We’ve all been told that you have to start young, specialize quickly and get in 10,000 hours of practice or you will not succeed. Yo Yo Ma starting to play the cello at age 4. Tiger Woods showed interest in golf at 6 months old and won the Masters for the first time at age 21. Prodigies, however, are the outliers of those who achieve success, not the rule, says David Epstein, author of the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”
I have an inner critic who is incessantly telling me I’m not good enough, I’m not trying hard enough, or that I’m not meeting its expectations. Sound familiar? In “The Inner Game of Tennis,” Timothy Gallwey describes ways of calming that inner critic and what doing this can do for your tennis game and, ultimately, your life.
Why do we fixate on a few negative or critical comments, when we hear hundreds of positive ones? It seems one bad event, or even a not-so-great event, can discolor our day. Yet all of the positive and pleasant things go unnoticed or can’t be recalled, according to John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, authors of “The Power of Bad.”
What would you do in a plane crash? If your office building were filling with smoke, what would you do? Typically, we avoid these questions, but when we hear how others dealt with such a crisis, we tell ourselves that we would do better, that we would keep our wits about us.
Farsighted is at its core a book about making better decisions, and strategies to overcome our natural tendencies that lead us to make poor decisions. Here, I highlight three concepts that anyone can easily apply to individual or group decision-making.
Thinking back to your high school chemistry class, how much do you really remember? The way we are taught information and skills, and the way we learn and absorb knowledge are vastly different. Even when we get to choose the subject and it is something we are genuinely interested in learning, we find that the information has slipped from our memories. Continue Reading…
Is it possible to make small tweaks to what you are already doing to create big change? Who doesn’t want to make minimal effort to go from good to great? This small book walks the talk of being small itself and yet identifies achievable ways to help you make big changes. Continue Reading…
“Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” by Erick Barker, is a strategic map for how to be successful. Written with so many references to research and other books, it is a kind of meta-review of the best of current behavioral research, illustrated with compelling stories. Continue Reading…
I love questions, especially if I’m asking them. It’s why I initially picked up a copy of the book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger. I liked the title of this book, with its promise that I could ask better questions—questions that would get to the heart of the situation more elegantly and garner answers that would help me craft better solutions. Continue Reading…
