Rarity of Quiet | Corned Beef Hashtag It starts at 6 a.m. with the alarms that wake us up. Then the television goes on for the news, because so much has probably changed in the four or five hours that, maybe, I’ve been asleep. The coffee maker gurgles and burps in the background. The toaster pops and the skillet sizzles. The car rumbles to a start, the heater roars as it blows the still cold air through the vents. The traffic of the morning rush is heavy and the other drivers whoosh past me in their vehicles. Turning into the residential area that the school is in and the birds are chirping amid the thrum of cars riding over speed humps. I arrive back at the house, greeted by the barking of the dogs. My evening is spent yelling to be heard over the clanking of pans, the rattle of plates being stacked and unstacked, and the calls of the other cooks; beyond it all is the incessant, maddening, rhythmic throb of the exhaust hood. Finally at home, things are still. The silence rolls in. Like this: Like Loading...
ohdeardrea: How To Have A Great Life Without Spending A Lot Of Money + Saving Some Too I'd like to think I might be an expert in this category, but I'm not sure what gives anyone expert status on these things. I mean, I'm not a financial or money expert of any sort. In reality, I don't like to talk about money--- so this really is not a post on how to get rich in money, but how we live our good (great) life. We're a middle class family with two incomes. We're not rich. Don't buy disposable products. Don't buy cheap crap. Invest in expensive things (sometimes). Invest in classic things (always) I have four, six, and eight+ year old pairs of shoes that still look good--- and not because they've been sitting in a closet--because believe me they've been danced in, ran in, partied in, played in, etc. Buy some things second hand.I wrote about this before. Buy a house. You don't need a big one (a house that is). If you don't have money, don't spend it. Make stuff. Eat leftovers + meal plan. Don't buy processed foods. Drink water. Love your home. Plant a garden. Don't rush.
The High Cost Of Acting Happy 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently This list has been expanded into the new book, “Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind,” by Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman. Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they’re complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. “It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. While there’s no “typical” creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. They daydream. They observe everything.
The science behind optimizing a productive work environment 1.9K Flares Filament.io 1.9K Flares × I’ve written about how creativity works in the brain before, and I found it really useful to understand this process. Or, I should say, multiple processes. There’s so much going on in the brain during creativity that science is still trying to pin down exactly how it all works. What we do know is which three parts of the brain work together to help us create and come up with new ideas: The Attentional Control Network helps us with laser focus on a particular task. The Imagination Network as you might have guessed, is used for things like imagining future scenarios and remembering things that happened in the past. The Attentional Flexibility Network has the important role of monitoring what’s going on around us, as well as inside our brains, and switching between the Imagination Network and Attentional Control for us. You can see the Attentional Control Network (in green) and the Imagination Network (in red) in the image below.
Freelancing an Art or Commodity? There’s a debate online (and probably offline too) that divides writers, designers and more into two camps: those who consider their work a trade, and those who consider their work an art form. Now, for those of you who know me or have read older posts on this site, you’ll know that I firmly sit in the “writing is a trade” camp and disdain calling what I do for a living an art. It’s a career. It brings me income. It’s a business. It’s not William Shakespeare or Leonardo DaVinci. I don’t make a point of fighting to convince those that call themselves artists that they aren’t. One such discussion can be found right here: Are Freelancers a Commodity or a Profession? The post debated whether job auction sites like Elance devalue professional work. I won’t repeat them here. The majority of comments reflected a pretentious, arrogant mindset. Let me clue these people into some very important facts: More importantly, buyers don’t CARE. They want results. Let’s be realistic here. Alright, thinks Joe.
Conversation Skills Core | People Skills & Self-Esteem to Be More Social Hard Things You Need To Do To Be Successful You have to make the call you’re afraid to make. You have to get up earlier than you want to get up. You have to give more than you get in return right away. You have to care more about others than they care about you. You have to fight when you are already injured, bloody, and sore. You have to feel unsure and insecure when playing it safe seems smarter. You have to lead when no one else is following you yet. You have to invest in yourself even though no one else is. You have to look like a fool while you’re looking for answers you don’t have. You have to grind out the details when it’s easier to shrug them off. You have to deliver results when making excuses is an option. You have to search for your own explanations even when you’re told to accept the “facts”. You have to make mistakes and look like an idiot. You have to try and fail and try again. You have to run faster even though you’re out of breath. You have to be kind to people who have been cruel to you. The things that no one else is doing.
7 Ways Noise Affects Your Health We are surrounded by sound. From coworker chit-chat to the sounds of traffic outside to that tinny trace of music coming from a co-commuter’s earbuds, we often don’t consider the noise that makes up our daily environments. But the truth is that the distant jackhammers, incessant elevator bells and even the whistling and humming of the people around us can have a real effect on our health and wellness. As pioneering noise researcher and environmental psychologist Arline Bronzaft, Ph.D., of the City University of New York has said, noise is in the ear of the beholder. “While the ear picks up the sound waves and sends it to the temporal lobe for interpretation, it’s the higher senses of the brain that determine whether that sound is unwanted, unpleasant or disturbing.” Read on to learn more about how noise affects your well-being. Noisiness can affect children’s abilities to learn Why? Sound makes you less productive at work A noisy neighborhood could actually kill you
Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better If someone granted you one wish, what do you imagine you would want out of life that you haven’t gotten yet? For many people, it would be self-improvement and knowledge. Newcounter knowledge is the backbone of society’s progress. Great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and others’ quests for knowledge have led society to many of the marvels we enjoy today. Your quest for knowledge doesn’t have to be as Earth-changing as Einstein’s, but it can be an important part of your life, leading to a new job, better pay, a new hobby, or simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake — whatever is important to you as an end goal. Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. Health Shake a leg. Balance Sleep on it. Perspective and Focus Change your focus, part 2. Recall Techniques Listen to music. Visual Aids Every picture tells a story. Verbal and Auditory Techniques Stimulate ideas. Kinesthetic Techniques Write, don’t type.
Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity by Maria Popova Why creativity is like LEGO, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Susan Sontag and Gandhi. In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame. I spoke about Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, something at the heart of Brain Pickings and of increasing importance as we face our present information reality. These are pages from the most famous florilegium, completed by Thomas of Ireland in the 14th century. In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker: Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.” Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also of content curation. You may have heard this anecdote. Kind of LEGOs. And I like this last part. Do stuff.
On Self-Promotion You are a shameless self promoter!” he said. I can’t speak to the “shame” part, but for the rest: guilty as charged. Self-promotion may appear revolting, but it’s the only promotion that’s guaranteed in this business. Do it right, and only haters will hate you for it. To get, you must give. Love your work If you write or design, you must believe in what you do. Sometimes this takes the direct form of a case study. There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The love you make But direct self-promotion is ineffective and will go unnoticed unless it is backed by a more indirect (and more valuable) form of marketing: namely, sharing information and promoting others. Is your Twitter feed mostly about your own work, or do you mainly link to interesting work by others? You can’t fake this. This may sound Jedi-mind-trick-ish, but never create a blog or a Twitter feed with the explicit idea of promoting yourself.
Getting out alive | Finite Attention Span One Friday in May of 2011, I locked up my shared office, went to the pub with some colleagues and students, and said goodbye to my job as a senior lecturer in psychology. On the following Tuesday (it was a bank holiday weekend) I started a three-month stint as an intern at a then-mid-sized software company. They were pretty clear that there wouldn’t be more work at the end of it; all I had going for me was that they were paying me — a lot less than my academic job paid, but hey, it was money. (Let’s not even start on the ridiculous exploitation of young people by companies looking for free labour, or how unpaid internships exclude those who can’t afford to work for free.) Anyway, so … lunacy, right? Maybe. I cannot possibly supply a complete list of the things that drove me out of higher education. * the way the system effectively punished people for caring about ( = preferentially putting time into) teaching, denying them a legitimate career route with equivalent promotion opportunities;
How to be disruptive: a retrospective primer, with meerkats. | Finite Attention Span ‘Disruptive’ doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Being disruptive used to mean you’d be in trouble pretty soon: with your teachers, your parents; with other kids’ parents. You know — grown-ups. Back then, being disruptive was seen as bad, and not something that would get you very far in life, beyond maybe the head teacher’s office. Times change. (I’m not talking about knock-and-run here, by the way — it’s much more like “hmm, I wonder what happens if I do … this?” Over the last couple of months, while I’ve been literally and metaphorically packing up my office, I’ve been thinking a lot about disruptivity and its role in my recent career. It’s easy to stay inside your comfort zone if you work in a big organisation: there are established procedures and methods, and a culture of handing these things down to the next person. And yeah, I was pretty compliant to begin with. No, check that: it’s impossible to go back into your silo. Lastly, if you really want to be disruptive, leave. Like this: