While group brainstorming is often more effective at generating ideas than normal group problem solving, several <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2420030402/abstract">studies</a> have shown that individual brainstorming produces more – and often better – ideas than group brainstorming.Individual brainstorming can produce better ideas because you're less likely to run into counter-productive behaviors.However, the best brainstorming takes advantage of both individual and group work.

Group or Individual Brainstorming?

<ul><li>Find comfortable setting</li><li>Minimize distractions</li><li>Use tools you're comfortable with (e.g., mind maps)</li><li>Clearly define the problem</li><li>Develop list of related questions</li><li>Record your first idea</li><li>Ask yourself, "If this idea couldn't be made to work, what would be the next best idea?"</li></ul>

Tips on Individual Brainstorming

<ul><li>Collect a diverse group with varied backgrounds, areas of expertise, and experience levels</li><li>Set up comfortable environment with all the tools, resources, and refreshments you may need</li><li>Present and define the problem</li><li>Give people time to come up with ideas individually (see previous tips for individual brainstorming), then share with the group (round-robin will give each person the best opportunity to contribute)</li><li>Guide the discussion to build on each idea, generating spinoff ideas</li><li>Take breaks as needed, and allow individuals to break away as they need</li></ul>

Tips on Group Brainstorming

Brainstorming helps you develop creative solutions to a problem, and is particularly useful when you need to break out of stale thinking patterns. Includes a video.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Brainstorming: Generating Many Radical, Creative Ideas

This often bandied about claim (http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html), that happiness maxes out at $75k/year is due to a shallow and wrong reading of the research (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full).Actually, life satisfaction keeps improving with income, with no limit.Even emotional wellbeing doesn't always peak at $75k - it depends on local cost of living (https://medium.com/financial-strategy/the-dirty-little-secret-about-money-168edd36a2ee).

Happiness peaks or levels off beyond $75k income? Wrong!

Even Orange is the New Black got it wrong.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Philosophy

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Angus Deaton's badly misunderstood paper on whether happiness peaks at $75,000, explained

How rich other people are getting. “Nothing so undermines your financial judgement as the sight of your neighbor getting rich.”Financial advice from billionaires. The ultra-wealthy are usually out of touch with normal people for their advice to be useful. They can also recover from huge financial mistakes that you can't afford.

Looking at Others Can Get in the Way of Managing Your Financial Affairs

Your IQ. In investing, EQ matters more than IQ. There are lots of smart people who invest, but far fewer who can control their reactions. Normal IQ with high EQ makes you a better investor than the opposite.Success in other areas of your life. Those who assume (non-investment) career success automatically translates to investing success don't usually do well. It doesn’t work like that.

Some Things You Think Would Make You a Great Investor - Don't

What you paid for an investment. Holding on to a losing investment until you break even can burn you badly. Some stocks never come back. Buy and hold can work out well for some stocks, but for others, you're just throwing good money after bad.The time and effort you put into your investments. Doing due diligence when choosing investments is crucial. But there are no extra points for effort in investing. How hard you worked on your analysis matters far less than how good a job you did.

Once Purchased, Your Investments Will Perform as They Will

How much you could have made if you would have only put $10k into… This sort of backward looking fantasies are useless, unless they teach you how to pick the next 10-bagger before it shoots up. Otherwise, you may as well throw darts at a list of stocks. Enron anybody?Timing the market perfectly. Looking at market returns, for individual stocks, funds, sectors, or indexes, can be fun or terrifying, but not very useful. Nobody can consistently pick the best (or worst) times to invest.

Some Totally Useless Thought Experiments

Beating the market. Investing is about achieving your personal financial goals, not beating the market. Would you rather get great returns but fail to achieve your goals (e.g., because you invested too little, too late), or achieve your goals with mediocre returns (because you invested early, often, and consistently)?Short-term performance numbers. Your short-term performance will be great some of the time and miserable other times. Who cares? Long-term returns are the only ones that matter.

Things That Look Good but Don't Really Matter

We've collected the most popular hacks to help you reach your financial goals

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Business

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Money & Investments

How to Succeed at Investing

10 Things You Shouldn’t Care About as an Investor

Lifestyle inflation is an insidious killer of your financial wellbeing and eventual financial independence.What it is: allowing your expenses to grow along with increases in your income.How preventing it helps:<ul><li>Using increases in income to plump up your savings lets you take advantage of compounded returns over time.</li><li>Second, keeping your expenses lower reduces the size of the nest egg needed to fund your retirement. </li></ul>

Score a Two-Fer Toward Financial Independence

<ol><li>When you score a raise or bonus, invest at least half of it for the future - this is the most painless way of increasing your savings rate.</li><li>Whenever you pay off a loan or credit card, increase your savings by the same amount you no longer need to send to your creditor. This is another relatively painless way to save more.</li><li>Every few months, review your spending and trim 3% off each discretionary category (e.g., eating out, shows, etc.).</li></ol>

Pro Tips to Accelerating Your Financial Independence

You’ve heard before that you have to set money aside — money for emergencies, for buying a car or house, for a kid’s college education, and for retirement. This is hardly news. What you may not have…

How to Reach Early Financial Independence

To figure out how much you need in order to retire, answer these questions:<ol><li>How long do you expect to live in retirement (early retirement = longer retirement)?</li><li>What budget can you enjoy living on?</li><li>How much income do you expect in retirement (Social Security, rental income, part-time work, annuities, etc.)?</li></ol>Multiply by 28 the difference between answers 2 and 3. That's how much you'll need for regular retirement age. For early retirement, multiply by at least 33.

3 Questions to Answer to Know How Much You Need to be Able to Retire

One couple, Billy and Akaisha Kaderli, did just that. They saved up $500k by the time they were 38 years old, in 1991, invested it, and called it a career. Now, 30 years later, their portfolio is…

What Retirement Can You Actually Afford with $500k, $1 Million, or $2 Million in Assets?

The Biden administration proposed almost doubling the maximum capital gains tax rate, from the current 20% to 39.6%, about the same rate as standard income, which has a top bracket of 37%. This rate would only apply to those who have <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/75-percent-of-stock-owners-wont-pay-bidens-likely-capital-gains-tax-hike.html">$1 million or more</a> in annual income, which means only 540,000 investors need to actually worry about this tax. This tax would not apply to many of the investment vehicles used by average people, such as the IRA, 401(k), and 403(b). In fact, 75% of investors hold their assets in one or more of these accounts, which would be shielded, regardless of income level. However... <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41364.pdf">Research</a> points to a level at which a higher capital gains tax yields diminishing returns, with around 28 or 29 percent the upper limit. Also, analysis from the <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/4/23/revenue-effects-of-president-bidens-capital-gains-tax-increase">Penn Wharton Budget Model</a> (PWBM) shows: <blockquote>... raising the top statutory rate on capital gains to 39.6 percent would decrease revenue by $33 billion over fiscal years 2022–2031.</blockquote><blockquote>If stepped-up basis were eliminated — as proposed in President Biden’s campaign plan — then raising the top rate to 39.6 percent would instead raise $113 billion over 2022–2031.</blockquote>

Biden's Plan Doubles Capital Gains Tax - Is It a Problem?

The last major piece of legislation presented by the Biden Administration at the end of its first 100 days is the the American Family Plan, a $1.8 trillion set of policies aimed at supporting…

Brainstorming: Generating Many Radical, Creative Ideas

Angus Deaton's badly misunderstood paper on whether happiness peaks at $75,000, explained

10 Things You Shouldn’t Care About as an Investor

How to Reach Early Financial Independence

What Retirement Can You Actually Afford with $500k, $1 Million, or $2 Million in Assets?

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