Is Inactivity Slowing You Down? Reach Your Goals Using The Wisdom of Action.

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here

What are some counter-intuitive life lessons that go against common sense or wisdom?

Life provides us with many lessons many of which are passed down from generation to generation unfortunately some of them, which may sound like common sense, don’t actually work as well as we would like to think, and in fact, the opposite may hold true. Similarly, there are other life lessons that are  counter-intuitive to what we think would happen. This answer found in Quora helps to describe what counter-intuitive life lessons go against common sense or wisdom.

Here’s what Alan Rutledge, has to say about it -

The key to enjoying life is keeping expectations low to the degree that you’re always pleasantly surprised.

Hypothetically a well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal (specifically for knowledge work).

Caveats: so long as it fits within your ethical framework and the perceived penalty is tolerable (not advisable in foreign countries however haha). People die regretting all the things they didn’t do rather than the things they did do.

Prevention (i.e. good diet and food ingredients) is an order of magnitude cheaper than treatment (most age-related diseases are correlated with poor dietary choices).

Students who were asked to exert willpower by not eating enticing cookies put before them for a period of time spent an average of 8 minutes trying to solve an impossible puzzle. Students who could freely indulge in the cookies attempted to solve the puzzle for an average of 32 minutes.

If you try to stop watching TV your willpower will eventually break. If you get rid of your TV and use a browser extension to block Hulu/YouTube your habit will more readily break.

Most of us spend the majority of our 24-hour day sitting in a chair or sleeping on a mattress so it’s not surprising that most back problems originate from poor sitting/sleeping posture. The extra money spent in getting a good Aeron chair and foam mattress pays for itself in the long-run.

The marginal benefit of adding a sixth or seventh person to a team rarely outweighs the marginal costs associated with additional communication and collaboration effort (specifically for knowledge work that requires close collaboration like software development).

By doing something (working hard, smoking, etc.) you are actively endorsing that behavior for your children. The more time you spend around them, the more influential behavioral signals become relative to spoken demands/requests (“you should work harder,” “please stop smoking,” etc.)
For more:

Study body language and you’ll be pretty shocked at how often peoples’ spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.

Beyond a certain threshold of intelligence and skill, the efficacy bottlenecks quickly become your ability to communicate, get along with others, prioritize, focus, structure your thinking in advance, manage your time well, etc.

I’ll leave this one open to interpretation :)

Here’s the link to the original answer plus many more.

Featured photo credit: businessman at the start of his journey via Shutterstock

View the original article here

The Wisdom of Allowing Things to Happen

The Master allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the Tao speak for itself.
~The Daodejing

This has been what I’ve been learning over the past couple of years. Allowing things to happen.

It goes counter to our usual instincts in Western society — we are doers, creators of our destiny, we make things happen … we don’t wait for it to happen! That’s what I was taught from an early age, in school and by every motivational sports movie I ever watched. So allowing things to happen is not my normal way.

I have never been one to be passive, to let things happen instead of making them happen, to let go of control of things.

But here’s what I’ve been learning:

This control we think we have over our lives and our destinies … it’s an illusion. As the guy who had his life turned upside down by a heart attack, the woman who lost her father to death and had to drop everything, the family who lost their home to a hurricane, the entrepreneur that was doing well until the economy collapsed and no one was spending, the hard-working employee who was laid off when the economy tanked, the cyclist who was hit by a car, the car that skid because someone ran onto the road who had been obscured, the mom whose son has autism despite her doing everything right during pregnancy … it happens every day, where we think we’re in control but we’re really not. Do we control all the people around us who affect our lives so intimately? Do we control the overwhelming power of nature? There’s so much out of our control that what we think is control is really an illusion.To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture. This is a great quote from Zen Master Suzuki Roshi, talking about controlling your mind. I see the cow and her pasture as a form of allowing things to happen — instead of tightly controlling something, you’re opening up, giving it more room, a bigger pasture. The cow will be happier, will roam around, will do as she pleases, and yet your needs will also be met. The same is true of anything else — stepping back and allowing things to happen means things will take care of themselves, and your needs will also be met. And you’ve done no work.You have less stress, less to worry about. Imagine allowing things to happen naturally, and things work out, and all you did was smile and watch. You don’t have to worry about shaping things, about controlling something that doesn’t want to be controlled. You don’t have to push, and fix leaks, and put out fires. You just let things work on their own. They happen.Things will surprise you. Let’s say you’re allowing something to happen. You might want it to go a certain way, to a certain outcome. That’s your goal. But what if you let go of this idea? What if you say, “I don’t know what will happen.” (Btw, you really don’t.) What if you say, “Let’s see what happens.” Then things will happen, but not the way you planned. The outcome might be completely different than what you’d hoped for. But it can still be great, just different. It might even be wonderful, and surprising. Surprises are good, if we accept that things always change and that change is good.You learn how things work. Instead of trying to make things work the way you want them to work, just watch them work. You’ll learn much more about human nature, about the nature of the world, as you see things work without you controlling it. It might change you.

That’s all very good, Leo, you’re thinking. But that won’t put the food on my table.

Maybe you’re right. And so, don’t let me stop you from what you need to do. Carry on. I’ll just sit back and watch.

View the original article here

Of oxes and the wisdom of crowds: Lior Zoref at TED2012

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Possibly the most meta speaker on the TED stage is Lior Zoref. He had a dream: to speak at TED. He shows a video of himself saying to his friend that he wanted to do that, and his best friend telling him it was impossible. But his Facebook and twitter friends encouraged him. He wanted to give a talk on the wisdom of crowds. So, he’s giving the first ever crowd sourced TEDTalk, and he asked his online friends for help.

One suggestion came from a 16 year old, named Or Sagy: have the audience recreate a classic experiment in the widsom of crowds. Have people estimate the weight of an ox. Each guess will be wildly off, but the average will be remarkably close. To do this, he brings a live ox on stage.

No, really. There is a live ox on stage.

(echos of “Oh my god” and “No fricking way” around the room.)

Zoref asks the audience to guess the weight (using, of course a nifty website). Results to come later in the talk.

Now, if using crowd wisdom worked for companies, why couldn’t it work for his life? In that spirit, he posted the talk on wikipedia and solicited advice from his friends on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere. And he met several people doing similar things.

Kai Busman is a pastor who uses crowd wisdom to create his Sunday sermons. Every week he asks what he should talk about and writes his sermon from that. Durring the service, people use phones to share understanding in real time. Church is full every Sunday.

Francine is raising her son using crowd wisdom on a daily basis, and said that she feels as if “super-nanny” is helping her.

“Is this the best crowd wisdom has to offer?” One of Zoref, and everyone’s, deepest fear is a child being sick. Deborah‘s child had a fever and rash, so she took photo and posted on Facebook. After one hour, three people said he might have Kawasaki disease. Crowd wisdom saved his life.

These people are, “Thinking with their friends. They all say they feel as if their brains have been upgraded.”

“Do you want to upgrade your brain?” asks Zoref. Here’s how you do it: You need a big crowd. You need a healthy digital relationship with your crowd. You can’t just ask questions, you need to give value, listen, respond — tell people they matter.

One of his friends though this means there’s something new. At TED we get inspired by the best speakers, but each is created by one, shared to many. It’s possible now to give a talk created by many, presented by one to many. We are entering the phase of mind-sharing. “The entire human race connected through social networks, and creating a master-mind.”

How good does the the mind of that crowd do? There were 500 estimates, and the results were:

-The lowest guess was 308 lbs.

-The highest was more than 8000 pounds.

-The average was 1792 pounds.

And the real weight? The ox weighs 1795 pounds. Three pounds off. Zoref hopes we’ll use crowd wisdom, not just for thinking, but to make our dreams come true, and he ends his talk with a line read by his online friends:

“Great minds think alike, clever minds think together.”

I am at #ted, guessing the weight of a live ox on stage.

—
(@hodgman) February 29, 2012

View the original article here

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, is perhaps the best-known proponent of using meditation to help patients deal with illness. (The somewhat confusing title is from a line in Zorba the Greek in which the title character refers to the ups and downs of family life as "the full catastrophe.") But this book is also a terrific introduction for anyone who has considered meditating but was afraid it would be too difficult or would include religious practices they found foreign. Kabat-Zinn focuses on "mindfulness," a concept that involves living in the moment, paying attention, and simply "being" rather than "doing." While you can practice anything "mindfully," from taking a walk to cleaning your house, Kabat-Zinn presents several meditation techniques that focus the attention most clearly, whether it's on a simple phrase, your breathing, or various parts of your body. The book goes into detail about how hospital patients have either improved their health or simply come to feel better despite their illness by using these techniques, but these meditations can help anyone deal with stress and gain a calmer outlook on life. "When we use the word healing to describe the experiences of people in the stress clinic, what we mean above all is that they are undergoing a profound transformation of view," Kabat-Zinn writes. "Out of this shift in perspective comes an ability to act with greater balance and inner security in the world." --Ben Kallen

Price: $20.00

Click here to buy from Amazon