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