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My French grandmother came to the US to escape the Nazis. Although she had made a life for herself in America, she never stopped seeming sad to me, and her sadness never stopped unnerving me. What did a box of letters and photographs reveal about the sacrifice she made?
Long emails and dense, difficult to decipher memos mean modern office communication goes ignored more often than it’s understood. Beneath these brutal realities, getting busy co-workers and bosses to take action means changing eight things about the way we communicate.
Physical activity boosts short-term brain function and heightens awareness. And even on days they don’t train — which rules out fatigue as a factor — those who habitually push their bodies tend to confront daily stressors with a stoic demeanor.
The two qualities sound like opposites, but they can go hand in hand. Narcissists believe they’re special and superior; humble leaders know they’re fallible and flawed. Humble narcissists bring the best of both worlds: they have bold visions, but they’re also willing to acknowledge their weaknesses and learn from their mistakes.
Work spaces today come with strong smells, harsh light, lots of chatter, and constant messages on email or Slack. For neurodivergent people, this can be a big ask.
One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that’s packed with meaning: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
The process starts with understanding that stress is caused not by other people or external events, but by your reactions to them. In the workplace, many people blame their high anxiety levels on a boss, job, deadlines, or competing commitments for their time. But peers who face the same challenges do so without stress.
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.
E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self. “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
Identify the problem. State what needs to happen. Offer to help. Simple, right? If we want to learn, we need to tolerate the feeling of inauthenticity long enough to integrate the new way of being. Long enough for the new way of being to feel natural.
With the Feynman Technique, you learn by teaching someone else a topic in simple terms so you can quickly pinpoint the holes in your knowledge. After four steps, you’re able to understand concepts more deeply and better retain the information.
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
The more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a startling sense. You might not be a virtuoso, but you have remarkable music abilities. You just don’t know about them yet.
Remente is a system of tools and insights to help you lead a richer, happier and healthier life, based on how the brain works and performs. Maintain focus and direction while managing stress and work-life balance, all in one app. Tasks, routines, goals and habits in one place.
In a fascinating look at language, Professor George Lakoff lays out how political parties can sway supporters with tiny tweaks in word choice. When trying to get your point across, refrain from using the other side’s language. Doing so will activate and strengthen their frames and undermine your own views.
The Horvath clock is extremely accurate at predicting how old you are and can even predict when you’ll die. The clock itself is part of the aging mechanism, hence physically being able to dial back the hands of the clock could mean becoming physically younger.
Humans generate far more actionable information than is encoded in all of our combined genetic material, and we carry much of it into the future. The data outside of our biological selves—call it the dataome—could actually represent the grander scaffolding for complex life.
Most people think negotiating well is just looking the other person in the eye, appearing confident, and asking for tons of money. But being a good negotiator is a lot more subtle than that.
In his new book, Jon Mooallem tells the story of the Great Alaska Earthquake and Genie Chance, the woman whose voice on the radio held everyone together. It’s a beautiful exploration of how people tell stories on the radio, on stage, in books, and generally to each other.
It’s good to sleep on it when there are tough choices to make, but you also need a strategy once you wake up–which is why you should employ the 10/10/10 rule. How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?
There are many potential answers but all are derivative of the same goal: communicating empathy and offering assistance, empathizing with what a person is going through, understanding what a person might need from you, and knowing how to phrase sentiments the right way.
Vonn is a three-time Olympic medalist with 82 World Cup golds, an internationally renowned comeback artist, and one of the most dominant American athletes of a generation. She is also no longer skiing. So what will she do next?
Your super liberal and super conservative relatives might all have one thing in common. Radicals can’t question their own ideas the same way more moderate individuals can.
There’s plenty of advice out there on how to stop spending so much time in meetings or make better use of the time, but does it hold up in reality? Can you really make meetings more effective and regain control of your calendar?
Start your habit by reading, say, five pages of a book that interests you every day. Once you’re hitting five pages a day, try ten, then twenty, and keep pushing your goal horizon upward. Focusing on your own interests is key.
“Any time you can avoid getting on a plane, getting in a car or eating animal products, that’s a substantial climate savings.” Many people trying to avoid the coronavirus are already two-thirds of the way there.
Presence means becoming aware of a physical and psychic self that is temporally extended. To be self-conscious is to recognize oneself as something that persists through time and is embodied.
Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorize. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.
Why do people in the prime of their lives seem to be preparing for their demise? The answers vary widely, from eminently practical concerns, such as crushing debt and climate change, to social factors, like wellness culture, diverse spiritual practices, and the desire of some millennials to “curate their afterlives.”
Ryan Gunderson survived what many might consider the worst job in professional sports: playing for the Washington Generals. He was the team captain and starting point guard for a team whose sole existence is to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters.
I went in search of outsiders who were thriving in communities where acceptance is hard to come by. It turns out, we might all learn from their approach to life.
An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly.
Operation Match was a computer dating service started at Harvard in 1965 by two undergraduates, that paired students together for dates for $3 a pop. Students filled in questionnaires which were processed by an IBM 1401 before receiving the names and telephone numbers of their matches in the post.
A dizzying array of variables affects a portfolio of debt’s true potential — the age of the debt, how many agencies have tried to collect on it, the size of the balances, the type of credit card, where the debtors live and the current economic climate.
I was biking home when you barreled into me with your car and left me to die. And I would have died if Tim Gillach, a cyclist and insurance salesman from Colorado’s Front Range, hadn’t caught a fleeting glimpse of my face as he drove past.
In America almost 40m people—one eighth of its population—live in poverty. Why does the richest big country in the world still have so many people living in profound need?
