Category: Personal Choice

How to Direct Your Self-Development: Become a Center of Attraction

Following on our post building on the excellent LinkedIn post  “What I Wish I Knew At 22“, one particular comment has also raised my attention: “Stop chasing the girl, the promotion, and the raise. Become the person who attracts the girl, earns the promotion, is worthy of the raise. Spend your time growing into a more interesting person, and the gravitational force of the universe will shift towards you.”

Beyond the limited list of things to aim for (!) that would certainly need to be extended, I like this hint that we need to seek attracting the good stuff in general, rather than constantly chasing it. It is the ultimate aim of any marketing campaign: get people to come to us rather than having to seek them one by one.

It is also quite true on a personal level, and it is interesting to take this viewpoint or objective when considering possible direction for self development. Let’s evolve into someone that attracts what we want in life, and spend less time chasing for it.

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How Urgent It Is to Ban Autonomous AI Driven Weapons

The campaign to ban autonomous bots that act in swarms and have the ability to decide to kill a human on http://autonomousweapons.org has produced an amazing video that is worth watching.

The question of AI applied to daily objects is put in concrete terms in this simulation, not just as an intellectual discussion. In the video a parallel is made with nuclear deterrence and proliferation control approaches, which is quite worth pondering.

Like all technologies AI will bring a huge number of benefits and also its downside. Will humankind be wise enough?

(if you can’t see the video the Youtube link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

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How Not To Confuse Pleasure and Happiness

In this great post ‘The pleasure/happiness gap‘ Seth Godin reminds us that those are very different. And they are also distinct from the physiological point of view: “Pleasure is short-term, addictive and selfish. It’s taken, not given. It works on dopamine. Happiness is long-term, additive and generous. It’s giving, not taking. It works on serotonin.”

“Pleasure and happiness feel like they are substitutes for each other, different ways of getting the same thing. But they’re not.” Actually they are quite the opposite of one-another.

What people sell to us, what society tries to impose on us  is pleasure.

Happiness develops internally and is a voluntary construct. It takes time and personal effort, and it is so much worth it.

It is good to be reminded from time to time how those two can be so opposite.

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How We Need to Define Urgently Personal Behavior Rules Around Smartphones

The provoking title of this Atlantic piece ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?‘ is worth pondering. And the article worth reading too. The theme of the article is “more comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.”

Modern group social discussion?

The author is a mental health researcher that has noticed an abrupt change in teenager generational behavior around 2012 – the year 50% of the developed country population got a smartphone i.e. where smartphone penetration began to change our habits. “The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household.”

Teenagers socialize physically less and the rate of depression and suicide is going up dramatically. Research shows that more time on the screen and on social networks lead to higher rates of depression and lower happiness.

Like all new tools in our lives, we need to define social rules to live with it. The smartphone and the associated social networks are still too new to have developed and ingrained these behavioral rules. It might become a matter of urgency, still I am optimistic that a reaction will prevail.

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How Power Creates Responsibility (and Weakness Promotes Irresponsibility)

One of the issues we are facing as democracies is the rise of irresponsible requests from small groups. In fact, weak groups have nothing to lose: and they tend to become quite irresponsible. The weaker, the more desperate and the more irresponsible. A good illustration is the condition of trade unions in France, or the desperate gestures of people threatening to make their plant explode to avoid its closure.

On the other hand, power almost always brings responsibility, although it might take a while for the people to perform this transition (as such it is typical that a political party coming into power after too many years in the opposition will take one to two years to become quite responsible).

This observation bears also a way to deal with irresponsibility: give more power in certain areas to bring responsibility on the table. It can be an excellent negotiation strategy when facing a really irresponsible party.

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How one’s Status Should be Earned and be Limited

In our previous post ‘How Different Power and Status Are‘ we exposed the differences and why it is important to seek to develop some Status, and not just Power to progress in conversations and be successful.

At the same time it is important not to seek too much Status (or to concentrate just on seeking it) because it will become, beyond a threshold, a manifestation of one’s ego.

Thus status is dangerous concept because it may lead to a disconnect with the reality of the action, and too much self-centering. Status and the external perks and benefits associated with it is important but ideally it should be temporary and diminish after a certain period unless steps are being taken to justify it.

Status should be earned and should be related to one’s actions. And that’s where the concept becomes difficult.

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How to Bounce Back from a Setback

We all have from time to time to recover from a setback, which may be more or less substantial and structural. That’s also part and parcel of experimenting. An excellent post in Lifehack ‘How I Bounced Back From a Fiasco‘ gives a useful list of activities to perform when one intends to bounce back from a setback or failure.

The headers are as follows:

  1. Give up the victim mindset
  2. Change the setting (environment)
  3. Know Yourself
  4. Body First
  5. Mull it Over and get it Out
  6. Set Goals

I find this list interesting in particular the first items and the emphasis on maintaining the body in shape throughout the process. And you?

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How To Face Our Fears: Run Towards Them!

In this excellent post ‘the source of fear’, Om Swami quotes several experiences by Pema Chödrön regarding fear. In particular, Pema’s teacher Trungpa Rinpoche when faced with a nasty, ferocious and barking dog “turned and ran as fast as he could—straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail between his legs and ran away.”

What a better image of how to deal with fear? If we run away from the dog, fear will increase and we will get attacked. If we run towards our fear it will evaporate.

Of course it takes a considerable amount of self-control and courage to run towards a frightening thing, but that’s what we need to learnt to master.

“A degree of courage, certain resolve, a sort of commitment is needed to face our fears. Until we face them, we won’t understand them. And unless we understand our fears, how can we possibly ever rise above them? At any rate, developing an attitude of loving-kindness, abiding in mindfulness are absolutely critical to dissipate our ignorance and eliminate our fears. This prepares us in facing our weaknesses.“. How beautiful!

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How People Have an Irrational Need to Complete Sets of Things

This excellent Quartz post ‘People have an irrational need to complete “sets” of things‘ quotes a Harvard University study showing that as a species we have some strong bias towards completing incomplete sets.

This can be used as a marketing trick of course, and is a reason why some people become obsessed with collecting stuff (to complete some series in particular). “New research reveals that people are irrationally but effectively motivated by the idea of completing a set, even if it means working harder or spending more money—with no additional reward other than the satisfaction of completion and the relief of avoiding an incomplete set. ”

At the same time, research warns that the set should not be overly complicated and comprise only a limited number of items.

Be careful about this bias next time!

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Why Our Mind Should be Flexible – Up to Liquid Like Water

A famous quote by Bruce Lee goes “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be like water”

It is the property of liquid to take the shape of whatever container it is in. This mind flexibility is essential to adapt to the situations we are facing. This exercise is difficult because we naturally develop thinking patterns that rigidify our brains and the way we process information.

It is a good exercise to try to develop flexibility in investing in new habits and approaches to problems. To detach ourselves from certain experiences we might have that have created particularly strong patterns. It is worthwhile reminding us that we need to strive to exercise our flexibility in that way in a continuous manner.

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How the History of Murphy’s Law is an Inspiration

The Quartz column ‘Murphy’s Law is totally misunderstood and is in fact a call to excellence‘ and the linked pages on the history of Murphy’s law provide an interesting insight into the history and initial meaning of that law.

The gee-whiz experiment, around which Murphy’s law was conceived

It all happened around some hazardous tests conducted at the time of the sound barrier breaking effort. The original meaning would have been rather more aligned with a risk analysis approach: “When a reporter asked about the project’s inherent danger, Stapp allegedly replied that the team was guided by a principle he called “Murphy’s Law.” As Stapp put it, errors and malfunctions were an inescapable reality of any undertaking. Instead of using that fact as reason to quit, the engineers used it as motivation to excel. The only way to avoid catastrophe was to envision every possible scenario and plan against it”

Of course this is not contradictory with the current understanding of Murphy’s law ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’, but it takes a more positive prevention meaning. Murphy’s law is in fact an inspiration to consider all possible failure modes in a design, would it be a technical system or any other human endeavor.

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How to Overcome the Curse of Self-Interruption

We have increasingly a hard time to focus on something even when it is important. That point is very well developed in the Nautilus paper ‘Are You a Self-Interrupter?‘.

Studies show that we are today constantly multi-tasking, interrupted and quite never alone with our thoughts (are there is always the temptation of checking out our devices). For example, a study has shown that “Shockingly, students could not focus for more than three to five minutes even when they were told to study something very important“!

And more generally, “One interesting aspect of this penchant for combining tasks is that we seem to have lost the ability to single task. Glance around a restaurant, look at people walking on a city street, pay attention to people waiting in line for a movie or the theater, and you will see busily tapping fingers. We act as though we are no longer interested in or able to stay idle and simply do nothing.”

We need to consider this issue – close to a mental health issue – and develop disciplines to take the benefit of connectivity while making sure we still spend enough time with ourselves. It will take time for this to become standard, but we can already recognize at the individual level the need for some effort.

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