Category: Advice

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Finding Meaning In Your Work::For Best Results, Forget the Bonus

I agree with this, rewards based incentives although seems more fair, it undermines the fact that in a lot of things teamwork wins over individual excellence (Just don’t tell Michael Jordan). In relations to the workplace, bosses are severely inept, or if they are very capable they seldom have the whole picture, this deficiency makes most of their decision subjective to a fault, and as a few experiments have shown us people value themselves according to the people around them, in this setting the boss always loses.  The takeaway is simple, why are there academics who could get jobs in industry but still go the academic route? why is there people in NGO‘s who you can envision leading their own companies, simply put , doing these things make them happy and in the end that is what money is for, to facilitate our happiness by helping us acquire the things (skill/tools/stuff) that would help increase our happiness. If you are the boss your job is to find ways to make the job equate to your worker’s happiness. Look at a well trained and bonded military unit and you’d see that people do seemingly crazy stuff for something beyond money, something beyoond themselves. This is much harder and maybe this is the reason this is not done more often. The default action is throw money at the problem, not find the best solution.!
Let’s file this under “What I’d Do When I Have My Own Company”
Read the whole thing it’s very interesting.

A closer look, though explains why incentive plans not only do not succeed, but cannot succeed:

  • Rewards punish.
  • Like punishments, rewards are manipulative.
  • Rewarding people is similar to punishment for another reason. When people do not get the rewards they were hoping for, they feel punished.
  • Rewards rupture relations.
  • Relationships between supervisors and workers, too, can collapse under the weight of incentives.
  • Rewards ignore reasons.
  • Rewards deter risk-taking.
  • Rewards undermine interest. Loving what you do is a more powerful motivator than money or any other goody.

via For Best Results, Forget the Bonus.

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Walkable Cities Meme::Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com

In the Philippines people practice something called counter flowing, this is the act where a driver moves his car and enters a lane that is going at the opposite direction. You see this behavior whenever only one side of a busy road is experiencing heavy traffic. Well this behavior is dependent on two weaknesses. ONe is that when they are trying to get back at the proper lane drivers are either scared or kond enough to let them back into the proper lane. This creates a feedback loop where you one up other people by not following the rules and it is expected. This is bad because this causes the other lane to be more congested and in turn creates a very bad traffic jam. I suggest that traffic enforcers be made to book these traffic offenders to lessen this driving barbarism and that we do not let these types of drivers dominate the streets. If you read the article it has a nice dissection of the problem. The individuals are optimizing for themselves and thereby decreasing the total societal value. What is needed is for traffic enforcers to be the ones, through doing there jobs, force these players into a nash equilibrium where everyone wins!

But maybe these two traffic models have more in common than it first seems. Both encourage individuals to drive more slowly so that everyone gets to his destinations faster. Both favor a holistic approach to traffic, one that designs from the perspective of the overall flow rather than that of an individual driver. And both open up more space for pedestrians.
It’s not too difficult to imagine a city designed with these principles in mind. Fewer roads with slower but smoother traffic. Spaces that can easily be converted to car-free zones to suit the needs of the network. And fewer opportunities for people to drive like jerks. Sounds like a nice place to take a walk, actually.
via Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com.

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Had To Share::Lessons Learned: Fear is the mind-killer

This resonated with me alot. I get lost alot. This is why I tell people when we get lost , “Don’t Panic I’m An Expert At Getting Lost!”. This is also why I think It I feel comfortable going to places only with a certain type of personality. The Fuck I Dont Care Types of people. See i’ve been lost too many times to fear being lost. I take it as a truth that there are good people everywhere, some have more, some have only a few, but Everywhere I’ve been lost I’ve always found special people to help me.  To be honest I also do some stuff to minimize the effects of being lost, which means almost always bringing emergency money, and being prepared to walk tens of miles to get home is definitely a way to minimize the fear of being lost.
The specific advice is about developing software and I have to confess that I use to fear programming a lot. I use to have a lot of paranoia with screwing up the computer. I eventually outgrew this by a combination of the stated techniques below. nice article all in all!

The interesting thing about fear is that to reduce it requires two contradictory impulses. First, we can reduce fear by mitigating the consequences of failure. If we construct areas where experimentation is less costly, we can feel safer and therefore try new things. On the other hand, the second main way to reduce fear is to engage in the feared activity more often. By pushing the envelope, we can challenge our assumptions about consequences and get better at what we fear at the same time. Thus, it is sometimes a good idea to reduce fear by slowing down, and sometimes a good idea to reduce fear by speeding up.
via Lessons Learned: Fear is the mind-killer.

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Best Read:If You Have 3 Or More Priorities You've Got To Read This:Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders

Even though their influence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shuffle them around like Monopoly pieces?
Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.
Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.
Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.
via Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders.

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I’ve probably read this 5 times at least some parts probably more than 10. I am trying to live. I am trying to find the/my priority. I am incomplete, I am confused, I am human.

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rePost:Who Makes The Rules Win:Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Great Read from the ever reliable Malcolm Gladwell

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.
via Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

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Had To Share:Nice Story On Injustice:Guilt and forgiveness – Part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

A teacher writing on a blackboard.
Image via Wikipedia

Nice story read the whole thing!
Guilt and forgiveness – Part II
Published by Paulo Coelho on March 6, 2009 in Stories

Here is a beautiful story that illustrates precisely what I mean:
When he was small, Cosroes had a teacher who helped him to become an outstanding student in all his subjects. One afternoon, the teacher punished him severely, apparently for no reason.
Years later, Cosroes acceded to the throne. One of his first actions was to summon his former schoolmaster and demand an explanation for the injustice he had committed.
‘Why did you punish me when I had done nothing wrong?’ he asked.
‘When I saw how intelligent you were, I knew at once that you would inherit the throne from your father,’ replied his teacher. ‘And so I decided to show you how injustice can mark a man for life. Now that you know that,’ the teacher went on, ‘I hope you will never punish another person without good reason.’
Guilt and forgiveness – Part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

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rePost:Finding Happiness:Stumbling and Mumbling: Money, reputation and happiness

Heather Marks modeling for Miss Sixty, Fall 20...
Image via Wikipedia

I suspect there might not be. One reason why I think I’m happier now than when I was younger (despite the U-shape in happiness over the life cycle) is precisely that I’ve stopped giving a damn what anyone thinks about me. If you care about your reputation, you end up worrying about things you can’t easily control. You become like Heather Mills, ranting hysterically about the press.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s recipe for happiness – flow. He says we maximize happiness when we lose ourselves in an activity – playing music or sport say – when we are in control, and yet oblivious to our own ego.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Money, reputation and happiness.

Happiness is that thing that I yearn for and actually try to find. I haven’t but all good things take time. What am I trying to do to find happiness? Here are some:
-Trying out new thing. This includes hobbies etc. I am trying to skew towards activities that do.
-Connecting with people. Trying to interact with people and increase my circle of friends. This also include improving connections with my friends now.
-Connecting with your family. We tend to take our parent and siblings for granted. I try to smooth things over and try to maximize my time spent with my parents.
-Self Improvement. A most overused word but its overused for a reason you are never perfect. What you can be is a person that is totally comfortable with yourself! The best way (for me) to be comfortable with yourself is to face the harsh realities of life and your rough edges head on. This means being honest to yourself with the things taht are painful for you, the things that irk you, things that give you joy, the activities that gives you a lasting joy. The good thing about being honest to yourself is that when you do it often enough it becomes a habit thatbrings you closer

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rePost:Finding Your Thing:Stumbling and Mumbling: Consumption deskilling & utility

Petite Tricia
Image by madaboutasia via Flickr

I am proud to say that i see this in a few of my friends, where other people might ask why? they just do!
Why is this? Based on my all too biased personal experience I find that the majority of people I know are like this, consumption maximisers and probably all that I can blame is probably environment. TV is the national obssession.
I remember a local rock legend ranting about how the kids nowadays just buy off the rack punks wear, etc. Things like this are akin to exercise , you need to get to form a habit of doing, creating and when you are you probably just can’t stop.
But how?
-Find what you enjoy by doing a multitude of things and try to do it till you feel at least two levels of pay-offs, so you can evaluate if something is “your thing!” Why two levels? Well most experiences either have different pay-offs and different level of pay-off per skill level, you may not get to evaluate how much you would value something if you quit to quickly!
-Just like the previous post try to incorporate it to your life/habit. Remember how Randy Paush, when he is thinking always had a football in his hands, you could do this with guitar playing whilst watching tv play the guitar, or while walking think of poems if you’re into poetry, think of blogposts while waiting for your train, you have the time, you are just not using it wisely.
-Find a friend to help you with your hobbies. Remember its always fun to do something with someone.
-When something is beginning to define you step back and think if this is really something you want to be defined by.
-Evaluate the effort you put in to your thing. You must always strive to improve because you might end up just with another reflex action.
-Evaluate you thing. Sometimes doing your thing would hold you back on some important parts of life, Like how my Internet addiction is slowly making me more socially inept than I already am.
Read the whole post its packed with information.

I suspect something else is going on. That something is the spread of purely instrumental rationality – the idea that utility maximization consists solely in maximizing consumption for minimal expenditure of time and money. Many of us take it for granted that it’s rational to spend as little time cooking as possible, and that music should only be a consumption good.
What this ignores is that many things are worth doing for their own sake. I’ll never play the guitar as well as Martin Simpson, or cook as well as Gordon Ramsey, or grow enough vegetables to be self-sufficient. But I play the guitar, cook and grow my own because these things are worth doing for their own sake.
Labour is not just a cost, to minimized. It is – or can be – a form of satisfaction in itself – a way of asserting who we are.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Consumption deskilling & utility.

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rePost : Personal Yearning : The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida

SPLIT FRONT VIEW
Image by SUPERL0L0 via Flickr

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida.

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