Stressed? Just Smile!
By Kevin
What Stress?
I just finished The Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank a couple of days back and one of the questions was why managers who believed in achieving improvements in performance of subordinates through threats and reprimand rather than praise and reward were more likely to be able to prove that they are right.
Professor Frank suggests that it was because the performance of people usually varies with time but stays the same on average without special effort to improve or skive. That means that when a person perform badly it could just be his particularly down period and after getting scolded from the manager his performance tend to return towards the mean and result in the improved performance the manager was hoping for. On the contrary, a person may perform exceptionally on an especially good day and get praised for his work only to have his performance return to its mean, which means poorer than before the manager's rewards/praise. A manager who believes praise and reward yields better returns would thus have little means of proving he is right and so is unfairly proven wrong.
The truth seems more complex than just that. As this article from Harvard Business Review suggests, sensitivity to the anger or happiness of the manager or boss depends partly to the stress levels experienced. So from the perspective of the employer or manager, it is wise to inject more praise and rewards during high stress periods. Never mind the low stress periods when employers are slacking around.
Human behaviours and the motivations behind them are great subjects to study. This gives me the chance to introduce the publication, Psychology Today, which recently featured something really useful for people working in the business world (and perhaps even in academia). Confidence in yourself and your ideas really counts when it comes to presentations. So you will really have to work on yourself to get your ideas accepted. Check out the publication site for more of such tips to help discipline, aid and make sense of your mind.
New Mail
By Kevin
More Boxes!
This week's package of video, audio and reads is a little more on the lighter side, starting with a short 3-minute talk by Dr Laura Trice about asking for praise. After that you might like to listen to Dan Ariely's talk on our buggy moral code, a topic I've always been interested in.
In news, you might be encouraged to understand that Genius and talent is overrated and social forces can manipulate the motivations to create genius sheerly through encouragement as argued by Steven Levitt in SuperFreakonomics.
I'll like to take the chance to introduce Knowledge@Wharton, which offers high quality content as well as podcast on economics and business issues of the day. You might like to listen about questions posed on Net Neutrality.
Once again, enjoy your weekends!
Snoopy the Turkey
By Kevin
Another nice anecdote from The Difference Maker; John C Maxwell was quoting from a Peanuts Cartoon.
It was Thanksgiving and everyone were feasting on a turkey while Snoopy was given dog food. Snoopy thought, "Just because I'm born a dog, I'm given dog food while others are eating turkey for dinner". Then he walked back to his kernel and climb to the top; as he thought through it for a while, he realised, "It could have been worst. I might have been born a turkey."
Yea, so count your blessings and appreciate your status.
Thinking Sharp
By Kevin
Good Fit?
In 2002, the year I entered Secondary 1, I was "forced" to attend a course on Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats - it costs 100 plus bucks and is the first time I took part in such seminar-based sort of course. In the course, I learnt Edward De Bono's ideas and the tools he 'invented' to help us with attention-directing: the Thinking Hats (of course!), the Random Word method and more. The course instructor, Peter Low, introduced me to the idea of teaching creativity/thinking. The following year, a 'Thinking Programme' lesson emerged in our timetable - 40 minutes or so each week is devoted to this lesson. In the class, we learnt the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Critical Thinking and further applications of the Thinking Tools of Edward De Bono.
As I come to experience more of life, I realised more strongly than ever that thinking is a significant skill that sets brilliant people apart from mediocre ones. The intellectual capacity of people and their general talents in matters are often distributed pretty normally, and people do not exactly differ very sharply in these aspects. Thinking is thus what sets people apart and put them on wildly different paths in life. We all experience ups and downs and how we react to them or treat them has all to do with what we think about them; the ability to channel positive energies from circumstances through our thinking thus becomes exceptionally important.
"[F]or there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet, in Shakespeare's Hamlet
I've met plenty of 'emo' kids, students who fear just about everything: exams, parents' spanking, loneliness, being ostracized or bullied, fierce teachers, homework, failure, stress and more. These fears often destructive: a kid who is simultaneously fearful of failure and being ostracized by classmates for doing too well in class is going to be mediocre and sad for most of his childhood. Others are caught between losing friends and committing an act they know would earn them some whacking on their butts. These are 'problems' to young children and students but they often are just kid versions of the same things you'll find in adulthood. It is important to learn to 'think in the right way' to overcome these fears and such worries. It is the thinking involved in these circumstances that changes one's life by altering the choices one would make.
Critical Thinking helps you identify problems and appreciate cause-and-effect: if I've been studying hard and yet not scoring well enough, my methods might be wrong and I'll have to review my test-taking techniques as well. Creative Thinking helps you generate ideas for solving problems; cultivating habits of highly effective people helps you organize your thoughts and your work. Thinking allows you to manipulate your emotions as Hamlet has already discovered and your emotions will do the work of motivating or demotivating you. Even when you work, it is quick thinking that is going to save you; alternatively, at least learn the thinking that is going to help you stay calm when trouble arises. Often, uncertainty is more fearsome than 'the worst' and so picture 'the worst' in your mind and eliminate the uncertainty that surrounds - give yourself a pat when 'the worst' didn't happen.
Sharpen your thinking, and see your life change.
Excel Through Competition
By Kevin
As observed from Compete with Psych, I've always been interested in the factors that causes one to improve his/her performance at work or play. Competition is apparently one of the activity that can help one rise to his/her potential. It can, of course, worsen performance as well - it is a question of the stress threshold. Steven Landsburg discuss research into this area in his Everday Economics 'Department' at Slate.com.
What is suggested in Landsburg article, is that perhaps women cave in under pressure more easily than man; and often, being unable to take the pressure under more extreme work conditions, they opt out of it entirely, choosing not to take part in the rat race and thus rarely emerge in highly competitive environments like business.
Work? What work?
Of course, when you're sick of competition and tired of doing great, you can always decide to slack off. In this particular article on rising inequality of leisure time, Landsburg implies that folks are trading off income gains to receive huge gains in leisure time. I guess that could be very true for the bulk of the people in the population who fails to find work. One could think of this as a consolation; too often we hear people saying that no one would lie on his deathbed wishing he had spent more time in the office working (sensibly, most ordinary sane people would wished he/she had spent more time with the family). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to be a bad place for those who prefer to slack though - Channel News Asia just reported that our employment figures are rising and more people getting work to do.
Being Happy
By Kevin
Smile!
Previously, I talked about reading Stumbling on Happiness and now that I've finally finished it, I should say some stuff about it.
It was an amazing book, packed with loads of Dan's humour, occasional sarcasm about a myriad of stuff and little anecdotes about his research and different psychology experiments that kept me entertained and intrigued. Even Desmond was positively attracted by Dan's style of writing and the way he plays with your mind while giving you loads of information directly or indirectly about ourselves (yourselves), the way we (you) think and believe and thus behave. Despite a disproportionally large amount of text devoted to repeating the same points about human behaviors and examples given, Dan has planned his book very well, organizing it such that he would always go back to his point after leading readers wildly astray.
I went on reading and reading the book although the week was busy and I was very often distracted by loads of work (mostly involving me going away from the book and that explains why Desmond was reading it too). I didn't mind that I was giggling to myself at Dan's jokes at my workplace and attracting weird stares while only Desmond knew clearly why I was behaving so strangely because on the occasions when he takes over the book, he too gets the same sort of treatment.
If you've watch his presentations on TED.com, you'll realized that he knows his book so well that he uses the same wordings or phrasing to describe the same experiments, scenarios and even jokes for his presentation. And I exclaimed that he's a great speaker, which shows how speech-like his style of writing is. As I went through the words, predicting what is the next word that is going to turn up in the next sentence as described by him, I could even imagine his voice saying those stuff.
Compete with Psych
By Kevin
Don't look around...
I've always tried to inform people that they are not maximizing their potential and their attitudes are hurting them all the time. In one recent science and tech article from The Economist, researchers discovered that the more the perceived competitors, the more disheartened people feel and perform with less effort. In fact, if you're more socially aware, you become more sensitive to this perception of competition from others. That probably explains a general observation that people who are less socially apt might actually be able to perform independent of the number of competitors or in general do better than the others.
The article implicitly suggests that altering your perception of the number of competitors can allow you to motivate yourself and push yourself towards your potential.
Happiness Specialist
By Kevin
Dan's Book
Remember Dan Gilbert I talked about in 'Dan Gilbert Speaks'? I started reading his 'blog' for his book, Stumbling on Happiness. Dan's research and findings have lots of implications on how we can discipline our minds and heighten our awareness of our own thinking processes that will allow us to see our interactions with the world more clearly.
In particular, I thought his article on The Vagaries of Religious Experience actually brings out quite a lot of information about what it means to 'believe' to us.
At times I find it a mere laziness to think further than what we normally do or that we choose to build upon established explanations. I guess his book will be full of these interesting experiments they've conducted and more anecdotes about things going on in people's minds. I'll have to read the book to find out more and after that I'll probably do up a review of it here at ERPZ.
Subscribers, Behave
By Kevin
There's plenty of applications of Behavioural Economics at work in the market place but they are often rather subtle besides special promotions and such. The Daily News has decided to use it blatantly to save 'newspaper'. In this entry on Economics Free exchange, people discuss whether this model would work.
Tale of the Valiant Knight
By Martin See
Your eyes are fixated on the digital clock located at the front section of the school hall. The time inches towards judgement day. You are five minutes away from taking the most important examination in your life; the obstacle that separates you from your goals. Your stomach churns and groans in trepidation. Your hand shakes to its own rhythm. Fear chokes you as you struggle to recall the labyrinth of theories that you desperately studied the night before the examination.
You are afraid of the questions that lie ahead. How will I respond if I encounter unfamiliar questions? What happens if I run out of time to complete the paper? What will I do if I can't achieve my desired grade? These insecurities and uncertainties gradually worm its way into your mind, poisoning it with a cloak of pessimism. Any self-belief that you had prior to the examination would be drained away in a fashion similar to the Dementor's kiss.
For those of you who have accounts of such harrowing experience, I have a lot of sympathy for you because I know exactly how it feels to be that student. During my early schooling days, I was allergic to examination! The allergy manifest itself in many unpleasant ways. It was such a horrible experience! After being immeasurably frustrated by the same problem time and again, I decided it was time to control my mind and protect it from doubts and fears.
I had a taste for fairytale so I imagined myself as a valiant knight who was clothed in sturdy armour and equipped with the most menacing-looking lance. I was to ride to the land of Mathematica and to slay its heinous King using my newly acquired knowledge. In another scenario, I was an intrepid knight confronting the infamous nine-headed beast in the notorious wasteland of Scientia. I know it sounds like an absurd story to you but it did the trick! Through the power of imagination, I was no longer the kid sitting for the most important examination but I was the valiant knight, a noble man full of confidence and self-belief.
My new mindset yielded very positive results. The surge in confidence and my belief in my abilities influenced the way I studied subjects and how I answered questions. As Henry Ford, the automobile industrialist, once said, "If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." Many students cannot achieve their full potential because they are weighed down by their doubts and fears. They don't believe they have what it takes to score distinctions. Are you one of them? If you fit the bill, it is time for you to change your mindset and protect yourself from the adverse influence of pessimism. You can start doing so by transforming into the valiant knight!