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Wednesday, June 27, 2012
How to Not Talk Yourself Out of Your Goals and Dreams
We talk a lot about setting goals, living your dreams, reaching your full potential and even give you some great ways to plan out those goals and dreams. But, I have found that it isn’t the thinking and planning process of goals and dreams that is the hard part, oh, no.
The difficult part of reaching your goals and dreams is following through and not letting yourself talk yourself out of them. That’s a mouthful, so let me clarify.
Call them goal, dreams, projects, whatever. If you are a Lifehack reader then you have a list of them somewhere. These are the things that you want to accomplish or the things that someone else wants you to accomplish.
Even after intense brainstorming, planning, and following through with some of the steps that you have outlined to reach your goals; something happens. Plans change, people quit, things get tough, your idea doesn’t seem so revolutionary anymore; you get stuck and with that your goal starts to fly away to failure.
Don’t get me wrong, failure is a good thing and we must fail and fail often, but what about those things that you truly want to accomplish? What about your “life’s work” that you must do? What happens when those goals go up in a puff of smoke?
There are four reasons we fail to accomplish our goals and reach our dreams:
The goal is more of a “pipe-dream” than you thought and should be thought through more thoroughly. Maybe you don’t have the resources you need to accomplish it or something in your environment or life has changed. Your plan may need some work and you may have to “regroup” on the entire goal/dream/project all together.Your priorities completely changed and the goal isn’t important anymore. Maybe that’s not a complete failure, but the goal is now gone.Your goal/dream/project just sucked and you found out it wasn’t worth doing.Things got too hard to accomplish and you thought your way out of your goals. This is the worst of all offenders.We have a decent amount of content at Lifehack about how to plan things more effectively and how to deal with priorities and “areas of focus”, let’s look at how not to think yourself out of your goals and dreams.
Sometimes we think too much. So much that we can think ourselves out of a good idea. Not good.
How does it happen?
Yesterday I was doing a bike ride (know about our Fitness Challenge?) and I was about 20 minutes into it. My legs were burning, I was cramping up (not enough water, again), and I was sort of close to home. I reached a slower point in my biking and a thought entered my head, “you’ve done enough and you are spent, just head home”.
I’m working on a personal project that I am extremely excited about and I got to a place in code where I ran myself into a wall. I thought, “I should probably just start over with a different framework” which led to, “I’m never going get this done or make it right.”
This is where most goals stop dead in their tracks. The going gets tough, and we flee from the task at hand.
Stopping “stinking thinking” is somewhat easy. Instead of convincing yourself that failing at your goal is the right thing to do, stop yourself, take a breather and regroup until your thoughts become more positive. Then act.
It only took me about 1 minute to change my tune completely from, “I can’t make this last ten minutes” to “I’ve come this far, push yourself forward.” Once you hit that “positive self-talk”, that’s when you push forward. Don’t second guess yourself and don’t consider alternatives.
Another way to get your positive thinking back is to review your goal and write about it a little bit. This will bring you back to a more positive state as your thoughts can be better organized and will be much clearer on paper (or screen). Once you find the positives, act.
Of course this only works with goals and projects that are good ideas or good for you; the others will be weeded out by priority and planning processes.
Don’t let your negativity get to you and destroy your dreams. Any goal worth anything will be difficult and you will reach the elusive “I can’t do this anymore” moment. Don’t give up. Wait for positive thinking to take over and move forward.
(Photo credit: boy drawing sales report on the wall via Shutterstock)
CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.
An animated neuroscience of headache pills
TED have a fantastic animation that explains how pain works and how it is relieved by two common analgesics – aspirin and ibuprofen.
Of course, pain relievers work in many different ways – the opioids, for example, are vastly different – but the four-minute video is a wonderful guide to the neuroscience of two common household pills.
Excellent stuff.
Link to ‘How Do Pain Relievers Work?’ (via @brainpicker)
Stand on the Edge of Your Comfort Zone If You Want to Get Past It
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Massive online education: Daphne Koller at TEDGlobal 2012
Schools out of reach
Daphne Koller is a third-generation PhD, and in her own words, she is certainly one of the lucky people. Most people, of course, are not.
In some parts of the world, quality education is simply not available. In South Africa, for example, the higher education system was designed during Apartheid, and there are far from enough positions available. Earlier this year, thousands of people lined up to get a position at university, resulting in a stampede. 20 were injured, and a woman died trying to get a place at university for her son.
Even in the US and similar countries, higher education is not always within reach. Tuition is going up at twice the rate of even the spiraling costs of health care. And yet only a little over half of recent grads are working in jobs where higher education is required.
The opening of education
Koller thinks now is the time when major change can come to education. Quoting Thomas Friedman, “Big breakthoughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.”
She has found what is suddenly possible. At Stanford, professor Andrew Ng offered a machine learning class for free online. He found that 100,000 people enrolled. To get the same number at Stanford, he would have had to teach the class for 250 years. Inspired by that, Ng and Koller founded Coursera, an site for free, online education. Currently, there are 43 courses from four universities with more to come.
In its short time, it’s been successful. ”Unsurprisingly,” Koller says, “students like getting the best content from the best universities for free.” To date they have had 640,000 students from 190 countries, who have view 14 million videos and 6 million quizzes. When she submitted her TEDTalk slides to our backstage techs a week ago there were 1.4 million enrollments, but she had to update a slide to 1.5 million as of the date of the talk.
Of course, the numbers only tell part of the story. Koller points to some remarkable stories, such as a father whose daughter is immune-deficient, and he couldn’t leave the house for fear of infecting her. The daughter has since gotten better, and the father has a job thanks to taking the courses.
What is different?
There have been many attempts at novel types of education. What is different about this one? According to Koller, the key is that “this was a real course experience. It started on a particular day, and the students did real homework for real grades with real deadlines.” At the end of the course, they receive a certificate.
As with many activities that have moved online, one of the main advantages is that the professors can move away from constraints imposed by traditional methods. Instead of a 50-minute “hour,” the material can be broken up into modular chunks. Students can traverse this in different ways. Different students might need background material, or some might want to supplement it because of their interests.
“Of course, we know that students don’t learn by just passively watching videos.” Koller has found ways to engage students using techniques that are proven to produce results. Simple retrieval practice is an enormous help — just asking them to retrieve something they learned increased the learning. So they built that into the video itself.
Additionally, the video doesn’t just run, it pauses and asks a question, so the student has to show they understand to be able to continue. These are the kinds of questions the instructor might ask in a classroom, but in a typical lecture only one student answers, and most don’t even realize a question has been asked.
Are the students learning?
This isn’t the final answer, you need deeper exercises. But that brings up one of the most difficult questions, how do you grade 100,000 students? Some types of material can be graded automatically, and Koller shows some beautiful examples that surpass simple multiple choice.
Of course, they can’t grade all types of work that way. For other disciplines, such as in the humanities or business they have had to build in a different paradigm. Surprisingly, “It turns out that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy.” Even better than that, shockingly, are self grades — if incentivized differently. Both of those also turn out to be good learning exercises.
The students have also become strongly involved in their own education. “This is not just about sitting alone in living room,” says Koller. A global community has developed. For example, they’ve developed forums for students to ask each other questions. And in some classes, the median answer time was 22 minutes, which is, Koller frankly admits, “not a level of service I’ve ever offered my students.” There are virtual study groups and physical study groups, some multilingual.
Learning from the learning
The potential for transforming education goes beyond the ability to teach lessons online — the data collected is unprecedented. They can collect every click, homework submission and forum from tens of thousands of students. “That can transform the study of human learning from hypothesis-driven to data-driven mode.” They can understand which methods are the best, and can understand specific misunderstanding. Koller shows an example where a large number of students — 2,000 — gave the exact same wrong answer to a quiz question. Why? They used that to improve the teaching method to address that specific misconception — and offer a targeted error message to students who submitted the answer, to steer them back on the right path.
Personalization is one of the biggest promises of this method. (The exact opposite of what many fear from massive online education.) Koller describes the 2-sigma problem — which is that an individual tutor is better than lecture based by what is called 2-sigma, which means that 98% of the individually tutored students were better than the mean of the lecture based class. That is an extraordinary difference. “Imagine if we could teach so that 98% of our students are above average. We can’t give each student an individual tutor, but maybe we can afford to give them a smart phone or a laptop.” And the computers, she notes, don’t get tired of grading the same work, or repeating lessons if the students need it.
An extraordinary future of education
Are universities obsolete? Mark Twain thought so, writing, “College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.”
Koller disagrees, and thinks a better quote is one from Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.” The question, of course, is how do we light it up?
She wonder what would happen if we could offer the best education to everyone around the world. She thinks:
It would establish education as a fundamental right.It would enable lifelong learning.It would open the door to wave of innovation, “…because amazing talent could be found anywhere.”The audience agrees, rising to a massive standing ovation.
Photos: James Duncan Davidson
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Science is play: Beau Lotto and Amy O’Toole at TEDGlobal 2012
Science and perception
Beau Lotto starts with a game. He asks the audience, “Read what you see,” and he shows what looks like words with holes missing. Wh a e ou rea in ? The audience reads whole words (What are you reading?), but Lotto points out we’re not really reading the letters. Instead we’re “seeing what is useful to see, based on what we’ve seen in the past.”
The question, he says, is how can we see past our previous perceptions? Nature’s solution is play, and he defines play with five ways of being:
Celebrating uncertainty.Adaptable to change.Open to possibility.Cooperative.Intrinsically motivated.And, says Lotto, this is what defines science itself. As he says: “Science is not defined by the method section of a paper, it’s a way of being.”
Who can do science?
How universal is this view; can science only be done by a few experts or by anyone. Well, asks Lotto, “Who better to ask than 25 8- to 10-year-old children? They’re experts in play.”
He asked 25 students from Blackawton Primary School to come up with research questions — real research questions, the anwers to which were not known ahead of time. Thus was born the Blackawton Bees Project.
He introduces Amy O’Toole, the youngest published scientist in the world, to introduce the question that she came up with.
Says O’Toole, “We thought that it was easy to see the connection between humans and apes … but it would be amazing if humans and bees thought in the same way.” Do bees solve complex problems in the same way that humans do? Can bees adapt to new situations?
Lotto takes back the stage to move on to the next step: to design an experiment, “which is a game.” If you’re going to do an experiment on bumblebees, you have to create a game. So the kids created a puzzle for the bees. O’Toole describes the experiment: ”We created a game that was an if-then rule. We asked if the bees could learn to go to a certain color flower if they were in a certain pattern. They should only go to yellow flowers if they’re surrounded by blue ones.” So, how would they solve the puzzle? “The exciting point,” says Amy with a huge smile, “is that no one had done it before, including adults.”
The first scientific paper by 10-year olds
Lotto resumes, saying the next step is observation. He shows a video of the kids doing the experiment, and then moving on to the final step, sharing. In this case, writing a paper. Of course, “The best place is in a pub.” (Laughter, as they see Lotto’s beer by the kids’ sodas.)
At the pub, they wrote a paper — the students wrote a paper. In true kid fashion, it starts, “Once upon a time.” They submitted it to two journals. It was rejected by one (one reason for rejection: The figures were in crayon) but accepted by another, to glowing reviews. It is the first paper by primary school kids, making Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world. It’s been downloaded over 30,000 times, and was an editor’s choice in Science Magazine.
Download and read their paper here >>
Lotto brings us to the point: “We normally walk through life responding. If we ever want to do something different, we have to step into uncertainty…. Science lets us step into uncertainty through the process of play.”
Beau Lotto demonstrates a perception game on fellow Session 3 speaker Shimon Schocken.
To finish, we hear a final comment from O’Toole: “A small question can lead to a big discovery. Changing a way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard, but it all depends on how the person thinks of thinking.” And she has learned that “Science isn’t just a boring subject, and anyone can discover something new, you just need an opportunity.”
Watch Beau Lotto’s previous TEDTalk >>
Photos: James Duncan Davidson
20 Small Actions to Create a Fit Environment
I’ve learned, in the last seven years of getting fitter each year (from a really bad starting point), that when it comes to getting in shape, your environment is everything.
Small things I’ve done to change my environment make my life set up for getting fitter, slowly, gradually, but surely.
Consider two scenarios:
1. Person A has a long work day, gets home, wants to just veg out on the couch watching TV to relax. Is hungry so goes to the kitchen and gets some convenience food (he’s too tired to cook), gets some unhealthy snacks that are in the cupboard. Orders pizza later because it’s easy and there’s nothing else ready to eat besides some microwaveable stuff. After gorging on junk food, he’s too tired to do anything else but watch TV. Goes to sleep, gets up, rushes off to work, where there’s junk food all around anytime he gets hungry. Everyone else is in bad shape so he doesn’t find any motivation to work out. This cycle keeps repeating.
2. Person B has a workout time blocked into his workday, and has a workout partner waiting for him each day, so he won’t fail to do the workout. All his friends are relatively fit and often participate in various fitness challenges together. When they socialize, it often revolves around healthier foods. At home, he has no junk food, no convenience food, no snacks. No microwave. He has lots of healthy foods, and cooks them in big batches so that when he’s hungry and tired, the food just needs to be warmed on the stove. He participates in online social networks that revolve around fitness. He has no TV.
Which person is more likely to get fit? The person who has his life set up so that he’ll be likely to do the things to get fit.
The kicker, as you probably guessed, is that I am both Person A and Person B. Well, I was Person A and got overweight and unhealthy. Then I changed to Person B and got much healthier and fitter.
It was all a matter of creating the right environment. I’m happy to tell you that the changes aren’t that hard to make, and can be done over time.
The following are some ideas you can use to set up an environment conducive to getting fit — I’ve used them all at various times:
Get rid of the snacks. Don’t keep them in your house or you’ll be more likely to eat them.Don’t buy convenience food. You’re likely to eat this when you’re too tired to cook.Instead, cook big batches of healthy food once a week. Have it in the fridge, ready to be heated up.Take healthy snacks to work.Create a healthy eating challenge with your coworkers.Join Fitocracy (invite code: zenhabits) and make friends there. Log your activities.Join a running club.Find a workout partner.Set up an appointment with your best friend to go walking or running every day.Get a coach.Set fitness challenges with your friends. Log them online, on Facebook or some other social site.Have a chinup bar in your doorway, and do a chinup every time you walk by.Join a sports team.Have nuts and fruit with you when you’re on the go.Make it hard to turn on the TV (put it in the closet or something).Use a program like LeechBlock or Freedom to shut the Internet down at a certain time each day.Have healthy potlucks with friends or family.Publicly commit to posting body pics or measurements each week on your blog.Make a list of healthy restaurants, or healthy meals at other restaurants, for when you feel like eating out.Park farther away from things so you’ll walk more.Obviously not all of these will apply to everyone, and they’re just a start of what can be done, to give you an idea.
Setting up a fit environment doesn’t have to be hard, nor does it have to be overnight. But I challenge you to do one of these actions today, and see what happens when you start creating the right setup for a healthy life.
Today is the last day to join the Sea Change Program and be a part of the Unprocrastination Course in July. Don’t put it off! Read more.
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