Comedy and laughter are remarkably tricky to explain. As evidence of this, I'll point to the fact that there are more than 13 different theories of humor (each described at the bottom of this post). If you examine them, I think you’ll agree that while each captures relevant aspects of humor, none satisfactorily describes humor in all its forms.
Part of what makes comedy so hard to describe is that it has such variety. While the boundaries between different types of humor are fuzzy, I think y...
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communication
How Do You Increase The Productivity Of A Team You Are On Or That You Lead? A Simple Framework
We can think about "productivity" in terms of how much value a team creates (according to any particular measure of value) on average each month.
With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to b...
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Eschew Obscure Words
Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like "nonplused", "loquacious" and "limerance" spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don't consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books or articles. Unfortunately, obscure words have a tendency to interfere with communication.
Sometim...
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