It's from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs on the new Google operating system:

The Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine has a helpful, authoritative review of back pain, its causes, and advised treatments. Back pain is the second most common reason for doctor visits (after the common cold). I recommend sending it to anyone dealing with back pain.

Some of the key points:

• Most back pain has no recognizable cause and is therefore termed “mechanical” or “musculoskeletal.” Underlying systemic disease is rare.


• Most episodes of back pain are not preventable.


• Confounding psychosocial issues are common.


• A careful, informed history and physical examination are invaluable; diagnostic studies, however sophisticated, are never a substitute. Defer them for specific indications.


• Encouragement of activity is benign and perhaps salutary for back pain and is desirable for general physical and mental health. Evidence to support bed rest is scant.


• Few if any treatments have been proven effective for low back pain.


• Low back pain should be understood as a remittent, intermittent predicament of life. Its cause is indeterminate, but its course is predictable. Its link to work-related injury is tenuous and confounded by psychosocial issues, including workers’ compensation. It challenges function, compromises performance, and calls for empathy and understanding.

I would highlight the fact that exercise is helpful. (You should also exercise when you have the common cold, by the way.)

The last point about empathy and understanding rings true. Last October I woke up one morning with searing, unexplainable lower back pain. It dominated my existence for a couple weeks and I was able to do almost nothing else. I grew more understanding of what some must deal with on a daily basis.

Also, I never do exercises in the gym that come anywhere close to hurting my back. This includes squats. Unless you're extremely well instructed on how to use the weights, avoid back-related movement and stick with bodyweight exercises.

(h/t Andy McKenzie for the pointer)

College admins who run freshman orientation have the same goal as conference organizers who bring together 300 strangers for a long weekend retreat: facilitate rapid bonding among all the new faces.

The way to do this is not to rely on cheesy ice breakers. Instead, I think you want to cultivate connections by highlighting the common bonds among different sets of people. If two people both happen to be from the same small town in Wisconsin, they should each be made aware and linked up at the conference or in the first week of school.

I've seen three best practices.

First, all attendees or new students should complete a detailed questionnaire before arriving. In it they should list their interests, favorite books, movies, heroes, and what they do on Sunday afternoons when they have nothing to do. Solicit tons of information from each person. Then, on the first day of the conference or school, distribute a print facebook of each person which lists their answers to the questionnaire. (Eventvue does this for conference organizers.)

Second, since group dynamics can distort people's behavior and result in inaccurate first impressions, emphasize one-on-one conversation in those crucial early bonding moments. The best way to do this might be speed dating -- five minute conversations with every other person.

Third, make everyone wear nametags the entire conference or first week of school. Enforce this rule. Knowing someone's name is the first step to getting to know the person.

Bottom Line: If you're running a conference or orientation session, don't leave networking and bonding to chance. Cultivate it!

One of my favorite blogs, the Eide Neurolearning Blog, has an interesting post up about big picture thinking, defined as:

The post explores whether big picture thinking types -- people who learn inductively; that is, generate rules from examples -- are neglected in our education system.

###

The Eide doctors have a particular emphasis on dyslexia, ADHD, and fMRI.

Here's a listing of the top 30 entrepreneurs who were college drop-outs, left-handed, and dyslexic. Familiar names: Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Charles Schwab, Richard Branson, Steven Spielberg, Bill Hewlett, Ted Turner, Tommy Hilfiger, David Neelman, John Chambers, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison. Here's my post titled Damn It Feels Good to Be a Lefty.

Who doesn't advocate traveling and especially living abroad? Everyone, it seems. I do. "Just go do it" is the travel advice most people need to hear.

But there are some who take the advice to an extreme. They become professional vagabonds. They backpack around for years, going from hostel to hostel, teaching English in Peru, working at a bookstore in Calcutta. Or there are the international elite who pick a career (e.g. consulting) that requires moving base camps every few years, even within their own country. Or there are the children of diplomats who grow up citizens of the world.

I envy much about how these people live their lives, but when I observe unhappiness, it can usually be traced back to one or more of these three issues:

Rootlessness

"Home" changes over the course of one's life. It starts at your place of birth. Half of Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace. For the other half, what you consider home evolves over the course of time. The most comfortable transition is when "home" goes from A to B with no interlude. You might grow up in San Francisco (home), then move to Los Angeles (SF still home for awhile), until one day you realize that "home" is LA. Boom. It switches. But if you grow up in San Francisco (home), then move to LA, then move to Chicago, then Beijing, then Sydney, at some point SF no longer feels like home, but nor do any of the other cities. Where is your hearth? Where do you go for nurturance and renewal?

Shallowness of relationships

The best way to build intimacy in a relationship is to spend quality in-the-flesh time with each other. If you're always on the go, or never in the same place for more than a few years, intimacy can be hard to come by. It's hard to involve yourself in a long-term relationship if you're nomadic. It's true even for friendships. Thanks to technology it's rare that a friendship would ever move backwards in the absence of physical interaction -- maintenance is easy these days -- but technology can not accelerate intimacy in the way physicality does. It can even be hard to motivate yourself to invest in relationships as you think to yourself, "I'm leaving in six months anyway, what's the point in trying to find a best friend?" (People who have issues with intimacy of course will embrace this aspect of the traveler's life.)

Identity confusion

Where do I belong? Does the country name on my passport still accurately reflect my deepest national ties? How do I answer the question, "Where are you from?" If I'm living in a country where I am not a native speaker, will I ever be treated as a local?

###

By the way, the best way to understand a serial traveler or expat is to understand what they're escaping from back home. Oppressive parents? Unsuccessful social life? Failure? Racism? Unbearable boredom? Escapism is common to all. Then again, perhaps we're all trying to escape from something...

(tks Maria P. for helping brainstorm this)

There comes a moment, usually in adolescence or early adulthood, when you discover that you have agency. You discover that you have some control over your life -- that you can improve yourself and your situation. I can set goals! I can be the best version of myself!

It is exhilarating. For my 13th birthday my Mom gave me Sean Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. It had a profound influence on me, not because the content is new or profound, but because it was the first time anybody had told me about planning, emotional intelligence, attitude, persistence, and so on. I read about these concepts and felt a rush. Hark, the potential of self-determination!

Had I a blog at the time, I would have shared my lessons from this and other self-help books, and perhaps even tried to add my own spice to the stew of theories.

I didn't, but many teens and Gen Y folks of today do. They are for the first time discovering their power as agents in the world and have decided to share their excitement by blogging, reheating self-help principles, and linking enthusiastically to each other. More delicate matters, like introspection into personal strengths and weaknesses, get self-protectively channeled into de-personalized generation-wide theories.

At some point, you learn that some of the Tony Robbins axioms don't hold up, or are counterproductive, or are vague beyond use, or simply not very interesting compared to other topics of study. This is part of the maturation process, right?

I wish people didn't mock them in the meantime. I'd rather have young folks writing posts saying, "Make a list of 10 goals today!" instead of "Life sucks, stick your head in a bucket of water." If I had a blog when I went through the initial personal growth self-discovery stage, I'm sure I would have been writing stuff as cheesy and naive as what's coming down the pipe today. Hell, maybe I still am.

So let's understand and accept the phenomenon for what it is, recognize the worse alternatives, and move on.

(hat tip Cal Newport for brainstorming this idea over lunch)

Will Smith, one of my favorite actors and rappers, tells the audience at the 2005 Kid's Choice Awards that the keys to life are running and reading. The two minute YouTube clip is embedded below. Running because when you run you get tired and want to quit and have to train yourself to fight through the pain and be resilient, and reading because through books you can learn from the people who have lived before you. It's inspirational to hear this message delivered by Smith to a rap beat and interspersed with some riffs on hard work.

(hat tip: Max Marmer)

I have ~4,000 word essay up at the American Enterprise Institute reviewing Tyler Cowen's new book Create Your Own Economy and presenting my perspective on the ongoing debates around internet information culture, whether we are more distracted, whether bits from blogs cohere into knowledge, the importance of un-focus to creativity, and related issues. It is also the most detailed explanation yet of how I think about my information diet at a high level.

Do read the whole thing.

On the intellectual and emotional stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits:

Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow -- a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before. And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests, finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all fits together.

Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to appreciate the personal coherence of it.

On self-education in the era of the web:

Within my online information diet, it is exhilarating to follow narratives, read the latest controversy (seasteading, anyone?), add my own two cents to the debate, and stitch together all that I have learned. Self-education has gone from being like a loner sitting in a bar sparsely populated with hazily attractive women to being in the center of a packed, rocking night club where the women are wearing mini-skirts and the guys’ shirts open up several buttons down. As Cowen puts it, “The emotional power of our blends is potent, and they make work, and learning, a lot more fun.” When a topic gets filtered through a two-way, fast-moving, personal bit stream, it commands my attention in a way the static, one-way, black-and-white version of the topic never could.

On whether we're turning our brains into mush by our online info consumption habits:

The draconian bottom line for these people is as follows. The human brain is a famously plastic organ: how we use it shapes what it can do and what it becomes. If we spend all our mental cycles getting quick hits from blogs and our BlackBerries, our brains will optimize around this deployment of attention. Reading complicated books will become a hell of a chore and enduring long stretches of reflective solitude will become nearly unbearable. The bastions of intellectual culture are preparing to weep.

In praise of un-focus:

The glorification of “focus” is the second problem with the criticisms of bit-consumption and technology use in general. While some amount of focus is necessary, it is not the case that sitting alone in a quiet white walled room with no beeps or buzzes is the ultimate day-to-day environment for deep, creative thinking. Sam Anderson in New York Magazine summarized research that says un-focus is actually an important part of creativity—random meanderings and conversations can trigger important creative insights. Excessive conscious attention on one particular point can come at the cost of the free-associative brainstorms that just might lead to the next big thing. A University of Amsterdam study showed participants who were distracted from making a decision, and forced to consciously focus on something else, devoted valuable unconscious thought to the issue and ultimately made a better decision when they returned to the task.

To my knowledge this is the first published review of Cowen's book. A few additional footnotes:

1. It is more about autism than my review would suggest. The book opens and closes with exploring the autistic cognitive style, and it comes up in almost every chapter in-between.

2. The autistic cognitive style description personally resonated with me. I collect and organize information to an intense degree. I have tagged and labeled almost 6,000 web pages. A lifelong goal has been to take a bar code scanner and scan all the books my family owns and put them into a database. And I synthesize diverse bits of information faster than most.

3. I make a claim that is more negative than Cowen: that many people have not and will not read the great books, and for many people on many topics it's the bits or nothing. We both arrive in praise of bits but I get there in part via a more cynical path. I'm not sure if Cowen agrees with me here but I do think it's this truth which makes his positive vision work.

(Thanks to Kevin Arnovitz, Arnold Kling, Jesse Berrett, Cal Newport, David Casnocha, and Stan James for offering feedback on this piece, and my editor Nick Schulz.)

Today while making lunch I realized that when I cut my sandwich into two halves it tastes better overall than when I eat it in one piece.

Why?

When I eat two halves of one sandwich, it feels like I am "completing" two things, not one.

It's the same reason why we'd prefer to read two short books instead of one long book. Total number of pages read might be the same, but we feel more accomplished having completed two whole books.

It's the same reason why breaking tasks into bits (and then checking off each bit on our to-do list) makes us feel more accomplished and energized than leaving one, big task on the to-do list, ever unchecked.

We are completionists by nature.

Sometimes this is a bad thing. Rational decision makers must ignore sunk costs. Abandon that book that stopped being interesting at page 50!

Other times the completionist instinct lets us hack our way to more pleasure with no cost, such as the halved sandwich technique.

Of course, now that you've read this post, upon eating your newly-halved sandwich it will be hard to separate pleasure caused by heightened completionist success versus pleasure caused by a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Either way, you'll feel more pleasure, and have something to think about as you eat.

Joseph Priestly, the 18th century theologian, philosopher, and inventor, embraced three concepts I've written about at length:

• He exposed himself to randomness: try more stuff than the next guy; law of large numbers; insight at the intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas.


• He maintained side projects: hedge bets; humility around being able to predict which particular project will be the big win; stay intellectually stimulated.


• He experimented and iterated: many little bets over few big bets; learn by doing; adapt rapidly to changing conditions.

Priestly was never one for the grand hypothesis; he rarely designed experiments specifically to test a general theory….His approach was far more inventive, even chaotic. While the experiments themselves were artfully designed, his higher-level plan for working through a sequence of experiments was less rigorous, Priestly’s mode was to get interested in a problem – conductivity, fire, air – and throw the kitchen sink at it. (Literally so, in that many of his experiments were conducted in the kitchen sink.) The method was closer to that of natural selection than abstract reasoning: new ideas came out of new juxtapositions, randomness, diversity. Priestly would later credit the emerging technology of the period – air pumps and electrostatic machines – with helping him develop his distinctive approach: “By the help of these machines,” he wrote, “we are able to put an endless variety of things into an endless variety of situations, while nature herself is the agent that shows the result.

That's from Steven Johnson's book, as dog-eared by Russell Davies.

Much original, exciting content will grace this blog in the month of July. Meanwhile, for those of you who do not follow my delicious tags, I must dump upon you some favorite links:

Your job description, via Eric Reis: "Every person in the company has this job description: in any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgment, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company. That's it. Everything else is only marketing."

"I'm astounded by how far one can get in life with by just (a) getting stuff done, (b) having a sense of humor and (c) being a non-asshole." - Colin Marshall

How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy. A good analysis of her meta-bigotry: "instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry."

Laura Miller on three kinds of tragedy: when you want something and don't get it, when you want something and get it, when you don't know what you want in the first place. "As tragedies go, not getting what you want is the straightforward kind, and getting it can be the ironic variety. But there is also the existential tragedy of not knowing what you want to begin with."

The brain of a baby.

Instructions for life. Some good tips.

A reflection from the woman who designed the interior of many of David Foster Wallace's books. "You are loved." I miss DFW.

Scott Adams' terrific career advice: become pretty good at a couple things, and mix your skill set together in interesting ways. This is easier than becoming exceptionally good at just one thing.

The first rule of firearms: the man who tells you he's going to shoot you unless you do X, will not shoot you. From this highly entertaining article about a man who repossesses jets.

The most reliable sign that one of your bank employees is stealing money? He doesn't take a vacation.

The song of our generation?

In favor of nuclear power.

Why Terry Tempest Williams writes. "I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love."

Dan Baum, while interviewing Rahm Emmanuel about medical marijuana, tells Rahm, "Fuck you." Here's why.

Nerds vs. jocks. "Jockism is not about athletics per se. It’s a philosophy–of certainty vs. endless nerdish questioning; of happy conformity, vs. nerdish loner ostracisim. Jockism is suspicious of complexity, because that’s how you lose games. It’s more comfortable with what it can see, touch, feel, punch."

The value of what you don't know:

The author goes on to recommend four ways to cultivate healthy ignorance in your organization.

Ignorance is one reason why young entrepreneurs succeed when they do -- they're ignorant about how the world works so they ask dumb questions, challenge inbred assumptions, and dare the thing that age will fear.

In a post I wrote 2.5 years ago entitled How do you fall upwards? I listed three suggestions in this arena, including "cultivate the naive mind" (not as tactically useful as the above-linked article) and "spend time with children."

(hat tip to the book Chief Culture Officer which comes out in November. I will blog more about it at that time.)

In her latest piece in the Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh writes with customary brio about her infidelity and the subsequent dissolution of her marriage. Along the way she talks about the romantic compatibility of four basic personality types:

Why Him? Why Her? explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher [the author] posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer—the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder—the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director—the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator—the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.... Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects “most of the world’s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.”

Interesting stuff. If I had to be boxed in one of the above labels it would probably be Director. I agree that the most explosive combination (in a bad way) tends to be Explorers with Explorers.

###

Elsewhere in the world of love and romance, the always-worthwhile Meghan O'Rourke reviews a new book that makes the case for passionate, obsessive love. Why subordinate passion to reason? What's so wrong with being madly, crazily in love? The author advises: "Let go of security and embrace the radical alertness that comes with the fullness of feeling." Hmm.

O'Rourke concludes by challenging the traditional definition of successful relationships (longevity):

Nehring's paean to unconventional ecstasy is a bracing reminder of how narrow and orthodox our vision of love has become—and how that in turn bequeaths us a vast swathe of "unsuccessful" relationships. Most of us know more single mothers and unmarried partners than ever, yet we still think of relationships as goal-oriented, and that goal is conventional: until death do us part. Since when are longevity and frictionlessness, Nehring prompts us to ask, themselves a sign of "success"? The equitable marriage is a worthy goal, but it is hardly uncomplicated. Just consider the recent AOL Living and Woman's Day study that showed 72 percent of women have debated leaving their husbands. Only we can judge how a relationship changes us—what new spaces open up inside ourselves, or how a turbulent encounter may enlarge our view of human nature, as it did for Heloise.

The Mexican beer Dos Equis has very popular TV ads running right now called "The Most Interesting Man in the World." Watch the 30 second ad here (viewed 800k times on YouTube!) or see the embed below.

The announcer boasts about the most interesting man in the world:

• The police often question him just because they find him interesting.
• His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man's entire body.
• His blood smells like cologne.
• He once had an awkward moment just to see how it feels.

At the end the old man -- the most interesting man -- says, "I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis."

Why does this advertisement work so well?

Seth Stevenson, at Slate, has a masterful analysis. He notes the counter-intuitive but spot-on ambivalence the man has toward the advertised product and the quirky, Wes Anderson-inspired imagery at the beginning.

His most interesting insight has to do with why a senior citizen is advertising an alcoholic beverage aimed to 20-somethings who like to go out on the weekends. Normally, beer ads have beautiful busty women circling the lucky 25 year-old clenching a Bud Light and flashing a wicked smile. The atmosphere feels like a frat party. It's obvious, right? Sex sells. The films hip young people go to are Old School, Wedding Crashers, and most recently The Hangover, right?

But this isn't the whole story when it comes to the emotional buttons of young men (and women).

The Dos Equis ad appeals to "dudes' self-conception, placing the focus on older gents who serve as models of masculinity." The Most Interesting Man wears nice clothes throughout; the women who surround him are similarly examples of elegance, no sluts here; the activities shown are not beer pong or football but sports like jai alai which have a certain high-minded eccentricity about them. Even the label "most interesting" is different than "most cool" or "most popular" -- in adult-land, interestingness rules.

The ad, then, appeals to the same aspirational quality that's at work when little children play grown-up. Even into our 20's we're still modeling ourselves after elders we admire -- their maturity, self-confidence, and relaxed ambition. And we know that Real Men (and women) don't binge drink on the weekends but rather enjoy a fine adult beverage while munching on cashews.

If marketers spent time on glitzy private college campuses they'd learn that drugs, sex, and alcohol are not the only considerations of the privileged young men and women who attend (and buy expensive beer and other products). If the marketers embedded themselves in Private College X they'd hear the word "classy" mentioned a lot as justification for certain activities. Rich kids like to be classy. They like to buy nicer alcohol, go to dinner parties, and dress up in fancy clothes more than you'd think from just watching Old School. Ramen noodles and a beer while watching the basketball game is not as cool as a three course meal with pricey wine to match, in many cases.

It's easy to be cynical about this phenomenon. Is being classy at this age not, at its core, simply a refined display of your parents' wealth? Is there something fucked up about a 19 year-old buying fine alcohol and dining at Beverly Hills' highest profile restaurants in pursuit of classiness, while a great number of students struggle with loans and night jobs? Sure there is.

But in some sense, who cares? A psychological soft spot ("this will help you be classy") has been identified in a lucrative target market: let's follow Dos Equis' lead and go take their money.

In an excerpt from his book Hiring Smart, Pierre Mornell reveals the best reference check strategy I've heard of. It's fast and tip toes around the liability issues: ask a person's references to call you back if the person was outstanding.

Call references at what you assume will be their lunchtime--you want to reach an assistant or voice mail. If it's voice mail, leave a simple message. If it's an assistant, be sure that he or she understands the last sentence of your message. You say: "Jane Jones is a candidate for (the position) in our company. Your name has been given as a reference. Please call me back if the candidate was outstanding." The results are both immediate and revealing. If the candidate is outstanding, I guarantee that people will respond quickly and want to help. Take such a response as a green light. Proceed to the next level by checking out the individual. However, if only 2 or 3 of the 10 references selected by the candidate return your call, this message is also loud and clear. And yet - No derogatory information has been shared. No libelous statements have been made. No confidences or laws have been broken.

Brilliant. Mornell also advises you to ask the candidate beforehand, "What am I likely to hear -- positive and negative -- when I call your references?"

###

Elsewhere in the article, Mornell suggests saying "We have about five more minutes..." before closing the interview. This will prompt a last-minute, crucial disclosure or statement from the candidate:

Pay attention when the candidate says, "By the way...," "Oh, one more thing...," and "I almost forgot...," which means, "This is the most important thing I'm going to say." In my psychiatry practice, I always announced when we were coming to the end of an hour, both as the timekeeper and because I knew there was another patient in my waiting room. Men and women invariably say something that's really important at this point, regardless of the time we've already spent together.

Recent reading:

1. The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Strategies that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker.

De Becker is a legend in the field of security and violence prevention. Hollywood stars hire him to assess threats. Companies hire him to train employees on when to trust your gut if and when you feel danger. The title of the book refers to de Becker's claim that "true gift is a fear, unwarranted fear is a curse." What matters is being able to tell the difference.

This is a book written for women; most of the examples have to do with male predators looking to rob, rape, or otherwise take advantage of a woman who didn't listen to her "uh-oh" alarm. The lessons, though, are universal and I found this a valuable resource.

Methods criminals use to take advantage of victims:

• Forced Teaming: They use the word "we" and create a "we're in the same boat" mentality.
  
• Charm and Niceness: The smile is the typical disguise used to mask emotions. Unsolicited niceness.
• Too Many Details: When people lie they imbue their stories with too many details; lots of specificity where truth sayers would not include any.
• Typecasting: A slight neg: "You're probably too snobbish to talk to the likes of me." Something that's easily rebutted -- but the predator is just looking for a response.
• The Unsolicited Promise: "I'll just put this stuff down and go. I promise." Unsolicited promises are almost always of questionable motive.

Read into dark humor. Dark humor contains a truth that we often don't want to talk about or feel embarrassed about.

A caller who wants to discharge anger over the telephone by using violent imagery ("You'll all be blown to bits") or who is agitated and aggressive, is not behaving like a real bomber.

If someone tries to extort you, say "I don't understand what you're getting at" until the extortionist states his demands very clearly. When they have to be explicit they sometimes abandon the bad idea altogether. If someone says, "You'll be sorry" or "Don't mess with me" respond, "What do you mean by that?"

2. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin

Some good stuff on the phenomenon of celebrity -- "being known for your well-knownness" -- but overall I didn't find much here that engaged me. My favorite paragraph:

The tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him often unintelligible) product of the foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings in French. The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey.

A funny dialogue:

Admiring friend: "My, that's a beautiful baby you have there!"

Mother: "Oh, that's nothing -- you should see his photograph!"

4. The Book of Other People by Zadie Smith

Collection of fictional character portraits by various contributing writers. Only so-so, but I enjoyed this paragraph from one of the sketches:

This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else manically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

And my favorite sentence:

Sleep came like the lightest rain. He felt it on his skin, something like a mist, numbing his legs, his arms.

Here's my review of Smith's On Beauty, which I loved.

5. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller. Very disappointing. A hodge podge of historical examples which cohere into nothing. My favorite sentences:

Why are mindlessly good-natured persons popular? Because they pose no threat to anyone's self-esteem. Many people are envious of those whose conversation is superior to their own.

6. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink

I'm a big Dan Pink fan. This is his older book which hails the right brain in the "conceptual age." I'm sympathetic to his argument and found much value in the various resources and tips he scatters throughout the book. I recommend it particularly to highly analytical people.

"Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you disseminate." - Karim Rashid

Never say “I could have done that” because you didn’t. - Karim Rashid

As Alan Kay, a Hewlett-Packard executive and co-founder of Xerox PARC, puts it: “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.” Storytelling. Storytelling. Storytelling.

“A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.” - George Lakoff

The “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation”: sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite.

“Many writers are notorious eavesdroppers,” Epel writes, citing, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who kept a notebook in which he recorded “overheard conversations.”

###

Here are all my posts on books. Here are my all-time favorite books in an Amazon store.

Russell Davies, three years ago, posted worthwhile tips for how to become a more interesting person. His advice is premised on two assumptions:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

Here's his top 10 list. See the post for details under each header:

1. Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.

2. Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.

3. Keep a scrapbook

4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before

5. Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.

6. Collect something

7. Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it. (Carefully)

8. Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art, one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV. Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it

9. Make something

10. Read

If you had to take away just one thing from his post, I think it should be assumption #1: the way to be interesting is to be interested.

In his talk titled "You and Your Research," Richard Hamming implores researchers and scientists to pick hard problems to work on. Along the way he says the following:

It's important, in other words, to have one eye looking down at the work on your desk and one eye scanning the horizon to make sure what you're doing is still relevant and important.

Thus the thorny challenge: How to create a work environment with the optimal amount of distraction?

"When I come out I have supreme confidence. But I'm scared to death. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of being humiliated. But I'm confident. The closer I get to the ring the more confident I get. The closer, the more confident. All during training I've been afraid of this man. I think this man might be capable of beating me. I've dreamed of him beating me. For that I've always stayed afraid of him. The closer I get to the ring the more confident I get. Once I'm in the ring I'm a god. No one could beat me. I walk around the ring but I never take my eyes off my opponent....During the fight I'm supremely confident. I'm making him miss and I'm countering. I'm hitting him to the body; I'm punching him real hard. And I'm punching him, and I'm punching him, and I know he's gonna take my punches. He goes down, he's out. I'm victorious. Mike Tyson, greatest fighter that ever lived."

        -- Mike Tyson

I love this dual attitude: terrified of failure but also supremely confident of success.

It's too easy (and trendy) to just say "fear is the mind killer" or speak in glowing terms about how instructive failure is. If you aren't terrified of failing you probably don't care enough.

If an investor asks an entrepreneur, "Are you scared of your business failing?" and the answer is, "Not really," I'd be concerned. The best answer would be, "I'm fucking terrified that this will totally flop, and I'm doing whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen, and I'm confident it will not happen."

Too much fear can be crippling and preclude action. I think the optimal amount of fear is one notch before the "crippling" point.

I got nervous before high school and AAU basketball games.

I got nervous before big sales presentations in the early days of business career. So nervous, in fact, that I had a hard time getting business cards out of my suit jacket because my hands were shaking.

I get nervous before public speeches, difficult phone calls, or high-stakes emotional encounters.

I'm scared of failing, scared of letting people down, scared of embarrassing myself, scared of not one-upping what came before.

But the fear tends to be like cotton candy, it melts upon contact when the moment of truth comes -- the tip-off of the basketball game, the start of the big sales meeting, or the first words of the crucial one-on-one conversation I'd prepared for. In the clutch moment, confidence must take over. When you come to the plate and crouch into your stance, you must believe that you are capable of hitting a home run.

As Tyson has also said, "Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It's like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can't control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn."

###

Here's a compilation of other Tyson quotes. Here's my post on developing self-confidence. Here's my post on getting to the point of saying "I can do this!" Here's what elite athletes focus on in the clutch moments so they do not choke.

Episode #5 of Think Different TV features Colin Marshall, film critic, writer, and deep thinker, and me in conversation for 60 minutes. I recommend watching the video on the Vimeo site and letting it load all the way. Then you can use the chapter markings on that page. Here's an MP3 audio file of the episode. Here are the topics we discuss:

• How do you become a good writer? Should imitate the greats? How does a unique voice emerge?
• Embracing suckage. Your first draft will always suck. We need a museum of first drafts. Show me Shakespeare's first draft! Show me David Foster Wallace's first draft! Show me Steve Jobs' first business plan! [MP3 clip of just this part.]
• Philosophies of self-improvement: is Merlin Mann right that we need fewer cheesy tips?
• Bits vs. books: Would you rather go a week without blogs or a week without books? [MP3 clip of just this part.]
• What is your eternal bio? What parts of identity are permanent? Do political beliefs tell you anything important? [MP3 clip of just this part.]
• Friendships and the internet: how do online friends compare to "real life" ones? [MP3 clip of just this part.]
• Long/short (bullish/bearish): formal schooling, Netflix, the state of California, democracy in China, the print book, libertarianism, Twitter. [MP3 clip of just this part.]

It's a fun and stimulating conversation. Note due to an audio problem my voice sounds a bit rough but Colin's is smooth which is good because he's the more eloquent anyway.

(thanks to Charlie Hoehn for his diligent technical assistance)

The book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa is a nice introductory guide to evolutionary psychology, very much in the spirit of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.

Evolutionary psychology sees "human nature...as the sum of evolved psychological mechanisms." It is a useful tool for explaining why we do what we do. Romantics might find depressing the cold-bloodedness of it all -- it's not about you it's about what your genes want to spread far and wide. Romantic or not, it's an important field to understand, even casually, and since Wright and now Miller/Kanazawa make it so accessible, there's no excuse not to.

Below are my favorite excerpts from the book, copied from my Kindle and thus all direct quotes. In my notes you'll find their answers to questions like:

• Why the liberation of homosexuals may contribute to the end of homosexuality
• Why men find large breasts of women attractive
• Why parents kill their own children
• Why men steal more than women
• Why older siblings tend to do what their parents do
• Why women are more religious than men

GENERAL / BACKGROUND

The naturalistic fallacy is the leap from is to ought—that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. The moralistic fallacy would be, “Because everybody ought to be treated equally, there are no innate genetic differences between people.”

You may believe that your personal preferences for an ideal mate are truly personal and individual, not shared by other people. The basic message of evolutionary psychology is that, contrary to what you may have thought, your preferences and desires for your ideal mate are strongly shaped by the forces of evolution. Ultimately, it’s not what you want that matters; it’s what your genes want in order to assist their goal of spreading themselves as much and as far as possible.

There are only two legitimate criteria by which you may evaluate scientific ideas and theories: logic and evidence.

Stereotypes are observations about the empirical world, not behavioral prescriptions. One may not infer how to treat people from empirical observations about them. Stereo-types tell us what groups of people tend to be or do in general; they do not tell us how we ought to treat them. Once again, there is no place for “ought” in science.

Our preference for sweets and fats is an example of an evolved psychological mechanism. Throughout most of human evolutionary history, getting enough calories was a serious problem; malnutrition and starvation were common. In this environment, those who, for reasons of random genetic mutation, had a “taste” for sweets and fats, which contain higher calories, were better off physically than those who did not have such a taste. Those who had a sweet tooth therefore lived longer, led healthier lives, and produced more healthy offspring than those who did not. They in turn passed on their (genetically influenced) taste to their offspring, over many thousands of generations.

The Savanna Principle states that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. The Savanna Principle suggests that we continue to have (currently maladaptive) preferences for sweets and fats, and as a result become obese, because our brain cannot readily comprehend the supermarkets, the abundance of food in general, and indeed agriculture, none of which existed in the ancestral environment.

MALE VS. FEMALE SEXUAL JEALOUSY AND CUCKOLDRY

Men can never be certain that they are the father of their mates’ offspring, while females are always certain of their maternity. In other words, the possibility of unwittingly raising children who are not genetically their own exists only for men.

According to one estimate, about 13–20 percent of children in the contemporary United States and 9–17 percent in contemporary Germany are not the genetic offspring of the man whose name appears on the child’s birth certificate.

For this reason, men have a strong evolutionary reason to be sexually jealous, while women, whose maternity is always certain, do not.

Men become jealous of their mates’ sexual infidelity with other men, underlying their reproductive concern for cuckoldry. In contrast, women become jealous of their mates’ emotional involvement with other women, because emotional involvement often leads to diversion of their mates’ resources from them and their children to their romantic rivals.

Male sexual jealousy is another evolved psychological mechanism that hasn’t quite caught up to modern times. It solved the adaptive problem of reproduction in the ancestral environment by allowing men who possessed it to maximize paternity certainty and minimize the possibility of cuckoldry. Sexual jealousy was therefore adaptive in the ancestral environment. However, sex and reproduction are often separated in the modern environment; many episodes of sex do not lead to reproduction. There is an abundance of reliable methods of birth control in industrial societies, and many women use the contraceptive pill. For these women, sexual infidelity does not lead to childbirth, and their mates will not have to waste their resources on someone else’s children.

WOMEN'S ATTRACTIVENESS

One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness, and this is the reason why men like beautiful women. Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. During illness, a body needs to sequester all available nutrients (like iron and protein) to fight the illness. Since hair is not essential to survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the first place to which a body turns to collect the necessary nutrients. Thus, a person’s poor health first shows up in the condition of the hair.

Marlowe makes the simple observation that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus, it is much easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight if she has larger breasts than if she has smaller breasts, which do not change as much with age.

It turns out that men prefer blonde hair for exactly the same reason that they prefer large breasts: both are accurate indicators of a woman’s age and thus reproductive value.

Men in cold climates did not have this option, because women (and men) bundled up in such environments. This is probably why blonde hair evolved in cold climates as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth.

Many people, both men and women, express dislike for extremely dark brown eyes.

To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Women’s desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia.

Men in general prefer women with long hair. (Signals health.)

MALE SEXUAL INTERESTS

Male high school teachers and college professors in the United States (but not their female colleagues) have a higher-than-expected rate of divorce and a lower-than-expected rate of remarriage, probably because they are constantly exposed to girls and women at the peak of their reproductive value.

Given their greater desire for sexual variety, it is understandable why men would consume more pornography and seek out sexual encounters with numerous women in pornographic photographs and videos,

Empirical data do demonstrate that handsome men have more extramarital affairs and are not as committed to their marriages, which many wives may consider undesirable. In this sense, handsome men make better lovers than husbands.

Of course, diamonds and flowers are beautiful, but they are beautiful precisely because they are expensive and lack intrinsic value, which is why it is mostly women who think flowers and diamonds are beautiful. Their beauty lies in their inherent uselessness; this is why Volvos and potatoes are not beautiful.

From this perspective, men strive to attain political power (as Bill Clinton did all his life, since his fateful encounter with John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1963), consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. In other words, reproductive access to women is the goal, political office is but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it. The purpose of earning money is to spend it. The purpose of becoming the President (or anything else men do) is to have a larger number of women with whom to mate.

PARENTAL RELATIONS AND KIDS

Developmental psychologists have known for nearly two decades that girls whose parents divorce early in their lives, particularly before the age of five, experience puberty earlier than their counterparts whose parents stay married.

Why would parents kill their own children? Daly and Wilson have two answers to this question. The first answer is that they don’t. Daly and Wilson discovered that what often passes as parents killing their children in police statistics is actually step fathers killing their stepchildren, who do not carry their genes. Biological parents very seldom kill their genetic children.

Parents' evolved psychological mechanisms therefore compel them to invest most efficiently, which usually means that they invest more in children who have the greatest prospect for reproductive success, at the cost of other children whose reproductive prospect is gloomier.

Women only steal what they need for them and their children to survive, whereas men steal to show off and gain status as well as resources. In other words, women steal less than men for exactly the same reason as they earn less than men.

In the United States, the strongest predictor of remarriage after divorce is sex (male vs. female): men typically remarry, women typically do not.

Couples who have at least one son face a significantly lower risk of divorce than couples who have only daughters. Why is this?

The hypothesis states that wealthy parents of high status have more sons, while poor parents of low status have more daughters.

Parents are far more likely to neglect, abuse, and kill their biological children who are deformed, handicapped, ill, or even physically unattractive and to shift their parental investment of their limited resources toward those children with more promising reproductive prospects. As uncomfortable as we may be with such a conclusion, the truth appears to be that parents do favor some of their children over others, even among their own genetic children, to say nothing about stepchildren to whom they are not genetically related, and they overwhelmingly favor those who are intelligent, beautiful, healthy, and sociable.

OTHER GENDER STUFF

Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities in order to attract mates.

careful statistical analyses show that the wife’s age almost entirely determines the likelihood of being a victim of spousal abuse and homicide.

Ask a group of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (both men and women) to name five of their closest associates. Who are the people they talk to when they have something important to discuss? Chances are that women in your circles mention more family members among their closest associates, whereas men mention more coworkers and business associates in their personal networks.

The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists, which might be called the “age-genius curve,” is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then just as quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced and flatter; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

chances are that many of your female friends would mention traveling as one of their hobbies, while very few of your young unmarried male friends would.

Empathizing is about spontaneously and naturally tuning in to the other person’s thoughts and feelings. A natural empathizer not only notices others’ feelings but also continually thinks about what the other person might be feeling, thinking, or intending.

The tendency to favor “ingroup” members at the cost of “outgroup” members is innate (although we can overcome it through socialization and conscious effort)

RELIGION

With only a couple of minor exceptions, women in all nations and regions are more religious than men.

Many recent evolutionary psychological theories on the origins of religious beliefs share the view that religion is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other adaptations. In other words, these theories contend that religion itself did not evolve to solve an adaptive problem so that religious people can live longer and reproduce more successfully, but instead emerged as a byproduct of adaptations that evolved to solve unrelated adaptive problems.

Different theorists call this innate human tendency to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors (and as a consequence be a bit paranoid) “animistic bias” or “the agency-detector mechanism.” These theorists argue that the evolutionary origins of religious beliefs in supernatural forces come from such an innate bias to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors. The human brain, according to them, is biased to perceive intentional forces behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena, because the costs of committing false-negative errors are much greater than the costs of committing false-positive errors. It predisposes us to see the hand of God at work behind natural, physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown.

It is an error-management strategy to minimize the total costs of errors by predisposing the human brain to commit more false-positive errors than false-negative errors when the former has less costly consequences than the latter.

If men are more risk-seeking than women, and if religion is an evolutionary means to minimize risk, then it naturally follows that women are more religious than men.

Not only are women more risk-averse and more religious than men, but more risk-averse men are more religious than more risk-seeking men, and more risk-averse women are more religious than more risk-seeking women.

What distinguishes Islam from other major world religions (Christianity and Judaism) is that it tolerates polygyny.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status, who are most likely to be left without reproductive opportunities when older men of high status marry polygynously.

Humans are instead born racist and ethnocentric, and learn through socialization and education not to act on such innate tendencies. Humans are innately ethnocentric because ethnocentrism—helping others of one’s group members at the cost of all others—was adaptive in the ancestral environment.

SIBLING DEVELOPMENT

Frank J. Sulloway argues that siblings within the same family must occupy different familial niches. Firstborns (the eldest siblings), who are born into a family without any siblings with whom to compete for parental resources, typically grow up to identify with the parents and, by extension, other authority figures.

Later-borns (younger siblings), in contrast, are always born into a family in which there are older siblings who have already taken the niche of identifying with the parents. So they must carve out their own niche by distancing themselves from the parents and becoming rebels.

Sulloway’s massive historical data show that in religious, political, and scientific spheres, firstborns are more likely to become the conservative vanguards of the old tradition, and later-borns are more likely to become the leaders of new revolutions. Thus, birth order, whether one is the eldest or younger, is one factor that makes siblings raised in the same family different in their personalities.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

There is still no definitive and accepted explanation of homosexuality in 2007, thirteen years after Wright posed the question “What about homosexuals?”

the most likely reason that male homosexuality has survived to this day is that throughout most of recorded history, gay men were forced to hide their sexuality by social norms and legal sanctions, and so got married and had children like straight men. If so, the liberation of homosexuals, which allows them to come out of the closet and not pretend to be straight, may ironically contribute to the end of homosexuality.

If you really think about it, there is absolutely no evolutionary psychological reason why children should love and care for their parents.

GENDER DIFFERENCES

In every human society (and among many other species), males on average are more aggressive, violent, and competitive, and females on average are more social, caring, and nurturing.

Gender socialization helps to accentuate, solidify, perpetuate, and strengthen the innate differences between men and women, but it does not cause or create such differences. In other words, men and women are not different because they are socialized differently; they are socialized differently because they are different. Gender socialization is not the cause of sex differences; it is their consequence.

It is not that women do not want money or prefer less money to more; nobody in their right mind does. It is instead that women are unwilling to pay the price and make the necessary sacrifices (often in the welfare and well-being of their children) in order to advance in the corporate hierarchy and earn more money.

Regardless of what language their genetic parents spoke, all developmentally normal children are capable of growing up to be native speakers of English, Chinese, Arabic, or any natural human language.

The myth of Native American respect for the environment - Native Americans didn't treat the environment well.

NATURE VS. NURTURE

Harris instead argues that parental socialization has very little effect on children because they are mostly socialized and influenced by their peers.

Harris: the determinants of child development is 50-0-50—that is, roughly 50 percent of the variance in personality, behavior, and other traits is heritable (determined by the genes); roughly 0 percent by shared environments (what happens within the family, shared by all siblings); and roughly 50 percent by the nonshared environment (what happens outside the family, often not commonly shared by siblings).

it decidedly does not mean that parents are not important for children’s development. Parents are enormously important because children receive 100 percent of their genes from their biological parents.

Sulloway’s theory emphasizes family dynamics as a primary determinant of adult personality, whereas Harris’s group socialization theory focuses on what happens outside the family, Sulloway and Harris are naturally critical of each other’s work.

How do universities teach entrepreneurship?

The most popular way is to place the writing of a business plan at the center of the curriculum. Almost every school has a business plan competition at the end of the semester.

Yet most real-life entrepreneurs do not put much stock in business plans. They think they're overrated. Recent studies show that VCs don't care what is in a business plan; the content of plans has little to do with which businesses get funded.

So there's a gap between how schools teach entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurship is being practiced in the real world. Students graduate with an entrepreneurship major and when they start their first business they think, "Step one is write a business plan!"

To be sure, business plans have their merits. Writing a business plan forces you to think about all the fundamentals of your business idea.

But even entrepreneurship professors would probably agree that the best way to learn about how to start a business is to start a business. If you're a college sophomore interested in running your own company, start businesses while in school and learn by doing it. This is what they do at Babson and Bentley.

Alas not all students can get real businesses off the ground while tending to their studies. So what's the next best thing?

Start micro-businesses. Start affiliate businesses. Sell stuff on eBay. Do web design. Write and sell e-books. Heck, write a blog and try to gain huge readership. A micro-business, which requires less than full-time work and could be operated out of a dorm room, probably would teach more than taking a class on entrepreneurship and writing a business plan.

Finally, you might just consider not studying entrepreneurship in school. Wait till you're out of school and start your business then. Meanwhile, study topics (philosophy?) for which the classroom has a comparative advantage over self-education and real-world learning. Business and entrepreneurship are probably near the bottom of the list in terms of teachability in the classroom.

(Photo of Southern Chile)

I will be in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in July, Beijing for two weeks in August, and probably Mongolia afterward.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on what I should do in my free time, who I should meet with, and how I should think about what I am doing. Remember it will be winter in South America.

Also, it has been a pleasure staying with blog readers in my travels, from Dublin to Mumbai, Shanghai to Rome. I find it the best way to understand another culture. If you live in one of these places and want to host me, let me know.

As always, thanks.

###

Here are various related posts:

• What I learned from my 2006 China trip
• My sense of the status of Hong Kong as of 2008
• What I learned after my first visit to Mexico
• What I learned from my first visit to Colombia
• Why freedom in China is not bi-modal
• Here's my favorite book on China. Here are detailed notes from The New Asian Hemisphere, a terrific book. Here are my notes from The Forgotten Continent, about Latin America.
• These are my main travel related posts. This is my separate travel blog with 250 posts sorted by country.

The Musty Man, who writes an infrequently updated but thoroughly entertaining and well-written blog, uses his 30th birthday as an opportunity to dish out advice to the 20-somethings behind him. But first he protests at the well-worn tradition of older people telling younger people how it all will get better soon:

Hilarious. From the advice itself, something all students should consider as they work to beat the system:

###

Here's the Musty Man's post on his ex-girlfriends. I recommend it for all men. He says you want to ultimately get to a point where you can be happy for an ex-girlfriend and not just fake being happy for her (i.e. secretly wish her new boyfriend gets cancer in his dick).

Appreciative thinking is learning to see the value of things, says Seth Roberts. It's learning to appreciate what's good in something.

School teaches us to be proactively skeptical and critical. We're taught to immediately look for the flaws in experiments or theories. An appreciative approach, by contrast, simply asks, "What's redeeming about this experiment or idea? What's done right?"

Some VCs are naturally appreciative, others naturally critical. After an entrepreneur pitch their first feedback will either be, "OK, here's what I like about what you're doing" versus "Here's where I think the problems are."

I am trying to take a more appreciative approach to people. When I meet someone new at a cocktail party, I am trying to ask myself more regularly, "What's cool / impressive / interesting about this person?" as opposed to dwelling on their imperfections.

Stay positive, in other words.

I already do this most of the time. But I think I can do this more with at least three types of people:

1. People I perceive as less smart than me. It is possible to learn from someone not as smart as me. It is also very possible that the person is smart in ways I am not and I should try to appreciate that.

2. The type of people who preface every answer with "thank you for sharing." These are the exceedingly empathetic people. The touchy feely people. The Oprah people. People who love talking about their feelings more than their ideas. It's too easy to dismiss them as lightweights. I would like to be better at appreciating their approach to the world.

3. Self-absorbed people. When I'm stuck in a conversation with a self-absorbed person who does not realize that he is a self-obsessed asshole, in my head I sometimes play the game, "How long can he keep talking and I stay silent?" I focus in on his obliviousness to the social dynamics of the conversation. As a result I miss out on appreciating actual virtues he may be displaying, let alone listening to and comprehending the words coming out of his mouth.

Here's to ever more appreciativeness!