God's Christmas Tree

God’s Christmas tree has no colored lights. No ornaments. No trinkets.
It is not even pretty to look at. But God has his Christmas tree.
It is the cross of Christ.

Become Yourself

God creates each person as an individual and in effect says to each human being: “Become yourself, be the person I made you to be.”

C. Stephen Evans

Just the way we are.. but

God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way.

Leighton Ford

Heart, Temper, Touch

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Charles Dickens

Slow Anger

Grow angry slowly – There’s plenty of time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sanctified Exhaustion

God is never flattered by our sanctified exhaustion.

Calvin Miller

The Conviction

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

Finding Riches

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches but reveal to them their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

Real Thinking

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Today's Plan

A good plan executed now is better than the perfect plan tomorrow.

George S. Patton

All In

Give all to love; obey thy heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing to Prove

Genuine humility operates on a rather simple philosophy: Nothing to prove, nothing to lose.

Charles Swindoll

Data Mining and Jeopardy!

Roger Craig won a quarter of a million dollars on the TV game show Jeopardy! this year, setting the all-time record for money won in a single game. Here's how he did it: The Computer scientist decided to focus his study on the most common topics that come up during a game. He downloaded an online database of all the past questions and then created a pattern recognition program to look for the types of questions that were most likely to come up again - and then studied accordingly. World capitals are more likely to come up than questions about fashion, so he spent more time studying capitals. And instead of trying to learn every capital, he focused on the most statistically popular. He told NPR, "You can practice haphazardly or (you can study) efficiently."

The lesson here: before throwing yourself into a project haphazardly, spend some time identifying its critical parts and organizing how you will attack them to prioritize your effort.

There is a video of Craig in action here and you can hear an NPR story here.

And the future belongs to..

The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

C.K. Brightbill

What Forgiveness Does

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

Paul Boese

Letting in the Light

Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

How You Serve

For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act. But it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

CS Lewis

In the First Place

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich

Eating & Fasting

feed opportunities - starve problems

The Wrong End of a Telescope

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

Dr. Seuss

The Failure Compass

Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

What Irritates you?

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

The Shower

Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets
out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a
difference.

Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari)

Moving Forward

Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward.

Robert Gallagher

On the Right Track

Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers

A Measure of Sadness

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Jung

Driving History

Evangelicals for most of their history have had a curious emphasis on the brakes rather than on the steering wheel.

Calvin Miller

Standing on the Shoulders of Others

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

Real Growth

Embracing the changing circumstances around you is not the same as personal growth. Real growth, real transition into adulthood, is an internal process.

The Path to Greater Success

Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

(A new study detailed in Psychological Science) is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up . The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

(note: This finding has a practical implication. Studies show that when students are praised for their intelligence rather than their hard work, they will choose easier paths in order to maintain that success. But students who are told their success is the result of hard work are more likely to select more difficult pathways. They possess greater confidence that a similar effort of hard work will bring them continued success - Stephen Goforth).

Praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity (in the brain) a few hundred milliseconds after the error), directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence.

Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired Magazine

The Mark of Education

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence.

Robert Frost

Total Recall

Microsoft research scientist Gordon Bell says we’re headed toward the day when electronic devices will be able to digitally capture our every moment. Technology will follow us, recording each person we meet, each walk around the block, each moment of disappointment and triumph. We’ll be able to tap into a digital database at any time in order to see our exact location at a specific time. His book Total Recall envisions easily finding our lost keys or discovering the name of a person we briefly bumped into on the street. We’ll be able analyze our routines and find ways to make our lives more productive.

What will happen to our sense of privacy? The courts may have found legal grounds for itin the constitution while at the same time, technology has pushing toward limiting it. Do we really want the ability to preserve all of our past?

Psychologists will tell you that when it comes to our past, we have selective amnesia. Like a cheerleader’s megaphone (with a small mouth on one end and a large opening on the other) we filter parts of our past, preserving only select memories. You can’t retain it all, so the types of events you decide to recall says something about you. Many mothers say they don’t remember the pain of childbirth, only the overwhelming feelings of bonding and holding their own child for the first time during its first moments of life.

But what happens when there’s no escaping what we’ve been through in life? Instead of painful memories fading over time, we’ll have the option of replaying them vividly in our mind over and over again. Some of us already do that... living in history's prison - unwilling to forgive ourselves or someone else and move on.

Stephen Goforth

Laughter

The earth laughs in flowers.

ee cummings

Explaining Yourself

Don’t explain yourself: Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it.

The Limb

Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.

H. Jackson Browne

Relationship over Rightness

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship -- and not as ends in themselves.

Francis Schaeffer

Prayer

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.

Phillips Brooks

Conflict

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

William Ellery Channing

Denise's Confession

Dear God. No use tryin' to kid You... You know I done it.

Denise the Menace

Acceptance & Change

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.



Carl Rogers

Neatness Doesn't Alway Count

Creative minds are rarely tidy.

John Gardner

The True Cost

The cost of a thing is the amount of life that must be exchanged for it.

Henry David Thoreau

What Can’t you Live Without?

Facebook is more important than having a flushing toilet. That’s the finding of a survey by London’s Science Museum. It asked 3,000 adults what things they couldn't live without. Facebook came in 5th while a toilet ranked 9th. The winner was sunshine, followed by being on the internet, clean drinking water and a refrigerator.

The tools of the digital made a strong showing. Email was 8th and possessing a mobile phone 10th. Google came in at 22, Ipods at 37, Computer spell-checks claimed the 41st spot and the last position went to Twitter. The Wii and Xbox made the list as well.

The point of the survey was to show that many people do not have access to fresh water.

The survey indicates just how much the essential things in life are taken for granted, such as water and fresh food, which so many millions struggle to find everyday to survive.

Another way to approach the question: If your house were about to burn down, what would you grab on your way out the door? And why?

See the complete list here.


Stephen Goforth

An Expresion of Strength

Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness.

Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Mental Fatigue

A conclusion is often just the place where you got tired of thinking.

Awareness

Circumstances are designed to make us aware of his presence.

Chuck Swindoll

The decline of thinking outside the box

While IQ scores are indisputably on the rise, American creativity levels are bottoming out. Analysis of the results of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking suggests that the creative abilities of American children have been spiraling downward for almost 20 years. The Torrance tests analyze young children's ability to come up with original ideas and put them into practice. Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor at the College of William & Mary School of Education, found that scores on Torrance tests taken by children up to 6th grade between 1968 and 2008 showed a steady decline after 1990. That's a serious issue at a time when creative thinking is among the most desperately needed skills in the American workplace. A recent study found that 85 percent of employers concerned with hiring creative people say they can't find the right applicants. Kim blamed America's standards-obsessed schools for creating an environment in which creative thinking was not nurtured. "Creative students cannot breathe, they are suffocated in school," she said. "Then they become underachievers."

From The Week Magazine

Untried

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

GK Chesterton

The Price

Change is the price of survival.

Life's Challenges

Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

Mark Twain

Monuments

Carve your name on hearts and not marble.

Charles H. Spurgeon

Neighbors and Enemies

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors. and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

GK Chesterton

Advice from Denise

The best thing you can do is get good at being you.
Denise the Menace

Becoming

Becoming is superior to being.
Paul Klee

Constructive Criticism

Criticism must be sympathetic, or it will completely miss the mark; but it must also be dispassionate and relentless.

William Temple

Yourself

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde

Starting Over

Be it hereby enacted: That every three years all people shall forget whatever they have learned about Jesus and begin the study all over again.
Robert Brown

Better Off

Always leave things better than you found them.

There's a Cost

Anyone can hate. It costs to love.
John Williamson

Please pass the tissues

Every once in a while we just need a good cry. Right? No, says a researcher at the University of South Florida. Or at least, tears are not enough by themselves. Jonathan Rottenberg says his new study shows there’s not as much of a benefit to crying as people would believe. Instead, he suggests it’s sympathy that can make people feel better. Bolstering social connections and laying the groundwork for empathetic relationships may serve as the best way to prepare for that burst of bawling. Instead of just weeping, we need someone to offer a hug and an ear.

Details of the study are in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Stephen Goforth

Apple Seeds

Anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple. It takes imagination to count the number of apples in a seed.

Wasting Time

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.
Samuel Johnson

All you Have..

All you have to do, is to decide what to do with the time that is given to you.

Gandalf in Lord of the Rings

Deep Roots

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be the blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

J. R. R. Tolkien
Lord of the Rings

Defining Yourself

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner

Your Aim

Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
CS Lewis

Success Requires

The ability to succeed requires the realization of what one wants and the passionate desire to attain it.

In the Blink of a Phone Call

We're all one phone call from our knees.
Matt Kearney

The Perfect Love

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Tom Robbins

Creating a Ghetto

We (the church) have created a phenomenal subculture with our own media, entertainment, educational system, and political hierarchy so that we have the sense that we're doing a lot. But what we've really done is create a ghetto that is easily dismissed by the rest of society.

Bob Briner
Roaring Lambs

What We Know

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

Shakespeare

Finding the Time

We find time for anything we really want to do.

Living Truth

We can only acquire the truth as part of the process whereby we learn to live out the truth.

C. Stephen Evans

Hiding from Ourselves

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Fact and Opinion

We are entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts.

Daniel Moynihan

Horizons

We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.

Konrad Adenauer

Religious Talk

The way we live is what we believe. The rest is just religious talk.

Vision and Action

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.

Joel Barker

Light and Fog

Virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light; indulgence brings fog.

CS Lewis

One Way Tickets

Ultimately each of use is on a unique journey with a ticket marked “Good for this trip only – no transfers.”

William Bridges

Friendly Arguments

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

David Hume

Today!

Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way.

Dr. Seuss

Selling Your Soul

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that is much harder?

Ayn Rand

To Be Creative

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Love Never Fails

To do right because of reputation, to do right because it is the correct thing, to do right to escape criticism, all such motives will fail sooner or later. To do right because I love is the one and only lasting motive. "Love never fails."

G. Campbell Morgan

Trust and Love

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

George MacDonald

Not to See

To be blind is bad, but worse it is to have eyes and not to see.

Helen Keller

Planning and Believing

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Anatole France

Victims and Bystanders

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC

Justice

Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Think for Yourself

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.

Voltaire

3 Things to Be Happy

They say a person needs 3 things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

Tom Bodett

A Caterpillar's Future

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

Buckminster Fuller

The Extra Mile

There is no traffic jam on the extra mile.

Sliding Thru Life

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Alfred Korzybski

Flash Mobs

You’re walking through New York’s Union Square when thousands of people suddenly begin plummeting each other with pillows. This yearly tradition is part of a global fad known as flash mobs. Groups gather through social networking at a particular location. They may stop and remain still for one minute, offer synchronized applause or create some other harmless disturbance.

The man who started this phenomenon was Bill Wasik. He’s written a book called And Then There’s This.

Wasik suggests that our new internet world is moving at such a rapid pace we are wasting our lives on the trivial. We must “feed the beast” with our texting, blogging, twittering and emailing. Never able to pause without falling behind, we begin to “seize upon these tiny little things and try to elevate them into sensations but of course they can't bear up under the weight of it.. the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information. Away from the sort of constant buzzing of the hive mind.”

Read more in a Salon interview with Wasik.

Stephen Goforth

The Secret Formula

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.

Colin Powell.

The Heaviest Burden

There is no heavier burden than a great potential.

Linus, "Peanuts"

Every Meeting

There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Complete Revenge

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

Real Excellence

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.

David Starr Jordan

Youness

There is no one alive who is youer than You.

Dr. Seuss

There is no box

There is no box
made by God
nor us
but that the sides can be flattened out
and the top blown off
to make a dance floor
on which to celebrate life.

Kenneth Caraway

Miracles

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Who You Are

Tell me who admires and loves you, And I will tell you who you are.

Charles Aguustin Sainte-Beuve

Less and More

Talk less, say more.

Tact is...

Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he really has a hole in his head.

Why Not?

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw

What Happens Once the Test is Over

A study by the University of Michigan Law School found that LSAT scores bore virtually no relationship to career success as measured by levels of income, life satisfaction or public service. Even the NFL Combine is a big waste of time. According to a recent study by economists at the University of Louisville, there’s no “consistent statistical relationship” between the results of players at the Combine and subsequent NFL performance.

The reason maximal measures are such bad predictors is rooted in what these tests don’t measure. It turns out that many of the most important factors for life success are character traits, such as grit and self-control, and these can’t be measured quickly.

The problem, of course, is that students don’t reveal their levels of grit while taking a brief test. Grit can only be assessed by tracking typical performance for an extended period. Do people persevere, even in the face of difficulty? How do they act when no one else is watching? Such traits often matter more than raw talent. We hear about them in letters of recommendation, but hard numbers take priority.

The larger lesson is that we’ve built our society around tests of performance that fail to predict what really matters: what happens once the test is over.

Jonah Lehrer
author of How We Decide

Grit

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania is best known for her work on grit, a character trait that allows people to persist in the face of difficulty. A few years ago, she was commissioned by the Army to measure the grittiness of cadets at West Point. Although the academy is highly selective, about 5 percent of cadets drop out after the first summer of training, known as Beast Barracks. The Army has long searched for the variables that predict which cadets will graduate, but it wasn't until Duckworth tested them using a short questionnaire -- consisting of statements such as "Setbacks don't discourage me" or "I am diligent" -- that the Army found a measurement that actually worked. Duckworth has since repeated the survey with subsequent West Point classes, and the results are always the same: The cadets who graduate are the ones with grit.

In a new paper, Duckworth and Ericsson demonstrate that grit doesn't only keep people from dropping out, but it's also what allows them to become experts, to put in the hours of deliberate practice. The researchers tracked 190 participants at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The first thing they discovered is that deliberate practice works. Student spellers who spent more time studying alone and memorizing words with the help of note cards performed much better than kids who were quizzed by friends or engaged in leisure reading. Duckworth and Ericsson also found that levels of grit determined how much the spellers were willing to practice. Grittier kids were able to engage in the most useful kinds of self-improvement, which is why they performed at a higher level. Woody Allen famously declared, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." And grit is what allows you to show up, again and again and again.

Jonah Lehrer author of How We Decide writing in ESPN the Magazine

Seeing and Dreaming

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw

A Sign You are Really Grown Up

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

CS Lewis

Carrying the Weight of Troubles

Smart people pawn their troubles – and then lose the ticket.

Signs of Growth

A sign that someone is growing is that they expose themselves to people and places that are better than they are, different than they are, and more successful than they are.

John Maxwell

Clocking In

Show up in your life everyday.

What Emotions Can Tell You

For most of human history, the emotions have been disparaged because they're so difficult to analyze-they don't come with reasons, justifications, or explanations. (As Nietzsche warned, we are often most ignorant of what is closest to us.) But now, thanks to the tools of modern neuroscience, we can see that emotions have a logic all their own. The jitters of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting us to all those subtle patterns that we can't consciously detect. The emotional brain is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. Its massive computational power-its ability to process millions of bits of data in parallel-ensures that you can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. Mysteries are broken down into manageable chunks, which are then translated into practical feelings.

The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously aware of the benefits. It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error.

There are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming an expert just takes time and practice. But once you've developed expertise in a particular area - once you've made the requisite mistakes - it's important to trust your emotions when making decisions in that domain. It is feelings, after all, and not the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience. Those subtle emotions saying shoot down the radar blip, or go all in with pocket kings, or pass to Troy Brown are the output of a brain that has learned how to read a situation. It can parse the world in practical terms, so that you know what needs to be done. When you overanalyze these expert decisions, you end up like the opera star who couldn't sing.

And yet, this doesn't mean the emotional brain should always be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short-sighted. Sometimes it can be a little too sensitive to patterns, which is why people lose so much money playing slot machines. However, the one thing you should always be doing is considering your emotions, thinking about why you're feeling what you're feeling. In other words, act like the television executive carefully analyzing the reactions of the focus group. Even when you choose to ignore your emotions, they are still a valuable source of input.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Pain in Relationships

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Carl Jung

Rejection

See rejection as feedback.

The Balance Sheet

Rich people buy assets not liabilities. Poor people buy liabilities. Buy assets not liabilities. People are either liabilities or assets as well.

Admiration

Respect people for who they are, not for what their titles are.

Herb Kelleher

Malice

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Carrie Fisher

Awakening

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

The Quaker Reader

Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?

Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer. I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drug store is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?).

The problem, of course, is that the modern marketplace is a conspiracy to confuse, to trick the mind into believing that our most banal choices are actually extremely significant. While all these products are designed to cater to particular consumer niches, they end up duping the brain into believing that picking a floss is a high-stakes game, since it’s so hard. And so we get mired in decision-making quicksand.

Jonah Lehrer
Wired

Why We Lie

The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and it’s consequences.

Embrace Uncertainty

Hard problems rarely have easy solutions. There is no single way to win a poker hand, and there is no guaranteed path to making money in the stock market. Pretending that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion. Of course, there's not always time to engage in a lengthy cognitive debate. When an Iraqi missile is zooming toward you or when you're about to get crushed by a blitzing linebacker, you need to act. But whenever possible, it's essential to extend the decision-making process and properly consider the argument unfolding inside your head. Bad decisions happen when that mental debate is cut short, when an artificial consensus is imposed on the neural quarrel.

There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the facts through a different, perhaps uncomfortable lens, you often discover that your beliefs rest on a rather shaky foundation. For instance, when (poker player) Michael Binger is convinced that another player is bluffing, he tries to think about how the player would be acting if he wasn't bluffing. He is his own devil's advocate.

Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know. Even the best models and theories can be undone by utterly unpredictable events. Poker players call these "bad beats," and every player has stories about the hands he lost because he got the one card he wasn't expecting. "One of the things I learned from counting cards in blackjack," Binger says, "is that even when you have an edge, and counting cards is definitely an edge, your margin is still really slim. You can't get too cocky."

When you forget that you have blind spots, that you have no idea what cards the other players are holding or how they'll behave, you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated."

Jonah Lihrer
How We Decide

Achieving Goals

The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable.

Denis Waitley

Looking Down

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down you can't see something that's above you.

CS Lewis

Why We Get Cranky

Studies have shown that a slight drop in blood-sugar levels can inhibit self-control, since the frontal lobes require lots of energy in order to function. Look, for example, at this experiment led by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. The experiment began with a large group of undergraduates performing a mentally taxing activity that involved watching a video while ignoring the text of random words scrolling on the bottom of the screen. (It takes a conscious effort to not pay attention). The students were then offered some lemonade. Half of them got lemonade made with real sugar, and the other half got lemonade made with a sugar substitute.

After giving the glucose time to enter the bloodstream and perfuse the brain (about fifteen minutes), Baumeister had the students make decisions about apartments. It turned out that the students who were given the drink without real sugar were significantly more likely to rely on instinct and intuition when choosing a place to live, even if that led them to choose the wrong places. The reason, according to Baumeister, is that the rational brains of these students were simply to exhausted to think. They'd needed a restorative sugar fix, and all they'd gotten was Splenda.

This research can also help explain why we get cranky when we're hungry and tired: the brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. A bad mood is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Swearing

Profanity is a lazy man’s way of trying to be emphatic.

A Cosumer Lifestyle

The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper.

Rod Dreher

Seeing Opportunities

The pitcher is not your adversary; he is a partner; offering you the opportunity to hit a home run.

Coasting

If you are in go-go-go mode with the gas pedal stuck in the down position, it isn’t necessary to slam on the break. Instead, try to give your mind enough time to process your experiences, instead of just "having them." Allow your body time to coast.

Otherwise, you may find yourself bouncing back and forth between the go-getters, pulling you toward constant activity by modeling it for you (and making you feel guilty for failure to keep up) and the enablers on the other side, pushing you to keep the engine running at all costs.

Since the important stuff is going on internally, figure out ways to get breathing into your life.

Stephen Goforth

Looking into the Mirror

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.

Carl Gustav Jung

Not Automatic

Growth is not an automatic process.

John Maxwell

Puzzles and Positive Moods

Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires. And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.

Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto (says) “It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos. And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ”

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”

Read more at the New York Times

The Path

The path to sainthood goes through adulthood.

M Scott Peck

Joint Efforts

Participate in co-creative relationships.

The Passion Within

The passion that lies within you must be discovered.

Laurie Calzada

Short-term Decision Making

The problem with credit cards is that they take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into the brain. This failing is rooted in our emotions, which tend to overvalue immediate gains (like a new pair of shoes) at the cost of future expenses (high interest rates). Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of an immediate reward, but they can't really grapple with the long-term fiscal consequences of that decision.

Paying with plastic fundamentally changes the way we spend money, altering the calculus of our financial decisions. When you buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss-your wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that you don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain-imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Weak Passions

Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

CS Lewis

Missing the Glory

Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.

Marcelene Cox

Options

Pain and suffering is inevitable, being miserable is optional.

Art Clanin

Thinking Too Much

When a person gets nervous about performing, he naturally becomes extra self-conscious. He starts to focus on himself, trying to make sure that he doesn't make any mistakes. He begins scrutinizing actions that are best performed on autopilot. This kind of deliberation can be lethal for a performer. The opera singer forgets how to sing. The pitcher concentrates too much on his motion and loses control of his fastball. The actor gets anxious about his lines and seizes up onstage. In each of these instances, the natural fluidity of performance is lost. The grace of talent disappears.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Channeling Passion

Passion must be captured and directed in order to accomplish actual work.

Rick Karlgaard

Learning From Mistakes

People with a genetic mutation that reduces the number of dopamine receptors in the ACC suffer from a similar problem; just like the monkeys, they are less likely to learn from negative reinforcement. This seemingly minor deficit has powerful consequences. For example, studies have found that people carrying this mutation are significantly more likely to become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Because they have difficulty learning from their mistakes, they make the same mistakes over and over. They can't adjust their behavior even when it proves self-destructive.

John Lehrer
How We Decide

Just One More

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Thomas Edison

Banish the Traitors

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

Shakespeare

The Marshmallow Test

The marshmallow test turned out to be a better predictor of SAT results than the IQ tests given to the four-year-olds. The ability to wait for a second marshmallow reveals a crucial talent of the rational brain. When Mischel looked at why some four-year-olds were able to resist ringing the bell, he found that it wasn't because they wanted the marshmallow any less. These kids also loved sweets. Instead, Mischel discovered, the patient children were better at using reason to control their impulses. They were the kids who covered their eyes, or looked in the other direction, or managed to shift their attention to something other than the delicious marshmallow sitting right there. Rather than fixating on the sweet treat, they got up from the table and looked for something else to play with. It turned out that the same cognitive skills that allowed these kids to thwart temptation also allowed them to spend more time on their homework. In both situations, the prefrontal cortex was forced to exercise its cortical authority and inhibit the impulses that got in the way of the goal.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Broken Hearts

Only the heart that hurts has a right to joy.

Lewis Smedes

Yale Students Outsmarted By a Rat

A rat was put in a T-shaped maze with a few morsels of food placed on either the far right or left side of the enclosure. The placement of the food is randomly determined, but the dice is rigged: over the long run, the food was placed on the left side sixty per cent of the time. How did the rat respond? It quickly realized that the left side was more rewarding. As a result, it always went to the left, which resulted in a sixty percent success rate. The rat didn't strive for perfection. It didn't search for a Unified Theory of the T-shaped maze, or try to decipher the disorder. Instead, it accepted the inherent uncertainty of the reward and learned to settle for the best possible alternative.

The experiment was then repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike the rat, their swollen brains stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions and then tried to learn from their prediction errors. The problem was that there was nothing to predict: the randomness was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate. Although most of the students were convinced they were making progress towards identifying the underlying algorithm, they were actually being outsmarted by a rat.

The danger of random processes-things like slot machines and basketball shots-is that they take advantage of a defect built into the emotional brain. Dopamine neurons get such a visceral thrill from watching a hot player sink another jumper or from winning a little change from a one-armed bandit or from correctly guessing the placement of a food morsel that our brains completely misinterpret what's actually going on. We trust our feelings and perceive patterns, but the patterns don't actually exist.

John Lehrer
How We Decide

Powerful Words

Words have profound suggestive power, and there is healing in the very saying of them. Utter a series of panicky words and your mind will immediately go into a mild state of nervousness. You will perhaps feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach that will affect your entire physical mechanism. If, on the contrary, you speak peaceful, quieting words, you mind will react in a peaceful manner.

Use such a word as “tranquility.” Repeat that word slowly several times. Tranquility is one of the most beautiful and melodic of all English words, and the mere saying of it tends to induce a tranquil state.

Another healing word is “serenity.” Picturize serenity as you say it. Repeat it slowly and in the mood of which the word is a symbol. Words such as these have a healing potency when used in this manner.

It is also helpful to use lines from poetry or passages from the Scriptures. The words of the Bible have a particularly strong therapeutic value. Drop them into your mind, allowing them to “dissolve” in consciousness, and they will spread a healing balm over your entire mental structure. This is one of the simplest processes to perform and also one of the most effective in attaining peace of mind.

Norman Vincent Peale
The Power of Positive Thinking

Stepping on Toes

The one who never steps on toes is probably standing still.

Peaks & Valleys

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

GK Chesterton

The Goal

Not a grand performance but an act of love.

Mistakes

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

John Powell

Delayed Living

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.

Dale Carnegie

Resisting

One must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however 'good.'

J.R.R. Tolkien

Looking Foward

One of the sure signs of growth is that you are no longer impressed with how you did it yesterday.

John Maxwell

Launching Out

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Andre Gide

Greatness

Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

2011 Resolution

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: "To rise above little things."

John Burroughs