Founder, manage thyself

Founder, manage thyself

BY JUSTIN YOSHIMURA 
ON DECEMBER 30, 2013

Ben Horowitz summarizes the hardest job of CEOs as, “managing your own psychology.”  Until recently, I believed that I was pretty good at this. After all, despite not taking more than a few days off since I was 15 — even after I sold my previous companies I would immediately start working on the next thing — I’ve never felt “burnt out.” Read more of this post

How to Worry Less About Money; What Goethe can teach us about cultivating a healthy relationship with our finances

How to Worry Less About Money

by Maria Popova

What Goethe can teach us about cultivating a healthy relationship with our finances.

The question of how people spend and earn money has been a cultural obsession since the dawn of economic history, but the psychology behind it is sometimes surprising and often riddled with various anxieties. In How to Worry Less about Money (public library) — another great installment in The School of Life’s heartening series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living, which previously gave us Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane, Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex, and Roman Krznaric’s How to Find Fulfilling Work — Melbourne Business School philosopher-in-residenceJohn Armstrong guides us to arriving at our own “big views about money and its role in life,” transcending the narrow and often oppressive conceptions of our monoculture. Read more of this post

6 Ways To Create A Culture Of Innovation: Reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need

6 Ways To Create A Culture Of Innovation

REWARD EMPLOYEES WITH TIME TO THINK, WHILE PROVIDING THEM WITH THE STRUCTURE THEY NEED.

Every organization is designed to get the results it gets. Poor performance comes from a poorly designed organization. Superior results emerge when strategies, business models, structure, processes, technologies, tools, and reward systems fire on all cylinders in symphonic unison.

EDITOR’S NOTE

12/30/13

Happy (almost) New Year! We’re saying good-bye to 2013 by revisiting some of our favorite stories of the year. Enjoy. Savvy leaders shape the culture of their company to drive innovation. They know that it’s culture–the values, norms, unconscious messages, and subtle behaviors of leaders and employees–that often limits performance. These invisible forces are responsible for the fact that 70% of all organizational change efforts fail. The trick? Design the interplay between the company’s explicit strategies with the ways people actually relate to one another and to the organization. Read more of this post

10 Extraordinary People and Their Lessons for Success

10 Extraordinary People and Their Lessons for Success

by Sarah Green  |   9:00 AM December 30, 2013

From presidents to hip-hop producers to poets, the last page of every issue of Harvard Business Review is always an interview with someone who has succeeded outside the traditional corporate world. Here, some of our favorite lessons from the class of 2013:

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on having long-term colleagues: “Treat people well. Don’t mislead them. Don’t be prickly. Don’t say things that are aggravating. Try to be as agreeable as you can be. Try to be helpful rather than harmful. Try to cooperate.”

Cartoonist Scott Adams on using his MBA: ”When the comic strip first came out, it showed Dilbert in a variety of settings—not just the office. I didn’t really know what was working, because I had no direct contact with readers… So way back at the dawn of the internet, I started putting my e-mail address in the margin of the strip… I found out that there was a common theme: People loved it when Dilbert was in the office, and they liked it a lot less when he was at home or just hanging around. So Dilbert became an office-based comic, and that change made it all work.”

Chef Nobu Matsuhisa on starting as an apprentice: “I was 18 and didn’t know anything about fish. My mentor taught me the basics. For the first three years, I didn’t make sushi; I washed dishes and cleaned the fish. But if I asked questions, he always answered. I learned a lot of patience.”

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels on hiring: “I wouldn’t choose anyone whose side I didn’t want to be on. It isn’t like we hire 12 and figure six will work. We don’t bring in anybody we’re not rooting for. Sometimes they succeed in week five, but for most people it’s two, three, four years before they become who they’re going to be. You have to allow for that growth.”

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons on meditating twice a day: “Every creative idea, every second of happiness, is from stillness…. But the way you move around the world has nothing to do with the stillness in your heart. Moving meditation—that’s what we have to practice. It doesn’t mean you have to move slow; you just have to see the world in slow motion.”

Golfer Arnold Palmer on learning humility: “One time at Augusta, I was going into the last hole with a one-shot lead to win the Masters, and a friend from the gallery hollered at me, so I walked over and accepted congratulations. And then I proceeded to make six on the hole and lose. My father had warned me about that. I was told all my life not to accept congratulations until it’s over.”

Poet Maya Angelou on courage: “One isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things—in the way that if one sets out to pick up a 100-pound bag of rice, one would be advised to start with a five-pound bag, then 10 pounds, then 20 pounds, and so forth, until one builds up enough muscle to lift the 100-pound bag. It’s the same way with courage. You do small courageous things that require some mental and spiritual exertion.”

Designer Philippe Starck on persuading clients: “I’m very good at explaining. I don’t work like a diva. I don’t say, “Oh my God, that must be pink,” and refuse to discuss it… I am cuckoo, yes. I am the king of intuition. But I am also a serious guy. I explain in a clear way. And then, even if it’s something that looks completely different than expected, something completely against mainstream thinking, clients understand. I explain that it might look strange but why, given the two to five years it will take for development, it will for so many reasons be exactly the right thing to do… And then the clients agree, always, 100%.”

President Mary Robinson on being frank: “At every stage, it’s [a] passion for human rights that has prompted me to speak truth to power, to stand up to bullies, to be prepared to criticize even the United States after 9/11. People told me it wouldn’t help my career as high commissioner, but it seemed much more important to do the job than to try to keep the job.”

Historian David McCullough on hard work: “When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The love of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. I keep telling students, ‘Find work you love. Don’t concern yourself overly about how much money is involved or whether you’re ever going to be famous.’ …In hard work is happiness.”

How to Find Fulfilling Work: On the art-science of “allowing the various petals of our identity to fully unfold.”

How to Find Fulfilling Work

by Maria Popova

On the art-science of “allowing the various petals of our identity to fully unfold.”

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky, “all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” Indeed, the quest to avoid work andmake a living of doing what you love is a constant conundrum of modern life. In How to Find Fulfilling Work (public library) — the latest installment in The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living, which previously gave us Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane and Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex — philosopher Roman Krznaric (remember him?)explores the roots of this contemporary quandary and guides us to its fruitful resolution: Read more of this post

7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living

7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living

by Maria Popova

Reflections on how to keep the center solid as you continue to evolve.

On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work — one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college — with the subject line “brain pickings,” announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. “It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read,” I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story here.) Read more of this post

“Work as hard as you can, Imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.”; Fail Safe: Debbie Millman’s Advice on Courage and the Creative Life

Fail Safe: Debbie Millman’s Advice on Courage and the Creative Life

by Maria Popova

“Work as hard as you can, Imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.”

The seasonal trope of the commencement address is upon us as wisdom on life is being dispensed from graduation podiums around the world. After Greil Marcus’s meditation on the essence of art and Neil Gaiman’s counsel on the creative life, here comes a heartening speech by artist, strategist, and interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. The talk is based on an essay titled“Fail Safe” from her fantastic 2009 anthology Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design (public library) and which has previously appeared onLiterary Jukebox. The essay, which explores such existential skills as living with uncertainty, embracing the unfamiliar,allowing for not knowing, and cultivating what John Keats has famously termed“negative capability,” is reproduced below with the artist’s permission. If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now. Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design is an absolute treasure in its entirety, the kind of read you revisit again and again, only to discover new meaning and new access to yourself each time. It was preceded by How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer and followed by the recent Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, both excellent in very different but invariably stimulating ways.

What Is Love? Famous Definitions from 400 Years of Literary History; “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.”

What Is Love? Famous Definitions from 400 Years of Literary History

by Maria Popova

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.”

After those collections of notable definitions of art, science, and philosophy, what better way to start a new year than with a selection of poetic definitions of a peculiar phenomenon that is at once more amorphous than art, more single-minded than science, and more philosophical than philosophy itself? Gathered here are some of the most memorable and timeless insights on love, culled from several hundred years of literary history — enjoy. Read more of this post

Interview with Calvin & Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson; coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment.

Mental Floss Exclusive: Our Interview with Bill Watterson!

For the December issue of mental_floss magazine, Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson! Since we’re guessing there are a few Calvin and Hobbes enthusiasts in the audience, we thought we’d provide a glimpse of the e-mail exchange. For our full story on the comic strip, be sure to pick up the print magazine. Read more of this post

Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect.

Author: Noah Smith

“It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man.”
– Yukichi Fukuzawa
I’ve always been a communist revolutionary at heart. Inequalities between human beings have always annoyed me, and I have the strong desire to see them eliminated. In American society, we generally discuss three kinds of “equality”: 1) “equality of outcome”, usually meaning equality of wealth or income, 2) “equality of opportunity”, and 3) “equal rights” under the law. The first is typically supported by true communists and socialists, and some liberals; the second by centrist liberals; and the third by libertarians and conservatives. The arguments between proponents of the three types of equality are voluminous and endless. And I think all three are important. Read more of this post

Dynamic Duos: 5 Brilliant Business Lessons From Warby Parker’s CEOs; Launched in 2010, eyewear retailer Warby Parker has transformed the way many consumers think about glasses, selling ultra-stylish specs–online–for less than $100

Dynamic Duos: 5 Brilliant Business Lessons From Warby Parker’s CEOs

LAUNCHED IN 2010, EYEWEAR RETAILER WARBY PARKER HAS TRANSFORMED THE WAY MANY CONSUMERS THINK ABOUT GLASSES, SELLING ULTRA-STYLISH SPECS–ONLINE–FOR LESS THAN $100.

Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa, Cofounders and CEOs

Warby Parker started with a casual conversation among friends. Four Wharton MBA students were hanging out one morning on campus, and one of them, Dave Gilboa, happened to mention how annoyed he was with the high price of eyeglasses. They talked over the problem a bit, wondering if glasses might somehow work as an online business. “I remember going home and just constantly thinking about this idea, having trouble going to sleep that night,” recalls Neil Blumenthal, who, along with Gilboa and the other two friends, founded the transformative web retailer in 2010. Read more of this post

The Year Mao Met the Smartphone; As Technology Points to the Future, the Political Climate Goes Retro

The Year Mao Met the Smartphone

As Technology Points to the Future, the Political Climate Goes Retro

ANDREW BROWNE

Dec. 30, 2013 8:02 a.m. ET

BEIJING—Elsewhere in the world, people wake up and check the weather forecast. In China, they now open a smartphone app to find out how bad the air is. That, in itself, represents a big advance in the past year, as the government bowed to public pressure to increase transparency about the true extent of air pollution choking Beijing and other cities and to take steps to clean it up. Read more of this post

Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation

Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation

by Maria Popova

“Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality.”

Given my soft spot for famous diaries, it should come as no surprise that I keep one myself. Perhaps the greatest gift of the practice has been the daily habit of reading what I had written on that day a year earlier; not only is it a remarkable tool of introspection and self-awareness, but it also illustrates that our memory “is never a precise duplicate of the original [but] a continuing act of creation” and how flawed our perception of time is — almost everything that occurred a year ago appears as having taken place either significantly further in the past (“a different lifetime,” I’d often marvel at this time-illusion) or significantly more recently (“this feels like just last month!”). Rather than a personal deficiency of those of us befallen by this tendency, however, it turns out to be a defining feature of how the human mind works, the science of which is at first unsettling, then strangely comforting, and altogether intensely interesting. Read more of this post

More Rational Resolutions: To Reach Goals, Be More Logical and Take a Scientific View of Your Emotions

More Rational Resolutions

To Reach Goals, Be More Logical and Take a Scientific View of Your Emotions

ANGELA CHEN

Dec. 30, 2013 7:09 p.m. ET

Can “goal factoring” help you keep your New Year’s resolution to hit the gym every day in 2014? “Goal factoring,” a method of designing better plans, is one of the techniques taught by the Center for Applied Rationality, which hosts three-day workshops that teach attendees how to use science-based approaches to achieve goals. A November workshop in Ossining, N.Y., instructed 23 participants on how thinking about one’s future self as a different person can help goal-setting and why building up an “emotional library” of associations can reduce procrastination. Read more of this post

Raised to start a business; Offspring from family-run firms explain how parents can help

December 30, 2013 5:24 pm

Raised to start a business

By Jonathan Moules

Jack Barber was born into a family of food entrepreneurs. Barber Foods, a frozen-poultry company, was started by his grandfather in 1955 shortly after arriving in the US from Armenia. Read more of this post

Triathlons, exams and the allure of tough pursuits

December 30, 2013 5:07 pm

Triathlons, exams and the allure of tough pursuits

By Lisa Pollack

For some, climbing the corporate ladder simply is not enough. They have to have a sideline in being GI Jane (or Joe). Pulling a Clark Kent on their way through the office doors, they trade business garb for Lycra and Neoprene to train for marathons and Ironman triathlons. Presumably owing to poor memories of how much certain activities hurt, more and more people are signing up for events such as these every year. But life-affirming self-torture need not be so violent. After all, there are always professional exams. Read more of this post

For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain; Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said religion or spirituality was more important

Study Shows How Spirituality Could Help Your Brain

ANDREW M. SEAMAN, REUTERS
DEC. 30, 2013, 6:03 PM 1,466 4

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain, a new study hints. Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said religion or spirituality was “important” to them versus those who cared less about religion. Read more of this post

One-third of Americans reject evolution, survey

Updated: Tuesday December 31, 2013 MYT 10:30:25 AM

One-third of Americans reject evolution, survey

NEW YORK: One-third of Americans reject the idea of evolution and Republicans have grown more sceptical about it, according to a poll released on Monday. Sixty percent of Americans say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” the telephone survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project showed (Click http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/ for the full survey). Read more of this post

In the Human Brain, Size Really Isn’t Everything; the human brain is so advanced not simply because it is large, but because its rapid growth caused neurons to develop new connections and circuits

December 26, 2013

In the Human Brain, Size Really Isn’t Everything

By CARL ZIMMER

There are many things that make humans a unique species, but a couple stand out. One is our mind, the other our brain. The human mind can carry out cognitive tasks that other animals cannot, like using language, envisioning the distant future and inferring what other people are thinking. Read more of this post

Egypt Turmoil Turns Tourist Hub Luxor Into Ghost Town

Egypt Turmoil Turns Tourist Hub Luxor Into Ghost Town

By Sarah Benhaida on 12:37 pm December 31, 2013.
Luxor, Egypt. Tourists once flocked to Luxor for its ancient treasures, but as Egypt witnesses sweeping political upheavals, the visitors have simply vanished from this famed temple city. Christmas used to be particularly busy, as tens of thousands of visitors thronged Luxor’s famous temples, but fresh unrest that followed the army’s ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July has virtually stopped tourist arrivals. Read more of this post

Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy

Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy

By Aimee Groth December 30, 2013

Zappos is known for its zany corporate culture. The company’s Q4 “All Hands” meeting in November was aptly-themed “Gone Wild”: one female employee voluntarily climbed into a case filled with tarantulas to win a $250 gift card. The event opened with a Lion King performance put on by employees at the Smith Center in downtown Las Vegas and closed with an after party at the museum next door. Focusing on company culture and customer service is how CEO Tony Hsieh built Zappos into a billion-dollar online retailer. While he’s not getting rid of those priorities, Hsieh is laying the groundwork for a major reorganization. Read more of this post