The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people. Suddenly ask what’s wrong and whether they open up and spill their guts or deny it and pretend you’re off, they’ll think you’re perceptive and understanding. They’ll either be grateful, or they’ll be frightened and avoid you from then on. Both reactions have their uses, as we’ll get to. You can play it either way. This works over 90 percent of the time.

• • ­From David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King”

I think this is completely true. Furthermore, I think the willingness to respond to such an inquiry honestly is a sign of great confidence.

But what about “manhood” and “toughness” and “a stiff upper lip”? These traits should not be dismissed as anachronisms worth evolving beyond. They should, though, be correctly defined so as to maximize flourishing.

Imagine a restless six-year-old named Jimmy. Think of how his shirt always seems stained by an amalgamation of peanut butter, dirt, and blood. Picture him earnestly working through his math test with his knee bouncing at 200bpm. Jimmy jumps off swings. Jimmy jumps off beds. Jimmy touches everything in the check-out aisle. Jimmy is chaos in a tiny package. And when Jimmy’s speed outpaces his balance, he sometimes crashes. “Don’t cry, Jimmy. Come on, boys don’t cry,” his All-American father, Christian, utters.

Society is often quite bad at telling the complete story. What we are here to do is complete the story so Jimmy isn’t left stranded with only part of a valuable lesson.

(more…)

to say the same thing others have said (i.e., a cliché), the key point to convey is why the advice did not previously connect with you. This is the valuable insight. Generally, this insight will demonstrate that only part of the story is contained in the cliché, the part that belies the difficulty of adhering to said cliché, or the part that admits of no tradeoffs, even though there are always tradeoffs.

in warding off pain. Pride that jolts you out of malaise when you are about to be passed. Pride that holds you accountable to the promises you made. Pride that says I’m better than this, and I ain’t going out like this.

because the real experts aren’t in power.

It happens on a daily basis. You’ll be doing one thing, your concentration will be on that one thing, and then, suddenly, a different thing will capture your attention. Especially if this other thing requires less energy to complete, the temptation will arise to drop the first thing and jump to the second. Unfortunately, as is frequently true with temptation, giving in will leave you deprived long-term.

Why? Well, for starters, you will erode your ability to focus for any serious amount of time, a skill necessary to appropriately meet any sufficiently difficult task. More importantly, giving in actively encourages a forever racing mind that prevents you from being able to derive pleasure through attention – no current moment will ever prove good enough, the grass will always be greener.

A simple solution exists in what I’m going to make up right now and call “Active Observation.” Make a quick note of that other thing and return to the task at hand. Simply observing the thought, as mediation beseeches, is often not nearly enough for all but the elite meditators since that thought, especially a pressing one you fear forgetting, will continue remerging. The act of taking a note cauterizes this cycle. Research flights to Mexico. Buy a pineapple. Register for bowling league. Maybe the thought will indeed reappear, but now you can honestly tell yourself, “I know I’ll handle that later.”

(more…)

My staff called it the family prayer. You have to thank another team for something that happened last week. You can’t thank yourself, and you can’t repeat what someone else said.

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When a leader can get people past being passive-aggressive, then heated but honest arguments can happen.

… when it is called “debate” rather than “disagreement,” participants are more likely to share information.

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When she was discussing a decision with her team, she always had to be the last person to speak. You may know the answer and you may be right, but when you just blurt it out, you have robbed the team of the chance to come together. Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important.

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You tell the engineers the problem the consumer has. You give them the context of who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a  far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.

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When you fire someone, you feel terrible for about a day, then you say to yourself that you should have done it sooner. No one ever succeeds at their third chance.

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A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.

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Often, when people ask for advice, all they are really asking for is approval.

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Saying what you really think in a way that still lets people know you care.

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It is often the highest-performing people who feel the most alone. They usually have more interdependent relationships but feel more independent and separate from others.

… power creates a subjective sense of separation and distinctiveness from others

 

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?

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“Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.”

“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exists, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“Oh dear,” thought God. “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

“Oh that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

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The main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

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One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so – but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about it.

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became increasingly obsessed with he problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he’d bought over the past few years.

For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

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Ending is better than mending.

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I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it – only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.

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Bernard, by this time, was fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click. Click, click, click, click … And it was morning. Bernad was back among the miseries of space and time. It was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his work at the Conditioning Centre. The intoxication of success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedently heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.

(more…)

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

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You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up.

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Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. but this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last.

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Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships.

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People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life.

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So probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her work? Well, sure. If not consciously, then deeper. Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, after all. Detectives had to remember that.

(more…)