You can improve your life and work amazingly quickly by making a simple mental shift: treating everything you do as an experiment. You can experiment with any and all aspects of your life: your health, your energy, your work, your relationships, your side projects, etc. All it takes is a willingness to try something new for a little while just to see what happens. This post will help you design experiments that will teach you how you work best. Read more…
Recent psychological research indicates that we learn best when we’re “playing,” not when we’re “working.” Peter Gray’s extended essay on the virtues of play is well worth reading…
“One of the main purposes of play in our species, I think, is to promote our use of imagination to solve problems. We appear to be the only animal that thinks in imaginative ways. Imagination provides the foundation for our inventiveness, our creativity, and our ability to plan for the future. I believe that our huge capacity and desire for play came about, in evolution, partly to promote our capacities to invent, create, and plan. When we allow children ample opportunities for real play, we are providing them with opportunities to exercise and develop those capacities. When we allow ourselves to take a playful attitude in our work and domestic life, we are providing ourselves with a context for solving problems that might otherwise be intractable.”
Question: How much time do you spend reading about what Richard Branson is doing vs. actually doing things?
I have a confession to make – several years ago, I used to read The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Entrepreneur, Inc, AdAge, and other business-related periodicals. I’d spend hours thumbing through stories of the wealthy and famous, studying photo after photo of older men in conservative ties and ladies in pantsuits, hoping to find some little tidbit of knowledge that would somehow make me more “successful.”
Looking back, it was a complete waste of time and energy – 99.9% of the useful things I’ve learned about how to live a productive and enjoyable life I learned via (1) reading great books, (2) conducting independent research and experiments, and (3) having lively discussions with interesting people.
I had been sucked in by power porn. Read more…
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