Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Disproven Hypotheses Are Useful Too

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Hypotheses are conjectures—often merely proposals or intuitions—about what may constitute facts.

A specific hypothesis can be tested for its adequacy and proved correct or incorrect using the scientific method. Sometimes, a hypothesis is accepted for the time being, until further evidence suggests an amendment.

It does not matter if a certain hypothesis is proven incorrect because, in itself, the falsification of a hypothesis can offer precious insight about the “what is not” to enhance the “what is.”

Hypotheses are the bedrock of scholarship. Scientific understanding accrues when many interrelated and tested hypotheses are used to develop theories, and rethink and restructure our knowledge.

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We’re All Trying to Control Others

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We're All Trying to Control Others

One of the realities of the human condition is that we’re all operating our lives by trying to make the settings around us—the environments in which we live, work, and play—to be just the way we want them to be.

However, we share these settings with other people, who themselves are trying to make their settings just the way they want them to be.

And herein is the source of a great many conflicts: as we control our worlds and our lives with the purpose of making them transpire as we’d like them to, we intercede with the controlling of others.

Conflict is not necessarily bad. It is a normal, fundamental, and pervasive facet of life. It is a natural outcome of what happens when our expectations, interests, viewpoints, inclinations, and opinions are at variance with those of others.

Every relationship is a minefield of conflict, and each instance of contradictory viewpoints brings new challenges.

The key to getting along amicably and resolving the problems of the world is working out how we can wisely facilitate our control of what is important to us without interfering with other people’s efforts at doing the same thing.

Idea for Impact: Life is negotiation. Getting what you want out of life is all about getting what you want from—and with—other people. Learning how to engage in conflict to get what you want without inflicting damage on the opportunities and the relationships is one of life’s essential and practical skills.

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Inspirational Quotations #741

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Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.
—Mignon McLaughlin

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
—Marian Wright Edelman

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power? Shared vision is vital for the learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning.
—Peter Senge

Friendship with the evil is like the shadow in the morning, decreasing every hour; but friendship with the good is like the evening shadows, increasing till the sun of life sets.
—Johann Gottfried Herder

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.
—Booth Tarkington

If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.
—Christian Nestell Bovee

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
—George Macdonald

Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck.
—Og Mandino

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.
—Jean Paul

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things.
—William James

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
—Robert Fulghum

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To Micromanage or Not?

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Micromanagement—any unnecessary meddling in someone else’s responsibilities, decision-making, and span of authority—is often one of the most common gripes that employees have about their managers. No manager’s participation, influence, and authority should chip value away from an employee’s work.

Nobody Likes a Meddling Boss

To Micromanage or Not? There’s a thin line between appropriate questioning and micromanaging. What characterizes micromanaging is not whether a manager is questioning the minutiae, but whether the fine points are significant enough to be pried into and to what end the manager is probing.

For instance, is a manager making a point of a certain inconsistent operating expense, or is the manager examining bookkeeping details that may help bring to light a bigger-level problem such as a defective accounting system? Asking questions doesn’t in and of itself signify micromanaging, as long as those questions lead to insights of some substance.

If a manager hones into some trivial detail and challenges it with an intention of establishing an employee’s error, it’s reasonable to assume that the manager is micromanaging.

When micromanaging happens in the area of the manager’s expertise, his nitpicking is usually provoked by an egotistical need to emphasize his knowledge or experience on the subject, especially if the manager is insisting on his pet course of action.

Idea for Impact: When tactically applied, micromanaging can be a powerful tool to get the right things done

The ability to pose broad, open-ended questions (try the Socratic Method) and help an employee uncover crucial details—and to do this without creating the perception of micromanaging—is a particularly valuable managerial skill.

The smartest managers I know of do away with as many unnecessary reports, reviews, and approvals as possible. They ask the right questions about the right subjects in the right tone to help refocus an employee’s attention while deferring to the employee’s decision-making prerogative. They don’t delve into the fine points of everything—they selectively micromanage only if they must.

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  5. How to Address Employees with Inappropriate Clothing

Inspirational Quotations #740

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A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
—George Jean Nathan

The gambler is a moral suicide.
—Charles Caleb Colton

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
—Aristotle

A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
—Malcolm X

Jealousy is an inner consciousness of one’s own inferiority. it is a mental cancer.
—B. C. Forbes

The terrible immoralities are the cunning ones hiding behind masks of morality, such as exploiting people while pretending to help them.
—Vernon Howard

We create our fate every day … most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
—Henry Miller

The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date.
—Charles Caleb Colton

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
—Edward R. Murrow

Love of fame, fear of disgrace, schemes for advancement; desire to make life comfortable and pleasant, and the urge to humiliate others are often at the root of the valor that men hold in such high esteem.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don’t know.
—Bertrand A. Russell

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
—Satchel Paige

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.
—William F. Buckley, Jr.

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
—John D. Rockefeller

If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.
—Pauline Phillips (Abigail van Buren)

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.
—Washington Irving

The Historian’s Fallacy: People of the Past Had No Knowledge of the Future [Mental Models]

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The practice of picking a thesis and then setting out to establish it is a widespread intellectual pursuit. But biographers and historians sometimes portray their subjects as if the historical participants could recognize what lay ahead of them.

The Historian's Fallacy: People of the Past Had No Knowledge of the Future Assuming that people of the past pondered over the events of their day from the same perspective as we do in the present is committing The Historian’s Fallacy.

The notion of the historian’s fallacy was first presented by the British literary critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88) in his The Study of Poetry (1880.) In questioning how historical backgrounds were portrayed in the development of literary styles, Arnold called attention to the frequent logical error of using hindsight to assign a sense of causality and foresight of significant historical events to the people who lived through them. In reality, those historical participants may not have had wide-ranging perspective that we assume in interpreting the context, conventions and limitations of their time. Arnold wrote,

The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic. … Our personal affinities, likings and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet’s work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance.

The American historian David Hackett Fischer, who coined the phrase “historian’s fallacy,” cited the claim that the United States should have anticipated Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor because of the many warning signs that an attack was in the cards. Fischer argues those signs seem obvious only in hindsight—to the World War II military leaders, many of those signs suggested possible attacks on many positions other than Pearl Harbor.

A good historian strives for objectivity by ignoring his own knowledge of consequent events and employing only what the historic individuals would have known in the context of their own time.

A related fallacy is Presentism—a manner of historical analysis wherein the past is interpreted by means of present-day attitudes. Presentism often fosters moral self-righteousness. Employing present-day moral standards to reflect on the Founding Fathers’ ownership of slaves, David Hume’s racism, or Gandhi’s opposition to modernity and technology should not be tainted by our stance of temporal condescension.

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  4. Learn to Adapt More Flexibly to Developing Situations [Mental Models]
  5. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress [Mental Models]

Writing To-Do Lists Can Help You Sleep

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Sleeplessness Can Both Cause Anxiety and Be Caused by Anxiety

Writing To-Do Lists Can Help You Sleep - Zeigarnik Effect If you have recurrent difficulty with falling asleep or staying asleep, making a to-do list may help.

The authors of a Baylor University study suggest that not only can anxiety about unfinished tasks affect your sleep, but improving your sleep problem can also help symptoms of anxiety.

The authors’ experiment asked 57 students to spend a night in a sleep lab with no gadgets or distractions. Five minutes prior to an enforced sleep time, one half of the volunteers created a list of things they wanted to do over the upcoming days and the other half recorded tasks that they had completed during the previous few days. The researchers examined the participants’ brain activity during the night and established that those who wrote their to-do lists fell asleep nine minutes sooner on average.

How Ruminating about Unfinished Tasks Can Keep You Awake

The beneficial effects of a humble to-do list on your sleeplessness can be explained by the Zeigarnik Effect, the tendency for interrupted tasks and thoughts to be evoked better than completed tasks.

As I’ve written previously, Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who studied this phenomenon, theorized that incomplete tasks can incite “psychic tension” and can inundate you with a constant stream of reminders. Just the modest act of capturing how you’re going to deal with the unresolved tasks in a to-do list can achieve a sense of completion and respite.

According to Michael Scullin, the lead researcher of the aforementioned Baylor study, “there’s something about the act of writing, physically writing something on paper, that helps us hit the Pause button.”

When you have a task that’s unfinished, it’s on your mind more than any task you have completed. If you test people’s memory for things that were unfinished versus things that were completed, people remember the things that were unfinished a lot better. It seems that unfinished tasks rest at what we call a heightened level of cognitive activation. We think that’s the key ingredient. With our day-to-day lives and work schedule, unfinished tasks pile on one another and create this cognitive activation that’s difficult to set aside—unless, of course, you write about it.

Idea for Impact: Write a to-do List Before Hitting the Sack Every Night

Some folks I know create a ‘brain dump’ just before bedtime—they not only jot down any worries or unfinished tasks from the day, but also create a plan for resolving their worries and stressors.

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  2. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress [Mental Models]
  3. How to Elevate Timing from Art to Science: Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’
  4. Stressed, Lonely, or Depressed? Could a Pet Help?
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

Inspirational Quotations #739

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Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.
—Jean Paul

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.
—Charles Caleb Colton

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
—Katherine Mansfield

Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning.
—George S. Patton

Every man’s memory is his private literature.
—Aldous Huxley

By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look in thy chest; for ‘Tis thine own: And tumble up and down what thou findst there. Who cannot rest till he good fellows find, he breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.
—George Herbert

One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero.
—Beilby Porteus

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
—Charlotte Bronte

We’re all stumbling towards the light with varying degrees of grace at any given moment.
—Bo Lozoff

You will not find a soulmate in the quiet of your room. You must go to a noisy place and look in the quiet corners.
—Robert Brault

Being educated means to prefer the best not only to the worst but to the second best.
—William Lyon Phelps

Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.
—Miyamoto Musashi

Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary—they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
—Berthold Auerbach

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
—William Shakespeare

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
—Elizabeth Bowen

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
—E. W. Howe

What skill of yours has given you the must success? Use it more.
—Marty Nemko

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started … the fate of humanity is in his hands.
—Abraham Lincoln

How to Elevate Timing from Art to Science: Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’

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Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018) explores how the quality of the decisions we make are correlated with their timing.

Pink is an expert on motivation and management, and an author of such best-selling books as Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) and To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012.) He describes When as not so much a “how-to” guide for making the most of our lives, but as a “when-to” manual for individual and group work.

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

'When Perfect Timing' by Daniel H. Pink (ISBN 0735210624) Pink’s principal theme is chronobiology—the science of how the body’s biological clocks can influence our cognitive abilities, moods, and attentiveness.

Drawing on scientific research on the science of timing, Pink concludes that the mental acuity, creativity, productivity, temper, and frames of mind for most folks follow an identifiable “peak-trough-rebound” template. Most people get their best work done in the mornings, suffer a trough of mental weariness in the afternoon, and experience a late-evening burst:

Our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. … [R]esearch has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Needless to say, this “peak-trough-rebound” phenomenon is fairly universal but differs among individuals. There are “larks” who do remarkably well in the mornings and “owls” who tend to embrace their late night productivity habits.

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

According to Pink, “peak-trough-rebound” is attributable to the body’s relatively low temperature when we wake up. The increasing body temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness, which consequently “enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction.” As the morning evolves, we become more focused and alert until we hit a peak. Then our energy level wanes and our alertness declines, only to be restored in early evening.

Pink concludes that mornings are good for decision-making and that errors increase in the afternoons. Studies recommend that we schedule surgery in the mornings when surgeons tend to make fewer mistakes and avoid petitioning a traffic ticket in the afternoons because judges tend to be less considerate than in the mornings.

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

Pink emphasizes the risks of clouded judgment that characterizes the afternoon “trough.” As an example, Pink speculates that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 was about the time of day—it’s captain’s ill-fated decisions were made in the afternoon following a night of no sleep.

With case studies of error-reduction in hospital operating rooms, Pink suggests “vigilance breaks” (quick team huddles for reviewing checklists and verifying courses of action) and restorative breaks (naps, short physical activities, or mental diversions) during troughs to “recharge and replenish, whether we’re performing surgery or proofreading advertising copy.”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Based on the mentioned studies’ correlations and causations, Pink offers advice further than daily scheduling—from marriage to switching careers and sports:

  • The best time to perform a specific task depends on the nature of that task. Identify your chronotype (Pink offers an online survey,) understand your task, and decide on the most suitable time. Do not let mundane tasks sneak into your peak period. Additionally, if you’re a boss, understand your employees’ work patterns and “allow people to protect their peak.”
  • The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions: Daniel Pink's 'When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing' Tasks that need creativity and a flash of insight (rather than analytical perspicacity) are best done during the late-evening recovery period when the mind tends to be less inhibited and more open to inventive associations.
  • Harness the psychological power of beginnings—New Year’s Days, birthdays, and anniversaries are all natural times to make resolutions and start working on goals. Other opportunities for fresh starts include the first of the month, the beginning of the week, and the first day of spring.
  • “Lunch breaks offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—especially for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”
  • Afternoon coffee followed by 10- to 20-minute naps and leisurely daily walks are “not niceties, but necessities.” Drink a cup of coffee just before a nap—the 25 minutes it takes for the caffeine to kick in is the optimal length of a restorative siesta.
  • Morning workouts are best for people aiming to burn fat, lose weight, or build sustainable exercise habits. Folks trying to reach personal bests should seek out the afternoons, when physical performance tends to reach its zenith.
  • Studies suggest that people are most likely to run their first marathons at ages ending in 9—but those ages are also when people are most prone to cheating on their spouses.
  • According to one survey, switching jobs every three to five years in your early career can lead to the biggest pay increases.

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing offers little fresh substance. Many of the cited studies’ implications, causations, and correlations are open to debate.

A speed-read of When, especially of the takeaway points at the end of each chapter, can offer some practical tips about when you are likely to be creative, focused, and least error-prone.

Parenthetically, the third and the final section on “Synching and Thinking” is out-of-place to Pink’s principal theme of timing, even if the case study of the synchronized effort that constitutes the Mumbai Dabbawala lunchbox delivery system is interesting. Pink explains that the importance of “syncing up” with people around you through a collective sense of identity and a shared purpose is “a powerful way to lift your physical and psychological well-being.”

Complement skimming Daniel Pink’s When with Michael Breus’s The Power of When (2016; Talk at Google.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Book Summary of ‘The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload’
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  3. Hoarding and Learning to Let Go
  4. How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job—Book Summary of “Mindful Work” by David Gelles
  5. The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy / Book Summary of “The Millionaire Next Door”

Inspirational Quotations #738

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Know that a word suddenly shot from the tongue is like an arrow shot from the bow. Son, that arrow won’t turn back on its way; you must damn the torrent at its source.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
—Walter Lippmann

Imagination arises in between our eyebrows, not from the intellect.
—Hans Taeger

This above all—to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
—William Shakespeare

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
—Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

There is only one real failure possible; and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.
—Frederic William Farrar

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
—Guillaume Apollinaire

Every time you win, it diminishes the fear a little bit. You never really cancel the fear of losing; you keep challenging it.
—Arthur Ashe

The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.
—David Starr Jordan

One of these days is none of these days.
—Common Proverb

I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead.
—Jimmy Buffett

The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge of the real value of things, and of the genius of the age in which we live.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment.
—A. W. Tozer

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
—Elie Wiesel

Here’s a prayer to help you deal with annoying people. Learn from the Stoics!