Curiosity Required. Once, while looking for a new gig, I met up with a couple of potential coworkers for food and drinks. We were chatting about their project, what I’d worked on previously, etc., and eventually started talking about recent tech news. At one point, I mentioned having found out about a story on Twitter. “Oh, I don’t use Twitter,” one of them said quickly, with disgust.
“Oh? I pressed further and turned out he didn’t know anything about Twitter. That’s when I decided to add a new question to the list of questions I ask both when interviewing and when being interviewed: “Have you heard of [new app/service]?” To be clear, it doesn’t matter if the answer is yes or no.
And if you’re intensely curious, I tend to worry less about those other skills. It’s not a nice-to-have. Kudos. Joe Kraus Blog. A few weeks ago I gave this rough presentation on a topic called “SlowTech”. I wanted to cover three things We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us and increasingly unable to engage in long-form thinking.
People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated.We are losing some very important things by doing this. We threaten the key ingredients behind creativity and insight by filling up all our “gap” time with stimulation. And we inhibit real human connection when we prioritize our phones over our the people right in front of us.What can we do about it? I’ve pasted the text of the speech below (sorry, it’s a bit rough). Remarks for SlowTech talk – CONSTANT CULTURE OF DISTRACTION I want to start with some imagery of the way we live today. I want to talk three things tonight As a culture, we’ve got a crisis of attention.
Part 1. I don’t think I have a healthy relationship with mine. I hope so. How we die (in one chart) The New England Journal of Medicine looks through 200 years of back issues to understand how we die differently: The first thing to notice here is how much our mortality rate has dropped over the course of a century, largely due to big reductions in infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. The way we talk about medical conditions has changed, too. NEJM finds that, back in 1812 - the first year it published - reports of spontaneous combustion were taken quite seriously by the medical community, as were debates over how, exactly one would be injured by a close-call with a cannonball: Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them (1812f). Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of “brandy-drinking men and women,” received serious, if skeptical, consideration (1812g).
Love, Dad. In June of 1971, just days before his 26-year-old son, Michael, got married, future-U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent him the following letter of advice. It really is quite stunning. (Source: Reagan: A Life In Letters; Image: Ronald Reagan, via.) Michael Reagan Manhattan Beach, California June 1971Dear Mike:Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won't.You've heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the "unhappy marrieds" and cynics. A Short Lesson in Perspective. Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently engaged upon – an ad for a new gas oven, tennis racket or whatever.
Scribbled headlines. Bad puns. Stick-men drawings crudely rendered in fat black Magic Marker. It was a kind of brain dump I suppose. Everything that tumbled out of our heads and mouths was committed to paper. On a productive day, aside from the mountain of dead trees (recycling hadn’t been invented in 1982), stacked polystyrene coffee cups and an overflowing ash-tray, there would also be a satisfying thick sheaf of “concepts.”
Hangovers not withstanding, the next morning at the crack of ten ‘o’ clock we’d reconvene in our work-room and sit quietly surveying the fruits of our labour. But here’s the thing. So. A week would be nice. The myth of the eight-hour sleep. Image copyright Other We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. Image copyright bbc "It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74. » Tired of Being Tired. ‘A man grows most tired while standing still.’ ~Chinese proverb Post written by Leo Babauta. It’s tough being tired all day. I’ve had days like this, when I’m struggling through the day and don’t have the energy to tackle anything that matters. Hell, I’ve had years like this. When you’re tired, not much seems appealing. These days I don’t have many days like this, but when I do, I rest. This is wrong. Why We’re Tired Mostly we’re tired because we don’t rest enough. The Spanish famously have siestas. We don’t rest enough. So we cut rest in favor of these other things that are much more important, and then wonder why our energy levels are low. But there’s more. We also run ourselves too fast, like a sprint, when life is much longer than a sprint. Note: Sometimes chronic fatigue can be a sign of deeper problems.
How to Get Started When You’re Too Tired to Start My first suggestion is to take a nap. Disconnect, get outside, take a walk. More Solutions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.