Suppose you’re just starting a new job and you’re sitting in a conference room with your boss and your new team on the first day. You’re excited about the new work and want to make a good impression. Then you notice it: someone across the table is giving you the “Critical Evaluation [...]
I was climbing the stairs in my office building one day and noticed a small crumpled gum wrapper lying on a step. Should I pick it up, or leave it there? I decided on the latter and continued to climb. The next day the wrapper was still there. I started to get curious about how long it would stick [...]
The creative-thinking maven Michael Michalko (in ThinkerToys) tells the story of Louis Braille, the inventor of the Braille alphabet for the blind. He was musing on the problem of how blind people could be enabled to read books, and happened to pick up a pine cone. The impression of the sharp spines[...]
My wife was once rescued from a perilous highway situation by a kind stranger driving a red pickup truck. When she sees a red pickup today, she still experiences a feeling of gratitude! Your emotions are made of two things: the sensations in your body, and the story you’re telling yourself about [...]
You can fight back against cognitive bias! One of the easiest and most effective lines of attack is to compensate for your built-in tendency to focus on the negatives. Rick Hanson’s book Hardwiring Happiness details a practice he calls “taking in the good”. It’s the choice to allow yourself[...]
Building trust with others can seem like running the bases in baseball. You, with your good intentions, might feel like the lone baserunner. The people you want to build trust with…they might seem like the other team, intent on getting you off the field entirely. Like a runner, you need to [...]
For many years the philosopher Immanuel Kant gazed out his window at a church steeple during his ponderings. You don’t have to be a philosopher, or spend a lot of time, to get benefit from training your focus on a physical object. Your visual sense is a dominant part of your experience: visual [...]
What does it take to be creative? All sorts of images come to mind. One of the most compelling is the starving artist, creating incredible masterpieces while freezing in a top-floor garret. It’s no doubt true that some starving artists create masterpieces. But for most of us, the challenges of [...]
The first time I walked into a pachinko parlor in Japan the experience was almost overwhelming. Colored lights were flashing everywhere. There was an incredible roar of bells and buzzers and music and the rattle of thousands of little steel balls. After I’d been there for a while, though, some [...]
Cognitive biases come about because your brain has hard-wired shortcuts that you use continually to do basic tasks, like walking across the room (which does require making quite a few judgments). But you use your awesome metaphorical and context-switching ability to use the same shortcuts in [...]