Back in April, I blogged about 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans, which turned out to be one of my favorite books of 2012. Cornell human ecology professor Karl Pillemer spent five years interviewing more than one thousand Americans older than 65. Then he distilled their wisdom into lessons […]
In his recent New York Times interview with Adam Bryant, venture capitalist Tony Tjan, CEO of CueBall, offers an amazingly simple and sensible approach for responding to new ideas. As he puts it: “When someone gives you an idea, try to wait just 24 seconds before criticizing it. If you can do that, wait 24
From NPR’s Robert Krulwich comes the tale of how a bus stop in Milan is making the wait for public transportation more bearable. The answer: Bubble wrap — cut into different sized sheets based on how long you expect to wait. Occupied time, it turns out, feels shorter and less stressful than unoccupied time. So anything
Tick, tick, tick. In just 30 days, I’ve got a new book coming out. It’s called To Sell is Human — and I think you’ll like it. (BTW, you can now read the 6-page Introduction here.) Already several thousand people have pre-ordered the book. So to thank them — and everyone else who follows their excellent
Folks, it never stops. Each week brings more emotionally intelligent signage from readers around the world. One of these days I’m gonna set up a Tumblr dedicated to this topic. Until then, here are four diverse signs we thought you’d enjoy: Eileen Can shows how one coffee joint guards against seared laps and eager plaintiffs’
The latest issue of Scientific American Mind, which I read during a vacation last week (yes, I’m an exciting guy), takes on the subject of genius. “Genius” is one of those freighted words, something we consider exceedingly rare and overwhelming innate. But after reading SciAm’s package of articles, one of my takeaways is that genius
BTW, if you pre-order the book (Amazon, BN.com, IndieBound), please hang on to your receipt. Next week, we’ll be announcing an awesome package of giveaways for folks who order before the December 31 publication date.
Do we try too hard to be happy? Has the relentless pursuit of happiness and positivity poisoned our ability to live a meaningful life? Oliver Burkeman thinks so. And he’s given us The Antidote (Amazon, BN.com, IndieBound) — a smart and entertaining new book that offers what he calls a “negative path” to happiness. Because
Gamification. It’s one of the year’s top memes. The idea is that the more we embed systems — on the job, for our health, in social movements — with the mechanics and grammar of games, the more effective their participants will become. Alas, like any white-hot meme, it’s often hard to sort the heat from
After more than a year of planning, I’m proud to announce that we’ve just begun rolling out a series of workshops built on the ideas in Drive and geared to help organizations put those ideas into action. Check out the new Drive workshop web site for more details. As you’ll see, we’ve begun in earnest
