63 ways to build more confidence (LifeHack)
Ways to live forever (James Altucher)
What not to say when pulled over by a cop (Chris Rock)
How to simplify your life (Frugal Zeitgeist)
The minimalist’s guide to cultivating passion (Zen Habits)
How great leaders inspire action (Ted)
Success in most arenas of life is thus not a reflection of innate skill but rather devoted effort (Peter Orszag)
1. Don’t try making sense out of it. You’re in an insane asylum – things are not going to make sense, people will do things that don’t make sense, that they cannot adequately explain. People don’t know what makes them tick, only that they tick.
2. Happiness, of course…is all in your head. If you don’t know that, if you haven’t come to that realization, you will never be happy.
3. The Bull Market Syndrome. People, when they are met with success, take personal credit for it (bull markets breed geniuses), and when they are met with failure, blame luck.
4. Actually, luck is responsible for both! If you can only die by being struck by lightning, eventually, you will die by being struck by lightning! Conversely, if a man were to live forever, and bought a lottery ticket every week, eventually, he will win the lottery, with a probability that approaches certainty. Just stay the course, keep doing today what you must do today. As Woody Allen says, “Fifty percent of success is just showing up.”
Luck Trumps Brains. To get luck, keep showing up each day with your shoes on.
5. Creativity trumps money every time.
6. Fortunately in life, you don’t have to succeed at everything you do, only a few things. One success often justifies all prior attempts.
7. You can buy great a education – you can not buy brains.
8. The Oswald Principle: Usually, the best course of action in life, is to take no action (and usually, the best thing to say is nothing!). The guys in jail or there not because they didn’t do anything. Usually, you should just sleep in! If nothing really bad happens today, as my friend Oswald said to me in eighth grade, it’s been a good day!
9. You don’t have the problems you think you do. Actually, the only real problems are health and criminal problems. Everything else is just a frivolous, meaningless nuisance.
10. Never say never. Everyone, however righteous they may claim to be, however upstanding they say they are, will, under the right circumstances commit the crime. A cold morning, wet, hungry, tired, angry….they’ll do things they never dreamed they would! (more…)
This lecture by professor Paul Bloom of Yale starts with the observation that religion serves no obvious adaptive purpose. I find that a little surprising since it is well documented that people who have a make generally accurate appraisals of themselves and their environment are depressed (notice it is not clear which way causality runs). Since optimism is considered to be adaptive, and most religions have a point of view as to what death is all about and what if anything happens afterwards, I would think that giving people coping strategies about the inevitability of death would be adaptive. As I wrote last year:
In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira goes looking for his missing brothers, who went searching for water. He finds them all dead next to a pond. In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?” Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”
And as Americans have become more and more work focused, and as job tenures become shorter and people often have to move in search of gainful employment, the idea of community as a place seems quaint. As this video suggests, houses of worship may be the only place most people find community these days. I doubt that is a healthy development.
And this DOES relate to the Super Bowl! The Center for Public Religion has found that 1/3 of Americans think God decides the outcome of sporting events. He does not do so directly, by having favorite teams (too tacky!) but by favoring teams with more God-fearing athletes.
