Get inside your box!

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Do you know one of the "box people"? When they meet someone new, the “box people” immediately ask a question to identify which box the person belongs inside. "What do you do?" “Where are you from?” the “box people” want to stick a label on each person. Once they know the "box" (based on class, politics, religious affiliation, race, etc.), they can avoid the work of getting to know someone and treating them as an individual.

Meeting someone living outside the set of predetermined boxes is a challenge to the arrangement of tidy little containers. This affront will be met with increasing demands to "Get inside a box!” There’s a difference between asking honest questions to understand someone because you see them as an end in themselves, and asking questions as a result of treating people as means to an end.

Each of us has the same decision to make: Whether or not to treat others as unique individuals.

Stephen Goforth

The value of arguing with your parents

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Arguing with your parents as a teenager trains you to reject peer pressure. University of Virginia researchers observed more than 150 13-year-olds as they disputed issues like grades and chores with their mothers. Checking back in with the teens several years later, they discovered that those who had argued the longest and most convincingly—without yelling or whining—were also 40 percent less likely to have accepted offers of drugs and alcohol than the teens who were required to simply obey their mothers. Study author Joseph P. Allen says constructive debates with parents are “a critical training ground” for independent decision-making.

The Week Magazine

The Green Lumber Fallacy

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A fellow made in fortune in green lumber without knowing what appears to be essential details about the product he traded—he wasn’t aware that green lumber stood for freshly cut wood, not lumber that was painted green.  

Meanwhile, by contrast, the person who related the story went bankrupt while knowing every intimate detail about the green lumber, which includes the physical, economic, and other aspects of the commodity.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend to believe are important constitute a distraction away from more central attributes to the price mechanism.  

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

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Because of advances in computing power, smarter machine learning algorithms and larger data sets, we will soon share digital space with a sinister array of AI-generated news articles and podcasts, deepfake images and videos—all produced at a once unthinkable scale and speed. As of 2018, according to one study, fewer than 10,000 deepfakes had been detected online. Today the number of deepfakes online is almost certainly in the millions. Deepfakes pose not only criminal risks but also threats to national security.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Emotionally intelligent leaders are willing to step out of their comfort zones

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Growth and development require that we continue to push the boundaries of what we feel comfortable doing. Emotionally strong leaders recognize this and continue to push themselves and encourage those around them to go beyond what they already know and are familiar with. 

Emotionally intelligent leaders recognize that change is constant and that their success, the success of their people, and the success of the organization requires constant advancements and adjustments. 

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

Hiding Endings from Ourselves

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We avoid endings whenever possible, and we steer clear whenever we can of the neutral-zone emptiness. Endings feel like failure to us, and at a deeper level. So we use the busyness and structure and status of work and family life to hide ending it from view. Believing in doing so that if we just keep adding and adding to what we have, we’ll end up with something new and will avoid the need to make any endings.

But it is not just endings that we fear. The aloneness and emptiness that are often felt in the neutral zone are just about as fearful for many modern people as endings are. Whenever we can’t see that anything is happening—and you usually can’t in the neutral zone—we doubt that anything can “really” be going on.

We fail to see that real new beginnings, the kind that revitalize and inaugurate a new order of things, come out of that chaotic neutral zone.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Don't Forget about the Blue Goat

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The most popular episode of the 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show was titled Chuckles Bites the Dust. The main character (Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore) was a news producer for a TV station where one of the shows featured Chuckles the Clown.

Chuckles served as grand marshal of a city parade when a rogue elephant attacked and killed him. Throughout the episode, Mary’s colleagues made jokes at the poor man’s expense. But she took his death seriously and chastised them for the inappropriate behavior. That is, until Chuckle's funeral. That’s when the roles reversed. Her coworkers became solemn and sober, but Mary couldn’t suppress her urge to giggle during the eulogy at the clown’s comedic demise and references to his silly routine for children.  

It was ranked #1 on TV Guide's 1997 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.

Ever tried not to laugh at a wedding, church, or another solemn event? The more you fight it, the stronger the urge becomes to burst out howling. Ever had a crazy thought pop into your head about disrupting a meeting? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stood up in a restaurant and started yelling? Or start a food fight? Have you had a crazy thought pop into your head about what it would be like if you jumped out of a one-story window to the surprise of your coworkers? 

Suppress that contrarian thought, and it can become an outright urge. Suddenly, you are wondering if you can prevent yourself from doing something completely outrageous and inappropriate. The more you try to avoid the idea, the stronger the desire becomes to do it. Anyone who’s tried to quit smoking or stop drinking alcohol probably knows the feeling. 

A paper in the Journal Science tries to explain the phenomenon. Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner says if you keep ruminating on the idea of something bad happening, it can make it more likely to occur. 

Our brains are busy suppressing impulses all the time. We use a great deal of energy to keep inclinations in check. When we focus intensely on avoiding errors and taboos, the impulse can be strengthened because the brain is locked on the idea. 

Just try not to think of a blue goat.

In sports, players may be told not to swing their bat or golf club a certain way. Soon, the athlete can barely avoid doing it and feels obsessed and distracted, especially under pressure.

Are you not thinking of a blue goat? 

It’s hard to shake until something new shoves the thought out of the way. There’s the solution: Instead of trying to keep down the stray thought, use your energy to focus on something else that can take its place.

Basketball players are more successful when they visualize the ball going through the hoop and the process of getting it there. Rather than focusing on "not missing," they see success through visualizing accomplishment. Even thoughts of depression can sometimes be squeezed out by changing our focus from our own situation to helping someone else.

Just don’t forget about the blue goat.

Stephen Goforth

Should you focus on learning the basics or developing creativity?

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Putting the learning basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one's knowledge about the subject hand, the more nuanced one's creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house.

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

Gaining new Perspective by unfocusing

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Truly successful people don’t come up with great ideas through focus alone. They are successful because they make time to not concentrate and to engage in a broad array of activities like playing golf. As a consequence, they think inventively and are profoundly creative: they develop innovative solutions to problems and connect dots in brilliant ways.

In a time and age when everyone is over-scheduled and over-focused, creativity is more and more prized— it’s the key to your effectiveness and success, in life and in business.

Experts suggest that the key to being idle or to unfocusing is to diversify our activities rather than being constantly focused on a single task. To get a new perspective on something, we actually need to disengage from it. We can diversify in two ways: through mindless tasks or through a broader set of experiences.

Stanford psychologist Emma Seppälä writing in the Washington Post

Technology & the Ability to Focus

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There are two schools of thought on attention. The first argues that we haven’t lost our ability to focus, it has been wrested, even “stolen”, from us by technology. In this view we’re little more than lab rats lured by notifications and algorithms, pings and dings in a large-scale social experiment. We may develop strategies for resisting those dopamine dispensers, such as blocking software or switching to a “brick phone”. But the game is rigged against us.

Those in the second camp may scoff at this: they maintain that most of our struggles with focus are more to do with self-control. There is no notification that can distract us unless we are on some level willing to be distracted. Even the notion of a “shorter attention span” may provoke skepticism.

Instead, could it be that you’re just not that motivated? Whichever worldview you subscribe to – that our attention has been hijacked by our devices, or by our lack of self-discipline – they share an element of fatalism: there is either little you can do, or you’re just not doing enough. 

Elle Hunt writing in The Guardian

Our Brains Trick Us

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The futures we imagine contain some details that our brains invented and lack some details that our brains ignored. The problem is that our brains fill in and leave out. God help us if they didn’t.

No, the problem is that they do this so well that we aren’t aware it is happening. As such, we tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined. One of imagination’s shortcomings, then, is that it takes liberties without telling us it has done so.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness