This past week was clam and content. A lot of work has become the norm, and I felt good about negotiating to reduce the work for the team. My boss really came through and he laid down the law, enabling me to focus on quality work.
Working with him made me realize the importance of saying no, to focus on important and high impact activities. While it’s easy for someone like me to sign up for every opportunity there is, I’m learning that it’s respectful and rewarding to be selfish about time and the type of work that I’m going to engage in.
Interesting reads of this week below!
1. Automation is here to stay and as much as 30% of service industry workers will be impacted.
2. Made me think twice about getting that millennial pink planner on sale.
3. Instagram is changing our museum experience, but is it for the better?
4. Banksy is ballsy, creative and entertaining, with his latest stint at Sotheby’s.
5. Totally agree that hobbies can and should be another way to enjoy time, instead of striving for “excellence.”
Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.
But there is also a real and pure joy, a sweet, childlike delight, that comes from just learning and trying to get better.
6. With behavorial economics popularity, there are limits that I need to consider, such as results below.
In order to appeal to other economists, behavioral economists are too often concerned with describing how human behavior deviates from the assumptions of standard economic models, rather than with understanding why people behave the way they do.
A meta-analysis of 93 studies found “no statistically significant differences” in the persuasive power of public-health messages when framed in terms of loss as opposed to gain.
7. Maybe reading the book at the right time, like Melville, is all we need to write a masterpiece that everyone carries in their hearts.
And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby-Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.
upbeat dabbler 