Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list …
Category archives: Being Human
“Innovation is about saying no to 1,000 things”
I came across this Steve Jobs quote in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s tremendously entertaining book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, and it struck a chord. I notice it’s a fairly popular quote on Goodreads too, as are quite a few from Taleb’s book. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. …
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The world according to Plato in 6 lovely minutes
A lovely bite-sized tour of Plato’s greatest hits from The School of Life. Plato’s four big ideas for a more fulfilled life: Think more (and know yourself) Let your lover change you (love is based on admiration, we need to help each other) Decode the message of beauty (we sense in beauty qualities we need …
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Flow states feel awesome because: norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin and endorphins
Dr Steven Kotler, Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project, talks in this 4:20 video about the neurochemistry of your brain when you’re in a flow state. Transcript from YouTube: Besides neuroanatomical changes in flow there are neurochemical changes, right. The brain produces a giant cascade of neurochemistry. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin …
This is so good: “We are dead stars, looking back at the sky”
Can’t believe I hadn’t seen this before. It is the best video ever. Made in May 2014 by The Atlantic and The Really Big Questions, the video (3:57) features NASA astronomer Dr Michelle Thaller explaining, beautifully, how “the iron in our blood connects us to one of the most violent acts in the universe—a supernova explosion—and what the …
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Why you shouldn’t drink seawater (even if you’re shipwrecked)
I feel like I’ve always ‘known’ that it’s bad to drink seawater but I can’t remember ever learning why. This excerpt from Rose George’s excellent ‘90% of Everything: Inside Shipping‘ gives a fair idea: In a lecture to the Royal College of Physicians in 1942, MacDonald Critchley, a physician who had studied survival …
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‘Never mind passion and goals, get a system’
Scott Adams, creator of the wonderful Dilbert cartoons, talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. He says forget about passion (you’ll be plenty passionate once your business is working well) and don’t worry about goals …
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‘I’m intrigued by this idea of complexity being something adversarial, that sneaks into your life like a cockroach’
Five takeaways from the written version of a charming talk given by Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski at the 2013 XOXO conference in Portland. Well worth a read. I’m intrigued by this idea of complexity being something adversarial, that sneaks into your life, like a cockroach, and you have to fight to eradicate. There’s a pernicious idea …
‘Making time in your schedule is not enough, you also need bandwidth’
I like the distinction Sendhil Mullainathan makes over on Time.com between scheduling time and scheduling bandwidth. Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources — psychologists …
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Empathy in journalism, management and explanation
The Evolution of User Experience | Whitney Hess Whitney Hess talks about how she’s evolved her career in response to what she sees happening around her. Right now, she’s evolving into a kind of compassion coach who’s working on developing empathy in the workplace. I eventually realized that doing the work for my clients wasn’t …
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