Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. –Viktor Frankl (born March 26, 1905)
When Albert A. Michelson, the first person in the United States to win a Nobel prize in science, was asked at the end of his life why he had devoted so much of his time to measuring the velocity of light, he is said to have replied, “It was so much fun.’ And lest we forget, Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. These and the many other great scientists one could easily mention were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not “professionals” in their field, recognized figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow
The purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers to develop their own initiative, strengthens them and the use of their own judgment, enables them to grow, and to become better contributors. -John W. Gardner
The secret to happy workplaces isn’t spending more money. It’s about creating the conditions that allow employees to do their best work. -Ron Friedman
Numerous examples and research show that overly loyal people are more likely to participate in unethical acts to keep their jobs and are also more likely to be exploited by their employer. These could manifest as being asked to work unreasonable hours or on projects or assignments unrelated to your role, or keeping things under wraps because it is in the company’s (read: family) best interest. We’re all in this together, so you have to play your part, right?
Studies show that employees who operate within a “familial culture” often fail to report any wrongdoing when they feel closer ties to the perpetrator. Feelings of fear the damage might cause to the perpetrator keep fellow employees quiet and complicit.
Joshua A. Luna, writing in the Harvard Business Review
Your feelings are a very important tool in understanding the world. Your unconscious mind does a lot of mental calculations that are more complex than your conscious mind is able to do. It can handle more information. That’s what comes back to your brain in gut feelings, hunches and intuitions. Those aren’t from nowhere. They're the result of complex calculations your brain did on an unconscious level, in conjunction with emotion.
Leonard Mlodinow, quoted in GQ
Most of us want a dictator—albeit a benevolent one—so we can pass the buck, so we can say, "You made me do that. It’s not my fault." But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet.
Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. -Charles Bukowski
E.B. White once wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” But in my research, I’ve found that productive people don’t agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful.
Often our productivity struggles are caused not by a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Productivity isn’t a virtue. It’s a means to an end. It’s only virtuous if the end is worthy. If productivity is your goal, you have to rely on willpower to push yourself to get a task done. If you pay attention to why you’re excited about the project and who will benefit from it, you’ll be naturally pulled into it by intrinsic motivation.
Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times
Anger is like smoke. You have to get at what’s feeding the fire. -Gail Cornwall
Think of our brain circuitry like hiking trails. The ones that get a lot of traffic get smoother and wider, with brush stomped down and pushed back. The neural pathways that sit fallow grow over, becoming less likely to be used. Kindergarten teachers are thus spot on when they say, “The thoughts you water are the ones that grow.” This is also true for emotions, like resentment, and the ways we respond to them, like venting. The more we vent, the more likely we are to vent in the future.
Gail Cornwall & Juli Fraga writing in Slate
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. -Albert Einstein (born March 14, 1879)
The process of self-discovery requires an undoing of the self-knowledge that you assume you already have. Becoming is the ongoing process of losing yourself and finding yourself. -John Kaag
I know the signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing those things in myself. I can’t be telling my students, “Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed” if I’m ignoring those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t happening.
Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, quoted in the New York Times
Researchers have found that the happiness produced by acquiring material things such as cars, jewelry, and gadgets decreases over time. By contrast, the satisfaction associated with experiential purchases— like vacationing with a spouse or attending a sporting event with friends—increases as time moves forward, in part because we seldom do things alone. Elizabeth Dunn, a professor of who studies happiness says, “Going to a concert, taking a trip, any unique experience that is very special can make us feel more connected to people we love.”
March, 2022, Atlantic Magazine
When I hear something like “we’re like family here”, I silently complete the analogy: We’ll foist obligations upon you, expect your unconditional devotion, disrespect your boundaries, and be bitter if you prioritize something above us. Many families are dysfunctional. Likening them to on-the-job relationships inadvertently reveals the ways in which work can be too.
Joe Pinsker, writing in The Atlantic
According to a wealth of research that now spans five decades people who see the ageing process as a potential for personal growth tend to enjoy much better health into their 70s, 80s and 90s than people who associate aging with helplessness and decline, differences that are reflected in their cells’ biological aging and their overall life span.
“There’s just such a solid base of literature now,” says Prof Allyson Brothers at Colorado State University. “There are different labs in different countries using different measurements and different statistical approaches and yet the answer is always the same.”
Many people will endorse certain ageist beliefs, such as the idea that “old people are helpless”, long before they should have started experiencing age-related disability themselves. Those kinds of views, expressed in people’s mid-30s, can predict their subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease up to 38 years later.
David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. -Jorge Luis Borges
Planning is improvisation on a sense of direction. -Harlan Cleveland
If you’re in a grocery store, and you're hungry, everyone knows you're going to buy more stuff. You go into the store, you have certain data. If you go when you're in a non-hungry state, you have all that data in front of you, and all those choices to make, and you make a series of choices. If you go when you're in a hungry state, same data, same information, and you make totally different decisions. That's a good illustration of what emotions do. The emotions are a framework for your logical processing. It affects how you evaluate data, how skeptical you are of certain ideas versus how accepting you are of those same ideas. Your brain doesn't process in a vacuum.
Leonard Mlodinow, quoted in GQ
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