Dilbert on Outsourcing, Powerpoint and other mumbo-jumbo :)

Love this!  Shows how silly some outsourcing plans can really be.

Going the Extra Mile Will Give You an Advantage

https://lifehacker.com/the-extra-mile-is-never-crowded-1748474610

https://lifehacker.com/consider-going-the-extra-inch-instead-of-the-extra-mile-1749321685

The Extra Mile Is Never Crowded

This principle advocates for putting in significantly more effort than what is required or expected. The core idea is that very few people are willing to do this, so by making the extra effort, you immediately stand out from the crowd. It's about distinguishing yourself from being "average" and becoming "extraordinary."

• Key Learning Point: The path to exceptional success is often less competitive because most people settle for doing just enough. Willingness to do more than what's necessary is a key differentiator.
• Action Point: Identify areas in your work or personal projects where you can do more than the bare minimum. This could be conducting extra research, making an extra follow-up call, or adding a thoughtful, unexpected touch to a project. Don't wait to be asked; proactively offer more.

The Serenity Prayer

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference

You Snooze, You Win: How a Lack of Sleep Can Hold Back Your Weight Loss

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/you-snooze-you-win-how-a-lack-of-sleep-can-hold-back-1736338596

Sleep Deprivation Sabotages Willpower and Decision-Making

A primary learning point from the article is that a lack of sleep significantly depletes your willpower. When you're sleep-deprived, your brain's ability to make sound decisions and resist temptation is dulled. This can manifest in poor food choices, as you're more likely to give in to cravings for sugary snacks. In a professional context, this diminished self-control can translate to procrastination, difficulty focusing, and making impulsive decisions that could negatively impact your work and career progression.

The happy secret to better work - Shawn Achor

The Flawed Formula for Success

The central learning point is that our common belief about success is backward. We tend to think, "If I work harder, I'll be more successful, and then I'll be happy." Achor argues this is a broken model because every time we hit a success, our brain changes the goalpost for what success looks like. This puts happiness over the cognitive horizon, always out of reach.

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/

Embrace the "Give Away Your Legos" Philosophy

The central metaphor of the article is that in a scaling startup, your job is like playing with Legos. Initially, you have a lot of Legos and can build whatever you want. As the company grows and new people are hired, you have to share your Legos. The natural instinct is to hold on to what you've built, to micromanage, or to feel threatened. The key learning point is to fight this instinct. To grow personally at the same pace as the company, you must be willing to give away your responsibilities, the "Lego towers" you've built, to others. This allows you to move on to building bigger and better things.

Understand That Scaling is Counterintuitive and Uncomfortable

Scaling a company is an inherently chaotic and stressful process. It's filled with ambiguity and constant change. A key takeaway is to recognize that the emotional turmoil you and your team feel is normal. Leaders should actively communicate this to their teams. When employees start asking questions like, "Why did we hire that person?" or "Is So-and-so taking over my project?" it's a sign that it's time to talk about the "give away your Legos" philosophy.

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html

The Happiness Equation

A core concept of the article is that happiness can be understood with a simple equation: Happiness = Reality - Expectations. When your reality exceeds your expectations, you're happy. When your expectations are higher than your reality, you're unhappy. Generation Y yuppies (or "GYPSYs," as the author calls them) often find themselves in the latter category.

Why Expectations Are So High

The article suggests that Generation Y was raised by Baby Boomer parents who, after experiencing significant economic prosperity, encouraged their children to "shoot for the moon." This led to a generation that is wildly ambitious, not just seeking a stable and prosperous career, but a fulfilling one. They were often told they were special and could achieve anything, leading to a sense of entitlement and the belief that a great career is a given.

Lifehacker: Focus On What You Can Do, Not What You Should Do

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/focus-on-what-you-can-do-not-what-you-should-do-1720078724

You know those moments when you’ve gobbled up an entire pizza and you mutter, with sauce still dribbling down your lips, “I shoulda ate only one slice?” But you didn’t, and the regret of bygone decisions only further undermines your drive to achieve your health goals. Here’s how you can pick yourself up, stop worrying about what you should’ve done, and focus on what you can do.

Lifehacker: How I Built Better Habits With Calendar Appointments

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/how-i-built-better-habits-with-calendar-appointments-1721459016

Key Learning Points:

• Building habits takes a lot of time: The article debunks the myth that habits are formed in 21 days, citing a study that suggests it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days. This emphasizes the need for patience and consistent effort over a long period.
• Remembering to do the habit is a major challenge: Often, the difficulty in forming a new habit lies in simply remembering to perform the action consistently.
• Ignoring alerts is a sign of a problem: If you find yourself consistently dismissing calendar alerts for your new habit, it's a signal that your approach needs adjustment. This could be due to the task being too complex, the timing being wrong, or the alert itself being ineffective.
• Small successes build momentum: Focusing on small, repeatable steps helps to build foundational skills and makes the habit less daunting, leading to greater success in the long run.

The Truth About Dishonesty

The Flexible Nature of Honesty and Rationalisation

Humans are engaged in a constant internal conflict: the desire to view themselves as honest while simultaneously benefiting from dishonest acts. Thanks to our "flexible cognitive psychology" and the ability to rationalise our actions, we can do both. The speaker highlights that we tend to cheat "just a little bit", allowing us to gain from dishonesty while still maintaining a self-perception as good, honest people. This rationalisation is key; the more we can rationalise an action, the more dishonest we can be without feeling bad. The research, involving 30,000 people, revealed that while there are very few "big cheaters," there is a vast number of "little cheaters" whose collective minor transgressions (e.g., 18,000 individuals stealing $36,000 in total) have a far greater economic impact than the few major ones (e.g., 12 individuals stealing $150). This pattern is argued to reflect real-world society, where the majority of dishonesty stems from generally good people cheating slightly.

Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve

Two Mindsets: Fixed vs. Growth

The core concept of the talk is the distinction between two mindsets. A "fixed mindset" is the belief that your intelligence, abilities, and talents are fixed traits that you're born with and cannot change. People with a fixed mindset see challenges as risks and failure as a devastating judgment of their core abilities. In contrast, a "growth mindset" is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication, effort, and good strategies. People with a growth mindset embrace challenges, persist through setbacks, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html

Interesting article, they key comments being:

"but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success"

"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics."

"First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group."

"Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men."

"This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."

A technologists approach to self-improvement

http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2014/12/16/self-improvement-lessons/

1. Always work on a new version of yourself.

2. Add new “features” to yourself... new skills, new good habits, new experiences

3. Fix “bugs” in your life... work on reducing bad habits

4. Think about what “major upgrade” you could have. Most of the time, your improvements will be incremental. But every now and then, you should do a major upgrade of yourself. This usually involves a big change in your life.