• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Nagesh Belludi

How to Argue like the Wright Brothers

February 15, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

The Wright brothers, most notable for inventing powered flight, also enjoyed developing their critical thinking by fiercely debating with each other.

Wilbur and Orville found debating and challenging each other’s viewpoints was a constructive way to identify solutions to a myriad of problems or resolve their interpersonal conflicts.

The Wright brothers often took two different sides of an argument, debated the subject, then switched sides and debated the opposing argument. Orville Wright once narrated, “Often, after an hour or so of heated argument, we would discover that we were as far from agreement as when we started, but that each had changed to the other’s original position.”

Idea for Impact: Only when you contrast your point of view with an opponent’s does your own make sense. Use the Wright Brothers’ technique of double-sided debate to question your own preconceptions about an issue and appreciate alternative perspectives.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. To Make an Effective Argument, Explain Your Opponent’s Perspective
  2. How to Gain Empathic Insight during a Conflict
  3. Rapoport’s Rules to Criticize Someone Constructively
  4. Presenting Facts Can Sometimes Backfire
  5. Don’t Ignore the Counterevidence

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Conflict, Conversations, Critical Thinking, Getting Along, Persuasion, Thinking Tools, Thought Process

Inspirational Quotations #415

February 12, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I’m not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
—William Saroyan (American Novelist)

I was made to work. If you are equally industrious, you will be equally successful.
—Johann Sebastian Bach (German Composer)

Perhaps the best test of a man’s intelligence is his capacity for making a summary.
—Lytton Strachey (British Biographer)

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we might have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.
—Gian Carlo Menotti (Italian-born American Composer)

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss Philosopher)

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.
—Karl Barth (Swiss Reformed Theologian)

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
—Jean Sibelius (Finnish Composer)

The art of teaching is tolerance. Humbleness is the art of learning.
—B. K. S. Iyengar (Indian Hindu Yoga Teacher)

Without constancy there is neither love, friendship, nor virtue in the world.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Nobody Likes a Tattletale: Do Not Play the Office Cop

February 8, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

A co-worker takes twice as many days off as your company allows. The receptionist is frequently on the phone with her boyfriend. A team member goofs off all the time and never gets his job done. To top it all, your easygoing boss does not seem concerned about all these. Convinced you should tell on others? Thinking of complaining to your HR in the interest of fairness?

Do not play the office cop. Because, nobody likes a tattletale. Moreover, it’s is your boss’s job to keep an eye on everybody at your workplace and correct them if necessary, not yours. You have some influence over your peers, but no authority. Hence, you cannot control them.

Examine Your Motivations

Tattling is a common trait during the formative years of life. Children tend to feel compelled to notify elders when siblings or other children do something wrong. By taking on a parental responsibility under the guise of being helpful, young tattletales use a socially acceptable way to tell on others and get them in trouble. As children age, they learn to discern between when to keep a secret and when to inform on others. Some never seem to outgrow the need to tattle or gossip and bring these traits to the workplace.

A tattletale is usually motivated by selfish reasons. Therefore, examine what is behind your own desire to inform on someone. Are you bothered more by your boss’s laidback attitude rather than the behaviors of your colleagues? Are you trying to draw positive attention to your own righteous adherence to the rules? Is your intention to gain acceptance by management and be seen as a dependable employee? Are you seeking to curry favor with the boss? Or, do you sadistically enjoy having your colleagues punished or embarrassed?

Don’t Rob the Workplace of Trust

A tattletale quickly destroys team morale and brings about increased conflict in the workplace. In successful organizations, team members set high expectations for one another and push each other to work smarter. When you do complain to your boss, you do not want to raise anything that may seem trivial or vindictive.

If you observe an incident that might constitute a breach of ethics or is significant enough to affect your team, you have every right to blow the whistle through the established channels or a whistleblowing system even at the risk of being branded a tattletale. The standards of decency require you to talk directly to anybody who offends you before going to your boss. If a peer persistently interferes with your work or sabotages your projects, you should privately warn the offender that if it happens again, you would report it to your boss.

Wisdom Comes from Knowing What to Overlook

Control the impulse to be worked up and tattletale on issues that have little to do with your own work. Let your resentment subside. Be quiet and keep your head down. If someone’s behavior is genuinely in the way getting a job done, wait for a manager or HR to identify and fix the problem.

For now, think of ways to ask your lenient boss for some extra time off for yourself.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear
  2. To Inspire, Translate Extrinsic Motivation to Intrinsic Motivation
  3. Extrinsic Motivation Couldn’t Change Even Einstein
  4. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  5. Teams That Thrive make it Safe to Speak & Safe to Fail

Filed Under: Managing People, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Feedback, Great Manager, Workplace

Inspirational Quotations #414

February 5, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you would walk the way of love, never feel hurt nor yield to anger, but accept pain as a part of life.
—J. P. Vaswani (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.
—William Ralph Inge (English Anglican Clergyman)

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
—Amos Bronson Alcott (American Teacher)

The desire for the well-being of one’s own nation can be—and must be—made compatible with the welfare of all humanity.
—Louis Leo Snyder (American-born German Scholar)

Words once printed assume a life of their own.
—Wilma Askinas

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
—E. F. Schumacher (German Mathematician)

Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad.
—Christina Rossetti (English Poet)

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
—Hannah Arendt (German Political Theorist)

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
—Louise Erdrich (American Children’s Books Writer)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #413

January 29, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
—Jeremy Collier (English Anglican Theater Critic)

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
—Jonathan Swift (Irish Satirist)

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
—Iris Murdoch (English Novelist)

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
—Igor Stravinsky (Russian-born American Composer)

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German Lutheran Pastor)

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic)

What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
—David Foster Wallace (American Novelist)

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
—Eugene O’Neill (American Playwright)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #412

January 22, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Advanced countries of today have reached their present affluence through domination of other races and countries…Their sheer ruthlessness, undisturbed by feelings of compassion or by abstract theories of freedom, equality or justice, gave them a head start.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them – occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.
—Michelle Richmond (American Novelist)

The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
—Frederick II of Prussia (Prussian Monarch)

The more comfort becomes your priority, the more contracted you become with fear.
—T. Harv Eker (American Motivational Speaker)

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
—Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian Christian Philosopher)

In small proportions we just beauties see,|And in short measures life may perfect be.
—Ben Jonson (English Dramatist)

Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #411

January 15, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One must not hold one’s self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one’s creations.
—Ludwig van Beethoven (German Composer)

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway (American Author)

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
—Joshua L. Liebman (American Jewish Rabbi)

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
—John Weiss (American Author)

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.
—Golda Meir (Israeli Head of State)

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.
—Stevie Wonder (American Singer)

Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.
—Ludwig van Beethoven (German Composer)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #410

January 8, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
—Marlene Dietrich (German-born American Actor)

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
—Charles Sanders Peirce (American Philosopher)

Clarity moves much more efficiently than violence or stress.
—Byron Katie (American Speaker)

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.
—Lisa Kirk (American Actor)

Be grateful for yourself… be thankful.
—William Saroyan (American Novelist)

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon (English Poet)

I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.
—Madeleine Albright (Czech-born American Diplomat)

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
—Barbara Kingsolver (American Novelist)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #409

January 1, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actor)

If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

Contemplate the wonders of creation, the Divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from a distance, but as the reality in which you live.
—Abraham Isaac Kook (Latvian-born Jewish Rabbi)

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
—Sheridan Le Fanu (Irish Novelist)

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

If things are not going well with you, begin your effort at correcting the situation by carefully examining the service you are rendering, and especially the spirit in which you are rendering it.
—Roger Babson (American Entre)

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.
—Mel Brooks (American Film Actor)

To know that which lies before us in daily life is the prime wisdom.
—John Milton (English Poet)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations #408

December 25, 2011 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make … your life bearable.
—Francine du Plessix Gray (Polish-born American Author)

Bad behavior and irrational decisions are almost always caused by fear. If you want to change the behavior, address the fear.
—Seth Godin (American Entrepreneur)

When work is a pleasure, life is joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery.
—Maxim Gorky (Russian Writer)

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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust (French Novelist)

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
—Shakti Gawain (American Author)

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

Love what you do. Believe in your instincts. And you’d better be able to pick yourself up and brush yourself off every day.
—Mario Andretti (Italian-born American Sportsperson)

Stripped of all their masquerades, the fears of men are quite identical: the fear of loneliness, rejection, inferiority, unmanageable anger, illness and death.
—Joshua L. Liebman (American Jewish Rabbi)

Filed Under: Inspirational Quotations

« Previous Page
Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Popular Now

Anxiety Assertiveness Attitudes Balance Biases Coaching Conflict Conversations Creativity Critical Thinking Decision-Making Discipline Emotions Entrepreneurs Etiquette Feedback Getting Along Getting Things Done Goals Great Manager Innovation Leadership Leadership Lessons Likeability Mental Models Mindfulness Motivation Networking Parables Performance Management Persuasion Philosophy Problem Solving Procrastination Psychology Relationships Simple Living Social Skills Stress Suffering Thinking Tools Thought Process Time Management Winning on the Job Wisdom

About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

Get Updates

Signup for emails

Subscribe via RSS

Contact Nagesh Belludi

RECOMMENDED BOOK:
How Asia Works

How Asia Works: Joe Studwell

Joe Studwell on how Asia’s post-war economic miracles emerged via land reform, government-backed manufacturing, and financial repression.

Explore

  • Announcements
  • Belief and Spirituality
  • Business Stories
  • Career Development
  • Effective Communication
  • Great Personalities
  • Health and Well-being
  • Ideas and Insights
  • Inspirational Quotations
  • Leadership
  • Leadership Reading
  • Leading Teams
  • Living the Good Life
  • Managing Business Functions
  • Managing People
  • MBA in a Nutshell
  • Mental Models
  • News Analysis
  • Personal Finance
  • Podcasts
  • Project Management
  • Proverbs & Maxims
  • Sharpening Your Skills
  • The Great Innovators

Recently,

  • Sadness Isn’t a Diagnosis
  • Optionality is the Ultimate Hack
  • Life Isn’t Fair, Nor Does It Pretend To Be: What ‘Tokyo Story’ Teaches Us About Disappointment
  • Inspirational Quotations #1148
  • The Only Cure for Imposter Syndrome Is Evidence
  • The Inopportune Case of the Airbus A340 Aircraft: When Tomorrow Left Yesterday Behind
  • You Don’t Know If a Good Day is a Good Day

Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!