Fun Stuff Brought To Us By Mad Scientists
A recent study found that participants were performing better than usual in a creative task when they received electric stimulation of the brain.
The method is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS),
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David Rock. (2009). Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long.
This book gives very useful insights into how our brain works, and what we can do to make it work better.
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In this very short (2:21) animated video, Jonah Lehrer makes a case that criticism is an important driver of creativity:
If we want to come up with new and better ideas,
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Michael Ende. The Neverending Story.
Many of my German-speaking friends will have read this one, and would quite likely list it as one of their favorite childhood books.
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It turns out that making decisions is tiring and wears us out, more so than other (similarly difficult) mental tasks. At this point, a large body of research shows that whenever we make many choices in a row,
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There’s a great new online decision tool out: somethingpop.com, by Ben Gimpert.
It is very simple to use but built on a solid theoretical framework. The algorithms used by this online decision tool are based on the same principles that we also describe in our book (in Chapter 5).
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John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, & Howard Raiffa. (1996). Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.
It’s time to recommend another classic. This book is a short and very useful guide,
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This RSA talk by Dan Hurly is a bit slow (I recommend listening to it while doing something else, rather than watching), but I found the content excellent, well-researched and important.
(The actual talk starts at 1:30 and ends at 27min,
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We’ve all experienced it: we’re talking to somebody, and suddenly they are trying to solve our problems for us or give us unasked advice. Our first impulse? Shutting them down. Saying, “yes, but …”, and making clear that their idea is neither new nor helpful.
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Erica Olsen. Strategic planning kit for dummies.
If you’re a decision-maker in an organization and you’re serious about strategic planning, I highly recommend this book by Erica Olson as a very thorough but practical reference. It will give you more than you need,
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Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
This book offers very well-researched insights into how “choice architecture” can successfully nudge people toward making the best decisions for themselves,
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Daniel T. Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.
This is my pick for the season: an entertaining and well-researched book about our failures to predict what will make us happy or unhappy in the future, and about how these misconceptions affect our decisions.
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A conversation about procrastination with Joseph Rhinewine, PhD, from Portland Mindfulness Therapy:
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(Or: A real-life example of a creative resource allocation decision.)
If you’ve been in my office, you already know that it has a great view, but no waiting room, let alone one with a fancy coffee machine.
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What the research says about online coaching:
At this point, there is quite a bit of research on this question, for example showing that coaching over the phone or through online channels can be very effective,
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Merlin Mann is advocating a lean process to deal with our flood of emails and become more productive: http://inboxzero.com/video.
The talk itself is 1/2 hour (~2:30-32:30), the rest is intro and Q&A.
The basic idea is to keep your Inbox empty and not spend time re-reading and re-considering emails without responding.
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Chip and Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. New York: Crown Business.
I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers,
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Im my last post, where I discussed a free personality self-assessment, I promised to write more about self-assessments, in particular provide information about a test that is more geared towards career development.
Here is a website that offers several free career-oriented self-assessments and a neat way to explore information about hundreds of occupations: http://www.cacareerzone.org.
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My clients sometimes ask me if I could do a personality assessment with them. Although I don’t think that’s usually necessary, I understand that learning more about our own personality, and how we compare to other people, can be fascinating and may inform our choices.
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