Living in More Than One World

If, like me, you are reluctant to show your sketches to other people, be sure to read Art Markman’s new Psychology Today blog post, Tools for Innovation III: Sketches and your brain. Art is a friend and a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The post is one of three recent ones based on ideas (in this case from a chapter by Barbara Tversky and Masaki Suwa) from an Oxford University Press book he and UT engineering professor Kristin Wood co-edited, Tools for Innovation. When you have ideas for innovation, sometimes the best ways to think about, formulate and communicate them are by making some sort of visual representation, even if it is crude, dashed off and open to interpretation. But Art correctly points out that many of us are concerned about what people will think of our less-than-stellar artistic talents, so we either don’t make the sketch, or don’t show it to others. “But it is these very limitations in our ability to sketch perfect what we are thinking,” he writes, “that leaves room for those drawings to be reinterpreted.” If we can get over this limitation, there is a potential for a real breakthrough, because other people may have interpretations we wouldn’t have considered, and that can sharpen our thinking. Another concept he points out is that since so much of the brain is visually-oriented, limiting your ideas to either spoken words, or words on paper, can act as a damper on your creativity. In a similar vein, see Dan Roam’s bestselling book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

I’m about to begin a teaching semester, and many of us will be either teaching, taking classes, pursuing degrees or involved in self-learning ventures this summer. In that spirit, you should benefit from Tad Waddington’s short and to-the-point May 22 Smarts blog on Psychology Today, Smarts: Four things worth learning about learning. Waddington, author of the book Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, demonstrates how with additional focused effort and thinking about what we are trying to learn, we’ll gain greater understanding and recall. This is especially true today when we are bombarded by so much material online, in print and on TV and radio. If you add that to the material you are teaching or learning, it can create serious information overload.  He suggests such strategies as reading and re-reading a passage for understanding, but then writing out or saying aloud its meaning.  Also: doing something backward as well as forward (it seems like this one can be fairly tricky), retesting to see if you really understand what you’re trying to learn or accomplish (see how he references Peter Drucker on this one) and trying to understand the theory or principle behind a fact, not just the fact itself. He intriguingly calls the latter behavior “a self-imposed learning disability.” That concept gives us something to think about as we transition to the summer months: how do we hold ourselves back by the way we think and learn?

Check out Chip Conley’s wide-ranging May 18 ideas in Huffington Post, What We Measure Matters. Conley is both a practitioner and a writer; as founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based Joie de Vivre Hospitality and the author of such books as PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. The latter is about applying psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory to the business world, taking a concept developed for the individual and applying it organizationally. In his post, Conley discusses how his company asks questions of its employees to help them consider the highest levels of attaining meaning from one’s work and making a positive difference in the experience of the people they serve. Their answers, in his view, help even hourly workers performing tasks such as cleaning toilets see the larger context of their work. Conley says the small country of Bhutan is doing something similar to the application of Maslow’s theory with its Gross National Happiness index, moving away from the traditional economic measurement of Gross Domestic Product to less tangible, but highly important, measures of personal satisfaction and well-being. He wrote about his visit to Bhutan to learn more about the index and how it played out in the lives of its people in a May 11 post in Huffington Post, The Happiest Place on the Planet? For more on Bhutan and its index, see the May 7 Seth Mydans article in The New York Times, Thimphu Journal: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom.

The pros and cons of curiosity in life are explored in a great radio interview yesterday with psychology professor Todd Kashdan, of George Mason University, on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, produced by WAMU-FM. (It’s the public broadcasting station of my undergrad alma mater, The American University, in Washington, D.C., and also the producer of The Diane Rehm Show.) Kashdan was promoting his new book Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more on Kashdan and the book, see his Q&A with Positive Psychology News Daily, and his blog. He’s also one of the interviewees in Deborah Kotz’s recent usnews.com post, 10 Secrets to Finding Happiness During the Recession.

How can you resist a column called This Column Will Change Your Life? The latest from Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (where he is also a reporter), deals with positives and negatives regarding habits and routines. Sometimes the regularity of the routines causes the benefits derived to be diminished. “But there is one way,” Burkeman writes, “to get the best of both worlds: develop habits and routines that are designed to disrupt your habits and routines, and keep things fresh.” This could entail weekly self-reviews of your work, which even though being another form of routine, still gets you out of your daily routine for awhile.

He also writes about “burst working, involving tiny, timed sprints of five to 10 minutes, with gaps in between,” as an antidote to procrastination.
Also check out “The Bedsit Epiphany, ” his recent in-depth interview with Eckhart Tolle, the mega-selling self-help author of The Power of Now and A New Earth.

Can we really predict the things that will make us happy? How does that relate to how much time and effort we allocate to various activities in life? Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses this in “Delusions of grandeur II: Overexcited, overanxious, and ready for action,” for his Psychology Today blog. Markman’s post references two other psychology professors: Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Sussex.

Also worth reading is a short piece in the May-June 2009 Foreign Policy, The Next Big Thing: Happiness, by Swarthmore College psychology professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He reminds us that a lot more goes into the measure of a country’s well-being than purely economic factors. Many of us, he says, knew about the factors (such as community, family and friends) that contribute to our happiness, but downplayed them in the pursuit of wealth and risk until reality hit.