Eat, Pray, Love is not the sort of book that I’m likely to pick up despite its tremendous success. Nevertheless, this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, its author, is an excellent rumination and reflection on choosing the most effective emotional relationship between creativity and work. In a nutshell, the Greeks had it right in their [...]
Tagged creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert, TEDBrain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Medina, John John Medina is a molecular biologist bent on sharing how what we know about the brain can help us be more effective in the world at large. His central argument is that there are simple, but very important, lessons to [...]
Tagged brain, curiosityWhat a great way to start off a St. Patrick’s Day. This is certainly worth 20 minutes of your life. As someone inclined to spend entirely too much of my time inside the left-hemisphere of my brain, I found this especially affecting. Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity [...]
Espen reminded me of the following passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderfully succinct description of the scientific method and its power to protect us from the risks of wishful thinking when problems call for discipline. We used to use this passage as a piece of our basic training [...]
I finally got around to taking a peek at this video of Clay Shirky’s presentation at the Supernova 2007 conference in June. It’s relatively short and Shirky is a good speaker. Like Jimmy Guterman, I was particularly taken with Shirky’s observation on AT&T’s reaction to a particular proposal: “They didn’t care that they’d seen it [...]
There’s in interesting essay in the most recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine on the importance of understanding whether you are working on a puzzle or a mystery written by Gregory Treverton, who is the Director of RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security. There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each [...]
While I wouldn't be so bold as to label it a “definitive collection,” it is nonetheless very rich. The techniques I am familiar with are very effective and effectively described, which gives me confidence that those new to me are worth investigating as well. The definitive collection of idea generation methods. Martin Leith gifts us [...]
A nice reminder from Jack Vinson about an excellent resource on ways to poke on complex systems that are more likely to be effective than our typical efforts. I’ve pointed to this before in several incarnations (here and here). We’ve certainly seen more than our share recently of ineffective ways to intervene. Perhaps we can [...]
Bob Frankston has had several recent posts illuminating the long-term strategic blindness of competitors pursuing doomed approaches to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The short and sweet version: DRM vs the Bathroom. For those who found my recent DRM post too complicated I’ll put it more simply. There are those who believe that I must not [...]
An interesting reminder for the morning. It is curious that we generally devote so little time to this in both our education and our work practices. Think how often the organizational and educational systems we are embedded in convey the implicit assumption that someone else has already defined the problem correctly and that our only [...]
