1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Read “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature“

The essence of teamwork: make it easy for the rest of your team to get work done, and do it unselfishly. How effective would your team be if everyone worked with this goal firmly in mind?

Clive is living permanently in the present, as he can only remember between 7-30 seconds of the past. He remembers his wife and how to play music, but can’t recognise his children or his own house. The biggest tragedy of this is that he experiences intense emotions, with no way of knowing what caused them. Always scary to realise how fragile our minds are.

Update: Looks like the original video disappeared. I’ve posted an older one I found on youtube. Let me know if anyone finds the latest version.

This fundamental truth is right at the beginning of Denise Shekerjian’s Uncommon Genius – How Great Ideas are Born, just to remind us that there is no shortcut to creativity. The book is a guided tour of the creative impulse, based on interviews with forty winners of the coveted MacArthur Award; an award that could see you living out your years comfortably with a fat paycheck each month, if you have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in your creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

Even though there is no easy way to being creative, it is comforting to know that everyone else is struggling with the same difficulties.Book summary:

1. Find your talent and stick with it.
2. Don’t be afraid of risk. You may fail, but use it as a learning opportunity.
3. Stay loose in the beginning, so you can explore all solutions instead of committing to the first one that may be wrong. Quick solutions hardly ever work.
4. Get to know yourself; understand your needs and the specific conditions you favour.
5. Don’t worry about money, just focus on your creative work and the money will follow, or you’ll find a way to get along without it (and hopefully you’ll win a MacArthur Award).
6. Learn to communicate, because a creative act depends on the reciever just as much as the sender.
7. Respect your culture, because it will be the ultimate judge of your work. (Update: Some people missed the your here. Your culture means your targeted audience, the culture you’re a part of, not necessarily your entire country’s superficial pop-culture. If your work doesn’t appeal to a sub-culture or at least an individual, what’s the point?)
8. Don’t delay. You can spend a lifetime learning from books without having anything to show for it when you die. Rather spend your time learning by doing, even if your work is at first amateurish you’ll have something to show for your time.
9. You need vision. Without a broad, long-term vision you’ll find obstacles much harder to overcome and failures more difficult to justify. If you focus on the short-term exclusively you’ll get bogged down in the details, and forget why you wanted to spend your life this way in the first place.
10. Change your perspective often. There are thousands of books and websites on imagination techniques such as visualisation, metaphorical thinking, hypothetical questioning, and right-brain thinking. Pick one at random and try it when you’re stuck.
11. Travel more. We get stuck in routine and habit, which helps us brush our teeth in two minutes instead of stabbing ourselves in the eye when we have to re-learn the technique each morning, but too much routine leads to habituation, where you stop noticing the details of the world around you. So get out, travel to a new city where everything is strange, and you’ll be forced to notice the details again.
12. Sustaining concentration and drive. This is a personal thing. Some of us manage by focusing on the imagined feeling of crossing that finish line, others just enjoy the creative process for it’s own sake. Try both and see what fits. Drive shouldn’t be mistaken for a rigid march to the end, sometimes you do need to change direction.
13. Encourage luck by keeping your eyes and mind open for opportunities others miss; by following your curiousity round a few blind-corners, and by turning your work into play.
14. Finding the balance between instinct and judgement. You should be able to follow your instinct in the face of harsh criticism from others, but you have to listen to your own judgement of when you’ve taken a wrong turn.
15. Despair and isolation, madness and meanness.The dark side of creativity. Most geniuses are seen as nutters or depressives, but it is not a prerequisite. Creativity necessarily makes you deviate from the main-stream, which may lead to isolation if you’re not good at handling criticism or get upset when you’re misunderstood. People tend to equate you with your work, so don’t take everything as a personal attack even when it sounds like one.
16. Building resiliency, or how to keep going. Maintain a variety of projects to switch between when you’re sick of one; choose your friends wisely; embrace your errors and disappointments to see what you can learn; when a problem seems intractable, leave it, come back to it, leave it again, and again return; invest yourself in the vision, focusing not just on the goal but on the process; be accepting of the rhythms of pleasure and pain; retain a plasticity and curiosity about the potential of your field; learn to see the advantage in a hardship; develop a philosophy that allows you to accept defeat on the same terms as you would welcome a victory; make an effort to know yourself and determine what works for you.
17. For the love of it. The easiest way to encourage creativity. Do it for love. Love of the work, the finished product, the people.

Related:

• 14 things you can learn from the Google story
• Milton Glaser’s 10 things I have learned
• School system needs revolution not evolution
• Thinking with a damaged brain
• Keeping your balance
• Hugh MacLeod’s How to be creative

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Mountain biking yesterday, on a steep five kilometre climb in 32 degree heat, I remembered it, and used it as my mantra to get to the top:

Pain is the mind-killer.
Pain is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my pain.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the pain has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

I found it kept me spinning my cranks past my breaking point, so maybe it’ll work for you too.

1. Pessimistic in the short term when facing reality, but optimistic in the long term. Faith that you will prevail in the end, without ignoring the harsh facts of reality.
2. Angered by sloppy code.
3. Long-term life planners. Shows that you have the ability to plan in the long-term in other areas.
4. Attention to detail

Rob hit the nail on the head here. My experience has shown these traits to be the most important in hiring excellent programmers. And they’re good to keep in mind when trying to improve your own skills. Learning the latest programming language to fill your CV up is only worthwhile in the short term, for the long term you need to focus on improving these four traits. Link to original article

[tags]programming, software development, personality, hiring[/tags]

Open your eyes/How to read for yourself

Reading and art should never be revered to the point of idolisation, as we then falsely perceive the things written about to be the only things of beauty in our surroundings. We should learn to see our surroundings with the master’s eyes, rather than trying to see the master’s surroundings with our own eyes. Use a master’s work to learn a new way of seeing to expand your abilities, instead of restricting yourself to the tiny fragment of human experience which the master artist has lived through.

On friendship

Friendship tends to be over-rated. A cynical and perhaps truthful view to take is that friendship is just a warm feeling of affection which may be reciprocated, and nothing more should be expected to avoid disappointment. The pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth should be seperated. Friendship allows for affection, but you need to split your personality for it to work. You cannot be brutally honest with a friend, but in placing your thoughts on paper or a painting you can be perfectly truthful. Thus both pursuits can be achieved without intefering with one another.

On appreciating life

If your death was guaranteed in a day, week, or year; how would your priorities change? Shouldn’t they be changed now rather than procrastinating till you’re dead? How would those people who were killed by the tsunami have lived differently if they knew? Okay, they probably would’ve given the beach a miss, but you get the point.

On taking your time

If you rush through life you’ll miss out on the richness which seemingly mundane objects and events have to offer. This applies even more in our current culture of get-things-done-faster-or-you’re-just-a-lazy-sod.

How not to point fingers

When suffering, don’t blame something or someone else and give up; just accept that shit happens and move on.

Expressing yourself

Avoid clichés in expression. Though they may be tried and true, they are also old and worn. Rather be original at the risk of ridicule or rejection.

[tags]proust, books, philosophy, psychology, life[/tags]