Please Understand Me

/

We want desperately to be understood. But if we put the power to decide whether we are understood into the hands of strangers, strangers who may or may not care about us, strangers who may or may not have our best interest at heart, we may waste our time and resources trying to please them.    

Why give people who don’t know us an outsized influence over our lives? Why provide them with control they haven’t earned by getting to know us by respecting us? How much better to find solace in those who truly care! Those people we can trust! People who will stand by us as they are invested in who we are becoming.

Stephen Goforth

A Dozen Recent Articles about AI & Journalism

/

The heroes of an epic adventure

/

A team of researchers interviewed a group of people who've been through a course of psychotherapy this is what they found:  

Those former patients who currently enjoyed better psychological health tended to narrate heroic stories in which they bravely battled their symptoms and emerged victorious in the end.

In other words, these people saw themselves as the heroes of an epic adventure and their problems as obstacles that are part of the hero's journey. Now crucially, in those accounts. there was a dominant recurring theme around personal agency. This is the sense that you are the subject influencing your own actions and life circumstances just like the hero in pretty much any story you've ever come across.  

So how can we do this for ourselves?

Tip number one is to practice self-distancing, which is a simple act of viewing yourself from the outside in. It allows you to take a calmer, more objective view on the events of your life.

Tip number two is to focus on building your sense of personal agency. My recommendation is to start by practicing your ability to take intentional action. The capacity to intentionally set and achieve goals is widely considered a cornerstone of self-agency.

Hazel Gale

Empathy is a Choice

/

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. … This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams 

13 Articles About How Companies are Using AI in their Businesses

/

Success

/

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;

who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

who has left the world better than he found it whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul;

who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;

who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;whose life was an inspiration;

whose memory a benediction.

 

Bessie Anderson Stanley

 

Wait! You Didn’t Use the Proper Lingo

/

Once introduced, a prescriptive rule about terminology in a particular profession or field of study is hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct:

The rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it. Since perspective rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.

11 Articles about AI for those Leading Companies

/

The Flip Side

/

Most people are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses but miss the flip side. If your weakness is confrontation, the flip side is that you are probably good at finding creative ways to get along with others and create harmony. Someone else might be prone to make rash decisions, and yet that same quality makes them ideal in times of emergency when quick action is critical. Those who are slow to act will likely be thorough and reliable. Whenever you spot your own (or someone else's) weaknesses—don't forget the flip side.

Stephen Goforth

Here's how you can spot who is going to be successful

/

(Some researchers ran) a workshop for low-performing seven graders at a New York City junior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a presentation on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning.

After the workshop, both groups of kids filtered back into their classwork. Their teachers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what (the researchers) call a "growth mindset," a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive learners and higher achievers than students from the first group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what (the researchers) called a "fixed mindset" that they're intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with.

(The) research had been triggered by curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. (They) found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute to their own inability-"I'm not intelligent"-become helpless. Those who interpret failure as a result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.

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

Assertive v Aggressive

/

While aggressive behavior injures in order to win, assertive behavior focuses, not on winning as such, but on negotiating reasonable changes in the way both parties behave so as to equalize the balance of social power. The purpose of assertive speaking-up is usually to solve an interpersonal problem.

But assertiveness is not just expressing feelings, laying down the law to someone, and then walking away. In general, to solve problems you must do more than talk back or express feelings; you must be very clear about what you want to accomplish by asserting yourself. You must attend to your feelings, decide what you want, and then use some specific verbal skills to negotiate for the changes you want.

Assertive problem-solving involves the ability to plan, “sell,” and implement an agreeable contract between yourself and the other person without sounding like a nag, a dictator, or a preacher.

In other words, an assertive person can express feelings in a manner that is both personally satisfying and socially effective.

Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself

Teaching Life Skills

/

The data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of them when it comes to life skills yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we’ve made for them.

Karen Able is a staff psychologist at a large public university in the Midwest. (Her name has been changed here because of the sensitive nature of her work.) Based on her clinical experience, Able says, “Overinvolved parenting is taking a serious toll on the psychological well-being of college students who can’t negotiate a balance between consulting with parents and independent decision-making.”

When parents have tended to do the stuff of life for kids—the waking up, the transporting, the reminding about deadlines and obligations, the bill-paying, the question-asking, the decision-making, the responsibility-taking, the talking to strangers, and the confronting of authorities, kids may be in for quite a shock when parents turn them loose in the world of college or work. They will experience setbacks, which will feel to them like failure. Lurking beneath the problem of whatever thing needs to be handled is the student’s inability to differentiate the self from the parent.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult

Self-Control as a Child

/

Behaving yourself as a child brings big rewards in adulthood. Researchers tracked more than 1,000 people from toddlerhood into their early 30s and found that the more self-control they showed as kids, the healthier, wealthier, and happier they were as grown-ups. By contrast, children who struggled to complete tasks and handle frustration without lashing out at their peers were more likely to be overweight, drug dependent, and ridden with debt as adults. The study’s authors say that self-control can be taught and nurtured with practice, and that no matter what a child’s circumstances, “good parenting can improve self-control and improve life success.”

The Week Magazine

Free yourself from negative people

/

Spend time with nice people who are smart, driven and like-minded. Relationships should help you, not hurt you. Surround yourself with people who reflect the person you want to be. Choose friends who you are proud to know, people you admire, who love and respect you – people who make your day a little brighter simply by being in it. Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.

Renee Jones, read more here

10 Amazing Things AI is being used to do

/