Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Chime in Last

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As a meeting’s thought-leader, or be seen as a decision-maker or arbiter, chime in last.

On an important topic, hear everyone out and withhold your judgments until the end. By speaking first, you’ll cast undue influence over the proceedings.

When you’re ready to speak, restate the meeting’s purpose. Call attention to the essential decision to be made. Acknowledge everyone’s points and counterpoints. Push for the next steps.

Spread your thanks liberally—acknowledge the contributions everyone has made. Be prepared to concede tangents, pitfalls, or different perspectives and points of view.

Concentrate on the outcome. It’s the result that matters, not your role in it.

Idea for Impact: Best of all, speaking last empowers you to incorporate the best of what’s been said and be diplomatic about appealing to everyone’s interests. Chiming in last also allows you to manage the alignment of everyone’s expectations and evade unanticipated criticisms of your viewpoints.

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Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission

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A long time ago, I heard the managerial maxim, “you will move as fast as you can make decisions.” Amen to that.

That complements the mantra “’tis better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission”—that’s the oft-repeated rallying cry of entrepreneurial thinking.

You need to know when you shouldn’t—and can’t—wait for someone else’s approval to do the things you need to do to succeed. Every time you ask for buy-in, approval, or agreement, you’ll slow yourself down.

Depending on what’s at stake, you’ve got to know when moving forward does need consent. As with everything, you want to know your manager, team, partner, or spouse, how they operate, and their expectations for the group effort. If something’s an important-enough decision with high stakes, they’ll want to be in the loop.

Idea for Impact: Live speed. Where possible, don’t let dilly-dallying for permission endanger your decision-making success. It’s not about taking advantage of situations but about knowing when to push the boundaries. Where possible, aggressively move forward on your own and “get it done.”

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Don’t Hide from Your Feelings, Accept Them

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When you’re feeling upset, angry, stressed, or sad, don’t deny, withhold, or hide from your feelings. Think about what it is that’s making you feel this way.

Emotional Acceptance refers to the willingness and ability to accept and experience negative emotions—to acknowledge and absorb them. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician-turned Zen teacher, writes in Mindfulness on the Go: Simple Meditation Practices You Can Do Anywhere (2014,) a practical guide for engaging the mind,

A very important way to work with discomfort is to stop avoiding it. You will walk right into it and feel from within the body what is true. You investigate the discomfort—its size, shape, surface texture and even its color and sound. Is it constant or intermittent? When you are this attentive, when your meditative absorption is deep, what we call discomfort or pain begins to shift and even disappear. It becomes a series of sensations just appearing and disappearing in empty space, twinkling on and off. It is most interesting.

Mindfulness practice needn’t be just for negative emotions, either. Are you feeling happy and joyful? Calm and content? Apprehensive or remorseful? No matter the case, taking stock of how you’re feeling can help you realize that your emotions do not represent you. They don’t have to define your thoughts.

Practicing this self-reflective process regularly will help you better understand yourself, break negative patterns in your life, and react to emotional situations in a wholesome, more productive way.

Idea for Impact: Practice Emotional Acceptance—Feeling Bad Can Be Good

Emotional avoidance appears to be a reasonable thing to do. Yes, it provides momentary relief in the here and now. But emotional avoidance often involves denying the truth—and that isn’t a good foundation for a healthy life.

Over time, it only makes things worse to avoid the thing that scares you. Create the awareness to feel your feelings, label them, accept them, and then let them fade.

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Inspirational Quotations #889

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It’s better to live as your own man than as a fool in someone else’s dream.
—Martin Landau (American Actor)

The superior man is he who develops in harmonious proportions, his moral, intellectual, and physical nature. This should be the end at which men of all classes should aim, and it is this only which constitutes real greatness.
—Douglas William Jerrold (English Dramatist)

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
—Shirley Chisholm (American Politician)

Like a stone That rolls down a hill, I have come to this day.
—Takuboku Ishikawa (Japanese Poet)

The magnificent and the ridiculous are so close that they touch.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (French Man of Letters)

Faith assuages, guides, restores.
—Arthur Rimbaud (French Poet)

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)

Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Spiritual Teacher)

Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.
—Hans Morgenthau (American Political Scientist)

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions, and actions of others.
—Johann Kaspar Lavater (Swiss Theologian, Poet)

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—Rachel Carson (American Biologist)

It is with life just as with swimming; that man is the most expert who is the most disengaged from all encumbrances.
—Apuleius (Roman Prose Writer)

Life is neither a good nor an evil, but simply the scene of good and evil.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
—Archibald Cox (American Lawyer)

The will to prepare is more important that the will to win.
—LaVell Edwards (American Football Coach)

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic, Author)

Life is one long jubilee.
—Ira Gershwin (American Lyricist)

Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

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Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

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Ever Wonder Why People Resist Gifts? // Reactance Theory

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People are more likely to resist or reject well-intentioned proposals, advice, or gifts when it feels like their freedom is being threatened in some way.

For instance, I hate receiving clothes for gifts—clothing is mostly a matter of personal taste. I’ll grin and bear it. I may even wear said clothes once or twice just to please the giver.

Turns out that my indifference isn’t atypical. Psychological studies of the gift-giving process indicate that giving clothing gifts involves greater risk than with other kinds of gift objects. The chosen gift may not match the recipient’s self-image, identity, or dress style.

The so-called Reactance Theory explains why giving gifts and offering uncalled-for advice could rankle so much. According to the American Psychological Association,

Reactance theory is a model stating that in response to a perceived threat to—or loss of—a behavioral freedom, a person will experience psychological reactance (or, more simply, reactance,) a motivational state characterized by distress, anxiety, resistance, and the desire to restore that freedom. According to this model, when people feel coerced into a certain behavior, they will react against the coercion, often by demonstrating an increased preference for the behavior that is restrained, and may perform the behavior opposite to that desired.

Reactance can come into play when you’re persuading someone to buy a specific product at the grocery store, forbidding a child from using a mobile phone at school, or insisting that an employee perform some detestable task for the boss.

Idea for Impact: Think twice before you do anything that, though meant well, may threaten another person’s sense of behavioral freedom. People who are threatened thus usually feel uncomfortable and angry—even hostile.

In gift-giving, offering advice, or any other attempt at social influence, know your limits. Beware that it’s not always easy to recognize the limits until you overshoot them.

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Inspirational Quotations #888

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You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don’t hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it’s never the same.
—Marjorie Kellogg (American Author)

This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. … As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.
—James Mill (Scottish Philosopher)

Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.
—Nathalie Sarraute (French Novelist)

The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—Charles Kingsley (English Clergyman)

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.
—Washington Irving (American Author)

One of the great penalties those of us who live our lives in full view of the public must pay is the loss of that most cherished birthright of man’s privacy.
—Mary Pickford (American-Canadian Film Actress)

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
—Thomas Keating (American Trappist Monk)

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
—Alfred North Whitehead (English Mathematician, Philosopher)

Success is the child of audacity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself… That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz (American Poet)

Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)

Make Time to Do it

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Think about how these two declarations sound:

  • “Let me make time to do it.”
  • “Let me find time to do it.”

If you asked someone to do something, which response seems more convincing and persuasive?

When someone says they’ll make time to do something, you sense they’ll give the matter a feeling of priority. It implies that they’ll prioritize.

On the other hand, if someone says they’ll find time, it appears like they’ll hope to find a gap where they may fit you in—if they can remember what it is you asked them to do.

Often language—particularly self-talk—can have a way of revealing truths about values and priorities. The expression “I’ll make time” shows how the idea of time management only matters to how important the stuff is that’s competing for your time.

Idea for Impact: You know something is important when one makes time for it.

Think carefully about what you make time to do versus what you find time to do. The essence of time management is to prioritize.

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Why Your Judgment Sucks

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Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describes the finer points of decision-making. It’s an engaging showcase of the innate biases of the mind and unthinking approaches to decision-making.

Human Beings are Intuitive Thinkers

Kahneman is a behavioral economics pioneer and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His lifelong collaboration with Amos Tversky (1937—96) has molded humans’ thinking about human error, risk, judgment, decision-making, happiness, and more. Tversky died in 1996, so he did not share in the Nobel.

Thinking, Fast and Slow explores what Kahneman calls the “mind’s machinery” as two coexisting modes of thought (“fast and slow,” as the title says.) Kahneman splits the brain into two radically divergent ways, employing a two-tier model of cognition.

  • System One makes judgments instantly, intuitively, and automatically, as when a cricket batsman decides whether to cut or pull. A significant part of System One is “evolved heuristics” that lets us read a person’s expression in a microsecond from a block away, for example. And it can’t be switched off. System One’s thinking is fast and effortless. It often jumps to the wrong conclusions, relies on hunches and biases, and perhaps overconfident.
  • System Two is slower, conscious, calculated, and deliberate, like long division. Its operations require attention. System Two is what we think of as “thinking”—slow, tiring, and essential. It’s what makes us human. Even if System Two believes it is on top of things, System One makes many of our decisions.

System One Isn’t All Flawed

In a world that often necessitates swift judgment and rapid decision-making (e.g., fight or flight,) a person who solely relies on deliberative thinking (System Two) wouldn’t last long. Doctors and firefighters, for example, through training and repetition, develop what’s called “expert intuition” that helps them identify patterns and impulsively devise the right response to a complex emergency.

We as humans are not simple rational agents. Consequently, our thinking boils down to two “Systems” of thinking/processing. As we strive to make better decisions in our work and personal lives, it benefits us to slow down and use a more deliberate System 2 way of thinking. Learn to doubt your fast/quick way of thinking!

Human Intuition is Imperfect

Thinking, Fast and Slow is an eye-opener in various ways. It can be a frightening catalog of the biases, shortcuts, and cognitive illusions that come to err our judgment—the endowment effect, priming, halo effect, anchoring effect, conjugation fallacy, the narrative fallacy, and the rest. Such mental processes are not intrinsically flawed; they are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, shortcuts. They are strategies the mind embraces to find a path in a tsunami of data.

Kahneman teaches how to recognize situations that require slower, deliberative thinking. Kahneman asserts that the value of the book is to give people the vocabulary to spot biases and to criticize the decisions of others: “Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”

Recommendation: Read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011.) As one of the most popular non-fiction books in the last decade, it’ll open your eyes to the quirky and error-prone ways in which you can be influenced in ways you don’t suspect.

The conceptions behind behavioral economics make Thinking, Fast and Slow a laborious read. Many chapters are bogged down by hair-splitting details of his rigorous scientific work and academic gobbledygook. It’s a commanding survey of this field, but it’s superbly written and intelligible to non-experts.

Complement with Rolf Dobelli’s accessible The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013.)

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Inspirational Quotations #887

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A mind conscious of integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform.
—Robert Burns (Scottish Poet, Songwriter)

Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
—Ihab Hassan (American Literary Theorist)

Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.
—Gerald Jampolsky (American Psychiatrist)

For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.
—George Gissing (English Novelist)

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
—Robert Bresson (French Film Director)

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
—Dale Carnegie (American Self-Help Author)

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might more truly be called the knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
—Max Muller (German-British Orientalist)

If food is your best friend, it’s also your worst enemy.
—Grandpa Jones (American Musician)

You cannot impress the mind of God by having a special Sabbath day set apart to tell Him what you want, and then forgetting Him the rest of the week.
—Wallace Wattles (American New Thought Author)

He who labors as he prays lifts his heart to God with his hands.
—Bernard of Clairvaux (French Catholic Religious Leader)

Truth is inner harmony.
—Walther Rathenau (German Statesman)

We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going day in and out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
—Arnold Bennett (British Novelist)

Laughter is wine for the soul—laugh soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm… Once we can laugh, we can live.
—Sean O’Casey (Irish Dramatist)

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words, than words without a heart.
—John Bunyan (English Writer, Preacher)

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
—Don DeLillo (American Author)

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
—Emily Kimbrough (American Author, Journalist)