Speed Up Your IKEA Visits By Going In Through the Exit Doors. Database Software | FileMaker. How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love. " But it's not enough just to tell people that.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative. By Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”: The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese’s model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision.
A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video. Creativity is not a talent. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! Thanks, Simon. Productivity hints, tips, hacks and tricks for graduate students and professors. Contents Jump to: My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is: Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior. In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.
People are surprised when I tell them I'm lazy. I don't try to change the fact that I'm lazy: I exploit it. I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be doing. Update: Managing willpower Years after I wrote the first version of this article, I discovered a book that provided a basis for my philosophy in sound psychological science, Willpower The book surveys the literature on the science of self control. Deliberating shaping the past of least resistance optimizes the use of willpower. Anecdote: Pull-ups to the door outside our bedroom. Don't work from home Home is full of distractions. Get rid of your TV.