t get you ahead
/“I was surprised by the consistency of the findings. No matter the individual or the context, disagreeableness did not give people an advantage in the competition for power — even in more cutthroat, ‘dog-eat-dog’ organizational cultures,” said Berkeley professor Cameron Anderson.
The researchers found those who scored high on disagreeable traits were not more likely to have attained power than those who were generous, trustworthy and generally nice.
That’s not to say that jerks don’t reach positions of power. It’s just that they don’t get ahead faster than others, and being a jerk simply doesn’t help, Anderson said. That’s because any power boost they get from being intimidating is offset by their poor interpersonal relationships.
Read more in Berkeley News
Miracles
/Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. -CS Lewis
Building walls
/Never build a wall until you know what you're walling in and what you're walling out.
False Causality
/We are always in search of patterns. The tendency means that sometimes we even find patterns where none really even exist. Our brains are so trained in this way that we will even make sense of chaos to the extent that we can.
Because our training wires us to seek out patterns, it’s crucial to remember the simple maxim that correlation does not imply causation. Just because two variables move in tandem doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other.
This principle has been hilariously demonstrated by numerous examples. For instance, by looking at fire department data, you notice that, as more firemen are dispatched to a fire, the more damage is ultimately done to a property. Thus, you might infer that more firemen are causing more damage. In another famous example, an academic who was investigating the cause of crime in New York City in the 1980s found a strong correlation between the number of serious crimes committed and the amount of ice cream sold by street vendors. But should we conclude that eating ice cream drives people to crime? Since this makes little sense, we should obviously suspect that there was an unobserved variable causing both. During the summer, crime rates are the highest, and this is also when most ice cream is sold. Ice cream sales don’t cause crime, nor does crime increase ice cream sales. In both of these instances, looking at the data too superficially leads to incorrect assumptions.
Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in
Guilt and Blame
/No one in a relationship problem is ever totally innocent or totally guilty. With this belief, people can always keep the door open to their own faults without engaging in excessive, guilty-provoking self incrimination. Holding back anger for even a short time and engaging in self-analysis in private has the effect of tempering the expression of anger. Confession alters our goals from changing others to changing the relationship.
Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger