The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have a Hard Time Changing Our Minds by Maria Popova How the disconnect between information and insight explains our dangerous self-righteousness. “Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind,” I wrote in reflecting on the 7 most important things I learned in 7 years of Brain Pickings. It’s a conundrum most of us grapple with — on the one hand, the awareness that personal growth means transcending our smaller selves as we reach for a more dimensional, intelligent, and enlightened understanding of the world, and on the other hand, the excruciating growing pains of evolving or completely abandoning our former, more inferior beliefs as we integrate new knowledge and insight into our comprehension of how life works. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. Nicolaus Copernicus's simple yet revolutionary 1543 heliocentric model, which placed the sun rather than Earth at the center of the universe, contradicted the views of the Catholic Church. So where does this leave us?
Marginalia and the Yin-Yang of Reading and Writing by Maria Popova The bibliophile’s property rights, or why the osmosis of agreement and disagreement belongs in a book’s margins. The acts of reading and writing have always been intertwined, a kind of fundamental yin-yang of how ideas travel and permeate minds. Marginalia — those fragments of thought and seeds of insight we scribble in the margins of a book — have a social life all their own. But what is the future of marginalia in the age of the ebook? Yet, digital platforms aside, hardly anything captures both the utilitarian necessity and cultural mesmerism of marginalia better than this excerpt from the classic How to Read a Book, originally written by Mortimer Adler in 1940 and revised with Charles van Doren in 1972: When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. HT reddit books Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr
How Traditional Parenting Is Harming Children ... And Benefiting Conservative Ideology Photo Credit: PathDoc/Shutterstock.com May 8, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. From The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting by Alfie Kohn. When you hear someone insist, “Children need more than intelligence to succeed,” the traits they’re encouraged to acquire, as I’ve mentioned, are more likely to include self-discipline than empathy. But what if it turned out that persistence or an inclination to delay gratification was mostly predicted by the situations in which people find themselves and the nature of the tasks they’re asked to perform? the ability to defer immediate gratification. Similarly, other experts have argued that it may make more sense to think of self-control in general as “a situational concept, not an individual trait” in light of the fact that any individual “will display different degrees of self-control in different situations.”
Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success by Maria Popova “Character is at least as important as intellect.” Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. In this short video from the MacArthur Foundation, Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work: We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on this problem. In the exceedingly excellent How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (public library) — a necessary addition to these fantastic reads on education — Paul Tough writes of Duckworth’s work: Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves. Duckworth began her graduate work by studying self-discipline. This is where grit comes in — the X-factor that helps us attain more long-term, abstract goals.
Why We Stay In Crappy Situations (And How To Get Out Of Them) Change sucks. That’s why we stay in bad relationships, eat at the same restaurants, and take the same path to work every day. Humans like comfort, even when that comfort is uncomfortable. We’re creatures of habit, and breaking habits causes everything from anxiety, to depression, to eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. For example, I spent nine years in a relationship when I should have left after five. Why? But, as we all know, change doesn’t happen overnight. Sure, we have growth spurts brought on by moments of clarity and the desire to stop playing small. Often, we grow in waves, a cycle known as evolutionary catharsis. So how does this work? Right before we have a growth spurt, many of us have a temporary feeling of discomfort. 1. Some hallmarks of this technique include: yelling compulsive behaviors sickness 2. Features of this trait include: depression withdrawal loss of appetite 3. Distractions can take many forms, including: any form of addiction dissociation watching a lot of television
Consciousness is Not a Computation In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the universe is in fact a computer. In this article, I explain why. My primary argument for this is that consciousness is not computable. Consciousness is More Fundamental Than Computation If the universe is a computer, it would have to be a very different kind of computer than what we think of as a computer today. However, it’s not that simple. The problem is that conscious is notoriously elusive, and may not even be something a computer could ever generate. In fact, I don’t think consciousness is an information process, or a material thing, at all. There are numerous arguments for why consciousness may be fundamental. Physics and Cosmology. Beyond Computation
Do You Procrastinate? Maybe It's A Form Of Wisdom Procrastination can make us feel guilty, unproductive, riddled with failure. You know what it feels like and how it looks: Just one more round of checking social media. A spontaneous Netflix marathon. What if I told you that procrastination can be a form of wisdom? In an age of “instant” and “gotta-make-it-happen-now” productivity, our hesitation can (erroneously) be labeled as procrastination. Look, we all put things off. How can you actually benefit from your procrastination? 1. Are you hesitating because you doubt your abilities? 2. Ask yourself: What about these circumstances has me pausing? 3. Maybe you like the work you’re doing but not the client. Think about what you can change, quit, and delegate. When you examine your procrastination, you get clear. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com We're thrilled to present revitalize, a two-day summit with wellness experts from around the world. Go
Bird by Bird: Anne Lamott’s Timeless Advice on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity by Maria Popova “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my 10 favorite books on writing — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. I started writing when I was seven or eight. So she found refuge in books, searching for “some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head.” I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. But, one might wonder, why? Donating = Loving
The metamorphoses of the self-employed And so it continues. Yesterday’s labour market statistics showed that the self-employment figures are up once again. Close to 75,000 more people became self-employed in the last 3 months of this year, which means we’ve seen an increase of around 340,000 over the last 12 months alone. A report we published a few weeks ago takes a closer look at who these people are, why they’re starting up in business, and what being self-employed means to them personally. Our attempt was to paint a much richer picture of what life is like for the self-employed, and to show how complex and diverse this community really is. While we dug much deeper than most – for example, by creating a typology of self-employed ‘tribes’ – it still feels as though we only scratched the surface of this group. A common theme that came up time and again in our interviews with business owners was that it took around 2 years for their venture to finally ‘begin working’. How do we do this?