Research has found that 50 percent of happiness comes from our genes, while 40 percent comes from our daily thoughts and actions. That leaves only 10 percent from our actual life circumstances.Having more doesn’t mean you’ll be happier. There will always be someone with more of what you want, and that person isn’t necessarily happy.Instead of ruminating about how this or that could be better, practice thankfulness. Remember to be grateful for what you have as you travel your own journey.

Happiness is largely a choice

You act only based on all the information you have at the time. But sometimes, circumstances change so that when you look back, it seems like you should have made a different decision.Stop being so hard on yourself. Based on your current situation at the time, you picked the best choice amongst others. Even today, you don’t know what the future holds in store and you’ll likely make choices depending on what your situation is like right now.

Hindsight is 20/20

People like to time travel in their heads. When we were kids, we would wish that we were grown-ups already. And when we become adults? Well, you know the answer.Time travel happens all throughout our lives. When people are bored at work, they think about sitting at home watching TV. When they watch TV at home, they worry about work.We end up wishing we had savored more of our time as it was. So instead, we should focus our time on being, rather than wishing. Take a moment right now, and enjoy the moment you are in.

 Embrace the present

We want everything — it’s human nature. We want money, recognition, fun, and good relationships. The problem is that there’s only so much time in the day and sacrifices are made.If you look back and think that you should have had more fun, that’s probably because you said “no” to fun and “yes” to money. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about what would happen if you had chosen to have more fun and worked less.

Saying “yes” to one thing means saying “no” to others

At one period in your life, you might focus on building a career. Then, your priority shifts to spending time with your family.Wanting your past self to have spent time doing something else means placing your present set of values on your former self, which doesn’t make sense.Our values evolve as we age. Even now, you might be spending time on a goal that your future self would think differently about. That’s okay. What’s important is that your values in that time align with the activities that you’re pursuing.

People have different priorities at different stages of life

Things could have taken a turn for the worse. It’s impossible to really know what our alternative realities are, for better or worse. So, we have to make do with what’s in front of us and act based on what we know.

Things could have turned out much, much worse

<ul><li>It’s sad to hear about people who go through traumatic incidents and later on blame themselves for something that wasn’t their fault. Maybe someone couldn’t rescue a loved one or lost an opportunity for personal growth.</li><li>Often, people blame themselves when they look back at what they lost. At the same time, they remove from their memories the fact that they really didn’t have a choice at the time.</li></ul>Don’t tear yourself up. Why not recognize that you did what you thought was right at the time?

Many events are outside of your control

Regrets are a byproduct of living, experiencing, and going through the ups and downs of life. No matter your decision, there are always going to be other options that you subsequently turned down.Instead of letting those feelings of regret weigh you down, use them to your advantage. Reflect on why you feel remorse over something you did or didn’t do. Is there a way you can take those experiences and turn them into lessons for the future?Looking into your past and re-experiencing those emotions leads to stagnation. But using the past as a guide on how to make better decisions in the future? Now<warningtag> that’s an opportunity for growth.</warningtag>

Move forward: Turn regrets into opportunities

How to deal with regrets, in order to move forward in life

Out of nowhere, you have a flashback to a crossroads moment. You think back to that point when you had a decision to make. Do you go or do you stay? Do you pick this option or that option?

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

mindfulness

Mindfulness

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

7 Ways to Move Forward and Be Happy, Even If You Have a Painful Past

Move Forward and Be Happy, Even If You Have a Painful Past

Marinating is the process of soaking meats in a seasoned liquid before cooking. It's an easy way to add flavour and moisture and make everyday food taste a little bolder. When you know the fundamentals of marinating, you can skip the store-bought marinades and make your own with ingredients that you have in your pantry.

Marinade for a fabulous taste

Marinades often use an acid such as vinegar or citrus juice or an enzyme such as mango, papaya, or kiwi fruit to enhance flavours and change the surface texture of the meat. The marinade causes the meat's tissue to weaken on the surface and should be used for short periods of time, otherwise the meat will become mushy, tough, and dry. Marinade works well with thinner, flat cuts or pieces of meat that have been cut into cubes or slices.

What's in a marinade

When you make a marinade, such as using ginger, honey, and soy sauce, the ginger and honey will remain on the outside of the meat, but the salt in the soy sauce will penetrate a bit deeper into the meat. Salt draws out the liquid from the meat by osmosis, then the brine is reabsorbed into the meat while breaking down the muscle structure. The oils are used to transfer fat-soluble flavors from the seasonings like herbs, chillis, and spices onto the surface of the meat.

Flavoring the surface

Fat: Use olive oil, sesame oil, yoghurt, buttermilk, tahini or mayonnaise.Salt: Use miso, pickle juice, sea salt, soy sauce, or fish sauce.Acid: Use citrus juice, pickle juice, balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar, hot sauce, and buttermilk.Enzymes: Papaya or papain (a common meat tenderizer) can be used.Seasonings: Add chilli powder, adobo seasoning, peppercorns, ginger, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, curry paste, tamarind paste, and mustards.Herbs: Thyme, chives, basil, marjoram, tarragon, dill, lovage, oregano, parsley, or mint.Sugar: Ketchup, honey, agave, <a href="https://www.jessicagavin.com/sweet-spicy-barbecue-sauce/">barbecue sauce</a>, molasses

Basic ingredients in a marinade

<ul><li>Time: Marinating some food too long can result in tough, dry, or poor texture.</li><li>Adding acid: Too much acid in a marinade can dry out and toughen chicken or meat, so finding the right oil/sugar/acid/salt balance is critical.</li><li>Sugar: Marinades containing sweeteners like sugar, agave, honey or molasses will burn quicker.</li><li>Marinate in the refrigerator to minimize bacterial growth.</li><li>Don't reuse a marinade that has come into contact with uncooked meat.</li><li>Use non-reactive materials: Acid in marinades can react with some metals and pottery glazes</li></ul>

Things to keep in mind with marinating

Meats could be marinated in the refrigerator for 30 minutes to overnight. <ul><li>Fish and shellfish should marinate for only 30 minutes to an hour.</li><li>Chicken can be marinated for two hours, but poultry can marinate for up to two days in the refrigerator.</li><li>Beef and Pork can marinate for up to 24 hours. However, a marinade can ruin better quality steaks.</li><li>Tofu can be marinated for up to 24 hours.</li><li>Soft vegetables should only be marinated for up to 10 minutes.</li><li>Firm vegetables like potatoes or carrots can marinate for up to 30 minutes.</li></ul>

How long to marinate foods

<ul><li>Grill: A perfect way to cook up some kabobs or flank steak is to slice up thin and enjoy in tacos. Using a skewer is a wonderful way to grill marinated meat efficiently.</li><li>Broil: Try some garlic, parsley, olive oil, and lemon zest marinated shrimp which cook up fast under the direct heat of the broiler.</li><li>Bake: Try a yoghurt, turmeric, garlic, and garam masala mixture slathered over chicken breast pieces.</li><li>Roast: Pork roast might taste great in a marinade of apple cider vinegar, coriander, honey, and garlic.</li></ul>

Best ways to cook marinated foods

A guide to marinating and how the culinary process works. If done properly food will taste more flavorful on the surface and inside.

food

Food

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Marinating: A Guide to How it Works and What it Does

To be successful in many careers, it's not enough to be right. You have to be right and think differently (e.g. scientists, investors).Independent mindedness is the art of being right when everyone else is wrong.

Think Different, Think Unique, Be Right When Others Are Wrong

<ul><li>Contrarian nature.</li><li>Display an amusement in denying conventional wisdom.</li><li>Relentless fact-checking.</li><li>Have a desire to determine the truth.</li><li>Curiosity.</li><li>Novel ideas that drive progress.</li></ul>These characteristics need not be possessed in equal measure. Also, don't hold an extreme belief in any specific truth. Believing conspiracies is worse than being convinced by orthodox beliefs.

Characteristics of Independent-Minded People 

Conventionally minded people may be unwilling to admit or even unaware that they are conventionally-minded.How to develop independent mindedness:<ul><li>Develop relationships with independently-minded individuals</li><li>Attempt to empathize with diverse individuals.</li><li>Be generally skeptical or untrusting of conventional wisdoms.</li><li>Avoid fads.</li></ul>

What To Do If You Don't Possess An Independent Mindset

productivity

Productivity

philosophy

Philosophy

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How to Think for Yourself

A call for shorter workweeks and condensed hours has been gaining traction around the globe, with companies and entire governments alike already exploring this alternative.
It’s necessary to shake up the structure of when we work. The 9-to-5, 40-hour workweek that emerged during the Industrial Revolution – the last time work changed so dramatically – is no longer sustainable due to the increasing pace of work necessitated by video conferencing software and continued online presence.

Shorter Workweeks

<ul>
<li>It will be a challenge in 2022 to navigate the gulf between those who can take advantage of flexibility versus those who can’t – especially as calls for increased flexibility and shorter hours only get louder. </li>
<li>The labour shortages and hiring difficulties of 2021 will follow us into 2022. That’s because the factors that drove these shortages will still be here – a pandemic, retirees and parents staying home and growing customer demand businesses must keep up with. This means employers may need to take a different tack for hiring workers – and keeping them in seat – than they did in the past.</li>
</ul>

A New Divide

Job personalisation could be the key to worker satisfaction – and retention – this year. In 2022, we will see employers catering more to employees’ needs and desires in order to engage their current workers and attract top performers from other firms. It’s not only good business sense – flexibility and accommodation is becoming a perk workers expect from their employers. This imbalance in worker demand and supply means employees and job seekers have elevated power to ask for more.
Another important personalisation could be prioritising a worker’s individual mental health. After all, amid burnout, more workers are saying enough is enough, and quitting their jobs ([or at least thinking about quitting). Even bastions of hustle culture such as Wall Street are getting in on the act and introducing sabbaticals.

A Job Tailored For Us

Even as rent stays sky-high in practically deserted city centres, companies still want workers utilising those buildings, especially as hybrid work will likely dominate 2022. It’s impossible to shrink the office footprint even after all the ways our working lives have been destabilised the past two years.

A Hybrid 2022

Despite all our best predictions, we don’t know what we don’t know.Many analysts were predicting a return-to-office movement by summer 2021, as vaccines became more widely available – but that target continued to move. Variants like delta protracted public health concerns and remote work didn’t end. Zoom meetings remained the daily standard for millions of workers around the globe.

The Unknowns We Don't Know

It’s hard to know exactly what to expect from work in 2022, especially with recent developments. Experts predict what we may be up against.

career

Career

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

Is finding a 'new normal' in the workplace impossible?

It would be easy to ascribe these tendencies to a simple quirk of evolution—a kind of mental tic encoded in our genes. But what if the cognitive biases we exhibit when making choices are not limited to us? What if these biases are basic emergent properties of any system forced to make decisions with limited mental resources?
In order to get inside the “black box” of humanity’s irrationality when deciding between many options, researchers created a simplified mathematical model of how a machine—an “automaton”—would make choices.

Making Decisions

Automatons are decision-making algorithms expressed mathematically rather than in code. These automatons commit the same “mistakes” that humans do when making decisions. An automaton may exhibit a “primacy” effect, in which it tends to pick one of the first items on a list. An automaton may also exhibit a “recency” effect, in which it goes for the last item on a list.
The ability of automatons to mimic human behavior, and the fact that they are built from mathematical first principles, means automatons can be used to formally analyze the fundamental tradeoffs that we face when making choices.

Automatons

When decision-makers are satisficing, it is not hard to see why they would be more likely to choose an item that appears earlier on a list, because they stop as soon as they find one that meets their pre-existing criteria, and might not even look at every item in a list. 
Contrast this strategy with rational decision making, which is a standard assumption in many economic models. It turns out that making a decision “rationally”—which in economics terms means analyzing every possible option—requires a great deal of cognitive horsepower.

Rational Or Irrational Decisions

Humans are neither perfectly rational decision-makers nor strict satisficers, no matter how Spock-like or impulsive any individual may seem.
A history-dependent satisficer automaton has some ability to remember what options it has seen before and to modify its criteria accordingly. The more memory this automaton possesses, the closer it gets to the choices yielded by rational decision making. The more states the automaton has, the better a decision it can make.

History-Dependent Satisficer

The effects that researchers derive using mathematical analysis show up everywhere in the real world. Humans are more likely to vote for candidates who appear first on a ballot, more likely to click on options at the top of their computer screen, and more likely to give high scores to competitors who appear first and last in a competition.
There was even a lawsuit in the 1980s in which the federal government forced American Airlines to stop putting its own flights above those of its competitors in American’s computer reservation system.

The First Option On The List

Psychologists and behavioral economists have established that humans exhibit a number of fairly predictable biases in their decision making. For example, when offered a menu, people generally choose one of the first items on it or the very last item.

Why humans can’t seem to make the “right” choices

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Decisions, Decisions

Most of us don't know - or even fear - quiet. A ritual of practising meditative silence is where you abstain from speaking for a set period each day.
Learning to be silent forces you to collect your thoughts, train your mind and helps you decide how you want to proceed into the day. It can bring inner peace and make you a better listener.

The power of silence

The rule is to keep complete silence for 60- minutes with no outside distractions. Keep a pen and journal at hand and a book you've meant to read for a while. Break the hour up into three segments: <ol><li>The first 30 minutes: Goal setting</li><li>The next 20 minutes: Learning and Growth</li><li>The last 10 minutes: Mindfulness</li></ol>

The Sphere of Silence

Break the first 30 minutes of complete silence up into 10-minute sets: <ul><li>The first 10 minutes is spent in writing your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals.</li><li>Dedicate the next 10 minutes to assessing your progress on the goals of the previous day.</li><li>Use the last ten minutes to note unmet goals and consider why you have not met them.</li></ul>

Goal Setting

During the second part of complete silence, start reading a book that teaches you new things or improves you. <ul><li>Spend the first 10 minutes reading a chapter of your book.</li><li>Use the next 10 minutes to write down a summary of what you've just read.</li></ul> Reading this way will allow for deeper thought and analysis and increase your short-term memory.

Learning and Growth

The last 10 minutes of silence is a grounding process. Use it for self-reflection. The objective is to be present and pay attention to your emotions and what those feelings mean to you. This allows you to mindfully choose to stay out of negativity.

Try this exercise the first hour of your day.

health

Health

habits

Habits

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Silence

For decades, scientists have investigated intelligent and less intelligent behaviour. Many definitions of intelligence, sometimes even contradicting each other, have emerged as a result.
Despite the differing views among scientists, we do know that intelligence affects life outcomes. In education, several programmes have aimed at increasing intelligence among students with disappointing results.

Conflicting definitions of intelligence

The fundamental question is if one can teach intelligence. If we view intelligence as using some basic cognitive abilities for efficient information processing, it is probably impossible. 
Other definitions of intelligence include problem-solving and decision-making, planning, strategic exploration, testing hypothesis and correcting them.

Teaching intelligence

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has given high priority to a broadened understanding of intelligence and found that problem-solving skills broader than the traditional conception of intelligence are markedly different from the traditional proficiency in maths, science and reading.
Looking at the broader implications of this on the existing education systems, teaching and instruction should focus more on cognitive flexibility, problem-solving and aspects of intelligence that are amenable to change.

A broadened view of intelligence

<ul>
<li>Teaching students strategies to increase self-monitoring and evaluation when problem-solving.</li>
<li>Using teaching methods that help with a deeper understanding of the structure that underpins new problems.</li>
</ul>
The methods boil down to providing students with as many active problem-solving learning opportunities as possible.

Ways to improve intelligence in the classroom

As our definitions of what intelligence is change, it might become possible to teach it.

education

Learning & Education

Can we teach intelligence?

Before making a decision, considers how you’ll feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.It’s easy to make short-term decisions that may be beneficial 10 minutes or 10 months from now, but these types of decisions usually don’t benefit us in the long-term. What’s harder is to make decisions that may not appear attractive or impactful in the short-term, but over time can have a positive impact in your life.

10/10/10 Rule

In anything we do, there’s always ~20% of activities that will deliver 80% of our desired results.It’s easy to be wrapped up in ‘busy’ work without ever getting anything done. Pareto’s Law is a useful mental model to be more effective, rather than just be efficient.

Pareto’s Law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So try placing artificial time limitations.If we’re given three hours to complete a task that normally would take an hour, we’ll find a way to fill those three hours. However, when we’re down to the final thirty minutes, we’re suddenly feeling the pressure to get things done.

Parkinson’s Law

Every one of us make dozens, if not hundreds of small to big decisions on a daily basis. Some don't impact our lives at all, while some can change the outcome of our entire lives. Love tech? You should go to TNW2019 Find out why See more Whether it's trying to figure out which job ...

timemanagement

Time Management

The Science Behind Smarter Decision Making: 7 Mental Models To Know

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) believed that in order to practice philosophy, you have to doubt everything.
His belief in thinking for oneself is noticed throughout his pseudonymous works. In writing under aliases, he lessened the sense that an authority wrote the books.

Doubt is necessary for philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard was influenced by Socrates, who thought that his task was not to discover the truth and then communicate it to his students, but to open the question to the pupils and ensure they stay open.
The last thing you should do is turn to an authority to tell you what you should think. You have to do that for yourself.

You  have to think for yourself

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

communication

Communication

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

Want to think for yourself? Start with an agonising state of doubt, says Kierkegaard

Successful people give up all the time. If something is not working, smart people don’t repeat it endlessly. They revise. They adjust. They quit. 
Just like the saying goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Telling someone to never give up is terrible advice

<ol>
<li>Failure of Tactics - the HOW mistakes: failure to execute on a good plan and a clear vision. </li>
<li>Failure of Strategy - the WHAT mistakes: when you follow a strategy that fails to deliver the results you want. </li>
<li>Failure of Vision - the WHY mistakes: failing to understand why you do the things you do.</li>
</ol>

The 3 Stages of Failure

<ol>
<li>Record your process. </li>
<li>Measure your outcomes. </li>
<li>Review and adjust your tactics.</li>
</ol>

Fixing a Failure of Tactics

<ol>
<li>Launch it quickly. </li>
<li>Do it cheaply. </li>
<li>Revise it rapidly.</li>
</ol>

Fixing a Failure of Strategy

Many people prefer to go-with-the-flow and take life as it comes. In theory, that's just fine. 
But in practice, there is a problem: If you never decide on a vision for your life, you'll often find yourself living someone else's dream.

Taking life as it comes

These are WHO mistakes. They occur when society fails to provide equal opportunity for all people.
Failures of Opportunity are the result of many complex factors: age, race, gender, income, education, and more.

Failures of Opportunity

One of the hardest things in life is to know when to keep going and when to move on. On the one hand, perseverance and grit are key to achieving success in any field. Anyone who masters their craft will face moments of doubt and somehow find the inner resolve to keep going.

7 Ways to Move Forward and Be Happy, Even If You Have a Painful Past

Marinating: A Guide to How it Works and What it Does

How to Think for Yourself

Is finding a 'new normal' in the workplace impossible?

Decisions, Decisions

Bentley