Taylor Swift’s Metaverse

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Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?

Well, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg is almost totally failing, yeah. This may seem like a leap, but a metaverse—a futuristic virtual-reality world—is essentially a shared online experience, which is not all that different from the online fanscape that Swifties inhabit. It sounds like the Swifties might be living in something that is pretty close to a metaverse currently. They’ll go wherever she goes. So it’s not a virtual world, but it’s a virtual community. That’s really what makes the metaverse and metaverse platforms powerful. People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question.

Wagner James Au quoted in The Atlantic

The Appeal of Video Games

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Good game designers know how to draw us in by catering to some very basic emotional needs. (Researcher Jane McGonigal) notes that the best games have four elements: clear goals that allow us to feel a sense of purpose; rules that make the task harder and thereby challenge our creativity; rapid feedback to chart our progress; and an experience that is voluntary.

Wouldn't it be nice if work was more like a video game? Your boss would articulate a clear mission and set of milestones you were expected to meet. You would go into the office every day and receive ongoing feedback about your progress so you could see the impact you are having.

The truth, of course, is that reality is messy. Our goals are fuzzy, our progress unclear. Video games, the majority of which now focus on getting us to cooperate rather than compete, offer a more fulfilling existence, McGonigal argues.

"We all want to find more meaning in what we do, like we're part of something bigger," McGonigal said. "Games give us a place to feel that, to cooperate and do something that is more satisfying."

Chris O'Brien, Mercury News Columnist

Givers and Takers

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"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of a study to be published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania.

In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write. What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self."

For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Moving out of Your Hometown

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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

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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

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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.

Learning to do Nothing

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

A little better than today

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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)

Doomed by Success

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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