Although they're remarkable for a number of reasons, launching high into the air and detonating to produce spectacular, colored light patterns, there's more than just combustion occurring when it comes to fireworks. The explosions that occur, as well as their unique and vibrant colors, are driven by quantum transitions that occur all the way down at the level of atoms. This 4th of July, or any time when fireworks are set off, you should appreciate just how intricately nature needs to work in order to produce these luminous displays that entertain us so thoroughly.

Fireworks!

<ul><li>Since fireworks were first invented more than a millennium ago, three simple ingredients have been at the heart of them: sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate.</li><li>With all those ingredients mixed together, there's a lot of stored energy in the molecular bonds holding the different components together.</li><li>The more stable configuration that these atoms and molecules could be rearranged into, the more energy is released.</li></ul>

The Chemistry Of Fireworks

When that first energy release occurs, conventionally known as the lift charge, it has two important effectsThe lift charge imparts an impulse, causing an acceleration, to the remainder of the firework, which includes the other three components.This upwards acceleration needs to give your firework the right upwards velocity to get it to a safe height for the explosion, and the fuse needs to be timed appropriately to detonate at the peak launch height.

How Fireworks Work

When you apply enough energy to an atom or molecule, you can excite or even ionize the electrons that conventionally keep it electrically neutral. When those excited electrons then naturally cascade downward in the atom, molecule or ion, they emit photons, producing emission lines of a characteristic frequency. If they fall in the visible portion of the spectrum, the human eye is even capable of seeing them.

The Mystery Of Colours

What determines which emission lines an element or compound possesses? It’s simply the quantum mechanics of the spacing between the different energy levels inherent to the substance itself.As applied to fireworks, there are a great variety of elements and compounds that can be utilized to emit a wide variety of colours. Different compounds of Barium, Sodium, Copper and Strontium can produce colours covering a huge range of the visible spectrum, and the different compounds inserted in the fireworks’ stars are responsible for everything we see.

Enter Quantum Physics

From the explosions themselves to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics.

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Fireworks are only possible because of quantum physics

Judgment is the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to develop opinions and make decisions. Good judgment is vital in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Yet it is challenging to move from understanding what judgment is to knowing how to get it or recognise it.
Six components of good judgment can build and inform the judgments we make:
<ol>
<li>Learning</li>
<li>Trust</li>
<li>Experience</li>
<li>Detachment</li>
<li>Options</li>
<li>_Deliver_y</li>
</ol>

Judgment Is Key To Good Leadership

<ul>
<li>Leaders with good judgment tend to be good listeners and readers. They know what people mean and can recognise patterns that others do not.</li>
<li>They have a breadth of experiences and relationships that enable them to recognize parallels or analogies that others miss.</li>
<li>They can recognize their own emotions and biases and take them out of the equation.</li>
<li>They remain grounded in the real world.</li>
</ul>

Qualities of Leaders With Good Judgement

Leaders often rush into bad judgments because they are not sufficiently critical of what they hear and read. They filter out what they don't expect or want to hear. Leaders with good judgment:<ul><li>They give their undivided attention to everyone. They pick up on what's not said and interpret body language.</li><li>They elicit information that people might not otherwise volunteer.</li><li>They demand quality information they see and hear to prevent information overload. If they feel overwhelmed, they focus on the parts that discuss questions and issues.</li></ul>

Learning: Listen Attentively, Read Critically

When leaders approach a decision, they should draw on the skills and experiences of others as well as their own. <ul><li>CEOs and entrepreneurs should refrain from only bringing people on board who only echo and validate them. </li><li>Instead, leaders should pursue diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. </li><li>They should look for advisers with organisational and personal qualities and experiences to fill a void in themselves.</li></ul>

Trust: Seek Diversity, Not Validation

Leaders use their experience when making judgment calls. If they have previous experience, leaders can scope out areas to focus their energy and resources. However, if the experience is narrowly based, the familiarity can be dangerous. Leaders may fall into a rut, make judgments out of habit, or be overconfident. To improve, assess how well you draw on your own experience to make decisions. Go through important judgment calls to identify what went well and what didn't, then share your conclusions with a coach or colleagues who might have a different perspective of the same experience.

Experience: Make It Relevant but Not Narrow

It's vital to understand and address your own biases. Research shows that leaders often make cognitive biases such as anchoring, confirmation, risk aversion or excessive risk appetite. People with good judgment ensure they have processes in place to keep them aware of biases. To improve, encourage, understand, clarify, and accept different viewpoints, engage in role-playing and simulations, which force employees to consider different agendas and can provide a safe space for dissent.

Detachment: Identify, and Then Challenge, Biases

In making a decision, a leader is often expected to choose between at least two options. Smart leaders look beyond only two options. Other options almost always exist, such as doing nothing, delaying a decision until more information is available, or conducting a time-limited trial. To improve:<ul><li>Press for clarification on poorly presented information, and challenge people if you think important facts are missing. </li><li>Question the variables on which their arguments depend. </li><li>Use modelling, triangulation, and artificial intelligence.</li><li>Don’t be afraid to consider radical options. </li></ul>

Options: Question the Solution Set Offered

You can make all the right strategic choices but lose out if you don’t exercise judgment in how and by whom those choices will be executed. A leader with good judgment anticipates risks after a course has been determined and knows by whom those risks are best managed. When assessing a proposal:<ul><li>ensure that the experience of the people recommending the investment closely matches its context. </li><li>Engage in “premortem” discussions, where participants try to surface what might cause a proposal to fail.</li></ul>

Delivery: Factor in the Feasibility of Execution

Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership,” according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. He approached CEOs at a range of companies, from some of the world’s largest right down to start-ups, along with leaders in the professions: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors, scientists, priests, and diplomats. He asked them to share their observations of their own and other people’s exercise of judgment so that he could identify the skills and behaviors that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to discern patterns that others miss. As a result, he has identified six key elements that collectively constitute good judgment: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery. He describes these elements and offers suggestions for improvement in each one.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Elements of Good Judgment

Anxiety isn’t the same as stress, but they are related. <ul><li>Stress is a response to direct external stimuli that goes away when you tackle the problem. </li><li>But unlike stress, anxiety is impressively self-sufficient. It can happily exist all on its own, like a delicate snowflake of existential fear that won’t melt when the sun comes out.</li></ul>

The Workplace War: Work Anxiety Vs. Stress

Instead of trying to calm your way out of anxiety, reframe the feelings as excitement and convert performance-related anxiety into goal-busting arousal congruency—a fancy term for channeling that sense of adrenaline that comes from high-anxiety situations into a positive effort.The crucial part is to simply accept you are anxious. It’s easy to waste time and energy trying to fight anxiety on all fronts. So don’t do it.

Don’t Calm Down

Use your anxiety to access feelings of accomplishment. Tim Ferriss recommends going further to manage anxiety-induced low productivity. Set aside three hours to complete one small task, even if that means putting off other urgent tasks. Taking your time to get one thing off your plate is surely better than fumbling through three important tasks and completing none

Curb Analysis Paralysis

If you switch between tasks, seek distraction, and avoid addressing your goals, it could signal the beginnings of an anxiety episode. Closely monitor productivity fluctuations and you’ll essentially develop an early warning system for those anxious feelings. If you regularly beat yourself up for not doing enough then it’s very easy to miss your daily achievements. Remember that it’s not always about what you didn’t do.

Treat Your Productivity Like An Anxiety Barometer

How attached are you to your devices? Nomophobia is the fear of being without a connected device.The need to be constantly connected to information can skew priorities.  But your productivity should not depend on your ability to get online. In fact, by disconnecting, you remove a number of barriers to productivity. You can say goodbye to browser tab overload, for a start.

Go Off The Grid

If your anxiety spikes when you’re unclear of your goal, demanding high-quality feedback is important. Repeatedly trying to clarify action points can not only hamper productivity, it can make less assertive people feel burdensome to clients.

Ask For Feedback

56% of anxiety sufferers deal specifically with performance anxiety at work. Here are five proven theories to help you manage work anxiety in a productive way.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

career

Career

mentalhealth

Mental Health

humanresources

Human Resources

How To Channel Your Work Anxiety In A Productive Way

The fictional Lightsabers are technically laser beams, which have diverse usage at low watts, like scanning UPCs, mapping buildings, remote sensing of the ozone layer or carbon dioxide levels.
Industrial lasers can burn and cut as well but have bulky power supplies, unsuitable for a lightsaber fight.

The Lightsabers Of Star Wars

Lightsabers are shown to strike surfaces just like a real sword, but they are made of photons with no mass, so hitting something physical, or producing a sound when striking an object is only in the fictional realmCurrent technology can create a high-powered laser beam in the shape of a glowing rod made of plasma but it still would not have the practical usage, namely, the sword fights shown in the Star Wars series.

The Hit Effect

“You’d be surprised how many times I have been asked this one.”

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Are Lightsabers Theoretically Possible?

The illusion of transparency is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the degree to which their thoughts and emotions are apparent to others. For example, the illusion of transparency can cause people who feel nervous about public speaking to overestimate the degree to which their nervousness is noticed by the audience.

The illusion of transparency

People experience the illusion of transparency because they have a natural egocentric bias, which causes them to rely too heavily on their own perspective when trying to consider the perspective of others.Because you spend the vast majority of your time considering your thoughts and actions from your own perspective, it’s hard for you to adjust from the anchor of your own point of view when you attempt to imagine how others see you.

Why we experience the illusion of transparency

communication

Communication

Why You’re Not as Obvious as You Think You Are – Effectiviology

Decision fatigue is the deterioration of the quality of decisions people make after a long session of decision making.
This was coined by social psychologist Roy Baumeister who argues that making too many decisions eventually depletes our willpower to the point where we're unconcsiously making increasingly poor decisions.

Decision Fatigue

“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.”

<ol>
<li>Impaired ability to make trade-offs - this is an energy-consuming type of decision making and when we're faced with too many we end up mentally depleted</li>
<li>Impulse purchases - decisions regarding prices and promotions produce decision fatigue</li>
<li>Decision avoidance - when our mental energy reaches the point of complete depletion we will completely avoid making decisions</li>
</ol>

The Impact of Decision Fatigue

<ul>
<li>Reduce your number of daily decisions. Reserve your energy for important decisions and cut down on the unnecessary trivial ones.</li>
<li>Make decisions in advance.</li>
<li>Changes your mindset about willpower. Start believing that willpower is not limited because this kind of mindset keeps us in a box that restricts us from performing taxing tasks.</li>
</ul>

Dealing With Decision Fatigue

timemanagement

Time Management

Decision fatigue: how a burden of choices leads to irrational trade-offs

"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake".

... but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. If we understand what influences us, we might avoid certain traps and understand why others act like they do.
And if we learn and understand what works and doesn’t work and find some framework for reasoning, we will make better judgments.

We Can’t Eliminate Mistakes

“It is our brain, its anatomy, physiology and biochemistry and how these parts function that set the limits for how we think. But since our brain’s parts also interact with our body’s anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, we must see brain and body together. They are part of the same system – us.”

<ul><li>The theory behind evolution is that all individuals alive today have evolved from simpler, more primitive forms of life. </li><li>There is fossil, anatomical and molecular evidence of evolution.</li><li>The major mechanisms responsible for the evolution and for how our brain evolved are mutation (caused by a copying error in the sequence of A, C, G and T molecules when DNA is copied that may cause a change in a protein leading to a modification in the individual that inherits the gene) and natural selection.</li></ul>

Evolution

<ul>
<li>It relates to the practices, methods, tools, myths, ethics, and social norms that are important in the evolution of our behavior. Customs that we learn from the experience of our parents and others – either by teaching or observation.</li>
<li>Cultural evolution is faster than genetic evolution since it allows much of what we learn to be passed on and combined with what others around us have learned. Unlike biological evolution, cultural evolution is not inherited. We don’t inherit our parents’ habits. We learn from them.</li>
</ul>

Cultural Evolution

“There is always some background within which behavior makes sense. Behavior can’t be seen as rational or irrational independent of context. We are created with a series of emotions that are appropriate depending on circumstances. If we change context or environment, we change behavior.“

<ul><li>Bias from mere association seeing situations as identical because they seem similar.</li><li>Self-serving bias: Overly positive view of our abilities and future.</li><li>Confirmation bias: Looking for evidence that confirms our actions and beliefs.</li><li>Status quo bias and do-nothing syndrome: Keeping things the way they are. Includes minimizing effort and a preference for default options.</li><li>Bias from anchoring: Over-weighing certain initial information as a reference point for future decisions.</li><li>Bias from reciprocation tendency: Repaying in kind what others have done for or to us like favors, concessions, information and attitudes.</li><li>Bias from over-influence by liking tendency: Believing, trusting and agreeing with people we know and like.</li><li>Bias from over-influence by social proof: Imitating the behavior of many others or similar others. Includes crowd folly.</li><li>Bias from over-influence by authority: Trusting and obeying a perceived authority or expert.</li></ul>

Biases That Influence Us Subconsciously

<ul><li>Underestimating the power of rewards and punishment</li><li>Valuing the present more highly than the future.</li><li>Over-influence by vivid or the most recent information.</li><li>Constructing explanations that fit an outcome.</li><li>Memory limitations: Remembering selectively and wrong.</li><li>Acting without a sensible reason.</li><li>Mental confusion from say-something syndrome: Feeling a need to say something when we have nothing to say.</li><li>Making hasty judgments under the influence of intense emotions. </li><li>Mental confusion from stress and from physical or psychological pain, the influence of chemicals or diseases.</li></ul>

Psychological Reasons for Misjudgments

This translate into:
<ul>
<li>Not understanding what causes desired results.</li>
<li>Believing cause resembles its effect – that a big effect must have a big or complicated cause.</li>
<li>“Underestimating the influence of randomness in bad or good outcomes.”</li>
<li>Mistaking an effect for its cause. Includes failing to consider that many effects may originate from one common root cause.</li>
<li>Attributing outcome to a single cause when there are multiple causes.</li>
<li>Mistaking correlation for cause.</li>
<li>Failing to consider that an outcome may be consistent with alternative explanations.</li>
<li>Not comparing the difference in conditions, behavior and factors between negative and positive outcomes in similar situations when explaining an outcome.”</li>
</ul>

When We Fail To Understand Causes

<ul><li>Underestimating that surprises and improbable events happen, somewhere, sometimes, to someone, if they have enough opportunities (large enough size or time) to happen.</li><li>Looking for meaning, searching for causes, and making up patterns for chance events, especially events that have emotional implications.</li><li>Failing to consider cases involving the absence of a cause or effect.</li></ul>

Failing To Consider Coincidences And Miracles

<ul><li>A model is an idea that helps us better understand how the world works. Models illustrate consequences and answer questions like ‘why’ and ‘how’.</li><li>A valuable model produces meaningful explanations and predictions of likely future consequences where the cost of being wrong is high.</li><li>Use knowledge and insights from many disciplines. Most problems need to be studied from a variety of perspectives.</li></ul>

Models of Reality

“Words, definitions, propositions, statements, or goals don’t tell us anything. We need to understand what they mean. It is the same with knowledge. Knowledge is only valuable if it’s useful and something is only useful if we understand what it means.“

<ul>
<li>Make problems easier to solve. Turn complicated problems into simpler ones. Eliminate everything except the essentials. Break down a problem into its components but look at the problem holistically.</li>
<li>Be problem-oriented. Not method-oriented. Use whatever works.</li>
<li>Make fewer and better decisions.</li>
<li>Dealing with what’s important forces us to prioritize. There are often just a few actions that produce most of what we are trying to achieve. There are only a few decisions of real importance.</li>
<li>More information doesn’t equal more knowledge or better decisions. And remember that today we not only have access to more information, but also misinformation.</li>
</ul>

Simplification And Decision Making

<ul>
<li>Filters help us prioritize and figure out what makes sense. When we know what we want, we need criteria to evaluate alternatives. Ask: What are the most critical (and knowable) factors that will cause what I want to achieve or avoid? Criteria must be based on evidence and be reasonably predictive, i.e., we must do better than chance by relying on them. Try to use as few criteria as necessary to make your judgment. Then rank them in order of their importance and use them as filters.</li>
<li>Elimination is a great conservator of effort. For example, place the burden of proof on statements that contradict basic scientific ideas. Eliminate situations that may cause great sorrow, what is not important or knowable, what can’t happen or be achieved, what can’t usefully be predicted or explained, what can’t be tested, what is already disproved, the easy decisions, the wrong assumptions, what we can’t do something about or problems where we don’t have any competence.</li>
<li>Doing something according to pre-established rules, filters and checklists often makes more sense than doing something out of pure emotion. But we can’t have too many rules, filters or items without thinking. We must always understand what we’re trying to accomplish.</li>
</ul>

Using Rules And Filters

<ul>
<li>Clearly defined</li>
<li>Focused on results</li>
<li>Realistic and logical</li>
<li>Measurable</li>
<li>Tailored to our individual needs</li>
<li>Subject to change.</li>
</ul>
Meaningful goals need to be backed by reasons as a way of testing that we set the right goal.

How Goals Should Be

<ul>
<li>Evidence helps us prove what is likely to happen or likely to be true or false. Evidence comes from facts, observations, experiences, comparisons, and experiments.</li>
<li>Do what scientists do: Strive for objectivity. Scientists try to describe the world as it is, not as they want it to be. They seek to answer ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions and try to predict natural phenomena and processes by using methods of scientific integrity.</li>
</ul>

Evidence

<ul>
<li>Whenever we try to achieve a goal, solve problems, predict what is likely to happen or likely to be true or false, we should think things through backwards.</li>
<li>Avoid what causes the opposite of what you want to achieve.</li>
<li>Thinking backwards, we can determine what actions must be avoided.</li>
<li>Instead of asking how we can achieve a goal, we ask the opposite question: What don’t I want to achieve (non-goal)? What causes the non-goal? How can I avoid that? What do I now want to achieve? How can I do that?</li>
</ul>

Backward Thinking

<ul>
<li>Part of avoiding misjudgments and improving our lives is having the right attitude toward life.</li>
<li>Since people are different, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. We each must figure out our own style. But there are guidelines that apply to us all.</li>
<li>We should act in a way that agrees with our nature, advantages and limitations and we should establish (and follow) some values.</li>
</ul>

Having The Right Attitude In Life

"I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart."

productivity

Productivity

books

Books

Seeking Wisdom

<div>We have hold self-control as a high virtue since the earliest times, and that's why it is a staple in most religions and the moral of many myths.</div>

The virtue of self-control

<div>We usually use this term when we describe a person that makes positive long-term decisions, by overcoming short-term temptations.</div>We associate this process with some sort of "will" or "willpower", though what these really mean is not that obvious.

Defining self-discipline

<div class="insight_content">In every moment of our lives, we are making decisions on how to act. Problems arise when we have to choose between what's immediately gratifying and what is not, but will be in the future. </div>The difficulty thus lies in delaying gratification.

Making decisions

<div>There are different factors behind every decision we make: genes, hormones, social environment, physical environment, past experiences, the context of the situation, etc. </div>But the most immediate cause of any of our actions can be traced back to our brain activity.

Behind decision-making

<div class="insight_content">The neurotransmitter called dopamine is more about the anticipation of a reward than it is about the reward itself.</div>Some specific cues found in our environment hint to a potential reward and dopamine starts to raise anticipation. So dopamine is the one responsible to make us take action towards a specific goal.

The role of dopamine

<div>When we're deciding between immediate and delayed rewards, our brain chooses how much dopamine to send to each part of the brain (the limbic targets for immediate rewards and the frontocortical targets for the delayed ones) pragmatically by how pleasurable the reward is and how much time would take us to get to that reward.</div>

Dopamine and rewards

<div>Habits are the ones that mediate the relationship between our desires and our environment.</div>To change a habit, both we and the environment have to change, and that's why self-discipline is so hard.

Self-discipline and habits

An individual can be changed through education.We have so little control over the biology that determines our desires. But the part of our biology that is more malleable is our brain.

The role of education

<div class="insight_content">Self-discipline is both an environmental and an individual problem: we can change our behaviors and beliefs through education, but the resources available for education are provided by our environment. Also, our habits are a product of what's available in the environment.</div>By acknowledging this, we can start finding alternative opportunities for learning and for satisfying our needs.

The product of our environment

Signup for your FREE trial to The Great Courses Plus here: http://ow.ly/ffLP30l0I5A Support Freedom in Thought: http://patreon.com/freedominthought In this video, we get to the bottom of why self-discipline (self-control) is so hard. Instagram: http://instagram.com/freedomintht Twitter: http://twitter.com/freedomintht Facebook: http://facebook.com/freedomintht Read more essays: http://freedominthought.com Art by Arianna Belotti: http://ariannabelotti.com/ Transcript and sources: http://freedominthought.com/archive/why-self-discipline-is-so-hard The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US, UK, and Australian markets. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.

Why Self-Discipline is so Hard

Bibliotherapy is the practice of encouraging reading for its therapeutic effect.
This first use of this term dates back to 1916 from an article named A Literary Clinic. In the article, the author describes a "bibliopathic institute" where reading recommendations are dispensed. The books must do something to you. They may be a stimulant, sedative, an irritant or a soporific.

Bibliotherapy

Bibliotherapy takes on many forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people. At first, bibliotherapy has been based within the medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books.
However, affective bibliotherapy is using fiction as the ultimate cure as it gives readers a transformational experience. It is prescribed for curing ailments such as feeling depressed, broken heart or career uncertainty.

Bibliotherapy is used to cure ailments

<ul>
<li>Ancient Greeks had inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes, the words 'healing place for the soul.'</li>
<li>At the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions.</li>
<li>After WWI, a course of reading has often been prescribed to traumatised soldiers.</li>
<li>Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and more recently by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors.</li>
</ul>

Method of bibliotherapy traced to Ancient Greeks

It is a book written in the style of a medical dictionary that matches ailments with suggested reading cures. But the book has a twist: each local editor can adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country's readership.
The ailments are culturally revealing. The Indian edition includes "public urination" and "cricket, obsession with"; the Italians introduced "impotence", "desire to embalm", and the Germans added "hating the world."

The novel cure: An A-Z of literary remedies

It is no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health.
A study showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through the experience themselves. Other studies confirm that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others. People who read regularly sleep better and have lower stress levels.

Benefits of reading fiction

Books mean different things to people. Or different things to the same people at different times in their lives. 
Reading allows an escape from ordinary, everyday pressures. It makes us lose all sense of self, while also putting us in perpetual union with another mind.

Reading allows us to escape

One major woe of modern readers is that they are overwhelmed by the number of books in the world.
But although more books are published than ever before, people are selecting from a smaller and smaller pool. Considering how many books you're likely to read before you die, you realise that you need to be highly selective to make the most of your reading time. The best way to do that is to see a bibliotherapist.

Highly selective reading lists

Ceridwen Dovey on how bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin prescribe fiction for healing and self-exploration.

health

Health

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Can Reading Make You Happier?

<ul>
<li>Deep work means those professional tasks that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit done in concentration mode (no distractions)</li>
<li>Shallow work relates to the tasks that do not require much cognitive work (logistical-style tasks) performed while distracted most of the time. They don't bring much new value in the world and are easy to duplicate.</li>
</ul>

Deep Work And Shallow Work

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The New Law of Productivity

Without explicit feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward actions that are easiest in the moment.

The Principle of Least Resistance In Business

Knowledge workers usually lack explicit indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable at work, so they turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing multiple tasks in a visible manner.

Busyness Is Not An Indicator Of Productivity

<ul>
<li>Monastic: isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed</li>
<li>Bimodal: reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic (you need at least one day a week)</li>
<li>Rhythmic: take 3-4 hours every day to perform deep work on your project</li>
<li>Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time (not recommended to try out first).</li>
</ul>

The 4 Deep Work Philosophies

In order to have a deep work routine, you have to decide the following:
<ul>
<li>Where you’ll work and for how long.</li>
<li>How you’ll work once you start to work.</li>
<li>How you’ll support your work.</li>
</ul>

Setting Up A Deep Work Routine

<ul>
<li>Downtime aids insights</li>
<li>It helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply</li>
<li>The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important</li>
</ul>
It's important to have a shutdown ritual, to ensure that every incomplete activity has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either you have a plan you will follow for its completion, or it’s wirrten down and saved in a place where it will be revisited.

Why Downtime Is Crucial

<ul>
<li>Sending too much time on Social Media breaks up our time and reduces our ability to concentrate.</li>
<li>Social Media take away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.</li>
<li>If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative.</li>
</ul>

Social Media Hinders Our Ability To Focus

Identify the key elements that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life.
Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection

Read the Wall Street Journal Bestseller for "cultivating intense focus" for fast, powerful performance results for achieving success and true meaning in one's professional life (Adam Grant, author of Give and Take). Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. 1. Work Deeply 2. Embrace Boredom 3. Quit Social Media 4. Drain the Shallows A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. An Amazon Best Book of 2016 Pick in Business & Leadership Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller A Business Book of the Week at 800-CEO-READ

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Damien