I’ve just finished listening to an interesting audiobook about memory and mnemonic techniques: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Author is a young journalist who decided to try all the memory improvement techniques himself but remain sceptical and objective while doing so. He talks about memory itself and the way it was influenced by spread of written language and by technology. Than, he tells us stories about people with extraordinarily good memory and amnesiacs, about people who had an ordinary memory but became memory champion and about mnemonic techniques they used.

Joshua begins his quest with a totaly ordinary, if not mediocre, memory. Bus after long preparation and work with best so-called “mental athletes” wins one of US memory champtionships. Although he himself acknoledges the fact that most of techniques he learned are useless in day-to-day life, I actually extracted a lot of intersting and useful ideas from the book. And this is what I would like to share with you.

Interesting facts and ideas

You might also like:

1. Superfreakonomics review
2. Review of awesome My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
3. 2 books about brain: What best neuroscientists can teach us about memory, creativity, society, productivity, work & leadership

Feynman is one of the brightest physicists of the 20th century who also happened to be a talented lecturer and an author of a book which is fun to read. Here are some excerpts from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” that I found interesting:

On freedom:

So I have just one wish for you–the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel heed by a need to maintain your position In the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

Isn’t it a modern luxury that very few of us can afford?

On pointless communication

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

On mindfulness and watching your thoughts become dreams:

I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don’t notice that they’re not logically connected until you ask yourself, “What made me think of that?” and you try to work your way back, and often you can’t remember what the hell did make you think of that!

So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they’re completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.

After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don’t really know what it’s like to fall asleep when I’m not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:

I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!

…

One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!

 

Interestingly enough, it eventually got him into a lucid dream.

On hypnosis:

All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, “Damn it, enough is enough! I’m gonna go straight to my seat.”
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t continue. I walked all the way around the hall.

I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While I was hypnotized she said, “I’m going to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain.” I thought, “Baloney!” She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, “That’s easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There’s nothin’ to that; it’s a fake!”

When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke. So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t”–which is just another way of saying that you can’t.

Feynman is an interesting person to hear about hypnosis from. I don’t think it’s  easy to find somebody with a more skeptical mind. What I find intriguing is how one’s brain can theoretically become conditioned to be inclined to do or feel one thing over the other. And what would be awesome is to use it consciously to condition yourself.

On learning instead of memorizing

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil–why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek–even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?”–and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr-up”–he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty! What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand. I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)

…

“I have discovered something else,” I continued. “By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what’s the matter–how it’s not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you.”

So I did it. Brrrrrrrup–I stuck my finger in, and I started to read:  Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed.. I said, “And there, have  you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You  haven’t told anything about nature-what crystals produce light when you crush them, why  they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.

“But if, instead, you  were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.”‘ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them, but it didn’t make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.

Overall, it’s an amazing memoir with stories varying from building an atomic bomb to pickup up girls.

You might also like:

1. Superfreakonomics review

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2. Good books
3. Cool stuff digest: February 2011 & March 2011

Despite pretentious title and correspond cover, “Suceed” fully met my expectations and appeared to be not an empty self-help “You can do it all” rant but more or less practical interpretation of scientific research in a field of psychology and motivation. Probably, the biggest compliment I can give a books is to say that I wrote down many notes in my Evernote while reading it. In this case notes were record-high long. Basically it’s my notes that I’d like to share here. Otherwise, how would I force myself to re-format and make them more structured?

Book is about setting your goals in a way that increases your chances to achieve them and enjoy the process. Percent of trivialities not as high as I expected it to be which is quite rare for self-help/self-development books. I personally found quite many ideas to be practically applicable and I hope so will you. So, what is my summary?

Difficult goals & self-control

• Usually, it pays off to set difficult goals. They usually bring much higher gratification than the ones you, honestly speaking, considered to be quite easy to achieve. For example, corporate departments that identified themselves with hard work usually appeared to be happier as well.
• Metaphorically speaking, self-control is a muscle. Immediately after its usage it gets temporarily weaker (you ability control yourself is lower) but in overall it grows and develops as you use it.
• Example of weakness: 2 groups of people were presented with 2 plates, one with a chocolate and another one with radishes. While 1 groups was allowed to eat as much chocolate as it wanted, another one could only eat radishes. Than, both groups were given a difficult (in fact, unsolvable) task and the 1 group performed much better (didn’t give up for longer time). Same effect after attempts to suppress laughter when watching comedy, etc.

1. First type of people (BE GOOD) think that our abilities and talents are somewhat given to us and we cannot get significantly better in things we weren’t born to and vice versa. For example, they think of themselves as being “smart” or “not good at math”. Usually this type of people chose tasks that help them highlight their own presupposition about their abilities. In other words, they will try to prove that they have the abilities (show others how “smart” they are) and not to get caught in their weakness (trying to solve a math problem that they “are not good at”).

2. Others (GET BETTER) think that everything can be changed if enough persistence is applied. When starting something you they naturally expect it not to be good at it from the very first minute (because the key believe is that mastery as the result of getting better). They usually study to get knowledge and not grades and are more likely to try harder on task they cannot solve (to get better) than to give up (because they “are not good at it” as the 1 type of people would do).

• Surprise-surprise! Contradictory goals can be a big problem.

IF THEN plans

• Plans should be actionable. Often people create plans like this: “Eat more. Exercise more”. (Author is a little obsessed with weight-management or maybe this is just a convenient example). Plans like this are useless.
• Recommended strategy is  ”if -> then” plans. For example, “if today is Thursday evening, I call my mom to talk to her” or “if today is Wednesday, than I go to gym after work”.
• Same strategy can be applied to obstacles. For example, “if my friends call me to join them for a movies the night before an exam, I will politely reject an offer” or “if I begin to doubt it, I will remind myself why it’s important to me”. This way you know in advance how to act instead of considering all the options when they present themselves.

• Visualization in a sense that it’s usually presented in self-help books & movies is total bollocks and has little scientific evidence.
• But visualization can work in the case if instead of imagining a final result and how great it would be if you achieve something, you actually imagine steps that you need to take and difficulties that you might face.

• Yes, sometimes it’s better to quit on goals. And ability to do is inherent characteristic of happy, integral people.
• When you should not quit: if you think that the reason is that you lack some skills or abilities to achieve a goal. In this case it’s more likely that you just weren’t persistent enough to get better.
• When you should quit: when you need to sacrifice too much (you cannot be successful in everything at the same time).

The book itself is available at Amazon, but you search really good, you’ll be able to find audio-version online.

You might also like:

1. How to win any negotiation: summary of “Getting to Yes” by William Ury
2. Heart-to-heart talk: how to be happy – scientific and religious point of view

For a long time I wanted to write about savants, people whose intellectual capacities significantly exceed what we consider to be normal. Usually, they have one or two fields where they really shine, but more often than not other abilities, usually social skills are sacrificed. You all remember Rain Man, right?

For example, Matt Savage learned to play piano at the age of 7, gave his first concert at 9 and recorded his album later on. You see him playing here:

What I find interesting and amusing about these people is how vividly they show the the real width of our own abilities and how inefficiently we use our own brain. Of course, personal traits, genetics and sometimes even injuries all play role here. But still all these amazing abilities are somewhere in our heads… And I like to believe that we can find a key to unlock them.

One of the most widely known savants is Daniel Tammet who blows you away with his memory, mathematics & language abilities. Actually he even created one of his own. What is interesting and atypical is that he doesn’t suffer from any significant problems with social skills. If I got you interested you might want to watch the whole movie about him:

He also wrote 2 books: Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky which I haven’t read but they surely seem to be worth it.

By the way, if you think that there are only a couple of people like this out of 6 billions you might be slightly underestimating the number… There is even an article called list of child prodigies in Wikipedia that highlights dozens of kids and young guys and girls who can speak 10 languages, who finished university at the age of 10, etc. One should acknowledge that the list inspires and lower your self-esteem at the same time.

However, life often takes an unpredictable turn for people like this. For example, Christopher Langan who has the highest IQ score recorded for most part of his life worked as bouncer and fireman. Despite all the controversy of IQ-tests it’s still a very interesting story. Here is the documentary about Chris:

Another related topic is High-IQ societies that are only open for membership for those who have the highest IQ. I won’t cover it in detail, just browse through Wikipedia and the websites of these societies if you’re interested.

I don’t know about you but I find these people-fluctuations really inspirational and interesting to understand. I even think that the field is secondary. Whether it’s a science, sport, music or literature. What is interesting is the fact of abnormal abilities or achievements. Anyway, I would be more than grateful if you share some names, books or films on the topic with me!

Update, 29 June 2011:

Daniel Tammet gave his own TED talk win which he discussed a topic of synesthesia:

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1. Heart-to-heart talk: how to be happy – scientific and religious point of view

I listened to Getting to Yes by William Ury who is probably the most recognized negotiations expert few months ago.

If you never heard about William Ury, short TED talk might be the best way to get to know about his impressive career:

And here are the notes that I wrote down while reading it. Probably they will be of some use for you as well:

1. Always set a goal of negotiation form the very beginning: “You want to sell at the higher price and I want to buy at the lower price. Let’s find the fair price that can both agree upon.”
2. Always try to understand interests behind a position. How did you arrive at that price? Why do you consider it just?
3. Always repeat the position of another side: “Correct me if I’m wrong. Do I understand correctly that you consider this price to be just because…”
4. Always set a principle, external standard to judge the agreement. E.g. fair solution.
5. Separate a person from a problem. “We are very grateful for everything you did for us but it’s very important for us to arrive at the fair solution.”

6. Ignore the irrelevant. “It is irrelevant whether we trust you or not. What relevant is whether our agreement is fair or not.”
7. All other things being equal the least interested side (the one with a better alternative) wins. Prior to negotiations one should think about action plan in case if negotiations fail.
8. Don’t make a decision under emotional pressure. If needed take time to think and postpone a decision. But suggest a reason for this, for example a need to consult with your partner.
9. When asking questions pause, don’t ask another question right away after another side stopped talking. Pause might force him or her to elaborate on issue better.

And a bonus. Very funny video of what can happen if you obsess about negotiating too much…

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1. How to win negotiation and get a better deal (1 basic principle and 30 useful tips)
2. Summary of Succeed: how we can reach our goals by Heidi Grant
3. Business model generation

Business model generation book that I’m currently reading is a brilliant example of how complicated topic can be structured and explained visually so simple that even a kid would understand it.

Here is the 72 pages free preview of the book provided by businessmodelgeneration.com.

CONS
It should be noted that it doesn’t go into much deep granularity level, doesn’t give you numbers, formulas or ready-to-use solutions.

PROS
However, it does give you food for thought, important questions to ask and what’s more even more important a great thinking framework that can also be used for brainstorming and collaboration.

Available on Amazon.

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1. What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis, personal & business lessons
2. How to win any negotiation: summary of “Getting to Yes” by William Ury
3. Food for thought: 10 business models that rocketed in 2010

Not a long time ago I wrote a post about My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. And during last couple of months I listened to and read 2 more: Brain Rules by John Medina and Your Brain at Work by David Rock. Unlike Jill, they don’t tell their own stories but try to give real life recommendations based on neuroscience research.

John focuses on general principles rules of brain functioning which he covers relatively briefly. David on the other hand provides more of a deep dive in various situations that we face daily, mostly at work but views them through the prism of our brain and its biochemistry. Social concepts, such as status, reward and others are explained through things like oxitocin, dopamin & epinephrin.

Those who find such topics interesting can find my notes below. Plus, a couple of great videos of authors’ talks and one fun Slideshare presentation.

1. Brain Rules by John Medina

I used the actual “brain rules” by John from his website as the basis for my notes and briefly tried to explain main idea of each one.

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

John recommends various kind of physical activity, especially aerobic one, including long walks. He states that if participants of business meetings walked on treadmills with 1.8 mile/hr speed, they would come up with much more creative ideas, not to mention increased memory and overall well-being. By the way, John takes his own medicine. It took him 15 minutes to adapt to replying to emails while walking.

SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

This is one is basically about history. The humankind survived mostly due to our brains as our brains are not all that adapted. Developed brain on the other hand allowed us to create unions with other people and win in the game of life by doing so. John also states that in order to have optimal brain functioning we need to feel completely safe. And based on this premise he critiques traditional corporate open spaces & cubicles as well as school classrooms.

WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
The concept of neuroplasticity is presented here: tasks that our brains are busy with literally shape them throughout our lives. As a result, we think very differently. Yeah, tell us something we don’t know… Again, based on this concept John describes the typical school as a terrible environment as it fosters uniformity more than creativity and diversity.

ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
We pay attention only to a very limited list of things. Such as emotions, sex, everything that is perceived as a threat, etc. That’s why it’s an art to get people interested in something that initially is not all that exciting. Taking into consideration “deaths from Power Point”, there are not so many people who mastered this kind of art….

John recommends to stimulate an audience attention every 10 minutes. For example, you might tell a relevant story, show a relevant video or otherwise engage everyone into active listening.

Here he also states that we’re unable to multitask. Unless everything except for main activity is performed completely automatically. After interruptions it takes a lot of time to get back to what we have been doing. On average, we finish 50% later and 50% more mistakes.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
Nothing eyes-opening here. To remember a phone number, you’d better repeat it during first 30 seconds.

LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
Same thing that you were probably taught at school. In order to remember something we need to repeat. The difference is that John recommends to do it in 1.5 to 2 hours instead of 1.5 to few days.

SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
All our cognitive functions are impaired when we are sleep deprived. Those who try to get more done by limiting their sleep time might use it as a food for thought…

Besides, 1/2 an hour afternoon nap can actually benefit freshness of our thinking a lot. But again very rarely corporate offices are designed accordingly. NASA experiment with pilots showed 34% performance increase after 26 minutes of napping.

STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
Stress can be beneficial. But long-term stress is always harmful. For instance, emotional stability in a family is one of the best predictors of the children performance at school.

SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
The more senses you engage the more likely you’re to remember something. Smell may be a strong trigger for memory. It’s used quite effectively by coffee houses. Think of Starbucks for example.

VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
In 3 days we remember only 10% of what we heard but 65% of what we’ve seen.

GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
Incidence of certain mental disorders varies greatly between genders. Also, we react differently to stress: men try to get the gist, while women focus on details more.

EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.
We are able to learn, explore and create at any age.

In Google, 20% of work-time is used on projects initiated by employees on their own. As a result, 50% of new projects are born this way.

Also, you might want to browse through a small Slideshare presentation by author or watch his talk at Google below. It’s easy to see usage of his own recommendations in the speech:

2. Your Brain at Work by David Rock

With Your Brain at Work by David Rock I will not try to summarize main ideas briefly as it’s hardly possible. Instead I will just copy my Evernote notes that I took while reading it.

Speaking about note-taking, I highly recommend you to try it! It doesn’t take a lot of time to summarize a book in a couple of passages but it’s very cool to browse through them later on when most of of the material is forgotten. As I read this one in text format instead of audio, notes are few times longer than usual and not very structured because I copypasted most of them instead of writing them down on my own.

But it contains lots of brilliant insights anyway. If not interested you might just practice rolling a scroll on your mouse. Otherwise, here it is:

• Make prioritization of your day first thing in the morning. Our mental resources get quickly and easily depleted. That’s why we often simply cannot do important things like prioritization after browsing through emails.
• You may reduce energy spend by visualizing instead of just thinking.
• Write things down.
• Say no to things that aren’t priority. Very difficult, but helpful.
• Schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.
• Schedule blocks of time for different modes of thinking (instead of for different projects).
• As much as possible try to minimize number of things in your head at a given moment. Ideally it should be only one.
• Split big issues in less than 4 chunks and then split them if needed. But don’t go into detail.
• Use your basal ganglia by automating some actions, so they don’t require lots of attention anymore.
• Get information on stage in a best possible order.
• When you need to focus remove all external distractions completely, clear your mind and inhibit internal distractions if they come.
• Peak performance “sweet spot” or Flow is somewhere between “under-arousal” & “over-arousal”;
• You can fix “under-arousal” by bringing “urgency” to task (visualize result of not doing it) – norepinephrine or raising “interest” levels (visualize positive rewards of doing the project well OR have a little fun, talk to somebody, maybe about a project) – dopamine;
• You can fix “over-arousal” by writing ideas down OR using other than prefrontal cortex areas of your brain: focusing on senses (e.g. sounds around you) OR just taking a walk;
• Capacity to notice what was going on in one’s internal world is called the Mindful Awareness Attention Scale (MAAS).
• When in impasse moment try unfocusing for a while, take a break.
• Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while increasing anxiety decreases the likelihood of insight.
• The “insight machines” those whom Beeman can pick based on brain scans before an experiment, are those who have more awareness of their internal experience. They can observe their own thinking, and thus can change how they think. These people have better cognitive control and thus can access a quieter mind on demand.
• Insight model: ARIA stands for Awareness, Reflection, Insight, and Action.
• A good way to simplify a problem is to describe it in as few words as possible. Saying to yourself, “I want more energy” is better than saying, “I want more energy to focus more on my work and family and make time for exercise and fun.”
• Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are.
• Focus on the connections between information rather than drilling down into a problem; look at patterns and links from a high level rather than getting detailed.
• Instead of becoming more self-aware by meditating on a mountain, you can do so while you work.
• Stimulated limbic system & increased adrenaline when you experience fear might make you feel focused and therefore more confident in your decisions, when your ability to make the best decisions has actually been reduced.
• Labeling bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion.
• Successful people learn to harness deep stress and turn it into eustress, thus enhancing prefrontal cortex functioning.
• People will always pay lots of money at least to feel less uncertain. That’s because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.
• It appears that the perception of choice may be more important than diet and other factors for health.
• Even if we have the illusion that we are in control, our cognitive functions are preserved.
• Series of studies shows that reappraisal generally has a stronger emotional braking effect than labeling, thus it’s a tool for reducing the impact of bigger emotional hits.
• I like to think of humor as a type of cheap reappraisal.
• Find ways to create choice and a perception of autonomy wherever you can.
• You can reappraise by reinterpreting an event, or reordering your values, or normalizing an event, or repositioning your perspective.
• A general feeling of expecting good things generates a healthy level of dopamine, and may be the neurochemical marker of feeling happy.
• Practice noticing what your expectations are in any given situation.
• A feeling of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, and an absence of relatedness generates a primary threat.
• Deciding someone isa friend also generates a toward emotional response, which provides more space on your stage for new ideas.
• When you interconnect your thoughts, emotions, and goals with other people, you release oxytocin, a pleasurable chemical.
• Research within the positive psychology field shows there is only one experience in life that increases happiness over a long time. The one thing that makes people happy is the
• quality and quantity of their social connections. Happiness is not just a good dose of dopamine, but a nice oxytocin buzz, too.
• Anytime you meet someone new, make an effort to connect on a human level ASAP to reduce the threat response. Become friends with people you work with by sharing personal experiences. Encourage people around you to do the same.
• So an increasing sense of fairness increases your levels of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Living in a world that appears unfair affects people’s cortisol levels, their well-being, and even their longevity.
• You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter, funnier, healthier, richer, more righteous, more organized, fitter, or stronger, or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a “niche” where you feel you are “above” others.
• And here’s a really big idea: one way you might play against yourself could be to work on improving your capacity to catch your brain in action. You could practice getting faster at things such as labeling and reappraising, reading other people’s states, or developing a quiet mind when needed.
• Think about what it feels like when you interact with someone who makes you notice what’s good about yourself (raising your status), who is clear with his expectations of you (increasing certainty), who lets you make decisions (increasing autonomy), who connects with you on a human level (increasing relatedness), and who treats you fairly. You feel calmer, happier, more confident, more connected, and smarter.
• Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback.
• “You know what. Don’t worry about what the problem is. It ‘s not that useful. I’m sure you did your best. Let’s think about what we can both do here to rescue the situation. I’m not going to give you a hard time. Let’s work together on this, okay.”
• “Tell me what your goal is here, in one sentence.”
• “What solutions have you already tried?”
• “Might there be others solutions we haven’t thought of?”
• Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.
• The trouble is, the carrot-and-stick approach doesn’t work well with adults. Adults can recognize that someone offering goodies is trying to change them, and they class that person as a threat.
• Creating systems and processes that require people to talk about a project regularly can be as simple as bringing an idea up once a week and having people share their
• thoughts. Ideas, and brain circuits, come alive in conversation.

Traditionally, I embed video of author’s speech @ Google. BTW you might find his presentation on TEDx as well.

PS First one can be found in torrents in audio and the second one I have in .pdf and can send it to you if you’re interested. Totally free, no strings attached!

You might also like:

1. Recommendation of few smart books
2. Review of awesome My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
3. Cool stuff digest: July 2010

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference”
Reinhold Niebuhr, Kurt Vonnegut

Cyprus, 2008.

I’ve been thinking about covering this topic in my blog for a long time and eventually decided to do it. Firstly to structure it all for myself and secondly to share some thoughts and interesting articles & videos which I collected for last couple of years. As a result, this post is quite long and wordy, so don’t open up the full article if you’re not really interested in such kind of philosophical issues and get bored easily by them. In this case you might think that this is just an unpractical gobbledegook.

I actually find the combination of how important and how ambiguous this issue is quite puzzling. Very high percentage of people respond to the question about meaning of their lives with “to be happy” answer. And very few of them actually have any particular idea what this happiness is, how to achieve & feel it. Even in their individual case, not universally.

No matter where you look there are more questions than answers. Is it possible to find an universal recipe for happiness or is it only individual, even intimate issue? Can you buy happiness or does money actually make us unhappy? Can the state of happiness be permanent or only fragmented in separate moments? Is happiness in achievement of one’s goals, in results or in process, constant “here and now”? And does the pursuit of happiness itself make us more or less happy?

Is it true that happiness is 100% subjective feeling that depends only on our perception or is it determined by external conditions that are outside of our control? Is “happiness regardless of conditions” really attainable or is it better left to psychos and Buddhist fairy tales? And if it’s attainable then how can one still keep the urge to grow and progress in this state? Can small habits change something significantly? Replies to all these questions vary greatly and often are simply opposites. Also, there are options of “truth is somewhere in between” and “both are true”. Or are these simply cliches and excuses not use one’s brain?

Why happiness level of countries differs so significantly, even on average? How is it all connected with meaning of life, success, motivation, goals, upbringing, religion, freedom of choice, level of expectations, life experience, stress, etc?

Well it’s clear that trivialities, such as “if you want to be a happy person, just be one” and “money doesn’t but happiness”, just won’t help here. Everything seems to be deeper, more ambiguous, but interesting. So, what can religion, science and various self-help popularizers tell us?

Buddhism, if you oversimplify it to an extreme, tells us that happiness can be achieved through the constant mindfulness of situation, our thoughts and feelings with simultaneous equanimity – letting everything be the way it is instead of creating internal conflicts. I think it goes beyond simple “letting go of one’s desires”. BTW, right now I listen to an awesome book which covers the topic in a greater detail — Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young.

From here we get an ages old concept of “happiness regardless of conditions” according to which we have an infinite amount of freedom between a particular thing happening to us and our reaction. Actually, this simple concept was sold billion of times by thousands of people, sometimes seasoned with different sauces and labeled differently. From enlightenment to proactivity, reframing & management of emotions.

Dan Gilbert, American psychologist in in popular and very funny TED talk presents an idea that we are actually very bad at predicting our emotional reactions to certain events. For example, people tend to largely exaggerate how happy winning in lottery would make them. And how miserable becoming disabled would make them. In fact Dan talks about same old “happiness regardless of conditions” concept, but calls it synthetic happiness. Apparently, we constantly transform our perception in order to be slightly happier. In a conclusion he talks about the same ideal state in which we realize intelligently that some scenarios are more preferable to others, but don’t pursue them with such a zeal that it undermines our equanimity & balance.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Albert Einstein

And in other talk at the same conference Richard St Jones talks about success. But in such a meaning that is very close to the topic discussed in this post. He shares his life experience and tells us how disappointed he was after achievement of his materialistic goals. After this, he turned to antidepressants that made them fell better, but the side-effect was that he stopped giving a shit about work & customers. Eventually he returned to normal fulfilled life and came up with his own definition of success. Which is a repeating circle of 8 things: passion, work, purpose, push, ideas, improve, serve, persist.

Few months ago I shared a video of debates on the topic “Is the Pursuit of Happiness Making us Miserable?” from Fora.tv which is certainly worth watching. In essence it’s a clash between what we think of as Western and Eastern world view. As a result, audience came to conclusion that it’s more possible than not that pursuit of happiness actually makes us unhappy (a little more than a half of people voted for this opinion).

Mark Anielski, whose book Economics of Happiness I already covered in this blog is interested in happiness on a national level and in an economic context. This approach is called happynomics and I was really interested in it recently, even thought of devoting my post-graduate paper to the subject. Before I actually was rejected in my attempt to change its topic. Anyway, besides other things in his book Mark looks on different traditional communities trying to understand their values. And often they seem to value free time and their social circle much more than money which is sometimes all the way around in our modern society. BTW, there is a very good talk on the topic of happynomics as well: Measuring what makes life worthwhile.

Further developing ideas of happynomics, Nic Marks created a Happy Planet Index which is based on Satisfaction With Life Index and Ecological Footprint of countries. Not surprisingly he also talked at TED and shared his thoughts on universal character traits that happy people possess and actions they take. In brief, these are following: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, give.

In a meanwhile, Dan Buettner once asked a question why people in some places of the world called Blue Zones live much longer than anywhere else. As it turned out, health and longevity are determined with happiness and socializing not less than by healthy lifestyle. So, what’s the secret? Purpose – reason to wake up every day, time to slow down & reflect, support of close friends, love and only then diet and exercising. Of course, Dan also talked about it at TED.

Another aspect of happiness is related to our work and career. Daniel Pink in this RSA video called “Surprising Truth About Things that Really Motivate Us“, which I already shared once, describes what one needs for happiness in professional context, at work or in business. Basically, three things: autonomy, mastery & purpose. Or, in full version, factors are autonomy, relatedness, competence, complexity, connection between effort and reward.

And to finish I will shortly tell you about Tony Hsieh. This guy started LinkExchange company in his twenties, and eventually sold it to Microsoft for few million dollars. Currently works as a CEO in Zappos. Recently he wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, which I’m really looking forward to read. He states that one of the reasons he sold LinkExchange was the fact that corporate culture was terrible and he didn’t like working there. Now Tony tries to apply happiness theories in practice using them to create the right corporate culture in Zappos. In his Google talk he speaks about all those things in more detail. His version is as follows: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness, vision/meaning.

In overall it looks that on one hand everybody talks about different things, but on the other hand about the same the same concept. I tend to think that it would make sense to divide these happiness determinants into 2 categories. First would be values and corresponding everyday states & actions. And another one would be the actual goals and achievements in areas that matter: “to be”, “to do”, “to know”, “to have”. But the most important and difficult thing is not to forbid yourself to be happy before everything is accomplished. And I still think that an attempt to understand what happiness is in one’s case is a personal journey of each one of us. While all the research and religious ideas can be used for reference and as a food for thought.

That’s all I actually wanted to share with you. Did anyone read it all? What do you think?

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Book with a stupid name Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner appeared to be quite surprisingly interesting and was listened on my way to work and back home in a week or so. I would probably even say that the sequel is better than the first book – Freakonomics.

Authors position themselves as economists doing research into non-conventional topics. However, I feel that it would be more appropriate to say that book is in the sociology field. Yes, individual & group level economics is often discussed, usually through the prism of decision-making. But in overall it’s more about psychology.

Topics covered are global warming (or cooling?) & ecology, technological & scientific breakthroughs, economics of prostitution, algorithmic search for potential terrorists based on banking activity and human altruism which is covered in more details in video below. In other words, as authors confess themselves, there is no uniting topic.

Superfreakonomics is full of curious facts. For instance, you have statistically higher chances to get into trouble if you walk home drunk then if you drive home drunk.

All topics are presented as stories revolving around particular characters and therefore easily digested. One of the main lessons sounds quite banal and generic: “people respond to incentives, sometimes unpredictably”. However, we forget about it more often than we’d like to think.

You might use this RSA video made from co-author’s speech as a trailer of some sort:

Update 2010.09.22: It turns out they make a movie based on the first book! Trailer is below:

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1. Review of awesome My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
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3. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman

Finished listening to My Stroke of Insight by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor today. It appeared to be as interesting as I expected, so I’d like to share it with you.

Jill is a Harvard PhD who built a highly successful career in science. Everything went just perfect till the moment when she got a stroke on one of her mornings. As a result, she lost almost all of her cognitive and physical skills, but survived. Moreover, eventually she finally recovered which took more than 8 years. Step be step she learned everything: from speech recognition, to walking and reading.

The Book tells her personal story and gives a basic understanding of our brain. According to author our brain functions can be separated by hemispheres: left and right. Right one lives in a present moment and is responsible for our sensory feelings, intuition, and perception of universe as a whole. Left one in turn is our rational mind, future planning, past evaluation, speech, critical thinking, etc.

After the stroke Jill lost functions of left hemisphere. The most interesting part is that despite the loss of cognitive functions, she describes her experience with sincere rapture. She emotionally tells us about feeling of “deep inner piece and bliss” and expresses ideas that I highly connected with a topic of mindful meditation that kind of follows me last month. BTW, here are two awesome Google Talks about it: first, second. I even decided to listen to book of the latter one, but that’s a separate story.

In My Stroke of Insight Jill talks a lot about right hemisphere with which connects this state of bliss comparing it to nirvana. She highlights how close we are from this state: “only one thought away”. But we often lose it by being immersed in our thoughts and actions or in left hemisphere.

How according to author can healthy people get closer to this state? Among many ideas which she shares you can find very simple things. Such as gratitude for everything that you have and what surrounds you, attention to and development of sensory feelings, meditation, special perception of environment during physical activity, etc.

But the most important thing is attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings, conscious choice of what to focus on and what not to. Jill believes in neuroplasticity, in our ability to train our brain through attention and concentration on aspects that we’re interested in.

To sum up, I really enjoyed the book and made many notes while reading it in my attempt to restore this useful notes-taking habit.

If you’re not sure if this is something you might be interested in, I suggest you to watch Jill’s TED speech. Less than 20 minutes.

Also, you might be interested in reading comments in Mind Hacks blog post about the book.

For more details it’s better to read the book. You know, where you can easily find an audioversion.

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Recently I finished reading What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis. Judging by title I didn’t really expect lots of insights from the book but it appeared to be truly visionary and smart. It even made me kind of regret choosing Economics&Business major over Computer Science 7 years ago…

WWGD appeared not to be about Google itself but about the way business, economics, relationships and world in whole change as the result of technologies wide spread and simplification. So, in fact the book covers quite wide range of topics. From Google’s PageRank, to Facebook, new media, customized solutions, customer relations, blogging, Twitter, context advertising, search engine optimization, online communities management, government policies and many other.

I personally generated a lot of ideas when trying to project the concepts from book to my own projects and life. So, here is my personal short list of lessons that I think are worth considering and thinking about, hope you’ll find it useful!

Top lessons from What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis, in my own words:

1. Focus on platforms & networks

   Many IT companies, incl. Google itself gain their competitive advantage not so much from their products themselves but from the creative power of users of these products.

   Apple promotes iPhone SDK development platform. Facebook gives wide range of tools to their users and webmasters. They all understand that the easier it is to build something on-top of their service the more powerful it will be. Even small websites, blogs and companies can benefit a lot from crowd-sourcing and providing their customers with opportunity to contribute.

2. Gain trust by giving up control and being transparent
   
   Consumers, readers, partners. Whoever it is you interact with, they will always want to know the truth about your company, service or brand. And it becomes easier than ever with the Internet to find it. In Google search results you can find blog post titled “Yourbrandname sucks” just next to your official website. So, instead of hiding it’s better to be transparent and open in the first place.




3. Launch early
   

   It’s connected with the first idea and has a lot of implications in agile development and goes very well with current web startups trend I think. The idea is simple.Instead of trying to create 100% perfect product, website, blog post or whatever it is and then “launch it” as widely as possible sometimes it’s better to create some alpha version with minimum functionality and then cooperate with first customers, visitors, readers in order to get a better understanding of what market really needs and provide a solution. Instead of wasting time to create dozens of useless features.

4. Customer support instead of traditional mass-marketing
   

   Word-of-mouth was always the first priority in marketing world. But the most effective ways to get it are getting different now. Often it is easier to get a positive feedbacks and publicity by direct open dialog with your customers. Even, with the most irritated ones that currently hate your brand and deliver according message all over. Especially, with them.

5. Organizing communities instead of being a middle-man
   

   As Internet and Google makes it easier to find almost any information and any person middle-men have less chances to succeed  by having access to limited knowledge or connections. Instead, another model becomes highly potential. And this is finding communities that already exist or have a high potential of forming around products, services, companies, problems, interests or places and trying to create something that would bring a better level of organization to these communities.

For insights into specific industries: restaurants, insurance and even government I’d suggest you read a book.

If you aren’t sure if it’s quite your thing it might be a good idea to watch Jeff Jarvis’ presentation @ fora.tv:

And if you finally decided to give it a try, you might want to download audio-book torrent, buy audio-book or buy a paper version it on Amazon.

As my post follows the above-mentioned philosophy and is “half-baked” I would love to hear any corrections or additions from your side!

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What I recently read:

1. Economics of Happiness by Mark Anielski

Quite an interesting book which summarizes ideas of economics of happiness (happynomics), sustainable development, ecological footprint and others. Sometimes it’s a little bit ideological: anti-consumerism, anti-credit, anti-FED, etc. But still there are lots, lots of interesting and familiar ideas. Both on individual level and on the level of world economy and national economy. I personally read it because it’s closely connected with my area of interest in terms of Ph.D. paper. But I’m sure it’s worth reading even if you did not have a particular interest in these specific topics. Overall, it’s an insightful book with fresh ideas.

2. Man’s search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, torrent.

Appeared to be much more of a non-fiction type than fiction compared to what I expected. Less of a personal story of Auschwitz and more of a scientific paper and a quick look on the 20th century history of psychotherapy. From Freud’s “will to pleasure” to the “will to power” and then to Frankl’s logotheraphy and “will to meaning”. If you’re into psychology or in the current search for meaning in your own life, I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this one, it’s a classic.

Currently reading: What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis (torrent), Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson and Crack the Case by David Orkhall. Another one that I still cannot finish is awesome On Writing Well by William K. Zinsser.

Did you read anything worthy recently? Care to share?

BTW! Question from twitter: how are you searching for books (both, audio and ebooks) if neither isohunt.com nor ebdb.net helps?

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In 2 recent months I’ve listened to few audio books on my iPhone and written short and subjective reviews to them. So if you are interested:

1. Making It All Work by David Allen – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – audio.

This is the sequel of the widely known Getting Things Done.

GTD is not just a time management system (what a nonsensical term it actually is…), but more of a comprehensive philosophical approach to life. The goal of implementation is so called state of water – the state of consciousness when there is no tension, stress or anxiety about forgetting to do something, calm state that is characterized by 100% readiness to action. To achieve this state, realize one’s full potential and achieve the highest level of productivity David suggest the certain set of habits worth having. Of course, there is a place for high level planning (vision, purpose, long-term goals, etc) in the book as well. However, with the minimum of bull-shit and a maximum of down-to-earth advice.

As it usually is with books selling a specific system, there is a terminology and algorithms attached. But it’s secondary. David presents quite interesting approach, which favors clear sorting of all the thoughts, worries and concerns in one’s head in order to enjoy life more while moving towards one’s goals at the same time.

Books itself contains quite a lot of self-PR in the beginning: stories of the successful implementation and so on. But in some way it’s even good, because let’s a reader to believe in the potential of system more and therefore raises chances to succeed with it.

The main part is quite interesting, despite the fact that it repeats the first book a lot. But, this repeating doesn’t usually bother, because it clarifies many details, gives tricks on how to apply some ideas in practice and just reminds of something that was already forgotten. Some pieces of advice I found really great even if there are isolated from the GTD context itself, such as “pay attention to what has your attention” for example. To sum up, if you’re interested in the topic, book is worth reading.

2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – text, torrent – audio.

Tipping Point is defined by Gladwell as the moment when drastic changes become inevitable. Author thinks about and tries to answer the question of the conditions that are needed in order for “tipping point” to be reached and for world to be changed significantly. In a meanwhile he tells a lot intriguing anecdotes and quotes the results of various social science researches.

Gladwell presents details of the fight against crime in New York city, analysis of the shoe brands transfer from underground to mainstream, secrets of the people with above-the-average persuasion skills, the laws of starting ideas epidemics and many other topics.

Generally speaking, I think that books like these should be read specifically because of the stories because it’s impossible to develop a mathematically precise theory in the field of psychology and sociology. No matter how hard author tries laws will still be quite blurred and exceptions will prevail. Summing up, Tipping Point is quite educating and entertaining at the same time.

3. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki – 8/10

Amazon, torrent – audio.

This one is very similar to the Tipping Point. Overall, I have a feeling that there is a trend of growing interest in popular science books that interpret results of social researches and try to make conclusions that are applicable in business, management and life in general. In this particular case author focused on the way groups of people make decisions, when these decisions are good when they aren’t. Well, from this description you might get an impression that the book is rather boring, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. As in the previous one, stories are the most interesting part here, no all of them, but many are rather educating and simply interesting to listen to.

Few examples of topics, covered by the book:

• peculiarities of the stock exchange dynamics: why it’s so difficult to predict stock prices, what is needed for the optimal performance of the market, how spreading of information affects people’s decisions to buy and sell and and their expectations;
• urban traffic, methods to fight traffic jams, application of the free market laws to the issues;
• various psychological experiments that prove the point that we’re as rational and egoistic (sic!) as think at all;
• dependency of the productivity and efficiency of large corporations and intelligence agencies on the degree of their centralization, etc;

4. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Peal – 5/10

Torrent – audio.

Very short book, takes only half an hour to read. Of course, this is the classics of positive thinking. And it presents right ideas. But today they look too hackneyed and boring. Not to mention religious themes that simply seem to be out of place and inappropriate. Could be of some value for those who have lived in a cave recently not heard anything about positive thinking.

How about you, have you read anything interesting recently that you would recommend?

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