How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back Join a gym and one of the first things the instructor does is talk about your goals – what exactly do you hope to achieve by hoisting weights and pounding the treadmill? Apply for an educational course, and you find yourself bombarded with promotional literature. Here’s the future you: suited, booted and smug. What they’re doing – the gym guy and the marketing department – is highlighting end results. They’re hoping to lure you in by showing you what you could achieve, what you can become. A new study by a pair of researchers at the University of Chicago and the Korea Business School shows that this approach has some benefits. Ayelet Fishbach and Jinhee Choi started out by recruiting over a hundred students at a university gym, just as they were about to start a session. Describing the goals of working out boosted the students’ intentions to exercise. Staying focused on our goals detracts from the inherent pleasures of the activities we need to pursue to achieve those goals.
The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. I am an essayist, for better or worse. I don’t suppose many young people dream of becoming essayists. Even as nerdy and bookish a child as I was fantasized about entering the lists of fiction and poetry, those more glamorous, noble genres on which Nobels, Pulitzers and National Book Awards are annually bestowed. So if Freud was right in saying that we can be truly happy only when our childhood ambitions are fulfilled, then I must be content to be merely content. I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations. Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled “What do I know?” According to Theodor Adorno, the iron law of the essay is heresy. Alexander Glandien Recently, with fiercely increased competition for admission to the better colleges, the “common app” essay has become an obsessive focus on the part of high school administrators, parents and students.
Top 10 Most Important Personality Development Tips | Infinityfast Blog Personality development is a term which is often misunderstood to be self development and or just limited to enhancing one’s own looks. So it becomes necessary to get a clear picture on what is personality development and what is self development. Personality development is something which is considered as improving the way we think, feel, behave and carry ourselves. In other words, it is not confined to the improvement of a single aspect of an individual; rather it is about improving an entity or a cluster of qualities which helps in achieving and presenting oneself in a better way. Positive approach and confidence: Positive approach and confidence are two different terms but are interrelated in many sorts. Listen with intent: Listening with intent results in a better understanding of the core point of what you listen to. Be good in learning: Always have a curiosity to learn new things. Body Language (Eye contact, Body Posture, Hand shake): Be yourself: Dress up well: Manners: Be encouraging:
Never Brainstorm with a "Blank Slate" Consider the following two statements:You can do anything you want. You can do anything you want with this box of colored pencils. Like most option-obsessed humans, you might prefer the limitless potential of the first statement. And like most creatives, you might believe this “blank slate” is an essential element of your ideation process. But Will Turnage, VP of Technology and Invention at digital advertising agency R/GA, thinks you’re wrong. As the man in charge of guiding and developing R/GA’s groundbreaking digital products, Will believes that paying respects to the unique capabilities of individual mediums builds the most efficient bridge to great work. Step inside R/GA’s Manhattan offices, and you’ll likely find Turnage and his team engaged in a practice he calls, “Technology First.” In other words, it’s the opposite of blank slate. Technology First starts by selecting a very specific medium for communication, then creatively exploits its full potential. How about you?
Getting Others Mad May Be a Winning Strategy "Don't get mad, get even," may not be the best advice in all competitive endeavors. In fact, anger can sometimes help people win, new research suggests. When people are made to feel angry in a game of strength, they tend to perform better. "You shouldn't look at emotions as something irrational," said study researcher Uri Gneezy, a behavioral economist at the University of California, San Diego and authoer of the book "The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life" (PublicAffairs 2013). Test of strength In the new study, published today (Jan. 13) in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gneezy and his colleagues give a world-famous example of the power and peril of anger. The case is clearly an example of anger going awry for Zidane, Gneezy told LiveScience. To find out, Gneezy and his colleague Alex Imas, also of UC San Diego, recruited male undergraduates for two competitive experiments. But there was a twist. Game of skill
10 Reasons Why 2013 Will Be The Year You Quit Your Job Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. Please follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. People read TechCrunch because they want to create something, they don’t want to follow orders all of their lives, and they want financial freedom. Getting the things you want is hard but for reasons I explain below, you now have no other choice. But don’t wait for shortcuts. You can’t make money without selling something real. And now it’s too late. Jabba’s newest employee 1) The middle class is dead. He said, “look out the windows.” “Not all the news is bad,” he said. And that’s the new paradigm. And it was. 2) You’ve been replaced. I’m on the board of directors of a temp staffing company with $600 million in revenues. Flush. Robots are the new middle class 3) Corporations don’t like you. “What’s the problem?” When I say a “major news publication” I am talking MAJOR. WHAT?
100 Excellent Art Therapy Exercises for Your Mind, Body, and Soul January 9th, 2011 Pablo Picasso once said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." It's no surprise, then, that many people around the world use art as a means to deal with stress, trauma and unhappiness – or to just find greater peace and meaning in their lives. Emotions Deal with emotions like anger and sadness through these helpful exercises. Draw or paint your emotions. Relaxation Art therapy can be a great way to relax. Paint to music. Happiness Art can not only help you deal with the bad stuff, but also help you appreciate and focus on the good. Draw your vision of a perfect day. Portraits Often, a great way to get to know yourself and your relationships with others is through portraits. Create a future self-portrait. Trauma and Unhappiness These activities will ask you to face some unpleasant aspects of life, but with the goal of overcoming them. Draw a place where you feel safe. Collaging Create a motivational collage. Self Draw images of your good traits. Gratitude
I discovered these common, self imposed I discovered these common, self imposed restrictions are rather insidious, though they start out simple enough. We begin by worrying we aren’t good enough, smart enough or talented enough to get what we want, then we voluntarily live in this paralyzing mental framework, rather than confront our own role in this paralysis. Just the possibility of failing turns into a dutiful self-fulfilling prophecy. Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose to strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive. If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. 11 Simple Ways to Improve Your Memory Whether you want to be a Jeopardy! champion or just need to remember where you parked your car, here are 11 things you can do right now to turn your mind from a sieve into a steel trap. These days we’re all about things being faster. That’s why this advice is invaluable: When you really need to remember something, concentrate on it for at least 8 seconds. That can seem like a long time when you're running around trying to get a million things done, but it is worth it. We’ve all walked into a room and suddenly realized we can’t remember why we needed to be there in the first place. If you’re having trouble remembering things at work, get a stress ball. At this point we should just accept it that science considers exercise the cure for absolutely any problem, and memory is no different. At some point in high school or college, almost everyone has tried to pull an all-nighter before a big test (or so pop culture would have us believe). We’re all font snobs to some extent.