becoming friends with the eminent dead.....

 I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them.  I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.  That sounds funny, making friends among "the eminent dead," but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education.  It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.

-Charlie Munger

The view from my desk...........................

About networking......................

     Since you need to have a network to be successful, can you build one and still feel good about yourself?  Even if you're an introvert?
     To answer these questions, let's take a look at Adam Rifkin.  In 2011, Fortune magazine named him the best networker in Silicon Valley.  Guess what?  Adam's a shy introvert.  He's also the nicest guy you'll ever meet.  In fact, he goes by the nickname "Panda."
     What's Panda's secret to networking?   Be a friend.  Yeah, it's that simple.  Networking isn't just a skill anybody can learn.  It's a skill you already know.  Make friends.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

On superstars..........................Part the first

     The first thing the researchers noticed, as they began crawling through all that data, was that the firm's most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits.  The first was they tended to work on only five projects at once - a healthy load, but not extraordinary.  There were other employees who handled ten or twelve projects at a time.  But those employees had a lower profit margin than the superstars, who were more careful about how they invested their time.
     The economists figured the superstars were pickier because they were seeking out assignments that were similar to previous work they had done.  Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over.  Repetition makes us faster and more efficient because we don't have to learn fresh skills with each assignment.  But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite.  The superstars weren't choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills.  Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities.  That's why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time.  Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.

-Charles Duhigg,  Smarter Faster Better:  The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Ouch................................

Spengler, an ex-neocon himself, disses the "neocons"................

Every ideology has a use-by date and you're long past yours. Henry Kissinger did great service to this country by opening relations to China, a necessary if not sufficient condition for winning the Cold War. But Kissinger couldn't see past the dull calculus of detente, while Reagan foresaw unconditional American victory over Communism--and without you neocons, he never could have done it. You made a Gargantuan error, though, when you assumed that the Reagan Revolution could be exported to the Middle East, Russia and China, and you misplayed the strongest hand that any world power ever held. America went from only-hyperpower status when George W. Bush took office to a playing second fiddle to Vladimir Putin today.

Full essay here.

Congratulations Ray.............................

The Not-So-Simple Village Undertaker has been counting up the days, and they total five years.  Not only am I a regular reader but I'm also proud to call him a friend.  Well done, Ray!

There is just something......................

.....................................................about that shirt.

Doesn't our wee corner of the blogosphere count as a tribe...............?

“Copious scientific data proves that loneliness is a greater risk to your health than smoking or lack of exercise, and finding your tribe is better than any vitamin, diet, or exercise regimen.” 

-Lissa Rankin, M.D. as excerpted from this blog post

Ah, a "shortcut"...........................

"I think it's fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect.  As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks."
-Seth Godin, as excerpted from this blog post

Whimsy.............................

Finding friends like Doug are what makes this whole bloggery thing worthwhile.  Faithful readers will know that, from time to time, we post blog headers from Eclecticity.   I just found this one, misfiled if you can believe that, in my archives and could not resist the urge to share.  To view many, if not most, of his others, just scroll through the "Labels" on the lower right hand side of this blog and click on Eclecticity.  It's quite the collection.

Making friends with technology............

Today's iPhone would have been the most powerful computer in the world as recently as 1985.  Yet to cite two contrasting sectors, typical air travel doesn't go faster than it did in 1970, and it is not clear our K-12 educational system has much improved.

     This imbalance in technological growth will have some surprising implications.  For instance, workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories.  The key questions will be:  Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?  Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?  Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?  Are computers helping people in China and India compete against you?

     If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery.  If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.  Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other.  That's why average is over.

-Tyler Cowen, as excerpted from Average Is Over:  Powering America Beyond the Age of The Great Stagnation

Pare down.....................

In the age of social media, you may experience the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of connections, followers, friends, etc.  Or you may employ my favorite tactic, as shown by the cartoon below.  Mathew Ferrara suggests a tighter focus on nurturing  a smaller number of stronger relationships.  Full post is here.  Excerpts here:

"During her presentation, she reminded us of anthropologist 
Robin Dunbar’s theory that most people’s brains can only 
support about 150 relationships at a time, in a high quality 
fashion."

"Because trust can’t be auto-built."


This says it all for me:

A cause for celebration...........................

The Mighty E. (heavy and light) passes the 10,000 blog post hurdle.   May there be 10,000 more.

The wonders of the Intertunnel..................

Newark, Ohio is located about 30 miles due east of Columbus.  Last evening, Ray (the not-so-simple-village-undertaker) Visotski stopped by to say hi to some blogging friends.  He was on his way home from delivering his youngest daughter to Marquette University.  As the map tells the story, Newark is only about three or four hours out of his way.  What does three or four hours matter when good friends, good beer, and good cigars are involved.  Thanks for the mighty effort Ray.

Ray Visotski, Kurt Harden, and assistant managing editor of
Cultural Offering, David Morrison pose for the camera man.

Questions................................

Friend Ray asks himself some hard questions.  Actually, he has been asking them for a long time, and has been generously sharing his quest for answers with us for the past three plus years.  Thanks Ray.

My Sweetie asked what we should do this weekend............

.........I'm thinking we should be going to a Tupperware Party.



thanks Gerard

Halloween................

My hometown likes its Halloween.  Never have figured out why we don't celebrate it on October 31st like you'd think.  But, whatever, last night was the designated Trick-or-Treat night for the downtown.  Crowd estimates are a chancy thing, but somewhere between 600 and 1,000 kids and parents  ambled around the Square, gathering goodies from local businesses and organizations.  Looks like kids of all ages are having fun.

More wine...........................

“A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a 
miserly wine lover” 
- Clifton Fadiman

The entitlement society...............

thanks Greg

"Backstory:  http://improveverywhere.com/2011/08/22/say-something-nice/

Like us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/improv.everywhere

"For our latest mission we constructed a custom wooden lectern with a megaphone holster and an attached sign that read, "Say Something Nice." The lectern was placed in public spaces around New York and then left alone. We wanted to see what would happen if New Yorkers were given the opportunity to amplify their voices to "say something nice." This project was produced by Improv Everywhere as part of the Guggenheim Museum exhibition stillspotting nyc."

thanks jonco