WORTHY OF ATTENTION
Olivia Y. Velazquez - Why Your Job Does Not Need To Be Your Passion
Olivia Velazquez is an English Creative Writing major at Biola university working hard to become the next J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien. Either one is fine.
I don’t know where this notion began that our dreams must coincide with our jobs. I have lots of dreams and one of them is to be a writer. But until I got my first job, I didn’t realize the beauty of keeping my work and my passion separate.
Having a job puts less pressure on your passion.
Writing was always my therapy, not my vocation. It was strange for me to choose it to be my major, but everyone around me said, “You’re writer. Study Writing!” I hadn’t thought of myself as a writer yet, and I think the label did more harm than good. Now having worked as a teaching assistant and exploring the possibility of teaching as a career, I have finally found the joy of writing again. It took four years, but writing is slowly becoming my therapy once more. Allowing my career to be separate from my passion set me free my own expectations. It gave me room to explore, fail, and write for simply for myself and not for success.
A job gives your dreams room to grow and change.
I was very legalistic when it came to my dreams. Not only were my goals specific, but they all had deadlines attached to them. (1) Graduate high-school a year early (did that by the way). (2) Publish my first novel before graduating college (still haven’t done that). (3) Get married before 25 (still have time for that). But putting deadlines on my dreams only added unwanted pressure. Seriously, how many of us have expected too much of ourselves, too soon? Getting a job that isn’t your passion is not a death sentence, it actually sets you free to pursue your dreams and, possibly, allows them to change.
Your job gives you time to dream.
I don’t know about you, but I need time to dream. Since I’ve become open to the idea of letting my dreams change as I get older, I realized I also need more time to let them grow and become a vision in my mind’s eye. There’s a yellow brick road for every dream, but we have to find it before we can follow it. Each of us—at one point in our lives—thought life would be different for us. Well it isn’t, in case you haven’t noticed. Getting a degree in the subject that we love does not guarantee our dreams will come true. At the same time, it does not doom us to failure either. Therefore, consider pursuing a career in something you are interested in, but you may not “love.” Let your dreams take the time they need to grow and change and make you the person you were always meant to be. Follow your yellow brick road wherever it leads you, from Kansas to Oz and back again.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic - Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He’s the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It)
To grow and innovate, organizations have to come up with creative ideas. At the employee level, creativity results from a combination of expertise, motivation, and thinking skills. At the team level, it results from the synergy between team members, which allows the group to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.
The most widely used method to spark group creativity is brainstorming, a technique first introduced by Alex Osborn, a real life “Mad Man,” in the 1950s. Brainstorming is based on four rules: (a) generate as many ideas as possible; (b) prioritize unusual or original ideas; (c) combine and refine the ideas generated; and (d) abstain from criticism during the exercise. The process, which should be informal and unstructured, is based on two old psychological premises. First, that the mere presence of others can have motivating effects on an individual’s performance. Second, that quantity (eventually) leads to quality.
Osborn famously claimed that brainstorming should enhance creative performance by almost 50% versus individuals working on their own. Yet after six decades of independent scientific research, there is very little evidence for the idea that brainstorming produces more or better ideas than the same number of individuals would produce working independently. In fact, a great deal of evidence indicates that brainstorming actually harms creative performance, resulting in a collective performance loss that is the very opposite of synergy.
A meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others. Brainstorming is particularly likely to harm productivity in large teams, when teams are closely supervised, and when performance is oral rather than written. Another problem is that teams tend to give up when they notice that their efforts aren’t producing very much.
But why doesn’t brainstorming work? There are four explanations:
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Social loafing: There’s a tendency – also known as free riding – for people to make less of an effort when they are working in teams than alone. As with the bystander effect, we feel less propelled to do something when we know other people might do it.
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Social anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas. This is also referred to as evaluation apprehension. Similarly, when team members perceive that others have more expertise, their performance declines. This is especially problematic for introverted and less confident individuals.
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Regression to the mean: This is the process of downward adjustment whereby the most talented group members end up matching the performance of their less talented counterparts. This effect is well known in sports – if you practice with someone less competent than you, your competence level declines and you sink to the mediocrity of your opponent.
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Production blocking: No matter how large the group, individuals can only express a single idea at one time if they want other group members to hear them. Studies have found that the number of suggestions plateaus with more than six or seven group members, and that the number of ideas per person declines as group size increases.
Given brainstorming’s flaws, why is the practice so widely adopted?
There are two main reasons. First, with the increased specialization of labor, organizations see that expertise is distributed among their employees. If problem-solving benefits from different types of knowledge, assembling the right combination of people should, in theory, increase the amount of expertise in the room and result in better solutions being proposed. However, in practice, this approach would require careful selection of individuals and painstaking coordination of their efforts. Second, even though groups don’t generate more or better ideas, brainstorming is arguably more democratic than the alternatives, so it can enhance buy-in and subsequent implementation of the ideas generated, regardless of the quality of those ideas.
Ultimately, brainstorming continues to be used because it feels intuitively right to do so. As such, it is one more placebo in the talent management cabinet, believed to work in spite of the clear absence of evidence. So go ahead, schedule that brainstorming meeting. Just don’t expect it to accomplish much, other than making your team feel good.
THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS
Richard Ainley Easterlin
FOR THE YOUNG PEOPLE: WHY COLLEGE IS A WASTE OF TIME&MONEY
(by James Altucher)
"The Power of No" author and podcaster James Altucher explains why college is no longer a good decision.
In my opinion, college remains a good choice, if turned out to be the own desire.
It must remain an option, valid as all options, of a personal aspiration. At the same time it shouldn't be a trend, an unwilled-step forced by the social and economical system.
The case-example:
JAGO, the young self-taught sculptor who wanted to be Michelangelo
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy