Reading books is a major key to success. The mega-rich and successful like Bill Gates and Elon Musk devote extraordinary amounts of their time to reading. Musk even attributes his knowledge of how to build rockets to his reading repertoire, and studies have proven that reading can reduce stress, increase focus, and improve long- and short-term memory.
It is now official. Scholars have analyzed the data and confirmed what we already knew in our hearts. Social media is making us miserable. We are all dimly aware that everybody else can’t possibly be as successful, rich, attractive, relaxed, intellectual and joyous as they appear to be on Facebook. Yet we can’t help comparing our inner lives with the curated lives of our friends.
From subway trains and wind turbines to toilet seats and toasters—all sorts of devices are becoming sources of data. The world will bristle with connected sensors, so that people will leave a digital trail wherever they go, even if they are not connected to the internet. As Paul Sonderegger, a big-data strategist at Oracle, a software-maker, puts it: “Data will be the ultimate externality: we will generate them whatever we do.”
In the future, I think we’ll need to see a redesign of how Google’s OAuth pages work. The problem is that the true entity to which you’re granting permissions in Google’s OAuth interface is buried under a drop-down window. Right now, the interface really relies on the app developer not lying about its name and app logo, and that’s just not good enough.
In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America’s housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”
If maths was nothing more than a sprawling mess of symbols for you at school, take solace in the fact that an enthralling, quite separate universe awaits you. Maths is replete with rich and wonderful mental representations — the kinds that foster understanding and forge connections between ideas. This is the maths that mathematicians fall in love with.
Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman, Harvard Business Review
Our findings suggest that if you want to be seen as a good feedback-giver, you should proactively develop the skill of giving praise as well as criticism. Giving positive feedback shows your direct reports that you are in their corner, and that you want them to win and to succeed. Once people know you are their advocate, it should also make giving criticism less stressful and more effective.
