More and more, we live in bubbles. Most of us are surrounded by people who look like us, vote like us, earn like us, spend money like us, have educations like us and worship like us.The result is an empathy deficit, and it’s at the root of many of our biggest problems. It’s because of how homogeneous people’s social circles have become, and also because humans naturally hold biases. But researchers have discovered that far from being an immutable trait, empathy can be developed.

Empathy Deficit

So what is empathy? It’s understanding how others feel and being compassionate toward them. It happens when two parts of the brain work together, neuroscientists say — the emotional center perceives the feelings of others and the cognitive center tries to understand why they feel that way and how we can be helpful to them. Empathy makes people better managers and workers, and better family members and friends. But it’s bigger than just its personal effect. We’re all in this together, and researchers say that connection and compassion are crucial to a sustainable and humane future.

Practice Empathy

<ul><li>Start conversations with strangers or invite a colleague or neighbour you don’t know well to lunch. Go beyond small talk – ask them how they’re doing and what their daily life is like.</li><li>Follow people on social media with different backgrounds than you have (different race, religion or political persuasion). </li><li>Put away your phone and other screens when you’re having conversations, even with the people you see every day, so you can fully listen and notice their facial expressions and gestures. </li></ul>

Talk to New People

Don’t just stand in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, but take a walk in them.Attend someone else’s church, mosque, synagogue or other house of worship for a few weeks while they attend yours, or visit a village in a developing country and volunteer. Spend time in a new neighborhood, or strike up a conversation with a homeless person in your community.

Try Out Someone Else’s Life

Working on a project with other people reinforces everyone’s individual expertise and humanity, and minimizes the differences that can divide people.<ul><li>Work on a community garden.</li><li>Do political organizing.</li><li>Join a church committee.</li><li>If you have experienced grief or loss, join with others who have experienced something similar.</li></ul>

Join Forces for a Shared Cause

We’re all biased. Acknowledging that is the first step. The second step is taking action to overcome it.Bias is a natural part of the human condition. This is adaptive for us to take mental shortcuts and make conclusions about the people around us. Actively working to combat that is what matters.

Admit You're Biased

The flip side of bias is privilege. Bias puts certain groups of people at a disadvantage in our society, while privilege puts other groups at an advantage. Your privileges are things that give you special status that you didn’t earn and don’t necessarily realize you benefit from. One example is when white people, unlike African-Americans, don’t worry about police violence during a routine traffic stop. Another is when someone raised with enough money has never thought about whether they can afford to eat.

Be Honest With Yourself: Check Your Privilege

One of the most important ways to confront bias and privilege in your life is to hear from others about their everyday lives, and consider how they’re different from yours.It can be as simple as having lunch with a colleague and asking about their routines, she said. Maybe you’ll learn that they leave early to care for a family member or drive a different commute because they’re afraid of interacting with the police. Perhaps they never feel heard in meetings, or struggle to find a time and place to pump breast milk during the day.

Again, Talking to People Helps

Empathy should drive us to act compassionately toward others. The next step, after acknowledging your privileges, is to put them to use on behalf of groups who don’t have them.Donate money to causes that help people in need or attend a rally in support of them. Speak up when someone makes a discriminatory comment or interrupts. This is especially important to do when you’re not part of the community that is being undermined.

Stand Up for Others

<ul><li>Remember that you don’t need to understand everything about someone to make them feel respected.</li><li>Advocate for things that will help others, even if they don’t directly affect you.</li><li>Don’t make assumptions about people based on what your life is like.</li><li>In workplaces, women and people of colour do more of what researchers call office housework – unglamorous chores like getting coffee for a meeting or arranging a colleague’s goodbye party.</li></ul>

It's Not About You

Reading is one of the best ways to open your mind to the experiences of others.Reading literary fiction requires people to enter characters’ lives and minds – and by doing so, it increases people’s capacity to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, researchers at the New School<a href="https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2013/CastanoKidd.htm"> have found</a>. People who read literary fiction performed better on tests of empathy and emotional intelligence afterwards. Read and watch first-person accounts of the experiences of others in magazines and newspapers, on social media and in podcasts and documentaries.

Read Books

Ask children what they think characters in books or during imaginative play are feeling, based on their facial expressions or what’s happening to them in the story.Don’t instruct your kid to say sorry. Instead, ask questions like: “How do you think he’s feeling? What could you do to help him feel better?”Help your children name their emotions. When they’re crying in frustration or anger, or don’t want bedtime to come or school to start, give them words for their feelings.

Raise Empathetic Kids

Many parents, especially those who are white, try to avoid talking about race, gender identity, income level or other differences among people, believing that if they expose their children to diversity without making a big deal about it, their children will grow up without prejudice. But research has shown that’s not true. Even preschoolers see differences – and also hold biases. When adults don’t talk to children about it, it can make it worse – children end up absorbing societal stereotypes or assuming it’s a taboo topic.

Talk About Bias

Researchers say children are aware of stereotypes by age 3. Counter them by encouraging children to do a wide variety of activities and spend time with a range of friends. Model the same in your own life — starting with sharing the chores at home. Teach them what to do if they experience discrimination or see someone else experiencing it, and role play with them. Teach them to say, “Stop” or “That’s unkind,” or to stand next to the person who’s being targeted, or to find a trusted adult.

Teach Them to Fight Stereotypes

the<a href="https://changemyview.net/subreddit/"> Change My View subreddit</a> is a discussion board with a twist. People have<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-reddit-change-my-view/"> described it</a> as the most civilized place on the internet, where people respectfully discuss controversial topics and are open to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/06/29/534916052/change-my-view-on-reddit-helps-people-challenge-their-own-opinions">changing their minds</a>.The goal is not to be comfortable. It’s to stretch ourselves and expose ourselves to others’ points of view. You can compare it to yoga – getting comfortable by being uncomfortable. If you are comfortable, you probably aren’t doing it right.

Change My View: Twitter Without The Trolls

If you’re uncomfortable with the topic of conversation, or if someone has told you that you said something that was offensive, the first step is to listen. Some common errors, experts say, are:<ul><li>focusing on your own feelings instead of the other person’s</li><li>making the conversation about you</li><li>blaming the victim or denying that their experiences happened. </li></ul>

Hard Conversations

<ul><li>Step One: Don’t say anything. Just listen.</li><li>Step Two: If you offended someone, apologize (and apologize earnestly).</li><li>Step Three: Do your research. Read articles written by people who have had firsthand experiences with what you’re discussing.</li></ul>

The Three Steps

<ul><li>Don’t be rude or hostile.</li><li>Don’t create echo chambers: Express opposing views, and explain the reasoning behind them.</li><li>Engage in the conversation: Don’t state your position and walk away.</li><li>If no one has changed their mind after three rounds of going back and forth, consider agreeing to disagree.</li><li>If you change your mind, be proud of it and tell people you did so. </li></ul>

Be Open to Changing Your Mind

Use your body language to show that you’re open to listening: uncross your arms, lean slightly forward, and make eye contact. Pay close attention to the speaker’s facial expressions and body language, which can convey more emotions than their words. <ul><li>Don’t interrupt.</li><li>Ask open-ended questions.</li><li>Put away your phone. </li></ul>

Learn to Listen

More and more, we live in bubbles. But there are steps people can take to acknowledge their biases and move beyond their own worldviews to try to understand those of other people. 

Stashed ideas

How to Be More Empathetic - A Year of Living Better Guides

The Angel Philosopher Naval Ravikant has blown the collective mind of Twitter and Podcast Land too many times to count. Here is the ultimate list of his life-changing quotes and wisdom.

The Mind Of Naval Ravikant

<ul><li>It’s better to go through a book really slowly, and struggle and stumble and rewind, than it is to fly through it quickly just to say, ‘Well now I’ve read 20 books.'</li><li>I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them, rather than read every single book out there.</li><li>Read what you love until you love to read.</li><li>It’s far more important in life to know the basics really well across a few domains and combine that than it is to try and be a deep expert in any one domain</li><li>When it comes to reading, I’d make sure your foundation is very, very high-quality.</li></ul>

On Books And Reading

<ul><li>The first step to being happier is to believe you can be happier.</li><li>What you do, and how you do it, is so much more important than how hard you do it.</li><li>Productize Yourself – Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well.</li><li>Find a career/job where you’re tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs – this will allow you to control your time much better.</li><li>Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don’t want to do.</li></ul>

Doing What You Love

<ul><li>When faced with a difficult choice, if you can’t decide, the answer is no.</li><li>If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal (it’s 50/50), take the path that’s more difficult and more painful in the short term.</li><li>In times of interpersonal conflict, make the choice that will leave you more equanimous (internally calm).</li></ul>

Decision Making Heuristics

<ul><li>Guilt is just society’s voice speaking in your head.</li><li>You don’t have to deal with anyone you don’t want to – just walk away.</li><li>We’re afraid of death because we fear we haven’t spent our time here on earth wisely.</li><li>If you’re smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you’re not that smart.</li></ul>

An Understanding Of Life

I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker, if somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich.

You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed.We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is to turn it off.

The News

Peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.In today’s day and age, many people think you get peace by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up the idea of having problems.The peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it’s peace from mind.

The Idea Of Peace

The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do it better than anybody because you love to do it. No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants, apply some leverage, put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you do, and then just crank it out.

How To Retire Early

<ul><li>Stop thinking in terms of “careers”</li><li>Instead, focus on developing skills, and doing what you want to do at a particular time to get paid.</li><li>The idea of having a lifelong career is going away.</li><li>If you want money – “Give the world something it wants that it does not yet know how to get”.</li><li>You have to like what you’re doing though – if you don’t like it, someone who does will outcompete you.</li><li>Know that your physical health, mental health, and your relationships will bring you more peace and happiness than any amount of money ever will.</li></ul>

Work And Career

The number one thing you can have is general intelligence, because general intelligence allows you to get good at everything else”.If you’re smart, and question everything, you’ll eventually figure everything else out at a good enough level – this can apply to nutrition, fitness, your sales skills, really anything.Intelligence and open-mindedness are everything.

Intelligence

<ul><li>Package yourself in a product.</li><li>Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well.</li><li>If you compete at being someone else, you won’t be the best in the world at it, and in turn, you won’t get rewarded properly for it.</li><li>If you’re getting paid for renting out your time, you can make good money, but you won’t make the kind of money that can really give you freedom – the passive income that can make you money while you’re on vacation.</li></ul>

Productize Yourself

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. Aim to have a job, career, or profession where your inputs don’t match your output.Being tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs, will allow you to control your time much better.2000 years ago, the inputs and outputs were connected – effort=result.Specific Knowledge – A combination of unique traits from your DNA, combined with your unique upbringing and your response to itFigure out what it was you were doing as a kid, almost effortlessly, that you didn’t even really consider a skill, but people around you would notice.

Input-Output

Everybody can be wealthy. It’s not a zero-sum game; it’s a positive-sum game.The reason you want wealth is because it buys you freedom, so you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck, so you don’t have to wake up at 7 AM and rush to work in traffic, so you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all your productive hours away to a soulless job that doesn’t fulfil you.All the benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in relationships, life, your career, health, or learning.

Wealth Is Freedom

The 5 most important skills are reading, writing, arithmetic, persuasion, and computer programming.If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic math, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life.

The Five Most Important Skills

<ul><li>Get comfortable with frequent, small failures. If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day, but in exchange, you win big later, you’ll be better off.</li><li> Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.</li><li>Reject most advice (but remember you have to listen to/read enough of it to know what to reject and what to accept).</li><li>Results take TIME. In entrepreneurship, you just have to be right ONCE. The good news is you can take as many shots on goal as you want (usually every 3-5 years, 10 at the slowest).</li></ul>

Entrepreneurship

<ul><li>Happiness is a bad word, it’s like love, it’s overloaded, it means too many different things.</li><li>You have to work to achieve happiness, but you don’t need to overwork yourself to get it.</li><li>It’s very easy for self-improvement to degenerate into self-conflict and self-conflict into self-misery.</li><li>You don’t want to spend 90% of your life trying to figure out how to be happy and 10% being happy, you want to be happy right now.</li></ul>

Happiness

<ul><li>Desire is suffering… every desire you have is an axis where you will suffer. So just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time. </li><li>The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing, and you focus on that, you’ll get it, but everything else you gotta let go.</li><li>Pick your one overwhelming desire – it’s okay to suffer over that one. But on all the other desires, let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed.</li></ul>

Desire

Meetings should really be phone calls, phone calls should be emails, and emails should just be texts.The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there. You’re literally just dying an hour at a time. You have to drop non-urgent meetings or forget them altogether if you want to do anything great.

Meetings

<ul><li>Set an aspirational hourly rate for yourself and stick to it.</li><li>Then, never do anything with your time for less than that amount – whether it’s attending a meeting or returning a package from Amazon (besides things for fun and leisure, of course).</li><li>If I have to return something, and it costs less than my personal hourly rate, I’ll throw or give it away.</li><li>If you need to do a task, but can hire someone for less than your hourly rate – hire them.</li></ul>

Your Hourly Rate

<ul><li>Be RUTHLESS about not scheduling things. You will HAVE to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours.</li><li>Busy is the death of productivity.</li><li>You have to get bored before you can get creative… You can’t be creative on schedule.</li><li>You need 4-5 hours of time by yourself every day doing NOTHING. Because if you don’t have that time, you won’t be able to do ANYTHING.</li></ul>

Scheduling: The Death Of Productivity And Creativity

<ul><li>The most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication (aka product leverage).</li><li>You can replicate your efforts without having to involve other humans.</li><li>Long ago, to get a similar reach, you would have had to give a public lecture.</li><li>30-40 years ago – you would have had to get on TV.</li><li>But today, thanks to the internet, anyone can launch a podcast.</li></ul>

Leverage

<ul><li>Product leverage is how fortunes will be made in the digital age – using things like code or media</li><li>People who utilized code-based product leverage – Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin.</li><li>Kings of media-based product leverage – Joe Rogan, Gary Vee.</li><li>Combining labour leverage, capital leverage, and product leverage is a magic combination for tech startups.</li><li>You use the minimum, highest output labour – engineers and product developers.</li><li>You add capital which you can use for marketing, advertising, and scaling.</li><li>You then add lots of code, media, and content to get everything out there.</li></ul>

Product Leverage

The robot revolution has already arrived – we just keep them in data centres/servers.Every great software developer has an army of software robots working for him/her at night, while they sleep, after they’ve written the code and they’re just cranking away:<ul><li>Robots do web searching.</li><li>Robots handle customer service inquiries.</li><li>Over time, this will progress to autonomous vehicles/planes/trucks.</li></ul>Coding is a superpower because it allows you to speak the language of the robots and tell them what to do.

The Robot Revolution

Naval Ravikant Quotes That Could Change Your Life • Podcast Notes

Social scientists understand many of the reasons why perpetrators catfish. Why do they take the bait?There are several theories about what motivates a victim to continue a questionable digital relationship. Attachment theory is one of them. <ul><li>Victims may struggle to form romantic ties in real life, and thus subconsciously seek to keep potential partners at a distance.</li><li>A study found that having an anxious attachment style - often expressed as clinginess in romantic relationships - was a predictor for being a catfish target</li><li>Having both high avoidance and high anxiety increased the likelihood of bein<warningtag>g a victim.</warningtag></li></ul>

The Psychology of Catfishing

More people than ever are falling prey to online romance scams. Why do they take the bait? 

Understanding the Psychology of Catfishing

Recently more and more companies are drastically reframing or ditching their annual performance rating process altogether. That's because people are dynamic and a single, standard review process cannot accurately encompass every employee’s achievements.Employees’ skills and development needs are constantly evolving due to personal factors and external influences. Given this, assigning a static rating annually based on the prior twelve months of work doesn’t make much sense. If anything, that annual rating may oftentimes serve to disincentivize employees.

Are performance reviews effective?

<ul><li>Be sure to know what's expected of you. It’s really difficult to improve within your role when expectations have not been properly communicated to you.&nbsp;</li><li>Ask for feedback. If your company doesn’t have a formal, regular feedback process in place, seek feedback. People are more than willing to provide information that will help you improve.&nbsp;</li><li>Accept the feedback and apply it. There is nothing more frustrating as a manager than taking the time to give constructive feedback, to then watch that employee continue to make the same mistakes.&nbsp;</li><li>You are the captain of the ship that is your career. Successful employees are aware of what they need to do to improve, advocate for their own learning and growth, and aren’t afraid to communicate their successes (when appropriate to do so).&nbsp;</li><li>Embrace the power of ‘not yet.’ It can be powerful to remind yourself that while you may have not mastered a certain skill or achieved a goal yet, you certainly can.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Take the lead of your performance review

The director of People and Culture at S3 advises workers to champion their own employee growth, so that their manager recognizes their contributions.


5 ways to take the lead of your performance review

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

Researchers have theorized that a sense of humor is made up of six basic variables: <ol><li>the cognitive ability to create or understand jokes</li><li>an appreciation, and enjoyment of jokes</li><li>behavior patterns of joking and laughing</li><li>cheerful or humorous temperament,</li><li>a bemused attitude about life</li><li>a strategy of using humor in the face of adversity. </li></ol>A sense of humor, then, can mean either being funny or enjoying funny things.

The Sense Of Humor

Humor can be positive, when it’s not intended to belittle or harm others, or when one laughs at one’s own circumstances. It can also be negative, when it attacks others or when one belittles oneself. Positive humor is associated with self-esteem, optimism, and life satisfaction, and with decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress. Negative humor follows the exact opposite pattern: While it can feel good in the moment, it exacerbates unhappiness.

The Type Of Humor You Consume And Share Matters

Researchers studying humor in the face of tragedy have found that jokes can indeed help people cope with grievances and loss. However, the joke can’t be too close to or too far from the event in time. Tell a joke during a horrific natural disaster and you will be shunned; tell one about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and most people won’t know what you are talking about. But get it right, and you can provide tremendous relief.

Timing Is Everything

Only 10 to15 percent of laughing is due to anything even remotely humorous. Much of the rest is meant to display emotions such as agreement or simple conviviality.Laughter itself is what brings a lot of humor’s benefits, not necessarily making other people laugh. Laughter also acts as a social lubricant, making interactions easier even when there is no humor involved.

Laughter As A Social Lubricant

<ul><li>Reject grimness.</li><li>Don’t worry about being funny. It’s better to consume humor than to supply it.</li><li>Negative, hurtful, or excessively dark jokes are a corrosive force on your and others’ well-being. This kind of humor tends to be nihilistic as opposed to lighthearted.</li></ul>

Improve Your Life With Humor

The Link Between Happiness and a Sense of Humor

Author Junot Díaz captured the line between creating and consuming in his advice to aspiring writers: &quot;Read more than you write, live more than you read.&quot;
A writer who never reads probably won&#39;t be a great writer. However, there is a point when consumption stops to inspire and becomes problematic. We should also create, not just follow along.

The line between creating and consuming

There&#39;s enough content out there to fill our time for the rest of our lives. Spending large amounts of time reading articles or absorbing self-help books feels productive. And it is - up to a point. If you only consume, it&#39;s time for a change.
Jack Butcher said in a tweet, &quot;If you have time to consume, you have time to produce.&quot; Turn your newly discovered knowledge into action.

Consume information, then act on it

Antony Moore writes that "the rich, wealthy, and successful are the minority. If you want to be in that minority, you need to switch teams and join those with a producer mindset."
Switching from a consumer to a producer can feel daunting, and we can find reasons why we can't start. Start producing, and know that the obstacles are part of the process.

You'll have to break the rules

The majority of people will rather dream about things instead of strategising how to make them a reality.
Instead of just reading about something that interests you, think about what you like about it and see how you can make it work for you. Create systems to break down large goals into actionable steps. This will keep you from feeling overwhelmed.

Have goals, not just dreams

When we think of creating, we often search for the most significant examples. Google. The printing press. Nikola Tesla. Our output doesn't have to change the world.
Creating is not limited to building something big. It can be writing a blog post, working on a knitting project, or cooking a meal. Maybe it's improving a skill. Creating is about being active instead of passive. Put things in the world, and see how it changes things for you.

Creating means lots of things


When asked what words of advice he had for aspiring writers, the author Junot Díaz offered this:&nbsp;
Read more than you write, live more than you read.
In just one short sentence, Díaz captured a crucial truth about the line between creating and consuming. It’s hard to dispute that a writer...

Self Improvement

How to Become a Creator Rather Than a Consumer | The JotForm Blog

Browser tabs, introduced in the early 2000s, are widely used but are now being considered an outdated concept that may hinder our productivity.
They are now seen as a manifestation of our cluttered mind and the work that is pending, bleakly staring at us. Browser tabs increase anxiety, divide our attention and crash our machines when overloaded to the hilt.

Browser Tabs: An Outdated Browsing Habit

The way we organize our tabs is to blame for the problem of tab overload. Having multiple windows open at the same time has now outlived its usefulness.
A better option is to group them as ‘tasks’ and arrange them organically, with the related tabs simply showing as a task. This helps reduce the clutter and keeps the eye on the ball, making us more productive.

Browser Tabs Need A Rethink

Our love-hate relationship with browser tabs drives all of us crazy. There is a solution.​

You are suffering from “tab overload”

Since the start of the lockdowns, a new trend started in social media feeds: People enjoying the beautiful, calm village life in cosy cottages, wooden pathways, and beautiful picnic-friendly gardens that contrasted with the horrors of the pandemic.
It was a surreal, escapist fantasy turned standout aesthetic of the turbulent year, that gave birth to a new hashtag: #Cottagecore. Taylor Swift swiftly embraced the trend with her new album Folklore, which carried a raw, escapist, earthy and nostalgic sound.

Cottagecore: The Standout Trend

Cottagecore, pushed into the mainstream by celebrities and social media in 2020, is in essence about living at a slow pace in country houses, where wildflowers, rivers and farm animals surround us. It is about being cosy with nature, growing our own crops, being with pets and picnicking in the woods.
The trend made staying alone at home an aspirational activity, where one can enjoy solitude, creativity and the affection of pets.

Slow Living In The Woods

The appeal of Cottagecore is the desire for moving away from the modern, fast-paced city life and towards simplicity and tranquillity. The symbols used to describe Cottagecore, flowers, bees, mushrooms, leaves and bees, indicate that there is a longing for a Disney movie-like paradise, full of wonder and magic.
Cottagecore is a repackaging of the trend of the 60s and 70s: Homesteading, a lifestyle based on living in self-sufficiency in a village, growing crops and enjoying the country life.

Cottagecore: Anti-Modernity

Urban life has eradicated the feelings of being together in a connected way, making things on your own, doing everything by yourself. One never thought of slowing down and having meaningful experiences in the constant ‘rush hour’ life we are used to.
Cottagecore puts forward the old ways of community living, doing everything by hand, be it milking cows, sewing, gardening or craftwork.

Do It Yourself Again

How did a bucolic dreamland became the perfect escape from real life? Anita Rao Kashi explores a whimsical world of nostalgia, tranquillity and folksy mysticism.

'Cottagecore' and the rise of the modern rural fantasy

Few people are fans of persistent effort, trying to sustain oneself through any task or project. Effective self-motivation is something that sets normal people apart from high-achievers.
While motivation is a personal effort, there are certain key factors that can help most of us who are trying to lose weight, save, or working on a challenging initiative.

Motivation Is Personal

One has to set goals that feel rewarding and interesting while being specific. Just having to know that you have to go to the gym may feel like a chore, but setting a goal of running 10,000 steps or doing 20 reps feels like a rewarding challenge.
In cases where one would find nothing interesting about the activity, and still has to do it, one can find certain elements of the work that may have fringe benefits.

Rewarding Goals

Goals should have intrinsic motivation, something that stokes our fire from within.
If people choose goals that are pleasant, the work gets done. On the other hand, if the external reward is big enough, people do unpleasant tasks as well, but not with enthusiasm. Example: Working only for the monthly wage (the extrinsic motivation) turns many people into ‘wage slaves’ who put in the minimum effort necessary to earn their income.

Intrinsic Vs Extrinsic Motivation

If you are trying to lose weight and reward yourself with a pizza every time you complete a milestone, the hard work is likely to be undone soon. Achievement of goals is not an incentive for indulgence.

Choose Your Reward

Research shows that uncertain rewards are a better external motivator than those which are certain. People are willing to invest more time, money and effort into something that feels thrilling.
Example: A chance to win anything between $50 to $150 creates a greater motivation than an assured win of $100 on completion of the task.

Uncertain Rewards Are Better

A backwards technique of motivation is exploiting the preference to avoid losses over acquiring gains. Making people aware that they will lose something if the activity isn’t completed is a fear-based but effective method of external motivation.
Example: Making people pay a fine if they don’t walk a certain amount of steps in a day makes them complete their target.

Loss Aversion

<ul>
<li>Most people working towards a goal witness periods of motivation(like in the beginning) and a slump(somewhere around the middle). </li>
<li>One way to overcome this slump is to have smaller goals or subgoals that give no time for a slump to happen.</li>
<li>Another way is to chart out the progress in such a way that it is fully visible and the end of the goal is in sight, creating an illusion to work just a bit more and get further towards the goal.</li>
</ul>
Example: The coffee stamps that indicate a person is just two coffee purchases away from earning a reward triggers more coffee consumption.

Sustaining Progress

As humans are social creatures, we consciously and unconsciously imitate the mannerisms, actions and habits of those around us.
Watching the ambitious, efficient and highly successful coworkers can sometimes backfire, as it can feel demotivating. One has to look at the thing which is being sought after, the achievement that one is moving towards, and talk to the successful person to find their motivation.

Motivation Using The Influence Of Others

For people struggling to find motivation, taking advice sometimes is less effective than actually giving it. By giving advice to others, they internally solidify their learnings and turn towards following it themselves, increasing their own drive and achievements.
Example: Teaching a subject to others makes us learn the subject more, than simply reading about it.

Giving And Taking Advice

How to Keep Working When You’re Just Not Feeling It

<ul>
<li>While starting out to accomplish a goal, we feel overwhelmed with the abundance of advice and information, creating an analysis paralysis.</li>
<li>Inaction and decision fatigue ensues, as we lose track of where to begin.</li>
<li>The Rule Of Five is a remedy to this problem. It is a commitment to take five daily actions (also called systems) to move quickly towards one’s goal.</li>
</ul>

Achieve Goals Faster: The Rule Of Five

Taking five mandatory actions, however small, on a regular basis makes for a routine that has nowhere else to go but eventual success, provided the action is a system practised daily, just like saving up 5 dollars every day no matter what. 
Example: Calling up five clients every day. Creating five meetings or virtual appointments, writing five pages of your book, calling and following up with five recruiters to find you a job.

Five Actions, Done Daily

Success is inevitable if a system is followed daily. It is the sum of small efforts, repeated every day. 
One can start small, by learning five new words every day in a language we want to master or even writing five sentences in your journal. Keep it regular, and see the magic of compounding.

The Power Of Persistence

Want to learn how to achieve your goals faster? Read this article to learn how Jack Canfield used the rule of five to launch a book to bestseller.

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