It's fascinating how, with a slight adjustment to our focus and perspective, we can enjoy a positive moment more, which means more enjoyment in our lives at essentially no cost (other than the effort of learning and practice). In other words, we can derive more enjoyment from positive experiences without changing anything about our lives. While it’s of course also often beneficial to make actual changes to our lives, I think most people underestimate how much we can enhance our lives through su...
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Alternatives To Circling For Facilitating Group Connections
Circling, for anyone who hasn't tried it, is an unusual kind of "authentic relating" group activity that can help people better understand each other and themselves. Thinking about it got me wondering - what other similar activities can a group do together that can accomplish different results (that might have their own unique strengths and weaknesses)? Here's my brainstormed list of Circling alternatives.
I'll start with Circling itself, for those who are not familiar. Note: if you plan to ...
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Personality traits as continuous spectrums
Nearly all human traits lie on continuums. Even many multi-trait conditions can be viewed as having distinct traits that each lie at one end of a spectrum. There are a number of cases where we only have a word for one side of a psychological spectrum, and we lack a word for what you'd be like if you inverted all the most common traits of a condition. Here's an attempt to give names to these opposites:
[Note: I've updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I firs...
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How do we predict high levels of success?
Below, I outline 13 approaches to predicting high levels of success with differing levels of complexity, including my own mega model at the bottom.
Note: here, I use the term "success" merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want "success" in the sense in...
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Eight ways you can get more enjoyment from the same activity
A. FOCUS
1. Attention: focus on every detail of the experience much more intently than normal.
Ex: with each bite, notice as much as you can about the flavor and texture
Ex: try to hear every distinct instrument in the music as it comes in and fades out
2. Savoring: try to extend and enhance enjoyable moments by using "metacognition" - become aware of how much you're enjoying the thing and how great you feel it is, even as you're experiencing it.
Ex: rem...
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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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The formula for productivity – and what you can do with it
Written: January 23, 2019 | Released: September 16, 2021
There is a simple formula for thinking about how to be more productive that most people aren't familiar with. It breaks down productivity into the product of three factors, namely:
PRODUCTIVITY = TIME x EFFICIENCY x OBJECTIVE
More explicitly:PRODUCTIVITY(i.e., the total value - according to your own values - of your work each week on a goal of yours)= TIME(i.e., the total hours you work on the goal each week)x EFFICIENCY(i.e., th...
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A thought experiment about what you’d be truly capable of doing (if you had no choice)
Think of something you value that:A. multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but thatB. you assume you would not be capable of achieving, even thoughC. you have never actually tried to do this thing well before.
Now suppose, for a moment, that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X months. Here, X could be 1 if it's a very small thing, or X could be 100 if it's a much larger thin...
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