Our two teachers, pain and fear

Often, we’re hesitant to identify a problem out of fear we can’t solve it. Knowing that we have to live with something that we’re unable to alter gives us a good reason to avoid verbalizing it—highlighting it just makes it worse.

While this sort of denial might be okay for individuals (emphasis on might), it’s a lousy approach for organizations of any size. That’s because there are almost certainly resources available that can solve a problem if you decide it’s truly worth solving.

Put yourself and your people on a path to finding problems without regard for whether or not they are capable of solving them. Queue them up, prioritize them and then go find the help your organization needs to solve them.

Just because you don’t know what to do about it doesn’t make it less of a problem.

Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

To explore the consequences of viewing one’s virtual doppelgänger, we ran a simple experiment using digitally manipulated photographs (Ahn & Bailenson, 2011). We used imaging software to place participants’ heads on people depicted in billboards using fictitious brands, for example holding up a soft drink with a brand label on it.

After the study, participants expressed better memory as well as a preference for the brand, even though it was obvious their faces had been placed in the advertisement. In other words, even though it was clearly a gimmick, using the digital self to promote a product is effective.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing.

A new medium: neither rare nor well-done

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

The great irony and tragedy of “intro econ” is that it is at its introductory level that economic theory is both most broadly consumed and most malignantly simplistic. In a recent study, economists at the University of Washington found there to be an “indoctrination effect” for non-majors who take an economics course: on average, they behave more selfishly and hold less regard for others after taking such a course.

Generations of the world’s business people and public policy makers have been nursed on such courses. To gain some insight into why our economies and institutions are crumbling beneath us, then, imagine an engineer equipped with a rudimentary understanding of physics that omits gravity, and a certain above-average disregard for human life not his own. Now imagine him building all the major bridges in the world.

Voluntary poverty – the intention to earn and spend less money — has the potential to be revolutionary. Humor me for a moment by imagining that we all – the moderately wealthy and rich people of the world — earn less money. Imagine how many fewer things we would buy. Imagine how many fewer things we would throw away. Imagine the decrease in the number of vehicles on the road, the increase in people sharing rides. Imagine the number of people who would buy smaller homes that would require less energy to heat and cool. Imagine the disappearance of silly devices like electric can-openers. Imagine our joy at discovering that it is cheaper and more satisfying to grow our carrots and bake our bread. Imagine how we would begin to value again the things we can do and make with our own hands. We might come to appreciate the true cost of labor and the true value of our time. We might be surprised by joy.

So you get tired of Christmas. You do not get tired of Christmas because of traffic jams, commercialism and family squabbles. Nor is tiresomeness caused by yuletide carols being sung by a fire and folks dressed up like Eskimos; the TV Christmas specials; the bathtub creches that are old tubs upended and half-buried in front lawns to form porcelain shrines; malls littered like bus stations, bus stations littered like malls; convenience store eggnog; bogus reports of epidemic suicide; cozy snow sprayed in the corners of store windows; and ubiquitous Santa Clauses. You get tired because of the obligation. We are obliged, however, to let nothing us dismay. Santa and Scrooge, go high, go low, beat you short, beat you deep.