What doesn't kill us

makes us stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Have you ever had to use this quote, in English or your own language, with one of your friends or family members?

Has anyone ever said it to you?

What happened?

Share if you dare!

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In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed a theory of why we humans do the things we do.  

This is usually presented in a pyramid that looks like this:

imagecredit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Maslow%27s_Hierarchy...

However, my question is, does this diagram suggest that when we do not have food, water and shelter that our need to be respected is no longer important?

From my travels around the world over the years, and from speaking to the people I met in these countries, I am really, very much not convinced. 

Thing is, I have met some very rich people with beautiful homes who have had no sense of shame or morality and I have also met very poor people who hold their heads up high, who shine with confidence, who help others as often as they help themselves.  Of course, the reverse is often true too.  But I guess what I am saying is that I'm not sure you need to have the lower level steps in place to seek out the "higher." 

In fact, this speech which Dan Pink gave for RSA animate is what really resonates with me. 

Listen to what he says:

(see below for the script so that you can read this while listening if you think he speaks too quickly!)

What about you?  

Would you say that you agree more with Maslow or Pink?  Why? 

Please let me know your thoughts in our discussion forum/ on your own blogs/ in comments below (if you use Twitter or Facebook) or in the MyEC, moderated chat session on Thursday, 24 February 2011.

Talk soon.

Here is the transcript so you can read it at the same time (or after because the cartoons are so entertaining!) 

RSAnimate

www.theRSA.org

Dan Pink, Drive

Our motivations are unbelievably interesting, I mean... I might have been working on this for a few years and I just find the topic still so amazingly engaging and interesting. So I want to tell you about that. The science is really surprising; the science is a little bit freaky. OK?

We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think. There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies. I want to give you two. They call into question, this idea that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want.

If you punish something, you get less of it

So let's go from London to the main streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts the Northeastern part of the United States. And let's talk about at study done at MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what they did, they took a whole group of students, and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles other kinds of spacial puzzles, even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop. OK, they gave them these challenges and they said, to incentivize their performance, they gave them 3 levels of rewards. Ok, so if you did pretty well, you got a small amount of monetary reward. If you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward. And if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers you got a large cash prize. Ok, we've seen this movie before.

This is essentially a typical motivation scheme within organizations, right? We reward the very top performers, we ignore the low performers and the other folks kind of in the middle ok, you get a little bit. So what happens? They do the test, they have these incentives.

Here's what they found out.

One, as long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected the higher the pay, the better their performance. Ok, that make sense. But here's what happens. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Now this is strange, right? A larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? Now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who did this are all economists. 2 at MIT, 1 at the University of Chicago, 1 at Carnegie Melanie the top tier of the economics profession. And they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in Economics which is that the higher the reward, the better the performance.

And they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around.

Which seems that this kind of, the idea that these rewards don't work that way seems vaguely Left-Wing and Socialist, doesn't it? It's kind of, this kind of weird Socialist conspiracy.

For those of you who have these conspiracy theories I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that finance the research- The Federal Reserve Bank. So this the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that's quite surprising seems to defy the laws of behavioral physics.

So this is strange, as strange as funny. So what do they do? They say this is freaky. Let's go test it somewhere else. Maybe that 50 dollars or 60 dollars prize isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student, right? So let's go to a place where 50 dollars is actually more significant relatively. So we take the experiment, we're going to Madurai, India. Rural India, where 50 dollars, 60 dollars, whatever the number was, is actually a significant sum of money. So they replicated the experiment in India roughly as follows: Small rewards, the equivalent of 2 week's salary I'm sorry, I mean low performance, 2 week's salary medium performance, about a month's salary high performance, about 2 month's salary. Ok, so these are real good incentives so you're gonna get a different result here.

Well, what happened though, was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward, but this time around, the people offered the top reward faded worst of all. Higher incentives led to worse performance.

What's interesting about this is that it actually isn't all that anomalous. This has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists by sociologists, and by economists over and over and over again. For simple, straight-forward tasks, those kinds of incentives if you do this then you get that, they're great. With tasks that are algorithmic set of rules where you have to just follow along and get a right answer, If-then rewards, carrots and sticks, outstanding.

But when the task gets more complicated when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking, those kind of motivators demonstrably don't work. Fact: Money is a motivator, at work.

But in a slightly strange way, if you don't pay people enough, they won't be motivated. What's curious about, there's another paradox here which is the best use money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they're thinking about the work.

Now nce you do that, it turns out there are 3 factors that the science shows, lead to better performance. Not to mention, personal satisfaction. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed. To direct our own lives.

Now in many ways, traditional methods of management run afoul of that.

Management is great if you want compliance but if you want engagement which is what we want in the workforce today as people are doing more complicated, sophisticated things, self-direction is better. Let me give you some examples of this of almost radical forms of self-direction in the workplace that lead to good results.

Let's start with this company right here. Atlassian, an Australian company, it's a software company and they do something really cool. Once a quarter on Thursday afternoon, they say to their developers "For the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want. You can work at it the way you want. You can work at it with whomever you want. All we ask is that you show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours." And it's this fun kind of meeting, not a star chamber session but this fun meeting with beer and cake and fun and other things like that. It turns out that one day of pure undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise have never emerged. One day. Now this is not an If-then incentive. This is not the sort of thing that I would have done 3 years ago before I knew this research.

I would have said, "You want people to be creative and innovative?" Give them a fricken innovation bonus. If you could do something cool, I'll give you 2,500 dollars. They're not doing this at all. They're essentially saying, you probably want to do something interesting let me just get out of your way. One day of autonomy produces things that never emerge.

Now let's talk about mastery. Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff. We like to get better at stuff.

This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. You have all these people who're acting in ways that seem irrational economically. They play musical instruments on weekends, why? It's not gonna get them a mate; it's not gonna make them any money why are they doing it? 'Cos it's fun. 'Cos you get better at it, and that's satisfying. Go back in time a little bit.

I imagine this if I went to my first economics professor a woman named Mary Allen Showman. And I went to her in 1983, and said "Professor Showman, can I talk to you after class for a moment?" "Yeah." I got this inkling; I got this idea for a business model I just want to run it past to you. Here's how it would work: You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week. Ok, she's looking at you somewhat skeptically there. Oh, but I'm not done.

And then, what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it. It's gonna be huge. And she truly would have thought I was insane. Alright, you seem to fly in the face of so many things, but what do you have? You have Linux, powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers and Fortune 500 companies, Apache, powering more than the majority of web servers, Wikipedia...What's going on? Why are people doing this? Why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled people who have jobs, ok? They have jobs, they're working at jobs for pay doing challenging, sophisticated, technological work. And yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work not for their employer, but for someone else for free!

That's a strange economic behavior. Economists who look into it, "Why are they doing this?" It's overwhelmingly clear, challenge in mastery along with making a contribution, that's it. What you see more and more is a rise of what you might call, the purpose motive. is that more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose.

Partly because it makes coming to work better partly because that's the way to get better talent. And what we're seeing now is, in some ways when the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive bad things happen. Bad things ethically sometimes but also bad things just, like not good stuff. Like crappy products, like lame services, like uninspiring places to work that when the profit motive is paramount or when it becomes completely unhitched from the purpose motive people don't do great things. More and more organizations are realizing this and sort of disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose. And I think that actually heralds something interesting. And I think that the companies, organizations that are flourishing whether they're profit, for-profit or somewhere in-between are animated by this purpose.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Here's the founder of Skype. He says our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place. Pretty good purpose. Here's Steve Jobs. "I want to put a Ding in the universe." Alright?

That's the kind of thing that might get you up in the morning raise you to go to work. So I think that we are purpose maximizers, not only profit-maximizers. I think that the science shows that we care about mastery very, very deeply. And the science shows that we want to be self-directed. And I think that the big take-away here is that if we start treating people like people and not assuming that they're simply horses, you know, slower, smaller, better-smelling horses, If we get past this kind of ideology of characteristics and look at the science, I think we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off but I also think they have the promise to make our world just a little bit better.

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Although the German word Protokoll looks a lot like protocol these are in fact, very distinctly different words.

Protocol refers to a set of rules:

• In computer science, it refers to the format and way data is transmitted.
• In issues of conduct, it refers to a standardized behaviour in specific situations e.g. "our safety protocol is..."
• In political situations, it refers to the etiquette or a way we should behave with our foreign guests.
• In the office, it refers to conventional ways of working - things we are allowed to do on company time and things we shouldn't!
  

The correct word used to describe the notes which are taken during a meeting is Minutes.  

And yes, you're right - it is confusing because the word minutes also refers to time passing by on a clock!  

However, on second thought, don't you think that sometimes our meetings are really just made up of endless minutes ticking by!!

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Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous - you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

Margaret Thatcher

Do you agree with Ms Thatcher?  

Can you tell us about a time when you were required to choose a side on a specific issue but preferred to stay neutral instead?

Have you ever chosen a side however, in the end, it was the wrong one?  What were the consequences?

Answer in the comments below (if you're on Twitter or Facebook), in our discussion forum or on your own personal blog.

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Following up on our discussions on Success and Failure and in honor of Valentine's day tomorrow, here are a couple of videos from Guy Kawasaki who tends to have a technology bias, however, in these two short videos he talks about the people we choose to work with and the work we choose to do.

Watch them and then let me know what you think in your own personal blog or within our forum.

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There are so many, many, many idioms that go with the word face...

that I just can't face them all!

Pick your favorites from HERE and then tell me in class (or on our platform) which ones surprised you or that you enjoyed learning!

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This is a funny one, it is...

In English, the word Beamer refers to the German car:

the BMW.

However, in German, a Beamer is a:

which native English speakers usually refer to as a Data Projector.

The truth is, though, well I think... that the word Beamer is actually a much better word.   I hope it gets adopted into general English because we do beam things using light on to walls or screens, after all and calling a car a Beamer doesn't really make any sense.

What do you think?

Are there any words in your language which you think make more "sense" in their meaning than the ones English-speakers use?   Have you heard any other funny "Englishes" from other non-native colleagues?  Let us know by answering in the comments below (via Twitter or Facebook), in our discussion forum or in your own personal blog.

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The man who removes a mountain, begins by carrying away small stones.

William Faulkner

Can you tell us about a time in your professional or personal life when you faced a mountain and were able to deal with it by carrying away the small stones? 

Answer in the comments below, in our forum or on your personal blog.

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Whenever someone tells us something that they hope will come true,

we say to them "I'll keep my fingers crossed for you."

Sometimes we cross our own fingers when we're talking about our dreams to friends.   In many Germanic countries, whenever you want to wish someone good luck you press on your thumbs instead.  What do you do in your country?

In some cultures, when they cross their fingers they also add the phrase "God willing."   It's possible that this gesture comes from history, from the time when believing in God or being a Christian was something to be kept secret.  Doing this showed others of your faith who you were because it looks like you are making the sign of a cross - like you're praying - and praying is like asking for help in making wishes come true.

What do you think? 

Do you think this gesture pre-dates Christianity? 

Also, in some cultures, people cross their fingers behind their backs while making a promise they plan not to keep - in this case, crossing their fingers means they aren't telling the truth.

Do you have a special ambition at the moment?  

Who has crossed their fingers for you recently?

Are you keeping your fingers crossed for anyone else?

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Often, whenever we're tired of doing something that takes up a lot of time or energy, we say

"Oh boy, I really need to switch off."

The idea in this idiom is somewhat romantic and impossible:  it's based on the thought that perhaps one day we can just turn off the things happening around us, as if life were all lights and machines! 

Or, wait, perhaps life is just made up of light and machines... :-(

How do you feel right now?  Is there anything you wish you could switch off?  

What would you switch off if you could?

Answer below in the blog comments below (by using twitter/facebook), by writing your own blog post about what you would love to do on a day when you could have absolutely no responsibilities and pressures from work or family, or simply talk about this in our discussion forum.

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My students sometimes make the mistake of saying "too less" when they actually mean "not enough."

Remember that in English, we say:

• I have enough.

• I have had enough.

• I haven't had enough.

• I don't have enough.

We never say

• I have too less.

But we might say:

• It was less than I thought it would be.

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When I was a little girl growing up in Antigua (an island in the Caribbean) I went to an all-girls school run by catholic nuns. 

My brother, of course, went to an all-boys school.

Later on, when I was fifteen, I went to America.  I went to a mixed school where not only did we not wear school uniforms, having the pressure of looking cool all the time, but our classes were made up of both boys and girls!  Honestly, the first thing I noticed was really just how much less we worked and studied then we had at my island school... because, of course, it was so much more interesting to impress the jocks than pay attention to my teachers or classes.  It's not that the boys weren't interesting in Antigua, it's just that there they were only a part of my after-school activities.

Later on in life when I became a teacher and I was teaching teenagers, I would be at the board talking about something fascinating but would glance out at my students in the room sending notes to each other or flirting instead of learning their new verbs... and when I saw this I thought to myself, "hmm... there really is no arguing with hormones, is there?"

When was it decided that boys and girls should study together... was it worth bringing us together? 

I've thought a lot about interests of the sexes and how we are, in fact, often very different and also a lot about the way girls learn and the way that boys learn.   Girls like thinking and talking and boys like doing and competing...   I wonder... you know.  I know that yes, some boys' brains are much more 'feminine' and some girls are much more masculine and who wants to live in a world where the boys get to be scientists and the girls get to be teachers...  so going back to the old way of schooling, i.e. separating the sexes for learning doesn't really make sense.  It would do more harm than good and women are doing really well these days, getting new opportunities and better pay because they are better educated. 

But a lot of boys aren't doing so well.

Watch this fascinating video from TED with Ali Carr-Chellman.  She is an instructional designer and author who studies the most effective ways to teach kids and to make changes at school. 

What did you think of her speech?  How were you educated?  How are/will your children (be) educated?  

Let me know what you think about what she has to say, especially where you disagree, in our discussion forum.   I look forward to hearing your viewpoints!

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Other than our Ning, which is a social networking website where we learn and practice English, do you belong to any others?

e.g.

• Xing
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Twitter

Do you ever think that you might be sharing too much personal information on these sites?  Do your children?

Or do you think that you should be sharing more?

Does your company have a social-networking policy in place for its employees? 

What sorts of rules have you been asked to follow when spending leisure time online?

Watch this video created by Harvard University / Berkman Centre  (hat tip @grahamstanley)

02Privacy640.mov Watch on Posterous

What did you think of it?  Could you relate to any of this discussion?

Write a blog post, comment in our discussion forum or tell me in class!

Watch more videos at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/youthandmedia

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Whenever we say that someone is really making waves in his/her field we mean that something they are doing is currently getting a lot of attention.  

It seems, they were lucky - they caught the latest technological wave, rode the crest of it and are now quite rich!

Can you think of example in Business where you could apply one of the following idioms? 

Either write your thoughts in the comments below, create a blog post or talk about it in our discussion forum.

• make waves
• catch waves
• ride on the crest of a wave

More idioms used in business context here.

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The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

Frank Hubbard

How good are you at saving money?

What are some of the problems today with managing money?   Do you think this is different from 10 years ago, 25 years ago or in your parents' generation?

Do we buy things today that we do not need?  Why?

Answer below in the comments, in our discussion forum or by writing your own blog post!

Read more quick business quotes here.

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I bet that sounds like a crazy question...

If you think I'm nuts, watch Fabian Hemmert's fabulous presentation on how to create phones with flexible size, weight and... emotion!

What do you think, is this a future we can really expect?

Would you buy a phone with any of these features?  How much would you pay for it?

Share with us what you liked most or least by either replying in the comments below, or by participating in our discussion forum (on videos about phones).

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Whenever you come across a word you have difficulty saying in English or you're not 100% sure about the exact pronounciation, you can visit this incredible website which, as of the date of this post contains 814,959 words, 762,279 pronunciations in 258 languages!

Whenever you have a word that you want to check on, you have several options to do this - firstly, you can type it into the search bar:

And if your word is listed (which it should be unless it's a complicated technical term*) then you'll arrive on a page which offers several options to listen to, often in different accents:

You can listen to this on the site as many as times as you want to and/or you can download these on to your own computer:

The site is interactive so if you don't agree with the way it's said, you can indicate that it was bad (perhaps the sound quality contains background noise or the speaker has spoken to quickly) and of course, you can give "kudos" to the people who have added their pronunciations by starring the words you really like. 

If you write a blog or you belong to an online community learning English, you can even embed this word  into your blog post (by clicking on the share button and copying the script and then pasting it).

Another option you have if you're bored and happen to be in the mood for practising pronunciation of various different English words, is to browse the site for words you don't know/ think may be challenging...

And whenever you can't find a word you're looking for - perhaps one that you need for specialized field of industry - all you have to do is join the site as a member (free) and then you can submit a request for someone to do this for you! 

Isn't that cool?

Summary:  This is a really super site, I really hope you enjoy using it!   And although the site is completely free of charge, they do also have an i-phone app.

If you enjoyed learning about this language-learning-2-learn web2.0 tool, click here for others.

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Busy people really juggle a lot, don't they?

One of my favourite expressions to use when anyone asks me how I am is usually

I'm juggling frogs.

I like the sound of this because juggling is usually only done with balls, obviously, and let's face it: frogs are very, very slippery animals.

This silly expression makes me smile because even though I'm busy, I'm enjoying myself.

However, whenever I'm managing several difficult projects all at the same time then I may claim instead that 

I'm juggling boulders.

The worst expression I could possibly use when someone asks me how I am and why I'm so busy is...

I'm chasing my tail.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smatkins/2163091697/sizes/m/

That means that, basically, I'm doing something that is taking up all my time and energy but it's pretty silly work.

What about you?

Do any of these expressions fit how you feel at the moment?  Why?

Answer in your own blog or in the comments below!

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Have you noticed all the differences between notes and notices? 

See the full gallery on Posterous

Thöse are all notes

and these are all notices

See the full gallery on Posterous

What are these words in your own language?  

image credits

notes:

notices

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/4555539387/sizes/m/

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Experience

is a comb

which nature gives to men

when they are bald.

Chinese proverb

What do you think this proverb means?

Answer below in the comments, in our discussion forum or by writing your own blog post!

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