Quote of the day
People seek to gain favorable judgments of their competence or avoid negative judgments. This evaluative orientation causes people to shy away from challenges and risk, all to avoid failure.
~CAROL DWECK, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Economists find rare empirical evidence of love in unique marriage survey, Phys | Tweet
Economists are not famed for their romantic insights. But a new study by two University of Virginia economists, Leora Friedberg and Steven Stern, has found quantitative evidence of love – something very few economic studies ever have claimed – in married couples’ answers to two penetrating questions about the quality of their marriage, combined with their divorce rates six years later.
EDUCATION
Should schools teach personality? [The Myth of the Spoiled Child
], NYT | Tweet
Self-control, curiosity, “grit”–these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum. Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit will distract policy makers from problems with schools.
HAPPINESS
The single best goal you can set for 2015 [Mindset
], Fortune | Tweet
So, in the spirit of the New Year, here’s one resolution that, if you make and keep, will make you happier, more powerful, and help others around you develop their potential more completely. The resolution: become less judgmental, particularly about people, but also more generally.
AGING
Two ways to look at life [What The Hell Are The Neurons Up To?
], Pyschology Today | Tweet
How we individually deal with the fact of getting old.
FOOD
How do we grow to like the the foods we once hated? [Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat
, Ethnic Cuisine
], NPR | Tweet
Why do some of us like to slather hot sauce or sprinkle chili powder onto our food, while others can’t stand burning sensations in our mouth? It probably has to do with how much we’ve been socially pressured or taught to eat chili, according to Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied attitudes toward food for decades.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
How to stop caring about what others think? [The Objective Leader
], FastCo | Tweet
Tying self-worth to others’ opinions gives you a flawed version of reality. Here’s how to separate fact from fiction.
TIME MANAGEMENT
The pros and cons of doing one thing at a time, HBR | Tweet
The idea that it’s better to finish your tasks in sequence than to jump around from one to another is very hard to accept, at least for me. It goes against my ingrained task-juggling habit, which I’ve come to believe is why I can hit my multiple, ever-changing deadlines. But three researchers — Decio Coviello of HEC Montreal, Andrea Ichino of the University of Bologna, and Nicola Persico of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School — have shown why the sequential approach to completing tasks makes a lot of sense.
PUBLISHING
Publishers are lining up behind ‘Netflix for Books’ services. But why?, Wired | Tweet
But while the addition of another publisher is an obvious win for the startups, what’s less clear is why publishers want in. Movie and TV studios can count on ticket sales and advertising dollars even as they offer their content on Netflix. Musicians can still sell concert tickets even if streaming services like Spotify cannibalize CD sales. But for book publishers and authors, the main source of revenue is still selling books. So why would they agree to participate in what amounts to an always-accessible lending library with an infinite number of copies?
WRITING
Five awesome nuggets of writing advice [The Heart Does Not Grow Back]
, Medium | Tweet
When asked for writing advice, I continue to lean on these five pieces as my go-to answers. I didn’t make them up, and I’m not the source for these, but they are the ones that I’ve collected, implemented, followed, and continue to lean on as my writing career progresses. Some are common sense, others are worth posting on your computer monitor in big, bold letters.
Scenes: The Skeleton of a novel, Darcy Pattison | Tweet
You’re a human being: you can stand up, sit down, or do a somersault. That’s because you have a skeleton that gives your soft tissue a structure. Likewise, it’s important to give your novel a structure that will hold all the soft murmurings about characters, places and events. It begins with understanding the structure of a scene.