BeeAyKay

In 1963, before Arpanet, the proto-internet, and way before the launch of Google, two men sent the first known long-distance computer query.

Research engineer Charles Bourne and computer programmer Leonard Chaitin forgot about their experiment for about three decades, not knowing what it would become.

Popular psychology can be described as trying to make psychological ideas accessible, palatable, and usable to the general public.

Pop psychology consists of three main genres.

1. Recent developments in scientific psychology. These works focus on mind, brain and behaviour.
2. Practical help with everyday challenges. It includes publications that aim to make us better leaders, lovers, parents, smarter, thinner, fitter, etc.
3. Help in overcoming mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety or other conditions. The genre seeks to reduce suffering and dysfunction.

Morbid curiosity is our fascination with ‘compelling awfulness’, like the footage of a plane crash, or a celebrity meltdown on camera.

People rubbernecking on a car crash site, for instance, cause further accidents just because the curious drivers cannot look away from the crash site and in front of their own vehicle.

The awareness of death is a powerful motivator, as evident in Buddhist, Samurai and Stoic teachings. Our days are numbered, and we must leave what is unimportant and focus on the essential.

However depressing it may sound, focusing on one’s death and considering oneself dead every day removes all distractions and time-wasting activities from our lives. It liberates us to move out of the fluffy cushion of life and get on to work, which is the best kind of motivation.

Many people have homegrown family businesses which they were supposed to do by default, even if they didn’t like it. When complaining, the answer was that it is work, and you are not supposed to like it.

Doing a job we dislike for a paycheck has been a common practice for centuries, so we don’t find anything wrong with it. But it is still absolutely wrong. We have to create a work process that energizes us and use our strengths into our work profile in such a way that the process becomes our own non-financial reward.

We seem to set goals around New Year's to re-evaluate where we are in life.

Statistics tell us that the vast majority of people will fail at their New Year's resolutions, but by choosing the right goals and creating a well-grounded plan, we will be able to keep on track.

• Failure is an opportunity to learn by transforming your failure into an opportunity to reflect and grow.
• Failure is the universe daring you to evolve.
• Failure fuels success.
• Failure exposes your weaknesses, but with self reflection, they can be turned into strengths.
• Failure forges greatness. You really can't know and understand success without first having failed.
• Failure reminds you why it's so important to pay it forward.

Factors to consider when choosing a new habit to track:

• Motivation: choose a habit you personally care about. If you pick a habit out of a sense of obligation, your motivation will fade.
• Regularity: find a habit you can track daily. Each habit repetition enforces it as a behavior and strengthens the pathways in your brain related to it. 
• Achievability: choose something achievable so you’ll feel that if you put the effort you can do it. 

Hope is a positive cognitive state based on determination and planning to meet a goal successfully. It consists of three things:

• Goals thinking : the ability to create goals.
• Pathways thinking : the capacity to plan specific strategies to reach those goals.
• Agency thinking : the ability to stay motivated for using those strategies.

According to psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is in the context of doing (the capacity to achieve goals), not in the realm of being.

Logic dictates that whoever is good at a particular household chore is to do the same, for maximum efficiency. This is known as Division Of Labour in simple economics.

If household chores are done by the one who is able to do them well, then one person ends up doing almost everything.