Peter Pronovost’s checklists better intensive care The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care. It’s an opaque term. The difficulties of life support are considerable. But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. After six hours, her core temperature reached 98.6 degrees. First, her pupils started to react to light. What makes her recovery astounding isn’t just the idea that someone could come back from two hours in a state that would once have been considered death. For every drowned and pulseless child rescued by intensive care, there are many more who don’t make it—and not just because their bodies are too far gone.
Swift To-Do List Blog First of all, if you don’t have any New Year resolutions yet, then STOP and make some. Why? Setting goals in January is better than setting them later, because you will get an edge: extra motivational boost of the New Year. Everything is fresh and the opportunities of the New Year are ripe to be harvested! Exploit this little life hack. Ready? If you now do have some New Year resolutions, then you are probably already failing. Whether you appreciate my twisted sense of humor or not, you might ask: How can I be already failing and sabotaging my resolutions if I have only set them a minute ago? Ladies and gentleman, prepare to be shocked, but… It’s not about putting the effort into your resolutions! Wait a minute! Well, here comes the $64,000 answer: It is about making sure that you will keep putting the effort into your resolutions. Big difference. Don’t let the fate of your resolutions be doomed before you equip them with the right weaponry necessary to succeed in the Age of Distraction.
The secret of self-control In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Most of the children were like Craig. The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. Mischel was born in Vienna, in 1930.
The 6 Keys To Being Awesome At Everything I've been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I'm far from the player I wish I were. I've been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I've taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I've had a number of rapturous moments during which I've played like the player I long to be. And almost certainly could be, even though I'm 58 years old. During the past year, I've read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). We've found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it's possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. There is something wonderfully empowering about this.
10 Lies You Will Hear Before You Pursue Your Dreams post written by: Marc Chernoff Email Unfortunately, just before you take your first step on the righteous journey to pursue your dreams, people around you, even the ones who deeply care for you, will give you awful advice. So they try to protect you by shielding you from the possibility of failure, which, in effect, also shields you from the possibility of making your dreams a reality. As our friend Steve Jobs says: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Here are 10 ill-advised tips (lies) people will likely tell you when you decide to pursue your dreams, and why they are dreadfully mistaken. You can follow your dreams someday, but right now you need to buckle down and be responsible. – Someday? Disregard these misguided bits of nonsense and you’ll be well on your way to fulfilling your dreams. Now get out there and make a splash! Photo by: Gigi 62 If you enjoyed this article, check out our new best-selling book.
The End of Solitude By William Deresiewicz What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Modernism decoupled this dialectic. The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. I speak from experience.
Why Positivity is So Essential in the Workplace How to Change the World Amazon start selling the paperback edition of my latest book, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. APE explains how to publish a book by breaking the process down into three stages: Author explains how to write a book. You can order APE here: There are 204 Amazon reviews for it: 181 five stars, 21 four stars, and 2 three stars which averages to five stars! Here are three of the blurbs: “Nuts, bolts, and inspiration too. Seth Godin, author and founder of The Icarus Project “Guy’s book is the perfect companion on the journey of independent publishing and great reading for the millions who aspire to become authors.” Atif Rafiq, General Manager, Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon.com “APE is easily the most comprehensive, best organized, nuts-and-bolts-useful work on self-publishing I’ve seen to date. Barry Eisler, bestselling novelist of the John Rain series including The Detachment, Requiem for an Assassin, and The Last Assassin
We need to talk about TED In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky. But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work. The first reason is over-simplification. At this point I kind of lost it. So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist's work (or an artist's or philosopher's or activist's or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn't feel good listening to them? What is TED? T – E – D.
The 4-Letter Word That Everybody’s Talking About - Head Count Denver — Here at this giant gathering of admissions officers and high-school counselors, I keep hearing the same word over and over. People have mentioned it during sessions, uttered it over coffee, and probed its meaning in conversations. The word is “grit.” It’s as good a word as any for the determination that many educators now associate with student success. Grit, as described by some researchers, is the habit of overcoming challenges, of learning from mistakes instead of being defeated by them. One administrator described it as “that fire in the belly.” It’s long been said that test scores and grade-point averages don’t tell you the whole story about an applicant, but these days there’s growing interest in ways of measuring—and improving—student’s “noncognitive” skills, as speakers here at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting attested. After all, we’re learning more and more about why students succeed or fail. In short, Ms. Ms. Return to Top