Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians. Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding…
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This is a guest post by Taylor Pearson. “[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” –Viktor Frankl The healthy state of humans is mild…
(Originally published at Ribbonfarm .) Here's a recipe for discovering new ideas: Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you're likely to have blind spots. Start groping around in those areas. If you can do this with the very…
Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing:…
John Dewey, the 20th Century educational philosopher, wrote a book called ‘Art as Experience,’ which has been largely forgotten by history. It happens to contain a more-or-less complete philosophy of aesthetics, the comprehensiveness and usefulness of which has never been matched. Dewey’s writing…
Superintelligence The Idea That Eats Smart People In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire. This was a legitimate concern. Nitrogen, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is not…
Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on…
Please understand that I’m not making any kind of criticism of her when I say that JK Rowling has abandoned the real world. When you have one billion dollars, it’s not really something you need any more; there’s no real need to explain why she chooses to live with magic instead. If nothing else, she…
Pages 144-235 of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life contain a theory of beauty as perceived by humans, conveyed in fifteen “fundamental properties.” Not every property occurs in every beautiful object, but in very beautiful buildings and objects, many of…
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Author’s note: The thinking that gave rise to this essay was committed in collaboration with St. Rev . Errors, suspicious implications, and dubious conclusions are my own. On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, just north of Los Angeles,…
Warning: some of the haiku and tweets reproduced herein contain naughty language and references to having intimate relations with an inanimate national symbol. Is beauty subjective? People have strong feelings in both directions. A stylized representation of possible opinions about the nature of…
Spiritual experiences, listening to live music, taking LSD, the state of flow. Becoming absorbed in a story, spending time alone in nature, singing in a choir. Staring into a bonfire, dancing at a rave, falling in love, meditation. What do these things have in common? They are all experiences in…
"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his…
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular. “People” is an…
On May 28, Harambe, a 17-year-old lowland gorilla was shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo worker to save a small child who had wandered into its enclosure. As such tragic incidents go, there was nothing particularly unusual about this one. Just a week earlier on May 21, for instance, zookeepers at…
Back in 2010, deep green environmentalist Rick Smith, then head of Environmental Defence Canada, hailed Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act regime as a cost-free operation that would catapult the province into the big leagues of renewable energy. Through fat subsidies and high prices…
Benoit Tardif Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they…
lorelinde How discovering an equation for altruism cost George Price everything. Laura met George in the pages of Reader’s Digest . In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George…
Theranos founder, chairwoman, and C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes, in Palo Alto, California, September 2014. By Ethan Pines/The Forbes Collection. The War Room It was late morning on Friday, October 16, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address heremployees at…
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase. The meme goes something like this: Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions . They…
Happy Ambition: Striving for Success, Avoiding Status Cocaine, and Prioritizing Happiness Why do billionaires, CEOs, and other titans of industry work so hard? Why do they maintain such relentless professional ambition? Look up and down the Forbes 400 list and you’ll find hedge fund managers who…
A nother week, another Donald-being-Donald moment. For many years in baseball, Indians, Red Sox, and Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez became a running joke in the fan community. That wasn’t because he couldn’t hit — he was a tremendous hitter. It’s because Ramirez was a kook. He’d throw to the wrong…
History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump La Peste di Firenze It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re…
08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called…
07.11. 2010 On my fourth day in a remote cabin up in Norway my host Ivar asks me if I would like to come along on a day trip to Burfjord, a little town on the mainland about forty minutes away. I don't have to think twice. Going to the mainland means a chance to charge my camera battery, use a flush…
Brian Snyder / Reuters I originally submitted this piece to the New York Observer where I am an editor-at-large and a columnist on media and culture. Editorial decided it would no longer accept columns of this nature on this topic. I have the utmost respect for the leadership at the Observer, but I…
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. (Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images) Every time I write a piece about Gawker —and I’ve written a few —I pause before I hit publish. Once I take a second to check what skeletons are in my closet, that my personal life is in order and that my facts and figures are…
The sharp-tongued Brit made his fortune playing "delusional, middle-aged men" who run their mouths, but this comic acknowledges the GOP frontrunner has surpassed even his bloviating characters: "Comedians tell a joke and they get in trouble; Donald Trump says a terrible thing … and he gets elected."…
This is a temporary archive of the May 2016 Top Performer free lesson series. This page will only be available until May 21st, after which it will be taken down. If you want to get the remaining lessons before its over, please join the newsletter here . If you want to save the text for later, I…
It is very common when I first encounter a client struggling with mental health issues that they report their problem is that they feel anxious or depressed. Here is a typical exchange: Me: So, can you share with me what brings you in? Client: Well, I have not been feeling good. I have these low…
There isn’t a working person among us who doesn’t deal with stress — whether you’re an entrepreneur, a freelancer, working for a struggling startup, or clocking in working for a company, work stress is inevitable. But where does this stress originate, and how do we deal with it? Most guides to…
Let’s pretend for a moment that you are a giraffe. You live on the grasslands of the African savannah. You have a neck that is 7 feet long (2.1 meters). Every now and then, you spot a group of humans driving around on a safari taking pictures of you. But it’s not just your neck and their cameras…
Articles → Over-compensate to compensate 2016-02-23 You have something you want to change: a thought process or habit you want to fix. Let’s use the metaphor of a bunch of bricks on a seesaw.Right now all the bricks are stacked on one side.This is the way you have been. To make a change, most people…
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber…
Chapter 3: relationships: Romanticism Romanticism Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We don’t expect bliss every day. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Nevertheless, there are couples who display such deep-seated incompatibility, such heightened rage and…
If econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best—controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think…
(Photo: Pixabay) I once worked for an incredibly dysfunctional company filled with people who had no business doing the jobs they had been hired to do. The head of this company, forced to deal with the endless and frustrating mistakes made by his incompetent employees, did not respond with…
Dear Dan— I’d like to thank you for taking the time to review Free Will at such length. Publicly engaging me on this topic is certainly preferable to grumbling in private. Your writing is admirably clear, as always, which worries me in this case, because we appear to disagree about a great many…
Photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester A s the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/indulgent, slimming/fattening — but which foods belong where depends…
What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special…
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