5½ Timeless Commencement Speeches to Teach You to Define Your Own Success | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/18/commencement-speeches-2/

5½ Timeless Commencement Speeches to Teach You to Define Your Own Success

18 MAY, 2012 by Maria Popova

The great and terrible truth of clichés, why success is a dangerous bedfellow, and how disappointment paves the way for originality.

It's that time of year again, the time when cultural icons and luminaries of various stripes flock to podiums around the world to impart their wisdom on a fresh crop of graduating seniors hungry to take on the world. After last year's omnibus of timeless commencement addresses by J. K. Rowling ("Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself. But poverty itself is romanticized only by fools."), Steve Jobs ("You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."), Robert Krulwich ("You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you've helped who've helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places."), Meryl Streep ("This is your time, and it feels normal to you. But, really, there is no 'normal.' There's only change, and resistance to it, and then more change."), and Jeff Bezos ("Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice."), here are five-ish more packets of timeless wisdom.

Across them runs a common thread of what seems to be as much a critical message, the message, for the young as it is an essential lifelong reminder for all: No social convention of success should lure you away from or could be a substitute for finding your purpose and doing what you love.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AT KENYON COLLEGE (2005)

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a remarkable speech that revealed in equal measure his singular, potent, wildly eclectic mind and his wounded spirit, peeling the curtain on the triumphs and tragedies of being David Foster Wallace. When Wallace took his own life in 2008 in a way referenced from the podium, the address took on a whole new layer of meaning for those who revered, mourned, and tried to understand the beloved writer. In 2009, the speech was adapted into a short book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Full transcript here.

ELLEN DEGENERES AT TULANE (2009)

In 2009, the great Ellen DeGeneres — icon, notorious happy-dancer, and one of my big heroes — sent off the graduating "Katrina class" at New Orleans' Tulane University with a hurricane of a speech that swirls you into a whirlwind of wit and humor, shakes you up with its humility and deeply personal candor, and puts you back down with a new understanding of

As you grow, you'll realize the definition of success changes. For many of you, today, success is being able to hold down 20 shots of tequila. For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. to try to be something that you're not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. to contribute in some way. So to conclude my conclusion: follow your passion, stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else's path, unless you're in the woods and you're lost and you see a path, and by all means you should follow that.

AARON SORKIN AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (2012)

Earlier this week, Aaron Sorkin took the stage at Syracuse University and addressed the graduating class with equal parts wit, wisdom, and disarming candor. His remarks about how the government failed to address the dawn of the AIDS epidemic because a disease that affected mostly homosexuals didn't seem worth the trouble, and how misguided that was in retrospect, make one think of the recent momentous strides forward for LGBT rights and wonder with what mix of bewilderment and shame we might look back on the days of government-sanctioned bigotry in a few decades.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt. My junior and senior years at Syracuse, I shared a five-bedroom apartment at the top of East Adams with four roommates, one of whom was a fellow theater major named Chris. Chris was a sweet guy with a sly sense of humor and a sunny stage presence. He was born out of his time, and would have felt most at home playing Mickey Rooney's sidekick in "Babes on Broadway." I had subscriptions back then to TIME and Newsweek. Chris used to enjoy making fun of what he felt was an odd interest in world events that had nothing to do with the arts. I lost touch with Chris after we graduated and so I'm not quite certain when he died. But I remember about a year and a half after the last time I saw him, I read an article in Newsweek about a virus that was burning its way across the country. The Centers for Disease Control was calling it "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" or AIDS for short. And they were asking the White House for $35 million for research, care and cure. The White House felt that $35 million was way too much money to spend on a disease that was only affecting homosexuals, and they passed. Which I'm sure they wouldn't have done if they'd known that $35 million was a steal compared to the $2 billion it would cost only 10 years later.

Am I saying that Chris would be alive today if only he'd read Newsweek? Of course not. But it seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less of each other, and that's got to change. Your friends, your family, this school expect more of you than vocational success.

BARACK OBAMA AT WESLEYAN (2008)

Philosopher Daniel Dennett once offered his key to the secret of happiness: "Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it." In his 2008 address to the graduating class at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama put it just as eloquently: "[O]ur individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition."

[S]hould you take the path of service, should you choose to take up one of these causes as your own, know that you'll experience the occasional frustrations and the occasional failures. Even your successes will be marked by imperfections and unintended consequences. I guarantee you, there will be times when friends or family urge you to pursue more sensible endeavors with more tangible rewards. And there will be times where you will be tempted to take their advice.

But I hope you'll remember, during those times of doubt and frustration, that there is nothing naïve about your impulse to change the world. Because all it takes is one act of service — one blow against injustice — to send forth what Robert Kennedy called that tiny ripple of hope. That's what changes the world. That one act.

CONAN O'BRIEN AT DARTMOUTH (2011)

Count on Conan to hit on the Big Truths with his signature blend of irreverence, self-derision, and keen cultural observation.

For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000 — in 2000 — I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.

BONUS: RAY BRADBURY (2001)

Though not technically a commencement speech, this remarkable keynote address by Ray Bradbury at The Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea is brimming with the kind of invaluable wisdom you wish someone had pinned to your mind in your early twenties, so you could laminate it for the rest of your life.

I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It's got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It's a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say "Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…", you know. Now, to hell with that. It's not work. If it's work, stop and do something else.

Now, what I'm thinking of is, people always saying "Well, what do we do about a sudden blockage in your writing? What if you have a blockage and you don't know what to do about it?" Well, it's obvious you're doing the wrong thing, don't you? In the middle of writing something you go blank and your mind says: "No, that's it." Ok. You're being warned, aren't you? Your subconscious is saying "I don't like you anymore. You're writing about things I don't give a damn for." You're being political, or you're being socially aware. You're writing things that will benefit the world. To hell with that! I don't write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn't set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

I've never worked a day in my life. I've never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: "Am I being joyful?" And if you've got a writer's block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you're writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.

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5 Ways to Avoid Natural Reactions that Prevent You from Making Good Decisions | The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business.

http://blog.bufferapp.com/social-biases-good-decisions

5 Ways to Avoid Natural Reactions that Prevent You from Making Good Decisions

Posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

Written by Gregory Ciotti

Article by Gregory Ciotti, founder of Sparring Mind and a regular Buffer blog columnist.

Most of us like to think that we are in-control of our actions.

Turns out, your brain can be a big jerk, and you are susceptible to a large list of cognitive biases and natural reactions that tend to hold you back from acting objectively. Luckily, some good social psychology books (spurred on by well-research papers & experiments!) have revealed a large amount of these biases to the common reader.

Today, we're going to take a look at 5 notorious social biases and discuss ways that you can recognize and react when your brain is trying to pull a fast one on you.

1.) Fundamental attribution error

This is a very insidious bias that we all fall victim to from time-to-time.

The calling card of the fundamental attribution error is when we place a large amount of emphasis on situational explanations when rationalizing when things happen to us, but we use personality-based explanations when rationalizing what happens to others.

As an example:

If Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (personal/dispositional).

If Alice tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational).

First uncovered by the classic study The attribution of attitudes, there are STILL no concrete explanations to explain it's occurrence.

Some of the more common reasons cited include:

• The just-world phenomenon: our brains are naturally inclined to have a belief that the world is balanced or "fair", and that things that happen to others happen for a reason. While we often see other people this way, we have a tendency to see ourselves as "victims" instead.
• Salience of the actor: individuals capture our attention, so when observing their situation, we are focused on them, when observing our own situation, we focus on the environment.
• Automaticity & processing: we often process things on a subconscious level, and it's often easier for our brain to wave away a situation as happening "just because they deserve it" rather than looking at the circumstances.

Dealing with it: Unfortunately, there isn't much beyond an agreed list of "best practices" when it comes to dealing with the fundamental attribution error (it's that pervasive!).

The best I've got for you is to remind yourself of the old adage of, "Walking a mile in someone's shoes," and determining if the situation is playing a major role in the event.

For instance, if a beginner makes a mistake, recall a time when you were a beginner yourself at the same activity or another; it's likely that your nervousness, inexperience and other outside factors caused you to make some errors as well.

2.) The Halo effect

The Halo effect is an attributional bias where our brain makes judgements about the character or competency of others based off of our general impression of them. In some cases, it can be viewed as a form of social proof.

The problem occurs when these impressions are wrong, and since they are often based off of superficial judgements (such as if the person is attractive to us), we can be wrong quite often.

What is also worrisome is that this bias seems to be present even at the highest levels of society in realms where objectivity should rule. In fact, it's been shown that on average, attractive people serve shorter prison sentences than others who were convicted of similar crimes.

Dealing with it: The most important way to battle against this bias is to try and detach yourself from the person at hand and to take the actions in as much of a "vacuum" as you are able.

If the same action were committed by someone whom you didn't admire, would it impact you the same way? We have a tendency to get swept up in the stories of others, so ask yourself if the "mystique" about someone was gone, would you perceive their actions differently?

It's important to ask yourself these questions when trying to objectively evaluate the actions of someone who may have left a strong impression on you or is someone who you truly respect: those qualities don't always lead to the person being right.

3.) Naive cynicism

The "Naive cynicism" bias occurs quite often, even in the most trusting of people.

It states that people are, on average, likely to assume that others have more of an egocentric bias than themselves. This means that people believe that others are more likely to be egocentric than themselves when dealing with people.

We often have data to show that this is not the case (statistically speaking), such as how Malcom Gladwell (in Blink) showed that most people do not sue their doctors when injured due to negligence, despite the often pervasive idea that patients are always taking advantage of malpractice in this manner.

In one series of experiments, groups including married couples, video game players, darts players and debaters were asked how often they were responsible for good or bad events relative to a partner.

Participants evenly apportioned themselves for both good and bad events, but expected their partner to claim more responsibility for good events than bad events than they actually did.

Dealing with it: The important thing to remember about this bias is that it's more of an outlook on others.

While circumstance often plays a huge role in people's outlook on the world (those born in a crowded, crime-ridden city may have different views on other people than those who grew up in a quiet suburb), but it's important to remember that there are a LOT of people in the world and that, on average, most people evaluate situations in the same fashion that you do.

People by and large will give credit where it's due, and you should try to react to situations where you have some sort of inclination that the opposite will happen, not just assume that everyone is more egocentric than yourself.

4.) In-group favoritism

This one probably didn't need a study to confirm it, am I right?

It's very obvious to many of us that people favor those who are in "their" group, but there is something a lot scarier about this bias than you may realize: people often form groups from the most trivial distinctions.

In a notorious study called Social categorization and intergroup behaviour, social psychologist Henri Tajfel was able to show that people could be placed into groups from meaningless choices (choosing between two painters who they had never met) and then have these choices affect their reactions when it came time to dole out real rewards.

Think about that.

People who chose the same painter (again, the choice was meaningless) would then, when queued to deal out real rewards to any participant, chose to FAVOR those who chose the same painter and DISCRIMINATE against those who didn't.

To make matters worse, in a study on customer loyalty programs, consumer researchers showed that people became more loyal to the programs when they new that they were in a "gold" class and above other people enrolled in the program, showing that meager distinctions of superiority can make people more loyal to a supposed in-group.

Additional studies have shown that things as shallow as similar purchases can trigger the effect. So if you meet someone and they also own some tennis racquets, terrariums, a pair of Crocs, or a Dolphin Power Boat (yes, that's real), you are susceptible to In-group favoritism rearing it's ugly head. Meeting someone with a common item, such as a guy who also wears pants, probably won't trigger the effect, or at least I hope so…

Dealing with it: This (as with all of these biases) is tough to handle, but this one is especially tricky because it can we can encounter it due to the actions of others.

To maintain our own objectivity, the best way is to envision an interaction without group constructs in place.

If this or that person weren't connected with you in some way, would you still feel the same about their actions? Conversely, if someone from the "other team" were on your side, would their actions be different in your eyes?

It's important to consider these distinctions when evaluating individual situations because, as the research shows, we can be heavily influence by them.

5.) Dunning-Kruger effect

No list would be complete without this one.

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that unskilled individuals are likely to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average.

Conversely, those who are highly competent may have feelings of inferiority, because they believe everybody else has the same competency that they do.

According to Charles Darwin:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

It turns out that he was far more correct than many of us would like to admit.

In some very recent research (2008), Dunning & Kruger asserted that individuals who were most likely to suffer from illusory superiority were those who were disinclined to receive feedback from others on their performance.

Blocking out of any critiques allowed them to create a sense of accomplishment that wasn't necessarily true.

Dealing with it: Lacking confidence in oneself is just as bad as being overconfident. What then can we do to avoid falling victim to both sides of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

I think that the solution is best addressed in one of my favorite quotes:

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."

- Ernest Hemingway

Focusing on improving yourself and not worrying about the performance of others or your skill in relation to them.

It's fine to be competitive, but when you spend too much time analyzing what other people are doing (especially if it's not for a competitive sport or activity), you're just setting yourself up for disappointment as you set goals based on other people's lives rather than your own.

Over to You

I'd like to hear from you: which of these social biases do you encounter most often? Do you find yourself getting tricked by any in particular?

See you in the comments, and thanks for reading!

About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the founder of Sparring Mind and the marketing guy at Help Scout. Get more research on persuasion + influence from Greg's free e-book on 'Conversion Psychology'.

11 Historical Geniuses and Their Possible Mental Disorders - Mental Floss

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/141360

1. Abraham Lincoln – Depression?

Studies have shown that there are much higher instances of mental disorder in political leaders and creative geniuses than in the general population. And while it's impossible to be completely sure of a correct diagnosis of a historical figure, that hasn't stopped researchers from making educated guesses. Here's a speculative look at the mental health of 11 of history's big thinkers.

The Great Emancipator managed to lead the country through one of its more trying times, despite suffering from severe depression most of his life. According to one Lincoln biographer, letters left by the president's friends referred to him as "the most depressed person they've ever seen." On at least one occasion, he was so overcome with "melancholy" that he collapsed. Both his mother and numerous members of his father's family exhibited similar symptoms of severe depression, indicating he was probably biologically susceptible to the illness. Lincoln is even assumed to be the author of a poem published in 1838, "The Suicide's Soliloquy," which contains the lines:

Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never knew;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?

2. Ludwig von Beethoven – Bipolar Disorder?

When the composer died of liver failure in 1827, he had been self-medicating his many health problems with alcohol for decades. Sadly, much of what he may have suffered from probably could have been managed with today's medications, including a serious case of bipolar disorder. Beethoven's fits of mania were well known in his circle of friends, and when he was on a high he could compose numerous works at once. It was during his down periods that many of his most celebrated works were written. Sadly, that was also when he contemplated suicide, as he told his brothers in letters throughout his life. During the early part of 1813 he went through such a depressive period that he stopped caring about his appearance, and would fly into rages during dinner parties. He also stopped composing almost completely during that time.

3. Edvard Munch – Panic Attacks?

The world's most famous panic attack occurred in Olso during January 1892. Munch recorded the episode in his diary:

"One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature."

This experience affected the artist so deeply he returned to the moment again and again, eventually making two paintings, two pastels, and a lithograph based on his experience, as well as penning a poem derived from the diary entry. While it isn't known if Munch had any more panic attacks, mental illness did run in his family; at the time of his episode, his bipolar sister was in an asylum.

4. Michelangelo – Autism?

You might have wondered in the past just how someone could paint something as huge as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. According to a paper published in the Journal of Medical Biography in 2004, Michelangelo's single-minded routine may have been due to the disorder. According to descriptions by his contemporaries, the painter was "preoccupied with his own reality." Most of the male members of his family are recorded to have exhibited similar symptoms. Michelangelo also seems to have had difficulty forming relationships with people; he had few friends and didn't even attend his brother's funeral. All of this, combined with his obvious genius in math and art, led the researchers to believe that today Michelangelo would be considered high functioning on the autism spectrum.

5. Charles Dickens – Depression?

By his early 30s, Dickens was the most famous author in the world. He was wealthy and seemed to have it all. But after an unbelievably difficult childhood, which saw the author working in a boot factory and living on his own when his father was thrown in prison, Dickens would start falling into depressions with the start of each new novel. The first one to cause him problems was one of his lesser-known works, The Chimes, in 1844. After that, Dickens' friends wrote that he became down every time he set to work on a new project, but that his mood would gradually lift until he was in a kind of mania by the time he finished. His depression worsened with age, and he eventually separated from his wife – the mother of his ten children – to live with an 18-year-old actress. After he was involved in a train crash four years before his death, in which he was uninjured but was forced to assist dying passengers before help came, his depression seems to have finally staunched his creativity, and his previously prolific output virtually ceased.

6. Charles Darwin – Agoraphobia?

Scholars still debate just exactly what problems Darwin suffered from, but whatever they were, they were serious. Despite his famed five year voyage on the Beagle (and the publication it led to) making his career, Darwin was virtually incapacitated the entire time. While he concentrated on his physical symptoms as the cause of all his suffering, the constant trembling, nausea, hysterical crying, and visual hallucinations (among other things) seem to have been mostly caused by a severe case of agoraphobia that kept him virtually bedridden from the time he turned thirty. Darwin's fear of people meant he would even avoid conversations with his own children, writing, "I am forced to live… very quietly and am able to see scarcely anybody and cannot even talk long with my nearest relations." In at least one letter he mentions feeling like committing suicide due to the publication of On the Origin of Species, the controversy over which caused him much distress. He may have also suffered from OCD and/or hypochondria, as he kept meticulous records of every new or recurring symptom.

7. Winston Churchill – Bipolar Disorder?

Like Lincoln, Churchill was a great leader dealing not only with international strife but his own mental struggles at the same time. In his 30s, he complained to his friends that he was hounded by the "black dog of depression." He sat in the Houses of Parliament and contemplated suicide. Churchill told his doctor that he had to be careful where he stood in a train station:

"I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through," he told his doctor. "I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation."

The black dog would follow him the rest of his life. When in his mild manic phases he was personable, but his moods could change quickly. During periods of high mania he would stay up all night writing, eventually producing 43 books on top of attending to his political duties.

8. Vaslav Nijinsky – Schizophrenia?

While not well-known today, in the early 1900s, Nijinsky was a household name. Considered the greatest male dancer of his era, he was famous for his intense performances, gigantic leaps, and ability to dance on his toes (en pointe), something uncommon among male dancers at the time. When he took to choreographing ballets, his modern take on the dance led to a riot. By the time Nijinsky was 26, the symptoms of his disease were affecting his work. He spent the rest of his life in and out of mental hospitals, often going weeks at a time without saying a word.

9. Kurt Gödel – Persecutory Delusions?

Gödel was a brilliant logician and mathematician, as well as a contemporary and great friend of Albert Einstein. Einstein's super-intelligence might have made him seem a little odd to the average person, but he doesn't seem to have suffered from any actual mental illnesses. Gödel, on the other hand, thought that someone was out to poison him. He was so sure of this delusion, especially later in life, that he would only eat food that his wife had cooked, and usually made her taste it first, just to be sure. When his wife was hospitalized for six months, Gödel simply stopped eating and starved to death.

10. Leo Tolstoy – Depression?

Tolstoy did not suffer from obvious signs of depression until middle age, but when it hit him, it hit hard. He went through serious personality changes, questioning virtually everything in his life. At times he debated giving away all of his possessions, becoming celibate, and the nature of his religious beliefs (or lack thereof). At one point he was determined to give up writing altogether, saying, "art is not only useless but even harmful." Tolstoy is a perfect example of someone who seemingly has everything brought low by this disease: despite coming from a wealthy family, being celebrated as an author, and being father to 13 children, eventually his demons drove him to seriously consider suicide. He wrote in one letter, "The possibility of killing himself has been given to man, and therefore he may kill himself." Eventually Tolstoy pulled himself out of this hole by becoming what we would now consider a born-again Christian.

11. Isaac Newton – Everything?

One of the greatest scientists of all time is also the hardest genius to diagnose, but historians agree he had a lot going on. Newton suffered from huge ups and downs in his moods, indicating bipolar disorder, combined with psychotic tendencies. His inability to connect with people could place him on the autism spectrum. He also had a tendency to write letters filled with mad delusions, which some medical historians feel strongly indicates schizophrenia. Whether he suffered from one or a combination of these serious illnesses, they did not stop him from inventing calculus, explaining gravity, and building telescopes, among his other great scientific achievements.

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http://bettermess.com/the-error-of-the-app-mentality/

The Error Of The App Mentality

From Matt Alexander:

OmniFocus, Things, Calendar, and broad swathes of productivity software on the market all claim to improve the human experience. To allow us to reclaim control over our lives. And yet, in many respects, such purported elements of productivity often become deep pits of wasted time and effort.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time using, experimenting with and advocating for exactly these kinds of apps (well, not Things, but I digress), I think it's important to examine this question from Matt's recent interview with Patrick Rhone. I've been turning this exact question around in my head for some time now and keep noticing that several of my favorite writers who touch on productivity are as well.

So, to answer a question that was asked to someone else, why do these apps "become deep pits of wasted time and effort"? The answer is actually in Matt's question. It's because we let ourselves believe that they can "allow us to reclaim control over our lives." As Patrick answers, only we can do that:

Well, nothing can control us or give us control. Only we can control our own actions. What we have, instead, is choice. The choice to follow one path versus following another. The choice to set that path or let that path be set for us.

I feel that this is the reason why so many of the productivity apps you mention fail. Instead of working on and building the systems and habits one needs to set for themselves — based on what works for them — they make the choice to be led by the technology born of tools and systems that work for others. […]

I think, in the end, what we are searching for in technology is no different than what humans have been searching for since the dawn of Man. Tools coupled with systems that will make our existence on this planet a bit easier […] If these can be coupled with increasingly effortless systems then the tools can become that much more powerful and the resulting technology that much more useful.

We will never benefit if all we do is download the latest, and buy the most popular applications or purchase the newest devices (no matter how much I enjoy doing just that). We can benefit by doing both of these things, but only they are combined with the upfront thought, discovery and understanding to determine how they best fit in to the way we do our best work.

What's Right For You?

It's easy to get overwhelmed by productivity minded sites like this. We tend to use and try a lot of tools. We also like to share them with the hope that they might help you. Some will, most won't. You have to be selective, you have to know yourself and the way that you work. You have to develop a filter for what's worth trying, because it's equally essential to identify and eliminate the tools that will not be a fit. The faster you can do this, the easier you can avoid avoid those deep pits that Matt mentioned in his interview. As Brett Terpstra put it:

I create a lot of tools, and I share a lot of links to other people's work. I don't expect anyone to use them all; even I don't. I try to fill gaps where I see them and fix problems I spot. I do use a lot of tools overall, and I imagine my workflows would baffle anyone not intimately familiar with all of them. They work seamlessly for me, though; if they don't, I leave them behind.

By knowing where the holes are, you'll know what to look for. If you're not happy with what you have, look. But if you have a solution that's working, don't allow any shiny objects to cause you to stray.

It's Not About The App

Now even with what he eliminates, it may seem that someone like Brett goes overboard with applications (as well as the and the array of tools, scripts, services and other various bits of magic that he uses that I cannot begin to explain or understand). But that's where I think our understanding of productivity fails. It's not that Brett uses a lot of apps, it's that he has one system, a single workflow that empowers him to do amazing things. For you, that workflow may require less, it may not even require any apps at all. For guys like Brett and me, the right tool can go a long way when integrated into our respective approaches to our work.

Don't Use Apps, Learn Them

The right applications can help you mitigate several of your own shortcomings or enhance your strengths, but their potential will only ever be realized if they are coupled with the right systems and methodologies. Sadly, finding the right tools is a process that takes time and often includes several wrong turns, but when the endgame is a unified workflow, I believe that any time wasted is time well spent.

This time also allows you to master your tools or at least master the areas needed to achieve your own personal breed of magic. This desire to master can get you in trouble, it can lead to excessive fiddling, but as Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter points out, fiddling can be important:

I fiddle with my software tools a lot. I examine the preferences in detail. I read the manuals and learn the tricks.

[…]

Each one has its strengths and domains that serve my needs. I had to discover how they fit me. That's where I find fiddling important. It's not just about learning what's available in the preference panes or reading a step-by-step blog post about how someone else uses an app. It's about learning how I can use my applications to do better work more consistently. It's the exploration that pays dividends, not just reading the manual. Knowing what an application can do is not the same thing as knowing what I can do with it.

It's only through this learning process that applications have any hope of living up to that initial promise of helping us to "reclaim control over our lives".

The App Mentality

Frankly, the whole app-driven mentality is flawed. When you think of these things in terms of what apps to use, you do it more from the standpoint of how are you going to best spend your money rather than how are you going to best accomplish your best work. Sites like this are probably partly to blame, but let me see if I can try to help clarify things a bit…

For those of you who read our sites (or any site that touches on productivity for that matter) and get caught up in the newest tricks and the latest app, try to take a step back from what we're talking about in the minute and really look at what we're trying to accomplish for ourselves in aggregate. We may talk about things one thing at a time, but that's only because creating your own ideal workflow is overwhelming. The best sites and the brightest minds that I see writing about productivity today aren't trying to steer you towards a new app. They aren't advocating an app-driven approach to better work, they're creating and sharing their workflow.

Brett, Gabe, Patrick and hopefully myself, are sharing what we discover, what interests us and what works for us with the hope that some of it will be useful in your own search. We're hoping that by sharing our experiences, it becomes easier for you to find the tools worth trying and the systems worth considering. But no matter what we share, you'll still have to go through much of the same pain we had to in order to find a workflow of your own. No matter how badly we may want to point you in the right direction, no one is going to be able to find the right workflow for you, except you. But hopefully, we can help along the way.

Why Men Fail - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/brooks-why-men-fail.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Why Men Fail

You're probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo.

In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D's and F's. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor's degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master's degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday's jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.

Millions of men are collecting disability. Even many of those who do have a job are doing poorly. According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, annual earnings for median prime-age males have dropped by 28 percent over the past 40 years.

Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

Over the years, many of us have embraced a certain theory to explain men's economic decline. It is that the information-age economy rewards traits that, for neurological and cultural reasons, women are more likely to possess.

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural reasons, many men stink at these tasks.

But, in her fascinating new book, "The End of Men," Hanna Rosin posits a different theory. It has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.

This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social position. When there's big social change, the people who were on the top of the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They're going to explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically.

Rosin reports from working-class Alabama. The women she meets are flooding into new jobs and new opportunities — going back to college, pursuing new careers. The men are waiting around for the jobs that left and are never coming back. They are strangely immune to new options. In the Auburn-Opelika region, the median female income is 140 percent of the median male income.

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She's just saying women are adapting to today's economy more flexibly and resiliently than men. There's a lot of evidence to support her case.

A study by the National Federation of Independent Business found that small businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small business during the last recession. In finance, women who switch firms are more likely to see their performance improve, whereas men are more likely to see theirs decline. There's even evidence that women are better able to adjust to divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent after a marital breakup.

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.

If she's right, then men will have to be less like Achilles, imposing their will on the world, and more like Odysseus, the crafty, many-sided sojourner. They'll have to acknowledge that they are strangers in a strange land.

Why Success Breeds Success: The Science of "The Winner Effect" | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/09/jonh-coates-hour-between-dog-and-wolf-winner-effect/

Why Success Breeds Success: The Science of "The Winner Effect"

09 AUGUST, 2012 by Maria Popova

Biochemistry and the self-reinforcing upward spiral of winning.

The past century of science has demonstrated the pivotal role of biochemistry in such human phenomena as love, attraction, and lust. But to consider that individual neurobiology might impact things as rational and complex as, say, stock markets seems rather radical. Yet that's precisely what trader-turned-neuroscientist John Coates explores in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (public library) — an ambitious look at how body chemistry affects high-stakes financial trading, in which Coates sets out to construct — and deconstruct — a "universal biology of risk-taking."

One particularly fascinating aspect of risk-taking has to do with what is known as "the winner effect," a self-reinforcing osmosis of the two key hormones driving the biochemistry of success and failure — testosterone, which Coates calls "the hormone of economic bubbles," and cortisol, "the hormone of economic busts." In traders — as in athletes, and in the rest of us mere mortals when faced with analogous circumstances — testosterone rises sharply and durably during financial booms, inducing a state of risk-seeking euphoria and providing a positive feedback loop in which success itself provides a competitive advantage. By contrast, the stress hormone cortisol spikes during financial downturns; traders with sustained high levels of cortisol become more risk-averse and timid, ultimately being less competitive.

Coates explains:

The euphoria, overconfidence and heightened appetite for risk that grip traders during a bull market may result from a phenomenon known in biology as the 'winner effect.'

[…]

Biologists studying animals in the field had noticed that an animal winning a fight or a competition for turf was more likely to win its next fight. This phenomenon had been observed in a large number of species. Such a finding raised the possibility that the mere act of winning contributes to further wins. But before biologists could draw such a conclusion they had to consider a number of alternative explanations. For example, maybe an animal keeps winning simply because it is physically larger than its rivals. To rule out possibilities such as this, biologists constructed controlled experiments in which they pitted animals that were equally matched in size, or rather that were equally matched in what is called 'resource holding potential,' in other words the total physical resources — muscular, metabolic, cardiovascular — an animal can draw on in an all-out fight. They also controlled for motivations, because a small, hungry animal eating a carcass can successfully chase off a larger, well-fed animal. Yet even when animals were evenly matched for size (or resources) and motivation, a pure winner effect nonetheless emerged.

An intriguing correlation, certainly, but what is the causal mechanism at work? Scientists have suggested that there are several elements at play: First, testosterone levels rise when animals face off, producing anabolic effects on muscle mass and hemoglobin, quickening reactions, improving visual acuity, and increasing the animal's persistence and fearlessness. Then, once the fight is over, the winning animal emerges with even higher levels of testosterone, and the loser with lower ones. Coates sums it up thusly:

Life for the winner is more glorious. It enters the next round of competition with already elevated testosterone levels, and this androgenic priming gives it an edge that increases its chances of winning yet again. Through this process an animal can be drawn into a positive-feedback lop, in which victory leads to raised testosterone levels which in turn leads to further victory.

So does this winner effect also occur in humans? Coates thinks so. He cites a study, in which researchers rigorously examined a database of 630,000 professional tennis matches and found that the winner of the first set had a 60% chance of winning the second one and, since the win in these matches comes down to the best of three sets, winning the match itself. (Anecdotally, a quick glance at Michael Phelps's Olympic scorecard would suggest a similar conclusion.)

The precompetitive surge in testosterone has been documented in a number of sports, such as tennis, wrestling and hockey, as well as in less physical competitions, such as chess, even medical exams. Winning athletes in sports experience a postgame spike in testosterone, suggesting that a positive-feedback loop is indeed the physiological substrate to winning and losing streaks. Incidentally, these testosterone-driven sporting victories appear to be more common when an athlete is on home turf, the so-called home-field advantage. Athletes on a winning streak may thus have a very different body chemistry than those on a losing streak. IN all these experiments, with both animals and humans, the winners experienced a self-reinforcing upward spiral of testosterone.

Tying the research back to the human condition itself, Coates puts it rather poetically:

We hold the keys to victory within us, but usually cannot find them.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf goes on to examine how this intricate exchange of information between body and brain coalesces into what we call "gut feelings," reminding us that we are, after all, remarkable and complicated machines.

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Eight Writing Tips from Flannery O'Connor

1. “Try arranging [your novel] backwards and see what you see. I thought this stunt up from my art classes, where we always turn the picture upside down, on its two sides, to see what lines need to be added. A lot of excess stuff will drop off this way.”

2. “I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book.”

3. “I suppose I am not very severe criticizing other people’s manuscripts for several reasons, but first being that I don’t concern myself overly with meaning. This may be odd as I certainly believe a story has to have meaning, but the meaning in a story can’t be paraphrased and if it’s there it’s there, almost more as a physical than an intellectual fact.”

4. “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.”

5. “That is interesting about your reading some Shakespeare to limber up your language before you start; though I think that anything that makes you overly conscious of the language is bad for the story usually.”

6. “It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.”

7. “This may seem a small matter but the omniscient narrator NEVER speaks colloquially. This is something it has taken me a long time to learn myself. Every time you do it you lower the tone.”

What Charlie Parker And Thomas... (fastcompany.com)

What Charlie Parker And Thomas Edison Knew: Jam Sessions Make New Ideas Happen
http://www.fastcompany.com/3000964/what-charlie-parker-and-thomas-edison-knew-jam-sessions-make-new-ideas-happen

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Keynote address by David Brooks | BrandeisNOW

http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2011/may/brooksaddress.html

Keynote address by David Brooks

Photo/Mike Lovett

David Brooks

May 22, 2011

Hello Brandeis

As I look out on this audience, the first thing I realize is that the Rapture must actually have happened yesterday, because, from the looks of it, America is now 50 percent Jewish.

The second thing I realize is that some of you may not have graduated from college before and you may not know the etiquette. It's customary after you get your degree to give the president a little tip. Ten or twenty bucks, just to show he did a good job.

It's also customary to give the commencement speaker a little something — no more than 15 or 20 percent of your annual tuition.

The money is not for me. It's going straight to the Yo-Yo Ma for President campaign. This country has a yawning leadership gap that only Yo-Yo can fill.

Now, even if you don't give, I want you to know how great it is to be here on this happy occasion. The parents are happy to have produced such outstanding young men and women. The faculty is happy to have produced such outstanding graduates, despite everything their parents tried to do to them. The administrators are happy to have such an outstanding alumni, despite everything the faculty tried to do to them. The students are happy they have turned out so well, despite what the blowhards in all these categories tried to do to them.

Well, Brandeis Class of 2011, I am the final blowhard. I am the last windbag between you and your degree.

So this is indeed a happy occasion.

Over the past few years, we've learned a lot about happiness. We've learned that the relationship between money and happiness is weak. Once you hit the middle class, getting richer isn't going to make you that much happier. The relationship between friendship and happiness is strong. Joining a club that meets just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends and sex. Not necessarily in that order. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting.

Now, there is a tradition to commencement speeches. The university asks somebody who has achieved some measure of career success to come to campus and tell you that career success is not that important.

And I'm happy to give that speech. It's actually true. I just had a book hit number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. I consider myself as shallow as the next guy, but I found the whole experience kind of flat. The commercial success was just a big nothing. The only thing that mattered to me was when people I admire engaged the book in a serious way, as happened to me magically last night here at Brandeis.

This confirms my general experience, which is that achieving some career success means you don't have to feel the negative experience of feeling like a failure, but it doesn't produce much positive sense of joy.

But I've decided not to talk about success and failure in the abstract today. I've decided to talk about the specific experience you Brandeis grads will experience over the next 5 or 10 years.

Think of this experience as leaving a chute. Over the past 15 years of your life you have been funneled through a set of rigorous and supervised institutions. The paths have been marked out, the grades you had to get and the tests you had to do well on. But, starting today, or in a few years when some of you leave graduate school, you will shoot out into a world that is unprecedentedly wide open, with an unmarked variety of lifestyle options, a global variety of places to live, an incredibly diverse number of careers, most of which you have never even heard of.

There will be an extreme contrast between the life you led until today and the life you will start tomorrow, from high-pressure structure to an extreme lack of structure.

Young Americans today live the most supervised childhoods in American history. The University of Michigan does these time analysis studies and they have found that over the last few decades the amount of time young people spend just hanging around on their own has declined by about a third. The amount of time they spend in adult-structured, supervised activities has risen by about a third: soccer practice, piano practice, SAT prep, LSAT prep.

And so we now have these public cartoon characters to symbolize the new mode of childrearing —Tiger Moms, Ubermoms, Helicopter Parents. Where I live you can see the Ubermoms coming to pick their kids up at the elementary schools in the afternoons. The Ubermoms are highly successful career women who've taken time off to make sure all their kids can get into Brandeis. The kids come out with these 80 pound backpacks stuffed with books so that if the wind blows them over they're like beetles stuck there on the ground. The parents usually drive Saabs and Audis and Volvos because in my kind of suburb it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy. You can usually tell the Ubermoms because they actually weigh less than their own children. During conception they were doing little butt exercises to stay fit and trim, and during delivery they were cutting the umbilical cord themselves and flashing little Mandarin flashcards at the thing to get them ready for the college admissions process.

Their kids are raised for six-figure incomes and ecological sustainability. They get taken to Ben and Jerry's because even their ice cream should have a moral conscience. I once joked that Ben and Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste: it doesn't kill germs, it just asks them to leave. They also get taken to socially enlightened grocery stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, where all the cashiers look like they are on loan from Amnesty International, and they buy them these obscure organic snacks made from sea weed, which are for kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom. I want a snack that will help prevent colorectal cancer."

So, by the time these Ubermom kids will apply to college, they will have cured four formerly fatal diseases, started three companies, done environmental awareness training in Tibet and competed in the Olympic trials in some completely obscure sport like fencing or competitive yoga.

The meritocracy has gotten much more competitive. Nobody my age could have gotten into the college they attended as a youth, and so everybody in your age group has been forced to do more homework assignments, to do better at sports, to do more community service, to jump through more hoops than almost anyone a generation ago.

And then suddenly it stops. Graduation comes. The supervision and the tests end. Yesterday people were paid to read your writing; tomorrow no one will get paid. Yesterday, faculty, administrators and residence heads marked your progress. Tomorrow nobody watches, except at a distance.

Tomorrow you will enter a new, unmarked, uninstitutionalized phase of life. And if you're like most people your age, you are going to spend the next 10 years wandering around American society.

People who graduated from college a generation ago usually did four things in rapid succession. They got their degree, they found a job, they got married and they bought a home. In 1960 the vast majority of college grads had done these things by age 30. Now the situation is reversed. The vast majority have do not these things by age 30.

Today you get your degree, but if you are like most college grads, you will spend the next decade of your lives moving from city to city, school to school and from job to job, temping, bartending, teaching, interning, experimenting with different careers and lifestyles. While you do this, by the way, your parents will be going slowly insane.

Everything will be contingent and uncertain. Many of you will find yourselves in professions you're not really thrilled to be in, but you're really not sure what else you want to do.

Many of you will hold junior associate jobs at various companies and organizations. The 40 year olds in your offices will have their career status established, but you'll be in these peripheral one- or two-year slots. Last month you were reading Tolstoy at Brandeis, next month, if you're lucky, you'll be working at a copying machine at some organization and providing the middle-aged people in the office with nothing more than fact-checking and sexual tension.

You'll have to figure out for yourself how much you can suck up to your superiors without losing all self-respect. You'll have to figure out what age in your 20s you should really should stop playing Mortal Combat. Most of all you'll have to figure out how to tie yourself down.

In America we celebrate freedom. But the fulfilled existence is more like the movie "It's A Wonderful Life," where Jimmy Stewart character dreamed of getting away and being free, but the real meaning of life came from the things he was irredeemably tied down to and committed to—his family, his town and his bank.

Over the next several years you will be compelled to go hunting for commitments.

This hunt for commitments will require extraordinary skill. You can't just commit to the first thing that comes along. But you can't wait and miss your opportunities. You have to struggle against the signals of your culture and commit to serious things that will give your life significance. Once you pounce on your commitment, you have to dig your teeth in, and hang on in good times and bad.

For example, you will be called upon to commit yourself to a husband or a wife. This won't be an abstract proposition. It will be with a real live person, with a name, a face, unwanted odors and body hair. You will have to ask yourself, is this the person I want to marry?

This will be the most important commitment you will face over the course of your life. If you have a great career and a bad marriage, you'll be miserable. If you have a great marriage and a bad career you'll be happy.

I tell educators they should compel every student to major in marriage. Students should be compelled to take courses on the psychology of marriage, the literature of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the history of marriage. Nobody listens to me, so in your 20s you will have to assign yourself your own curriculum. You will have to prepare yourself for this enormous task.

You will also have to commit yourself to a problem. I think it's a mistake to ask yourself, "What career do I want to have?" It's better asked, "What problem is life summoning me to tackle?"

Some of you will find yourself in a poorly managed office. Life will ask, "Can you lead and inspire people better than that jerk?" Some of you will have a relative with Alzheimer's. Life will ask: "Can you help cure that disease?" Some of you will find yourselves in neighborhoods were people drop out of high school, generation after generation. Life will ask, "Can you help break this cycle of poverty?"

The value of your life will derive from how fully you tie yourself down to a problem. And here I get to the crux of what I want to say to you. When you exit the world of the educational system and enter the commitment hunt, you will be called to practice an overlapping but slightly different set of skills.

Instead of answering questions others pose, you'll have to be the one choosing the questions. Instead of completing a set of assignments, you'll have to scan a very confusing landscape and create your own assignments.

As a commitment hunter, you'll have to possess metis, a Greek word that means looking over a landscape and having the ability to discern the important patterns and trends. You'll have to possess equipoise, the ability to look inside your own mind, observe your own weaknesses and correct for them. You'll have to practice sympathy, the ability to look across a social landscape and be sensitive to the emotional cues of the people around you. You'll have to practice mindsight, the ability to quiet your own prejudices so you can really absorb the wisdom of the people around you. You'll have to observe propriety, the ability to practice small acts of self-control, habits, and etiquette, so that when the big moral challenges come along, you will have the character muscles to meet them. These skills overlap with, but are different from, the skills that helped you excel in school.

There's a big difference between getting a good GPA, which requires you to do well across a range of subjects, and making a commitment to the world, which calls on you to be maniacally focused on one subject.

Some of the people who did really well in school will struggle in the next chapter of life, and vice versa. The average self-made millionaire in this country had a collegiate GPA of 2.75. Some of your friends who scraped by at the back of the class — be nice to them. In a few years you'll have a new name for them: boss.

Some of the skills you will need are scanning skills. They are the skills of observing the world closely and making sense of what you see. Some of them are emotional skills. Being able to detect and understand your own and other people's feelings and passions.

And so how does one develop these skills? Well, the good news is that the single best way is to get a good liberal arts education of the sort you've received at Brandeis. When you read history you get a wealth of metaphors and historical analogies. You can use these patterns to make sense of the world. When you read a novel or listen to a piece of music you move along with the characters. You begin to absorb and internalize their emotional states. You widen your repertoire of emotions and you are able to make more subtle emotional valuations.

When you are around creative and idiosyncratic peers, you widen your vocabulary of personality types. When you are asked to write paper after paper, you become better at arduously plumbing your own unconscious intuitions and bringing them rigorously to the surface.

At Brandeis you've had two educations. The first education gave you a set of conscious skills and that's a very important education. But second, you educated your emotions. You absorbed ways of being from your professors and your peers. You absorbed ways of thinking and reacting. You absorbed standards for how a decent person lives.

This second education doesn't work the way the scholastic education works. In the formal curriculum, the teacher describes what is going to be learned and then everyone marches through it. In the informal education the information comes indirectly, obliquely. Learning is the byproduct as you search for pleasure—as you hang around with your buddies, as you get to know your teachers, as you silently absorb the ethos of this place.

In his book, "Culture Counts," the philosopher Roger Scruton had a nice passage for how the liberal arts education subtly molds us. He wrote: "The reader of Wordsworth's 'Prelude' learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' learns the pride of corporations and the benign sadness of civil life; the listener to Mozart's 'Jupiter' symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain."

The decade ahead for you will be very challenging. One of the reasons America is a great is that we force our twenty-somethings to go through an uncharted decade during which they learn to take control of their own lives. But as the challenging years ahead will be, I suspect you are well prepared.

And the only question will be: Do you have the courage to throw yourself into the commitment hunt? Will you try on many different experiences and lifestyles to see which ones summon you? And the only final thing to say is that happiness is not achieved by chasing it directly. Your worth and happiness will be a byproduct of how zestfully you engage the commitments life throws in your path.

Most of us are egotistical and most of us are self-concerned most of the time, but it's nonetheless true that life comes to a point only when the self dissolves into some larger task and summons. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It's to lose yourself.

Thanks for your attention.

What Makes Work Worth Doing? - Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer - HBS Faculty - Harvard Business Review

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2012/08/what-makes-work-worth-doing.html

What Makes Work Worth Doing?

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Theodore Roosevelt, September 7, 1903

Teddy Roosevelt's assertion in a Labor Day speech 109 years ago still rings true this holiday; worthwhile labor can greatly enrich human life. Our research found that people's everyday work lives are greatly enriched when they make progress at work that they find meaningful. But what makes work worth doing?

Sometimes it's obvious. No one would question whether trying to cure disease is worth doing. The same goes for inventing and making products that enhance people's lives. But is all work worthwhile? Our own research focused on knowledge workers — highly educated people doing creative work and solving complex problems. As a result, readers often ask whether our findings apply to workers in the service industries or manual laborers. We believe they do apply, but only when workers feel that they are making a contribution to something or someone they value.

Chip Conley, the founder of the successful boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre, eloquently makes this point in a TED Talk. Conley describes a housekeeper — an immigrant from Vietnam named Vivian — who worked in the first hotel that he purchased. Somehow, she managed to find joy and fulfillment in her work. How is that possible in work that involves making other people's beds and cleaning their toilets? According to Conley, Vivian found great satisfaction in the emotional connection that she made with her coworkers and the guests of the hotel. She found joy in making people who were away from home comfortable, because she knew what it was like to be far away from home. Vivian found work that was worth doing and, like most hotel housekeepers, she worked hard at it.

We, too, have seen how meaning can make work that might seem dull or repetitive rich and rewarding. When one of us (Teresa) went to get an annual blood test, she noticed that the woman who was about to draw her blood was smiling broadly. Teresa remarked, "You certainly look happy today." The phlebotomist replied that she was happy, because there were lots of tubes lined up waiting to be filled with blood; that meant that she would be drawing lots of blood. No, she was not some kind of sadist. Rather, she went on to explain that the vast majority of illnesses are first detected by simple blood tests, and having lots of test tubes lined up meant that she had the opportunity to help lots of people.

Sadly, too many people seem to find the work they do unfulfilling. As a result, they are disengaged and less productive than they might be. If you are a leader, you can help change that by doing two things. First, make sure that the work you give employees actually serves a purpose for someone or something they value. Second, make sure that employees understand how their own everyday actions contribute to that goal.

Adam Grant, of the Wharton School, studied workers at a call center raising money for student scholarships. This work can be particularly frustrating because only a small minority of calls lead to contributions. Grant assigned the workers to three experimental groups. In one, the workers heard a student speak about how the scholarship money had helped him. A second group simply received letters of thanks from students, while the third group had no contact with the students who benefited from the fundraising. The results were astonishing. After one month, call center workers who had heard the student speak more than doubled the calls they were making and tripled the amount of money they raised. In contrast, there was no change in the other two groups. Making a personal connection with a real person who benefited from their work allowed the call center workers to feel the true worth of their efforts; that contact put a real face to the fruits of their labor.

If you are a leader, be creative in considering ways to help your employees see the impact of their work on others. This Labor Day, make sure they know that their work is worth doing.