How to break free of the wrong career

Ibarra (2002) believes that instead of wasting too much time planning, analysing, and researching career change options, you should take action first and work through the results iteratively afterwards. Through an action-oriented approach you can adapt, regroup your thoughts, and reorient your pathway from real-life experience. This means that your career change is never a pipedream that is too risky to implement because you are actively pursuing change. You have real-life information on which to base a decision.

It’s also a good way of exploring our many different “selves”. Ibarra quotes research from cognitive psychologist Hazel Markus (1986), Possible Selves, which explores the idea of multiple adult identities formed in the present, past and future. (…) Ibarra does not believe that we can find our one “true self” and that too much introspection will amount to nothing more than daydreams. It’s action that counts.

{ ona76 | Continue reading }

As onions are sliced, cells are broken, allowing enzymes called alliinases to break down amino acid sulphoxides and generate sulphenic acids.

A specific sulfenic acid, 1-propenesulfenic acid, formed when onions are cut, is rapidly rearranged by a second enzyme, called the lachrymatory factor synthase, giving syn-propanethial-S-oxide a volatile gas known as the onion lachrymatory factor (LF).

The LF gas diffuses through the air and eventually reaches the eye, where it activates sensory neurons, creating a stinging sensation. Tear glands produce tears to dilute and flush out the irritant. Chemicals that exhibit such an effect on the eyes are known as lachrymatory agents.

Supplying ample water to the reaction while peeling onions prevents the gas from reaching the eyes. Eye irritation can, therefore, be avoided by cutting onions under running water or submerged in a basin of water.

Another way to reduce irritation is by chilling, or by not cutting off the root of the onion (or by doing it last), as the root of the onion has a higher concentration of enzymes.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Stimulus Control Therapy consists of six very straightforward steps. If you follow these it should improve your sleep.

1. Lie down to go to sleep only when you are sleepy.

2. Do not use your bed for anything except sleep; that is, do not read, watch television, eat, or worry in bed. Sexual activity is the only exception to this rule. On such occasions, the instructions are to be followed afterwards, when you intend to go to sleep.

3. If you find yourself unable to fall asleep, get up and go into another room. Stay up as long as you wish and then return to the  bedroom to sleep. Although we do not want you to watch the clock, we want you to get out of bed if you do not fall asleep immediately. Remember the goal is to associate your bed with falling asleep quickly! If you are in bed more than about 10 minutes without falling asleep and have not gotten up, you are not following this instruction.

4. If you still cannot fall asleep, repeat step 3. Do this as often as is necessary throughout the night.

5. Set your alarm and get up at the same time every morning irrespective of how much sleep you got during the night. This will help your body acquire a consistent sleep rhythm.

6. Do not nap during the day.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

If you’re not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you’ve reached that point.

For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it’s “good enough” — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome?

From my experience, there are two often-unconscious reasons for this unproductive quest for perfection. The first is the fear of failing. (…) The second is the anxiety about taking action.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

The idea of the Paleo diet has been around for decades, but it’s really taken off over the last couple of years. It’s based on the idea that while humans have been eating for approximately 200,000 years, we’ve been farming for only about the last 10,000 or so. Farming introduced easily produced grains into our society, and bread, pasta, and other starch-heavy and processed foods into our diets. Evolution is too slow, the story goes, for us to have adapted to this new diet. So these “new” foods are responsible for many specific health problems we encounter, as well as a general feeling of un-wellness that most of us unwittingly life with. By returning to the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the proponents of Paleo claim, we can restore our happiness, health, and waistlines.

I had to give it a shot. And you know what? It’s been pretty great. After a few weeks, I’ve lost weight, I feel better, and the two-hour-plus sluggish period that used to follow lunch just about every day is gone. That’s while eating sort of like a pig—meat, vegetables, nuts, eggs, fish, all cooked with butter and scarfed down with gleeful self-contentment. I get hungry less often, and when I do it’s a different sort of hunger; not nagging and brain-debilitating, but more natural-feeling and subtle, almost healthy.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

artwork { Kinke Kooi }

One potential contributing factor to increasing rates of overweight and obesity is the availability and affordability of a wide range of food choices. A variety of inexpensive fast food options provides consumers the ability to rotate restaurant selection and reduce the risk of monotony in food selection.

Animal studies demonstrate that animals provided the same types of food (or other types of rewards) tend to reduce the level of consumption. This is a behavioral trait known as habituation. Habituation represents the tendency to reduce total caloric intake when eating the same foods and to increase caloric intake when presented novel food choices. (…)

If you are interested in losing weight, eating the same thing daily may be a way to use the habituation process to aid calorie restriction.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

photo { Brian Ulrich }

Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible. (…)

I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain.

{ Milton Glaser | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

If you ask doctors what is the worst part of their jobs, what do you think they say? Carrying out difficult, painful procedures? Telling people they’ve only got months to live? No, it’s something that might seem much less stressful: administration.

We tend to downplay day-to-day irritations, thinking we’ve got bigger fish to fry. But actually people’s job satisfaction is surprisingly sensitive to daily hassles. It might not seem like much but when it happens almost every day and it’s beyond our control, it hits job satisfaction hard.

{ 10 Psychological Keys to Job Satisfaction | PsyBlog | Continue reading }

artwork { Christian Schad, Operation, 1929 }

A few weeks ago, a woman asked me for advice about her teenage daughter. “She wants to be a writer,” the mother said. “What should we be doing?” (…)

First of all, let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. (…)

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken.

{ Molly Backes | Continue reading }

related { Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors. }

photo { Thatcher Keats }

You probably already know whether you’re a morning or evening person, but if you’re not sure, here are two ways to figure it out:

1) On weekends, or when you don’t have to wake up at any particular time, when do you naturally wake up? If the answer is more than an hour or so different from when you wake up on weekdays, chances are you’re an evening person by nature. Morning people tend to wake up just as early on weekends as they do during the week.

2) Regardless of how much sleep you’ve gotten, when do you find that you have the most energy? If your energy peaks in the morning and dwindles by late afternoon, you’re a morning person. If it peaks later in the evening - you guessed it - you’re an evening person. (…)

The debate over whether it’s better to be a night owl or an early bird has been going on for centuries. (…) Research on the advantages and disadvantages of each “chronotype” has yielded mixed results, in part because it is difficult to conduct this research experimentally. (…)

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that a preference for late hours may suggest a higher level of intelligence because being a night owl is presumably an evolutionary novel preference, though this hypothesis is controversial.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

painting { Edward Hopper, Summer Interior, 1909 }

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn’t work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.

Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading | Related: Meditation as cheap, self-administered morphine }

Why does exercise make us happy and calm? (…) How, at a deep, cellular level, exercise affects anxiety and other moods has been difficult to pin down. The brain is physically inaccessible and dauntingly complex. But a recent animal study from researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health provides some intriguing new clues into how exercise intertwines with emotions, along with the soothing message that it may not require much physical activity to provide lasting emotional resilience.

{ NYT | Continue reading }

photo { T. Harrison Hillman }

I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. (…)

So, what’s this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important – you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything’s shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don’t, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings – get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.

{ The Yorkshire Ranter | Continue reading }

Sleep is More Important than Food

Say you decide to go on a fast, and so you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of seven days, how would you be feeling? You’d probably be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner. But basically you’d be fine.

Now let’s say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week. Not so good. After several days, you’d be almost completely unable to function. That’s why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

So why is sleep one of the first things we’re willing to sacrifice as the demands in our lives keep rising? We continue to live by a remarkably durable myth: sleeping one hour less will give us one more hour of productivity. In reality, the research suggests that even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, our cognitive capacity and our productivity.

Many of the effects we suffer are invisible. Insufficient sleep, for example, deeply impairs our ability to consolidate and stabilize learning that occurs during the waking day. In other words, it wreaks havoc on our memory.

So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours. That means just 2.5 percent of us require less than 7 hours of sleep a night to feel fully rested. That’s 1 out of every 40 people.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

More than one-third of American adults wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Of those who experience “nocturnal awakenings,” nearly half are unable to fall back asleep right away. Doctors frequently diagnose this condition as a sleep disorder called “middle-of-the-night insomnia,” and prescribe medication to treat it.

Mounting evidence suggests, however, that nocturnal awakenings aren’t abnormal at all; they are the natural rhythm that your body gravitates toward.

According to historians and psychiatrists alike, it is the compressed, continuous eight-hour sleep routine to which everyone aspires today that is unprecedented in human history. We’ve been sleeping all wrong lately — so if you have “insomnia,” you may actually be doing things right.

“The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic,” Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University. “Humans slept in two four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time some might stay in bed, pray, think about their dreams, or talk with their spouses. Others might get up and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep.”

{ Life’s Little Mysteries | Continue reading }

photo { french zoo, 2001; i took the photo }

related { How losing just a few hours of sleep can take years off your life }

Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and they express powerlessness through closed, contractive postures. But can these postures actually cause power?

The results of this study confirmed our prediction that posing in high-power nonverbal displays (as opposed to low-power nonverbal displays) would cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern.

In short, posing in displays of power caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes, and these findings suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices.

That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

{ SAGE | Continue reading | More: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance }

Happiness can kill, claim scientists, after discovering that people who are too full of joy die younger than their more downbeat peers.

The study by a variety of universities analysed the details of children from the 1920s to old age.

They found people whose school reports rated them “highly cheerful” died younger than their more reserved classmates. This is because they are likely to lead more carefree lives full of danger and unhealthy lifestyle choices, it is believed. (…)

Researchers also discovered that trying too hard to be happy often ended up leaving people feeling more depressed than before. (…)

Results of the study revealed that the key to true happiness was simple: meaningful relationships with friends and family members.

“The strongest predictor of happiness is not money, or external recognition through success or fame. It’s having meaningful social relationships.”

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { William Klein }

Dear Men Who Send Dick Shots to Women,

Women do not want to see your dick. (…)

You know what women masturbate to? The color orange. Or maybe a sunset. Or a nonexistent man in a suit taking her future children to the park. (…)

The secret to seducing a woman is to distract her instincts and convince her you’re not there for sex. You give her a back rub or massage her feet.

{ Gavin McInnes/Taki’s Magazine | Continue reading }

Close relationships, and romantic relationships in particular, are characterized by the small acts of kindness we do for each other. Today you will be doing the dishes, paying for dinner, or taking out the trash, and tomorrow he will be taking you to the airport, putting gas in the car, or buying the groceries. Many of these small acts become so commonplace in relationships that they go unnoticed (how often do you thank your partner for taking out the trash, washing your dishes, or picking up the groceries, especially if it’s become their “job”?). However, when you do notice those small acts, and feel grateful for your partner’s thoughtful behaviors, research shows that both you and your partner benefit.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

Scientists have found that you can double your chances of reaching your target weight if you get between six and eight hours sleep a night.

If you have any more, you will become too inactive and if you have any less your stress levels will increase along with cravings for unhealthy food.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

artwork { Gerhard Richter }

How do I drill for oil in my back yard?

This is a great idea. (…) Do you own the mineral rights under your property? In many countries the government automatically owns all significant mineral deposits, no matter whose land they’re under. Here in the U.S., both the surface rights to a property and the mineral rights below can be privately owned, but they’re separable — acquiring the former doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting the latter. (…)

If the rights are yours, you can either use them yourself or lease them to an oil company.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

image { Alison Rossiter, Acme Kruxo, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1940s, processed in 2010 }

{ Creating the Invisible Mannequin Look | Chris Brock }