People often conflate it with prejudice, racism, discrimination, or sexism.But bias, on its face, is not inherently good or bad. In the simplest of terms, our biases are our preferences.Understanding two common myths around unconscious bias will help us better understand the role it plays at work.

Bias Can Be A Heavy Word

At our core, we all identify as good. So if we think bias is inherently negative and only bad people have it, we close off exploring these topics further. We put up walls and say, “I'm not even going to go there because I'm a good person. I try to treat people fairly.” We get defensive.If we recognize that we all have biases, we can reconcile the two opposing ideas that we can have biases and still be good people. They can coexist. That's what helps us make progress.

Myth #1: Bias Is Inherently Negative

After realizing that bias is natural and doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, people tend to lean into it. That can become problematic.But neuroscience teaches us that we can mitigate our unconscious bias through neuroplasticity. Once we identify a bias and understand its impact, we can “re-wire” our brains to create new pathways and teach ourselves to think and act differently.For example, if I am biased about a team member being lazy, I will treat them accordingly.

Myth #2: If Bias Is A Natural Part Of The Human Condition And How The Brain Works, I Can’t Do Anything About It

With intentional practice, our inherent biases don’t have to limit us or others. We have the ability to grow and change

Bias can be a heavy word. People often conflate it with prejudice, racism, discrimination, or sexism. But bias, on its face, is not inherently good or bad.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Mental Health

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Human Resources

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Artificial Intelligence

2 Common Myths About Unconscious Bias

Keep your study schedule evenly spaced out, with only a slight bump right before the test (if at all). Try to practice each piece of info five times from when you first learned it, until your exam.

When to Study and How Much

After your first time learning the material, the majority of subsequent studying should be in the form of retrieval practice—trying to reproduce the information, solve a problem or explain an idea—without looking at the source.

What to Study and How to Do It

Always prioritize higher-quality problem sets. Mock exams are best, followed by in-class problems and then writing prompts from big ideas or concepts discussed.

What Kinds of Practice to Do

Identify the core concepts and make sure you can explain them without looking at the material. If you really don’t get something, go back and forth between the explanation in the textbook and your own understanding until you do.

Make Sure You Really Understand

Simulate your exam by doing mock exams (or if you lack those, with other problems) under the same time constraints and conditions as the actual exam.

Beat Anxiety by Simulating the Exam First

I’d like to outline a simple strategy you can use to ace any exam you might have coming up.

Don't make studying for your next exam harder than it has to be! Here's five strategies, backed by cognitive science, to ace your next big test.

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Reading & Writing

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Strategy

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Learning & Education

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Problem Solving

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Science & Nature

Five Scientific Steps to Ace Your Next Exam - Scott H Young

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like your brain wants you to be happy. Why? And you worry a lot too. Why? In the short term, worrying makes your brain feel a little better — at least you’re doing something about your problems.But guilt, shame and worry are horrible long-term solutions. So what do neuroscientists say you should do? Ask yourself this question:What am I grateful for?Yeah, gratitude is awesome… but does it really affect your brain at the biological level? Yup.Do you know what the antidepressant Wellbutrin does? Boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. So does gratitude.

The Most Important Question To Ask When You Feel Down

You feel awful. Okay, give that awfulness a name. Sad? Anxious? Angry?Boom. It’s that simple. Sound stupid? Your noggin disagrees. Suppressing emotions doesn’t work and can backfire on you. But labelling, on the other hand, makes a big difference. Ancient methods were way ahead of us on this one. Meditation has employed this for centuries. Labelling is a fundamental tool of mindfulness.Labelling affects the brain so powerfully it works with other people too. Labelling emotions is one of the primary tools used by FBI hostage negotiators.

Label Negative Feelings

Ever make a decision and then your brain finally feels at rest? That’s no random occurrence.Brain science shows that making decisions reduces worry and anxiety — as well as helps you solve problems. But deciding can be hard. I agree. So what kind of decisions should you make? Neuroscience has an answer…Make a “good enough” decision. Don’t sweat making the absolute 100% best decision. We all know being a perfectionist can be stressful. And brain studies back this up.Trying to be perfect overwhelms your brain with emotions and makes you feel out of control.

Make That Decision

No, not indiscriminately; that can get you in a lot of trouble.But we need to feel love and acceptance from others. When we don’t it’s painful. And I don’t mean “awkward” or “disappointing.” I mean actually painful.Relationships are very important to your brain’s feeling of happiness. Want to take that to the next level? Touch people.Touching is incredibly powerful. We just don’t give it enough credit. It makes you more persuasive, increases team performance, and improves your flirting… heck, it even boosts math skills.Touching someone you love actually reduces pain.

Touch People

Here’s what brain research says will make you happy:Ask “What am I grateful for?” No answers? Doesn’t matter. Just searching helps.Label those negative emotions. Give it a name and your brain isn’t so bothered by it.Decide. Go for “good enough” instead of “best decision ever made on Earth.”Hugs, hugs, hugs. Don’t text — touch.

Sum Up

So what’s the dead simple way to start that upward spiral of happiness?

There's a lot of stuff about happiness on the internet, but what do neuroscientists say can *really* make you happy? Here are 4 things backed by research.

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Health

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Meditation

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

What sets apart some of the most successful people you know? Some might answer this question with various skills or even luck. I would say it is knowing how to dream big. But how do you learn to ignore all of the doubts or fears that can cause you to ignore what it is you really want? You’ve got to shift your mindset from one that focuses too much on the how and not enough on the what.

How To Shift Your Mindset

When I say this, I don’t mean it just as a passing thought. I mean really take the time to clear your schedule, sit down, and envision what you want out of life. What do you want from your career? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? The next decade? How do you picture your personal life?I have used the strategy throughout my career, and it has allowed me to continue to grow and stretch myself along the way. It has also changed over time. As I have encountered various obstacles and challenges along the way, the vision of what I would consider a successful life has also adapted.

Imagine The Life You Want

It’s amazing the commitment that can come from the simple act of writing down your dreams. In doing so, you help to really define your vision. It goes from an abstract idea to a concrete description of what you want. Not only that. Writing down your big ideas also gives you something tangible to look back on and motivates you. Thinking big will mean that you will encounter challenges. Any dream that stretches you outside of your comfort zone is challenging. A written list of what you want will help you stay on the path to achieving it.

Write It Down

This can be a hard step for many of us, myself included. When it comes to thinking big though you have to understand just exactly what is at stake. Think through what your life will look like if you don’t live out your vision. What would the consequences be? What would it mean for your life, your coworkers, and your family? Now compare that to what will happen if you are able to achieve your dream. This step is critical to understanding the heart of what is behind your vision. It will keep you motivated when the temptation comes along to settle for less.

Define What Is At Stake

Once you have created a vision for your future, the next step is to think through what you need to achieve to help set you up to achieve it. When you are thinking big, you have to define the path you believe will best get you to where you want to go. Create a timeline for yourself with goals to achieve each year to help you accomplish your dream. It doesn’t stop there. Thinking big requires clear actionable goals along the way. But before you can create your goals, you have to know what your dream is for your life.

Break Down Your Vision Into Actionable Steps

Achieve More Than You Thought Possible in 2023 By Focusing On Thinking Big

If thinking big doesn’t come naturally to you, you are not alone. But this mindset can be learned. I want to encourage you to use these strategies to help unlock the dreams you have and use it to create a clear vision as you move into a new year.

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Motivation & Inspiration

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Habits

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Business

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Creativity

Achieve More Than You Thought Possible in 2023 | Full Focus

Sometimes, achieving something is about quantity over quality, not the other way around. I’ve asked wedding photographers how they manage to capture such perfect moments. They all say the same type of thing: “I just take way more pictures. I’ll take a thousand pictures over a three-hour wedding. That’s a picture every 10 seconds. Of course, I’m going to have 50 good ones. I’m throwing 950 pictures away to find them!”

When Everything Rests On The Numbers

Today, we’re surrounded by tales of companies with million-dollar valuations that grow at lightning-fast rates. We hear about tiny startups that Google acquires for billions of dollars, just a few months after launch. We want to read about the fastest way to get a six-pack or accelerate our careers. But ultimately, what we want to find—quick fixes, easy answers, shortcuts—isn’t there.Some things take time. They take time. They just take time. It’s not about the number of hits but rather the number of times you step up to the plate.

We Cannot Hack Our Way To Success

“The number of failures I’ve had dramatically exceeds most people’s, and I’m super proud of that. I’m more proud of the failures than the successes because it’s about this mantra of ‘Is this generous? Is this going to connect? Is this going to change people for the better? Is it worth trying?’ If it meets those criteria and I can cajole myself into doing it, then I ought to.”

“I’m A Big Fan Of Poof”

We need to stop looking at successful people through the lens that their lives contain a success that led to a success that led to another success. Because you know what we’re really looking at? Not success, not really. Just people who are just really good at moving through failures.Moving through failures, swimming through failure, recovering and going forward from failure? That’s the real success. Successful people get to where they’re going because they are willing to try something when the possibility of failure is high … they know and accept that and don’t shy away from it.

Success Stories Are Not Stories Of Success  

Why would the guy with the most wins also have the most losses? Why would the guy with the most strikeouts also have the most walks? It’s simple—they just played the most. They tried the most and moved through loss the most.

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Entrepreneurship

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Startups

Take More Pictures: The counterintuitive way to build resilience — Neil Pasricha

It doesn't take long to figure out if something is worth reading. Skilled writing and high-quality ideas stick out.As a result, most people should probably start more books than they do. This doesn't mean you need to read each book page by page. You can skim the table of contents, chapter titles, and subheadings. Pick an exciting section and dive in for a few pages. Maybe flip through the book and glance at any bolded points or tables. You'll have a reasonable idea of how good it is in ten minutes.Then comes the crucial step: Quit books quickly and without guilt or shame.

1. Quit More Books

One way to improve reading comprehension is to choose books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind. Practice is a very effective form of learning.Choosing a book that you can use also provides a strong incentive to pay attention and remember the material. That’s particularly true when something important hangs in the balance. If you’re starting a business, for example, then you have a lot of motivation to get everything you can out of the sales book you’re reading.

2. Choose Books You Can Use Instantly

Keep notes on what you read. You can do this however you like. It doesn't need to be a big production or a complicated system. Just do something to emphasize the important points and passages.You can do this in different ways depending on the format that you're consuming. You can highlight passages when reading on Kindle. You can dog-ear pages and transcribe notes when reading a print book.But here's the real key: store your notes in a searchable format. There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up to your memory.

3. Create Searchable Notes

One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.

4. Combine Knowledge Trees

As soon as you finish a book, you can challenge yourself to summarize the entire text in just three sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but it forces me to consider what was really important about the book.Some questions you can consider when summarizing a book include:<ul><li>What are the main ideas?</li><li>If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?</li><li>How would I describe the book to a friend?</li></ul>

5. Write a Short Summary

If you only read one book on a topic and use that as the basis for your beliefs for an entire category of life, well, how sound are those beliefs? How accurate and complete is your knowledge?Reading a book takes effort, but too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. This is even more true (and more difficult to overcome) when it comes to using our one, individual experience as the basis for our beliefs.

6. Surround the Topic

I'd like to finish by returning to an idea I mentioned near the beginning of this article: read great books twice. The philosopher Karl Popper explained the benefits nicely, “Anything worth reading is not only worth reading twice but worth reading again and again. If a book is worthwhile, then you will always be able to make new discoveries in it and find things in it that you didn’t notice before, even though you have read it many times.”Additionally, revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time.

7. Read It Twice

One book will rarely change your life, even if it does deliver a lightbulb moment of insight. The key is to get a little wiser each day.

It's important to read books, but it's just as important to remember what you read. Read this article to learn three reading comprehension strategies.

7 Ways to Retain More of Every Book You Read

Taking an idea from the brainstorming stage to product development and into launch can be difficult. It is crucial to create a risk management plan for your small business.The first thing you'll need to calculate is the cost to launch, including your marketing and sales plan. Solidifying concrete numbers will give you a solid foundation to work from.

Laying the foundation for your risk management plan

Your business plan is your guide. It should be highly detailed with information on all aspects of the business, including an industry snapshot, go-to marketing strategies, finance, personnel and other various operating procedures.To do this, ask yourself the following questions: What is the current state of the market for this type of product (think supply and demand)? What is our ideal customer profile? How do competitors fit into the landscape? How are we different? What is our profit margin and how do we plan to pay off debts? Do we have the proper contracts in place?

1. Account for risk in your business plan

You do not need a huge collection; you need a pain point and a solution. According to research from CBInsights, startups fail most often due to two reasons: failure to verify market needs and not spending money wisely.It can be easy to get caught up in size and scale, but consumers are looking for quality authenticity and a compelling brand story. Focus on these things first. A quick way to run your brand into the ground is sprinting too fast out of the gate with no clear direction. Find your place in the market and develop one really good product first, and the rest will follow.

2. Establish your place in the market before you scale

Make sure your manufacturer has capabilities that fit your needs, from the size of the facility to quality and speed. You do not want your initial brand launch to turn out the way Jaclyn Cosmetics did in 2019 when its highly anticipated makeup products were found filled with mold, hair and bubbles.The reason for this error? The fibers from the cleaning towels were left in a big tub where the lipsticks were mixed. Although this was not the fault of the brand, it took the hit and its reputation never recovered.

3. Find a manufacturer that can help you scale your minimum order quantity

Gathering feedback on the performance of a product does not have to be expensive, nor does it have to be a huge undertaking. To gauge consumer interest, test your product on the market. This could look like doing a soft product launch on your website, or utilizing more general third-party selling platforms. Rather than purchasing 500 units, put 50 of each SKU and measure product performance based on key KPIs.Once your product is out, pay close attention to customer reviews. Criticism is not necessarily fun but take it to heart and respond accordingly.

4. Perform small test runs to gauge consumer interest

Knowledge of risk factors and the ability to implement risk-management strategies is crucial before launching your brand.

With high inflation and a potential looming recession, launching a business is riskier than ever — but these four strategies just might help lower that risk.

Mitigate the Risk of Business Failure With These 4 Strategies

If you were to examine some of the world’s most successful businesses, you’ll notice that most of them have something in common. It’s that they go to great lengths to attract the best available talent and to help their employees continually enhance their skills.The reason for that is simple: businesses will only go as far as their employees can carry them. In other words, better, more capable workers mean more productivity and more growth.

1. Invest in Talent Development

Any way you look at it, businesses can’t grow unless they have the financial means to do it. And that means most strategies that improve a business’s bottom line are pro-growth strategies. But it doesn’t mean that every effort at improving bottom-line performance qualifies as a strategy to create the conditions for continuous growth. For example, it’s possible to improve the bottom line by cutting staff—but that’s contraction, not growth.

2. Create a Sales Funnel

In the past, business leaders relied as much on intuition as they did on market research when making consequential business decisions. That was especially the case when evaluating new product ideas or market expansion opportunities. And those are the kinds of decisions that connect directly with a business’s growth prospects.The trouble is, that making the wrong decisions in those areas can lead to significant financial losses, which in itself can sabotage growth. And when those missteps are exceedingly costly, it can even lead to the business needing to pull back its operations to survive.

3. Make Data-Driven Decisions

No matter the industry, there are only two paths to continuous growth. The first is market dominance. In that scenario, the growth opportunity comes from out-competing every other business in the market and swallowing up its market share. But the truth is, there are natural limits to the growth that market dominance can generate.For proof, look no further than the story of eCommerce giant Amazon. Back in 1994, it set out to corner the market for online book sales. And it eventually did that and then some, driving physical bookstores to near-extinction.

4. Create a Diversification Plan

Famed American writer, William S. Burroughs, once observed that  “When you stop growing, you start dying.” And for businesses, it’s hard to think of a more apt description of their lifecycle. After all, in industries that have any competition whatsoever, businesses must be constantly growing to avoid being overtaken by others.

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Leadership & Management

5 Strategies to Grow Your Business Continuously

We’re often told that success is in the eye of the beholder — that we need to define it for ourselves, on terms that are meaningful to us.I believe that’s true but that advice doesn’t tell us how to do it. Try as we might, many of our achievements wind up fitting a mold that suits somebody else — employers, parents, societal expectations — at least as much as, if not more than, it suits us personally. And we still find ourselves left unsatisfied or unhappy, wishing we had something more or something else, no matter how ‘successful’ we’ve been.

Success Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Sales success is about getting people to buy something you’ve created. Your book is a commercial hit! Everybody’s reading it, everybody’s talking about it, you’re on TV. You sell hundreds and then thousands and then millions of copies. Dump trucks beep while backing into your driveway before pouring out endless shiny coins as royalty payments. Sales success is about money. How much did you sell?

1. Sales Success

Social success means you’re widely recognized among your peers and people you respect. Critical success. Industry renown! To extend the book example, let’s say the New York Times reviews your latest novel and some writers you respect send you letters saying they thought the book was great (whether or not it’s a commercial hit).

2. Social Success

Self success is in your head. It’s invisible. Only you know if you have it, because it corresponds to internal measures you’ve established on your own. Self success means you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve. For yourself. You’re proud and satisfied with your work.

3. Self Success

In order to be truly happy with your successes, you first need to decide what kind of success you want.Are you in marketing? Sales success means your product flew off the shelves and your numbers blew away forecasts. Social success means you were written up in prestigious magazines, nominated for an award, or shouted out by the CEO at the all-hands meeting. Self success? That’s the same: How do you feel about your accomplishments?

Success Is Not One-Dimensional

“How can I be successful?” It’s a question many of us ask ourselves and have trouble answering. Because what is success, anyway? 

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

The 3 S’s of Success — Neil Pasricha

The idea that the mind is like a muscle has a long history. In his famous treatise on education, John Dewey linked the belief to the English philosopher John Locke. But it’s likely much older. The idea is so deeply interwoven in our folk psychology that few people even question it.The mind-muscle metaphor goes something like this:• Muscles improve through training.• Strengthening your biceps by lifting dumbbells, for instance, will make you stronger at lifting groceries, luggage, or rocks.• Mental abilities improve through training.

The Mind-Muscle Myth

Does Education Boost Intelligence?

My perspective is that the only way to become smarter is by learning. The basic units of learning are specific, but when added together, these specific chunks can become impressive proficiency.A concrete analogy would be language learning. Fluency isn’t a muscle you improve. It results from knowing many words, grammar, and pronunciations and using that knowledge quickly and unhesitatingly. It can be impressive to watch someone at a mastery level converse in a language you struggle with. Still, there is nothing more to it than this—if you knew everything she did, you too would be fluent.

Applications for an Identical Elements View of Learning

Will mastering chess make you more strategic? Does playing Sudoku speed up your mind? Do brain teasers help you think more logically?

2 Common Myths About Unconscious Bias

Five Scientific Steps to Ace Your Next Exam - Scott H Young

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Achieve More Than You Thought Possible in 2023 | Full Focus

Take More Pictures: The counterintuitive way to build resilience — Neil Pasricha

Hatim Bootwala