Moving out of Your Hometown

Staying somewhere where you are no longer happy, and doing things that you’ve long ago stopped being surprised or fulfilled by, is never a good thing. Yes, there will be a difficult moment or several during the moving process, but it is at least a step towards taking active change in your life and putting it on a path that you want to see it go. I mean, if you’re at a point in your life where you are legitimately saying you are “over” the “drama” of your group — and you’re not on a reality show — there have to be some changes to make.

In any case, choosing to be somewhere because it’s familiar is a short-term fix to what is certainly a much bigger problem. There is a certain degree of charm that your hometown can take on after a long enough separation, and maybe it will end up proving the right place for you at some later point in your life. But don’t we all owe it to ourselves to explore a bit as an adult, and listen to ourselves when we constantly mutter how unhappy we are? A move is never a guarantee of a better life, but it is a guarantee of doing something you actually want to do, even if it means taking a chance.

Chelsea Fagan writing in Thought Catalog

Why are some people are incompetent

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence. Incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense of mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve. Incompetent people can be taught to raise their competence by learning the skills to judge their own performance more accurately.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

4 Scriptwriting Tools

Fade In
Script-writing software with similar features toFinal Draft without the price tag. Not as many of the extras that come withFinal Draft but only $50. Windows, Mac, Linux.

Final Draft*
Industry standard for writing screenplays on both Windows and Mac. Notes section for keeping track of characters, special scene view to get an overview, index card system for summaries, etc. $170.

Trelby
Free script-writing alternative to Final Draft and Fade In. Enough features to get you started.

TV Tropes
Fiction writing help through examination of storytelling devices in creative works.

The best thing you can do

The best thing you can do is get good at being you. -Denise the Menace

Making unhappy marriages

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. –Friedrich Nietzsche

Learning to do Nothing

In a 2014 study, researchers left people in a room alone for six to 15 minutes with nothing to do and found that the participants turned to almost any available activity, including administering painful electric shocks to themselves. Even pain—even, gasp, Twitter—is better than being alone with your thoughts. Despite the difficulties, learning to do nothing is good for us. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Experiencing more awe

Experiencing more awe is associated with living healthier and more meaningful lives. A 2021 study reported that feeling more awe is correlated with reporting feeling lowered levels of daily stress.

Positive experiences of awe have also been found to increase feelings of well-being, life satisfaction and sense of meaning. Emerging research shows that experiencing awe may make us more curious, creative and compassionate people.  

Richard Sima writing in the Washington Post

It’s the People you Barely Know

Distance acquaintances are more likely to help you get that new job than people you know well. That’s the finding of a new study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users. Researchers found weak ties, people with whom you have few mutual connections, are the most helpful. The “strength of weak ties” theory was first proposed in 1973 by a Johns Hopkins University sociologist.

Sinan Aral, a management professor at MIT and co-author of the paper says, “Moderately weak ties are the best. Not the weakest, but slightly stronger than the weakest.” The sweet spot is about 10 mutual connections between people. The usefulness of the connection to the other person falls when there are more than 10.  

Bottom line: When we broaden our horizons then the networks of acquaintances can go to work for us. The power of weak ties may have implications for other parts of life as well.

Read more details of the study in the journal Science.

Lincoln the Failure

Think of Abraham Lincoln, who was elected president of the United States in 1860. he grew up on an isolated farm and had only one year of formal education. In those early years he was exposed to barely half a dozen books. In 1832 he lost his job and was defeated in the race for the Illinois legislature. In 1833 he failed in business. In 1834 he was elected to the state legislature, but in 1835 his sweetheart died and in 1836 he had a nervous breakdown. In 1838 he was defeated for nomination for Congress. In 1846 he was elected to Congress but in 1848 lost the renomination. In 1849 he was rejected for a federal land appointment, and in 1854 he was defeated for the Senate. In 1856 he was defeated for the nomination of vice president, and in 1858 he was again defeated for the Senate.

Many people, both at home and abroad, consider Lincoln to be the greatest president of all time. Yet it should be remembered how many failures and defeats marked his life and how humble and unpromising his early beginnings were.

Ted Engstrom, The Pursuit of Excellence

The Goal of the Argument

Looking to ‘own’ someone in argument has the wrong orientation, that of domination not only during the exchange but afterwards. Instead, we should approach our particular and individual exchanges with the hope that we can set the stage for a more respectful and honest culture of reasoning together. For sure, this is but a hope, but it’s better to serve as an example of that aspiration than as an example of how argument can go wrong.

Scott Aikinis writing in Psyche

Random Acts

Research (published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology) found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.  “We have this negativity bias when it comes to social connection. We just don’t think the positive impact of our behaviors is as positive as it is,” said Marisa Franco, a psychologist.  “With a study like this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of kindness,” she said.

Catherine Pearson writing in the New York Times

The Purge

Death—or the prospect of death—has a way of clearing away everything that is not real.  Pretending is demeaning, and it makes you weak and confused, and it’s also a lot of work. I don’t do that kind of work anymore. -Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

A little better than today

Maybe it’s waking up early, starting an exercise program or learning a new skill; if there’s something you want, start taking steps now to get there, no matter how small. Instead of looking at the goal itself as some looming, insurmountable burden, look at what you did today and figure out how you can improve upon it tomorrow. Tomorrows add up quicker than you might think. -Alex McDaniel (born Oct 5)

Empowering others

The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process.  -Barbara Colorose

Doomed by Success

Few firms are good at recognising their own flaws (which helps to explain why only one company from the original Dow Jones Industrial Average of 1896 is still on that list: General Electric).

Henry Ford was so allergic to evidence that America was falling out of love with the Model T that he dismissed sales statistics as fakes and fired an executive who warned him of disaster.

Sears started to build its giant headquarters—the 110-storey Sears tower—at exactly the moment, in 1970, when its fortunes began to go south.

IBM allowed Microsoft to take over the PC operating-software business because it thought that the money was in hardware.  

Nokia allowed a substandard boss, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, to run the company for four years before finally getting rid of him.

In “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School argues that companies are often doomed not by their failures but by their triumphs. They may realise that the world is changing. But they are so good at doing what they have always done—making mainframe computers in IBM’s case—that they make a hash of embracing the new.

Schumpeter writing in The Economist

Be the change

Be the change you wish to see in the world -Gandhi (born Oct. 2, 1869)

Qualifications

Be yourself. Who else is better qualified? -Frank J. Giblin

Grammatical correctness ≠ Voice

The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.

What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. 

One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. 

Louis Menard writing in The New Yorker

Good news & bad news

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot.  -Michael Althsuler

Love and do what you will

In the early fifth century, Saint Augustine summarized all of human ethics in the dictum “Love and do what you will.” The happiest people have lives focused on love: of family, of friends, of others through work that serves, and in some cases of the divine as well. Research on people who wind up happy (and healthy) as they grow old shows that the most important part of life to cultivate is a series of stable, long-term love relationships.

Aquinas defines love as “to will the good of the other.” You can’t choose how much love you will get, but happiness depends more on how much you give. And what you give your love to matters just as much. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic