Op-Ed: Moving beyond dropout statistics and toward solutions

education John Legend hosts TED Talks Education—tonight, May 7, on PBS at 10/9c. Patricia Harrison, the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, shares why this event is so vital. Photo: Ryan Lash

By Patricia Harrison

When I attended the taping of TED Talks Education last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I knew I was witnessing an innovative collaboration with the potential to make a difference in the lives of many young people.

This milestone collaboration between TED, WNET, PBS, and the CPB American Graduate “Let’s Make it Happen” initiative moves us beyond the terrible statistics — that one million young people fail to graduate every year (see more stats in the infographic below) — and toward solutions. It’s the first TED event to be broadcast on television and, with it, public media has affirmed its commitment to investing in lifelong learning in every area we serve and given power to the notion that caring communities can make a difference.

So many of us had a school experience different from that of students today. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, where, at the time, everyone in my community played an important role in keeping kids on track. Our parents and our neighbors wanted to know how we did on our report cards. If I brought home a “B+” my parents, aunts and uncles wanted to know who got the “A” and then asked, “Why wasn’t it you?” Everyone from the candy store owner on the corner to the man at the newsstand had an opinion about our activities and behavior — and conveyed this information to our parents. As a kid, I remember it as very annoying, but in hindsight, it was very effective. We knew they cared, so we had to care too.

This is a very different time. During TED Talks Education, you’ll hear the stories of high school students who have dropped out — or who considered it, but ultimately decided not to. You will find that in most of these cases, what made the difference was a student having someone in their corner — a champion who cared. Establishing a culture of caring about our young people and education is essential and it all begins at a community level.

Education and the relationship with each community has always been a core value for the more than 1,400 locally owned and operated public media stations that are dedicated to ensuring all Americans have free access to educational, commercial-free programming. Over the past two years, more than 75 public media stations in 33 states have worked in partnership with 1,000+ community and national organizations to create content that engaged with their communities. They also provided classroom resources through American Graduate to help young people stay on the path to a high school diploma.

During TED Talks Education — which airs on public media stations tonight — we will hear from students and teachers, plus business and community leaders, who show us how we can be champions for America’s young people and turn the statistics below around.

Patricia de Stacy Harrison is the president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the leading funder of public radio and public television programming in the United States. In 2011, she created American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen, a nationwide public media initiative to help communities across the country identify and implement solutions to the high school dropout crisis. 

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5 Small Hacks to Improve Your Health in 2013 and Beyond

Getting fit, eating right and living a healthy lifestyle are always some of the top resolutions every New Year. We all know in our guts that we should be living healthier happier lives and every year many of us find ourselves with the same predicament: we start off strong and then by February we’ve given up. Four weeks go by and we’ve come up with every excuse in the book to avoid getting off our bums and eating right—life gets in the way, work is taking too much of our time, we have to take care of our families, our friends think we’re nuts, etc. etc.

One solution that I have found incredibly helpful is to make small changes that really add up over time. We can allow incredible shifts to occur if we commit to taking small simple actions toward a bigger goal.

Below you’ll find easy and simple ways to improve your health through 2013 and beyond.

Beginning a meditation practice is one of the easiest ways to reduce stress and help with a multitude of emotional, mental and physical road blocks. The best part? It’s completely free! All you need is a few minutes and your breath. If you’re not sure where to start ,check out some Meditation Motivation tools to help you begin, and to keep your own meditation practice going through 2013.

Making green juices or smoothies for breakfast is probably the easiest way to ensure that you’re getting enough greens in your diet. The advantages of greens are endless, including changing the body from acidic to alkaline, helping with bowel issues, clearing up skin, and refreshing cells in the body.

For recipes, information on juicers, and more, check out Kris Carr, Healthy Cooking Camp, or any of Victoria Boutenko’s books.

Not having time to work out is one of the biggest excuses people use to not get off their bums. Here’s some news for you: if you’ve got 10 minutes free, you have enough time to work out. The best part? There’s no fancy expensive gym membership required! YouTube makes it extraordinarily easy to make sure you get in a good workout, even if you only have a few minutes. Simply do a search for your favorite fitness guru, or try one of several YouTube fitness celebrities. With time you’ll be able to make your own No Excuses Workout playlist.

If you’re not sure which workouts to aim for check out this fitness hack guide.

I’m a big believer in the advantages of making forgiveness a daily practice. If we hold on to stuff that makes us angry, we only fuel negative thoughts, which in turn leads to emotional and even physical problems. Sometimes, forgiveness is easier said than done. Fortunately there are plenty of people out there who have tried to make it practical for daily life—my favorite being author and speaker Gabrielle Bernstein.

Instead of driving everywhere, try walking, biking, or taking public transit. This is one of my favorite fitness hacks because it forces you to get off your behind and move. If you live two blocks from the pharmacy or the grocery store, try walking there. If you can make it happen, take the bus, subway or train to work, and if you can walk or bike to the gym, even better!

Health isn’t just about the physical body—it involves your mind and soul as well. By taking small actions to keep your overall health, in check you’ll soon find yourself taking on bigger initiatives to make your healthy lifestyle really stick.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2013 and beyond!

Featured photo credit:  beauty girl drink water via Shutterstock

Amanda Abella is a Gen Y blogger, freelance writer and life coach that has been featured in online publications such as Forbes and The Consumerist. Her blog, GradMeetsWorld.org, was also named one of the 100 Blogs You Need in Your Life by Leaving Work Behind. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaabella

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Schizophrenia beyond the brain

The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent article about the rebirth of interest in how social experiences affect the development of schizophrenia.

It’s written by the brilliant anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann, who tracks how the enthusiasm for a completely neurobiological explanation for the disorder has now begun to wane.

It’s worth saying that this extreme neurobiological focus has really been an American phenomenon.

While it’s true to say that psychiatry has taken a distinct neurobiological turn across the world, the mantra that ‘schizophrenia is a brain disease’ and only needs to be understood in terms of brain function has been most strongly championed in the United States.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, and not without a touch of irony, American psychiatry has been subject to quite striking mood swings over the past century.

The ‘Freudian takeover’ only really occurred in the US, and was overturned by the diagnostic manual championing ‘mid-Atlantics’ who created the DSM-III.

Subsequently, a dominant current of thought emerged that mental illnesses could be understood as ‘brain disorders’ – a concept massively promoted and funded by drug companies. Searches for the ‘gene for schizophrenia’ and the ‘brain circuit for depression’ were all the rage, even if they seem a little naive in hindsight.

In Europe, however, social psychiatry – where mental disorders are seen within a social context – remained widely taught. In the UK, it had more an an epidemiological flavour, where on the continent it was more focussed on analysing the cultural meaning of mental illness.

Nevertheless, Luhrmann’s article is an excellent overview of how psychiatry has started to look ‘beyond the brain’, although we’d hope it doesn’t lose sight of it while gazing at the horizon

My only significant problem was that the article repeats the ‘people with schizophrenia do better in the developing world’ claim, which is so over-general as to be useless.

Other than that though, an excellent incisive article and one of the best pieces you’re likely to read in a while.

Link to ‘Beyond the Brain’ in The Wilson Quarterly (thanks Peter!)

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Beyond X PRIZE: The 10 Best Crowdsourcing Tools and Technologies

Peter Diamandis explaining X PRIZE economics. (Photo: Hubert Burda)

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, and co-Founder and Chairman of the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley based institution partnered with NASA, Google, Autodesk and Nokia. Dr. Diamandis attended MIT, where he received his degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D.

He’s no underachiever.

I’ve known Peter for several years, both as a friend and as advising faculty at Singularity University. He is known for being incredibly resourceful. And, true as this may be, it’s his ability to teach resourcefulness that impresses me most…

The following guest post offers an optimistic look at the tools and technologies he believes will change this world for the better, which you can harness. If you like this small sample and the resources at the end, I highly encourage you take a look at his new book on this subject, Abundance.

In it, Diamandis and co-author Kotler challenge us all to solve humanity’s grand challenges. The timing is right; innovative small teams are now able to accomplish what only governments and large corporations could once fathom.

I hope this excites you as much as it excites me. With a little planning and a little technology, you–yes, you–can create a domino effect that changes the world.

In 1861 William Russell, one of the biggest investors in the Pony Express, decided to use the previous year’s presidential election for promotional purposes.

His goal was to deliver Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address from the eastern end of the telegraph line, located in Fort Kearny, Nebraska, to the western end of the telegraph line, in Fort Churchill, Nevada, as fast as possible. To pull this off, he spent a small fortune, hired hundreds of extra men, and positioned fresh relay horses every ten miles. As a result, California read Lincoln’s words a blistering seventeen days and seven hours after he spoke them.

By comparison, in 2008 the entire country learned that Barack Obama had become the forty-fourth president of the United States the instant he was declared the winner. When Obama gave his inaugural address, his words traveled from Washington, DC, to Sacramento, California, 14,939,040 seconds faster than Lincoln’s speech. But his words also hit Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and Karachi, Pakistan, less than a second later. In fact, barring some combination of precognition and global telepathy, this is just about the very fastest such information could possibly travel.

Such rapid progress becomes even more impressive when you consider that our species has been sending messages to one another for 150,000 years. While smoke signals were innovative, and air mail even more so, in the last century, we’ve gotten so good at this game that no matter the distances involved, and with little more than a smart phone and a Twitter account, anyone’s words can reach everyone’s screen in an instant. This can happen without additional expenses, extra employees, or a moment of pre- planning. It can happen whenever we please and why-ever we please. With an upgrade to a webcam and a laptop, it can happen live and in color. Heck, with the right equipment, it can even happen in 3-D.

This is yet another example of the self-amplifying, positive feedback loop that has been the hallmark of life for billions of years. From the mitochondria-enabled eukaryote to the mobile-phone-enabled Masai warrior, improved technology enables increasing specialization that leads to more opportunities for cooperation. It’s a self-amplifying mechanism. In the same way that Moore’s law is the result of faster computers being used to design the next generation of faster computers, the tools of cooperation always beget the next generation of tools of cooperation. Obama’s speech went instantly global because, during the twentieth century, this same positive feedback loop reached an apex of sorts, producing the two most powerful cooperative tools the world has ever seen.

The first of these tools was the transportation revolution that brought us from beasts of burden to planes, trains, and automobiles in less than two hundred years. In that time, we built highways and skyways and, to borrow Thomas Friedman’s phrase, “flattened the world.” When famine struck the Sudan, Americans didn’t hear about it years later. They got real-time reports and immediately decided to lend a hand. And because that hand could be lent via a C-130 Hercules transport plane rather than a guy on a horse, a whole lot of people went a lot less hungry in a hurry.

If you want to measure the change in cooperative capabilities illustrated here, you can start with the 18,800-fold increase in horsepower between a horse and a Hercules. Total carrying capacity over time is perhaps a better metric, and there the gains are larger. A horse can lug two hundred pounds more than thirty miles in a day, but a C-130 carries forty-two thousand pounds over eight thousand miles during those same twenty-four hours. This makes for a 56,000-fold improvement in our ability to cooperate with one another.

The second cooperative tool is the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution we’ve already documented. This has produced even larger gains during this same two-hundred-year period.

ICT’s impact doesn’t end with novel ways to spread information or share material resources. As Rob McEwen discovered when he went looking for gold in the hills of northwestern Ontario, the tools of cooperation can also create new possibilities for sharing mental resources—and this may be a far more significant boost for abundance.

A dapper Canadian in his mid-fifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he’d unified those companies and was ready for expansion—a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery. To determine exactly what size refinery to build, McEwen took the logical step of asking his geologists and engineers how much gold was hidden in his mine. No one knew. He was employing the very best people he could hire, yet none of them could answer his question.

About the same time, while attending an executive program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, McEwen heard about Linux. This open- source computer operating system got its start in 1991, when Linus Torvalds, then a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, posted a short message on Usenet:

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/ dislike in minix…

So many people responded to his post that the first version of that operating system was completed in just three years. Linux 1.0 was made publicly available in March 1994, but this wasn’t the end of the project. Afterward, support kept pouring in. And pouring in. In 2006 a study funded by the European Union put the redevelopment cost of Linux version 2.6.8 at $1.14 billion. By 2008, the revenue of all servers, desktops, and software packages running on Linux was $35.7 billion.

McEwen was astounded by all this. Linux has over ten thousand lines of code. He couldn’t believe that hundreds of programmers could collaborate on a system so complex. He couldn’t believe that most would do it for free. He returned to Goldcorp’s offices with a wild idea: rather than ask his own engineers to estimate the amount of gold he had underground, he would take his company’s most prized asset—the geological data normally locked in the safe—and make it freely available to the public. He also decided to incentivize the effort, trying to see if he could get Torvald’s results in a com- pressed time period. In March 2000 McEwen announced the Goldcorp Challenge: “Show me where I can find the next six million ounces of gold, and I will pay you five hundred thousand dollars.”

Over the next few months, Goldcorp received over 1,400 requests for its 400 megabytes of geological data. Ultimately, 125 teams entered the competition. A year later, it was over. Three teams were declared winners. Two were from New Zealand, one was from Russia. None had ever visited McEwen’s mine. Yet so good had the tools of cooperation become and so ripe was our willingness to use them that by 2001, the gold pinpointed by these teams (at a cost of $500,000) was worth billions of dollars on the open market.

When McEwen couldn’t determine the amount of ore he had under- ground, he was suffering from “knowledge scarcity.” This is not an uncommon problem in our modern world. Yet the tools of cooperation have become so powerful that once properly incentivized, it’s possible to bring the brightest minds to bear on the hardest problems. This is critical, as Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Our new cooperative capabilities have given individuals the ability to understand and affect global issues as never before, changing both their sphere of caring and their sphere of influence by orders of magnitude. We can now work all day with our hands in California, yet spend our evenings lending our brains to Mongolia. NYU professor of communication Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.”

“Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,” says Shirky. “How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year—in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.” Imagine what we could do for the world’s grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention.

Until now, we’ve kept our examination of the tools of cooperation rooted in the past, but what’s already been is no match for what’s soon to arrive. It can be argued that because of the nonzero nature of information, the healthiest global economy is built upon the exchange of information. But this becomes possible only when our best information-sharing devices— specifically devices that are portable, affordable, and hooked up to the Internet—become globally available.

That problem has now been solved.

In early 2011, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled an affordable $80 Android smart phone through Kenya’s telecom titan Safaricom. In less than six months, sales skyrocketed past 350,000 handsets, an impressive figure for a country where 60 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Even better than the price are the 300,000-plus apps these users can now access. And if that’s not dramatic enough, in the fall of 2011 the Indian government partnered with the Canada-based company Datawind and announced a seven-inch Android tablet with a base cost of $35.

But here’s the bigger kicker. Because information-spreading technology has traditionally been expensive, the ideas that have been quickest to spread have usually emerged from the wealthier, dominant powers—those nations with access to the latest and greatest technology. Yet because of the cost reductions associated with exponential price-performance curves, those rules are changing rapidly. Think about how this shift has impacted Hollywood. For most of the twentieth century, Tinseltown was the nexus of the entertainment world: the best films, the brightest stars, an entertainment hegemony unrivalled in history. But in less than twenty-five years, digital technology has rearranged these facts.

On average, Hollywood produces five hundred films per year and reaches a worldwide audience of 2.6 billion. If the average length of those films is two hours, then Hollywood produces one thousand hours of content per year. YouTube users, on the other hand, upload forty-eight hours’ worth of videos every minute. This means, every twenty-one minutes, YouTube provides more novel entertainment than Hollywood does in twelve months. And the YouTube audience? In 2009 it received 129 million views a day, so in twenty-one days, the site reached more people than Hollywood does in a year. Since content creators in the developing world now outnumber content creators in the developed world, it’s safe to say that the tools of cooperation have enabled the world’s real silent majority to finally find its voice.

And that voice is being heard like never before. “The global deployment of ICT has utterly democratized the tools of cooperation,” says Salim Ismail, SU’s founding executive director and now its global ambassador. “We saw this in sharp relief during the Arab Spring. The aggregated self- publishing capabilities of the everyman enabled radical transparency and transformed the political landscape. As more and more people learn how to use these tools, they’ll quickly start applying them to all sorts of grand challenges.”

This is where you come in.

All of these cooperative tools and exponential technologies are reshaping our globe. But you no longer have to sit on the sidelines and wait for the future to happen. You are now empowered to get involved. To change the world. If you’re sick of the doom and gloom and ready to get in the game, explore the resources below. If you feel inspired to delve deeper, the Abundance book offers many more options.

Today’s 10 best crowdsourcing and collaboration tools on the web:

So given these powerful tools of collaboration, how do you use them to solve your corporate challenges? Here’s a few of the cutting edge organizations that have been created to help you.

1. X PRIZE Foundation (www.xprize.org): The X PRIZE focuses on designing and running incentive competitions in the $1M – $30M arena focused on solving grand challenges.

2. CoFundos (cofundos.org): cheap and really good platform for the development of open-source software.

3. Genius Rocket (geniusrocket.com): solid crowdsourced creative design agency composed solely of vetted video production professionals producing content as a fraction of the cost of a traditional ad agency.

4. Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com): popular and powerful crowdsourcing platform for simple tasks that computers cannot perform(yet), such as podcasts transcribing or text editing. There are also companies, like CrowdFlower, that leverage Mechanical Turk (and similar tools) for even more elegant solutions.

5. Innocentive (www.innocentive.com): one of today’s best online platform for open innovation, crowdsourcing and innovation contests. This is where organizations access the world’s brightest problem solvers.

6. UTest (http://www.utest.com): the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services.

7. IdeaConnection (www.ideaconnection.com): open innovation challenge site for new inventions, innovations and products.

8. NineSigma (www.ninesigma.com): open innovation service provider, connecting clients with a global innovation network of experts.

9. Ennovent (www.ennovent.com): worldwide expert platform seeking solutions for sustainable development in energy, food, water, health and education in rural India.

10. TopCoder (www.topcoder.com): the world’s largest competitive software development & creative design community, with over 200,000 at your fingertips.

Today’s best crowd-funding tools on the web:

In addition to getting people to help solve your problems, what about getting people to help fund your work? Here’s a few of the key sites that can help you raise money:

1. CrowdRise (www.crowdrise.com): Crowdrise is an innovative, crowd-sourced community of volunteers and online fundraisers that have come together to support online fundraising for charity, events and special projects. It’s a way to raise money in new ways, turning participants and supporters into effective online fundraisers.

2. Kickstarter (www.Kickstarter.com): Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. In 2011 the platform raised over $100 million for projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Uniquely, on Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands, it’s an “all or nothing model”.

3. IndieGoGo (www.indiegogo.com): IndieGoGo you can create a funding campaign to raise money quickly and securely. This trusted platform has helped to raise millions of dollars for over 65,000 campaigns, across 211 countries.

Posted on February 20th, 2012

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Living beyond limits: Amy Purdy on TED.com

When she was 19, Amy Purdy lost both her legs below the knee. And now … she’s a pro snowboarder. In this powerful talk, she shows us how to draw inspiration from life’s obstacles. (Recorded at TEDxOrangeCoast 2011, September 2011, in Boulder, Colorado. Duration: 9:37.)

Watch Amy Purdy’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

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Enhance Your Life: Going Beyond What’s Important to What’s Crucial

Climb past what's important to discover what's crucial in your life

When taking on the project of improving your productivity, you’ll undoubtedly come across two words that go hand-in-hand with the practice: important and urgent. These two words often intertwine depending on what your priorities are and how well you’re keeping up with what you’ve got on the go.

Knowing what the difference between important and urgent is a challenge for many, but once you’ve been doing it for a while it gets easier. It may not get easier to get the important stuff done before it turns into something urgent, but that’s a whole other matter. Another challenge is to remember that this is your time being spent, whether it is on a project or a task. How you plot out what each tasks means to you and to your time is worthy of strong consideration because if you simply jot things down without contemplating how they’ll be impacted by the time you have to offer and how they’ll impact the time you have to have available, you’ll end up in a state of overwhelm — and a very long to-do list.

Categorizing the levels of importance and urgency is another necessity. There’s no definitive way to organize these thoughts, but a common method is to use Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrant Matrix.

Stephen Covey's Four Quadrants

Covey’s matrix is still a resource for many who are trying to decide how and where to spend their time. But considering that it appeared in the book First Things First back in 1994, back when time management and productivity strategies didn’t have the benefit (or informational overflow) of the Internet, it could use a retooling. That may sound bold, but while the idea of Covey’s matrix still has some merit, the problem lies in the words used in the matrix itself.

The problem with important these days is that it is thrown around with little regard to what it means. In fact, it’s used so much that the word itself doesn’t seem to be as, well, important as it once was. Things that are important often are just things that have to get done, but have little resonance beyond that – they aren’t attached to anything deeper or more meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Anything with the word urgent attached to it will always feel stronger because of the need for it to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Even in passing, when someone says the word “urgent”, it creates a feeling or sense of immediacy. Unless someone is looking you straight in the eye, is genuinely in the moment and says the word “important” can it even come close to having the impact intended. The only way it gets closer is if you feel that what they are attaching to the word important to is actually important to you as well.

The word crucial, however, doesn’t get thrown around as much. Better still, when someone uses the word in the same manner as they used important as mentioned above, the ability to feel how much it matters to them all the more. When something is said to be crucial, it means that it is “of great importance” by definition alone. It’s possible that the other manner is which the word crucial is used – decisive or critical, especially in the success or failure of something: i.e. negotiations were at a crucial stage – adds instant power to the word it wouldn’t otherwise have, but the effects are still the same. When something is said to be crucial, you know it’s important. When something is said to be important, well…results may vary.

The key to really doing what matters on an overall scale – using David Allen’s Horizons of Focus as a measuring stick – you need to first earn to separate the urgent from the important and then curate what’s important to what’s crucial. Everything you do should lead to the great goal of what is crucial to you living a happy life. The amount of things that need to be done that are urgent should be minimal, because they generally serve to keep you occupied from what’s crucial to your overall goals in life. The amount of things that are important should be examined to separate what is important over the short term versus the long term. You may find that what you thought was important really isn’t at all. Often, these things are just things that will become urgent if you let them slide for too long, but they aren’t of any overarching importance. It’s those things that are crucial to you getting to where you want to be that will define your outcomes far great than anything else you do. You need to be clear on those so that you can map out how you’re going to achieve your goals – and your dreams.

Covey's matrix with a "Crucial Cube" inserted

Rather than use a quadrant to look at how to measure your actions and projects going forward, I suggest you do what I’ve done, and place a box in the dead center of the diagram. It’s what I call a Crucial Cube.

Sure, it isn’t exactly a cube (but Crucial Square doesn’t sound as appealing), but by adding it to the diagram the focus shifts to what’s crucial to you overall rather than what isn’t. Placing it in the centre draws focus, allows you to start there and finish on the outer realms or vice versa. The key is it gets you looking at what you really want to achieve and still displays the supporting things you can do to get there. The Crucial Cube feeds off of the remaining quadrants and the quadrants are fueled by what’s in the Crucial Cube.

Getting clear on what’s crucial is the most beneficial thing you can do to enhance your productivity, your balance and your life. Doing so could be the productivity wake-up call you need, the jumpstart to getting where you know you can be – and want to be. Moving beyond the word “important” and making a conscious choice to use the word “crucial” instead will power up your life in a simple, yet profound way.

Adopting a new habit is never easy, but with focus and perseverance, it can happen a lot faster. Take some time to really look at how you’re managing your time and your life, as well as what words you’re using in the process.

Understand urgency and how to deal with it.Investigate importance so that you can separate what is from what isn’t, bringing power back to the word by doing so.Cultivate what is crucial and you’ll enhance your life.

Give the diagram above a try. Write down what you feel is crucial to (and for) you inside a Crucial Cube. Then build the matrix around that, allowing the items inside to feed off the cube’s contents and vice versa. Let me know how it worked for you in the comments.

Mike Vardy is an independent writer, speaker, podcaster and "productivity pundit" who also dishes the goods at Vardy.me. You can follow him daily on Twitter, listen to him weekly on ProductiVardy, and read more from him eventually at Eventualism.

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Playlist: To infinity and beyond

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks Monday!)

The wonderful thing about the universe is not just how big it is, but how every time we look into it we find something new and extraordinary. Here are four talks about the vastness of space, and the things that may or may not be found in it.

1) Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, focusing on its largest moon, Titan, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to shoot jets of ice.

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2) Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe — How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? — and discusses how we might go about answering them.

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3) Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race — and jump-started science and math education around the world.

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4) Humorist John Hodgman rambles through a new story about aliens, physics, time, space and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

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Playlist by Becca McClain

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The Productivity Paradox: What Is It And How Can We Move Beyond It?

It’s a depressing adage we’ve all heard time and time again: “an increase in technology does not necessarily translate to an increase in productivity.” Put another way by Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

In other words, just because our computers are getting faster, that doesn’t mean that that we will have an equivalent leap in productivity. In fact, the opposite may be true! New York Times writer Matt Richel wrote in an article for the paper back in 2008 that stated, “statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused”.

There’s a strange paradox when it comes to productivity. Rather than an exponential curve, our productivity will eventually reach a plateau, even with advances in technology. So what does that mean for our personal levels of productivity? And what does this mean for our economy as a whole? Here’s what you should know about the productivity paradox, its causes, and what possible solutions we may have to combat it.

What is the Productivity Paradox?

There is a discrepancy between the investment in IT growth and the national level of productivity and productive output. The term “productivity paradox” became popularized after being used in the title of a 1993 paper by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, a Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.

In his paper, Brynjolfsson argued that while there doesn’t seem to be a direct, measurable correlation between improvements in IT and improvements in output, this might be more of a reflection on how productive output is measured and tracked.

“Intangibles such as better responsiveness to customers and increased coordination with suppliers do not always increase the amount or even intrinsic quality of output, but they do help make sure it arrives at the right time, at the right place, with the right attributes for each customer.

Just as managers look beyond “productivity” for some of the benefits of IT, so must researchers be prepared to look beyond conventional productivity measurement techniques,” he wrote in his conclusion.

How Do We Measure Productivity, Anyway?

And this brings up a good point. How is exactly is productivity measured?

In the case of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity gain is measured as the percentage change in gross domestic product per hour of labor.

But other publications, such as US Today, argue that this is not the best way to track productivity, and instead use something called Total Factor Productivity (TFP). According to US Today, TFP “examines revenue per employee after subtracting productivity improvements that result from increases in capital assets, under the assumption that an investment in modern plants, equipment and technology automatically improves productivity.”

In other words, this method weights productivity changes by how much improvement there is since the last time productivity stats were gathered.

But if we can’t even agree on the best way to track productivity, then how can we know for certain if we’ve entered the productivity paradox?

Possible Causes of the Productivity Paradox

Brynjolfsson argued that there are four probable causes for the paradox.

? Mismeasurement: the gains are real, but our current measures miss them;
? Redistribution: there are private gains, but they come at the expense of other firms and individuals, leaving little net gain;
? Time lags: the gains take a long time to show up; and
? Mismanagement: there are no gains because of the unusual difficulties in managing IT or information itself.

There seems to be some evidence to support the mismeasurement theory, as shown above. Another promising candidate is the time lag, which is supported by the work of Paul David, an economist at Oxford University. According to an article in“The Economist”, his research has shown that productivity growth did not accelerate until 40 years after the introduction of electric power in the early 1880s. This was partly because it took until 1920 for at least half of American industrial machinery to be powered by electricity.”

Therefore, he argues, we won’t see major leaps in productivity until both the US and major global powers have all reached at least a 50% penetration rate for computer use. The US only hit that mark a decade ago, and many other countries are far behind that level of growth.

The Paradox and the Recession

The productivity paradox has another effect on the recession economy. According to Neil Irwin, “Sky-high productivity has meant that business output has barely declined, making it less necessary to hire back laid-off workers…businesses are producing only 3 percent fewer goods and services than they were at the end of 2007, yet Americans are working nearly 10 percent fewer hours because of a mix of layoffs and cutbacks in the workweek.”

This means that more and more companies are trying to do less with more, and that means squeezing two or three people’s worth of work from a single employee in some cases. According to Irwin, “workers, frightened for their job security, squeezed more productivity out of every hour [in 2010].”

Looking Forward

A recent article on Slate puts it all into perspective with one succinct observation: “Perhaps the Internet is just not as revolutionary as we think it is. Sure, people might derive endless pleasure from it—its tendency to improve people’s quality of life is undeniable. And sure, it might have revolutionized how we find, buy, and sell goods and services. But that still does not necessarily mean it is as transformative of an economy as, say, railroads were.”

Still, Brynjolfsson argues that mismeasurement of productivity can really skew the results of people studying the paradox, perhaps more than any other factor.

“Because you and I stopped buying CDs, the music industry has shrunk, according to revenues and GDP. But we’re not listening to less music. There’s more music consumed than before,” he explains. “On paper, the way GDP is calculated, the music industry is disappearing, but in reality it’s not disappearing. It is disappearing in revenue. It is not disappearing in terms of what you should care about, which is music.”

Perhaps the paradox isn’t a death sentence for our productivity after all. Only time (and perhaps improved measuring techniques) will tell.

Tucker is a writer and social media professional living in New England. When she's not staring into a tiny electric box, she engages in pointless acts of stupidity at BadBoozeReview.com and posts daily at MargeryJones.com

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