Keep up the good work – a feedback more valuable than it seems.

Posted on January 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

At work, it is now ever-more popular to give and receive feedbacks routinely.  These business guys, these doctors, and even these video game makers all talk about giving frequent feedbacks makes you a better whatever-it-is-that-you-do.  Unfortunately, very few people talked about the other person – what does one do when all these feedbacks started coming your way from well-intentioned leaders? Continue reading →

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Sorry Mario, our princess is in another castle. But here’s a job offer!

Posted on January 12, 2014 | 1 comment

I spent the better part of childhood playing video games.  These absurdist approaches to accomplishment — rescuing a princess by jumping over turtles, rolling ever larger objects until you physically create a moon, or growing potatoes to defend against a brigade of the undead — they were immensely enjoyable. “Enjoyable” was all that video games were ever designed to be… until now.

As a kid, when my mom would grow upset when I go over my allotted hour – usually by factors >100% – I would defend by claiming it is improving my ability to think ahead and coordinate my hands and eyes.  Now, twenty years later, science has begun to prove me right.  However, when I sent this article to her to prove my point, she just chuckled and said that these things don’t actually translate to better jobs, better income, or even better “real-life” skills. Continue reading →

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The career advice an iPad would give

Posted on January 7, 2014 | Leave a comment

“Success in today’s world is no longer about being the best,” the iPad may say, “It’s about being good enough.” Continue reading →

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A fig­ment of my own yearn­ing imag­i­na­tion

A life story is a care­fully shaped nar­ra­tive that is re­plete with strate­gic for­get­ting and skill­fully spun mean­ings. Like any pub­lished mem­oir, our own life sto­ries should also come with a dis­claimer: “This story that I tell about my­self is only based on a true story. I am in large part a fig­ment of my own yearn­ing imag­i­na­tion.”

– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

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Posted on January 6, 2014 in Figure Stuff Out

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Seven seconds

Posted on January 5, 2014 | Leave a comment

… is the average attention span.

Marketing theory says seven seconds is how much time a digital marketeer has to prime a customer’s attention.  Entrepreneurship adage claims that the first seven seconds of an elevator pitch matters the most.  It’s how long we take to figure out what’s on TV before deciding to switching the channel, how much time elapses before your doctor interrupts your “what happened,” and how quickly we grow tired of the mundane for a better thrill.

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A simple interaction

Posted on January 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

Gazing through a pair of thick black frames, salt-and-pepper hair curling across his wizened forehead, Jim the clerk stands behind the US postoffice counter and elaborates on the minute differences between certified mail and delivery confirmation. Continue reading →

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One reason is plenty, two is too many

If you have more than one reason to do something … just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

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Posted on June 27, 2013 in Figure Stuff Out

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Why “pursuing your dream” is wrong (2/2)

Posted on June 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

In Part 1 I argued that career satisfaction is built, not found.  The implicit problem is that if expertise tends to precede true passion, and world-class experts spend at least 10,000 hours honing their crafts, where along the trajectory of career development can we say, “I have given it a fair chance, and it is time to move on”? Continue reading →

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How to mint gossip-worthy news

Word of mouth, then, is a prime tool for mak­ing a good im­pres­sion—as po­tent as that new car or Prada hand­bag. Think of it as a kind of cur­rency. So­cial cur­rency… So to get peo­ple talk­ing, com­pa­nies and or­ga­ni­za­tions need to mint so­cial cur­rency… There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner re­mark­a­bil­ity; (2) lever­age game me­chan­ics; and (3) make peo­ple feel like in­sid­ers.

– Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On

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Posted on June 24, 2013 in Figure Stuff Out

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Why “pursuing your dream” is wrong (1/2)

Posted on June 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

In 2005, the late Steve Jobs delivered a memorable speech to graduates of Stanford University partly on the theme of career dreams.  “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle,” said him, adding that “Money will come.”  After the housing bubble burst and lots of dream-chasers their lost jobs in 2007, I stumbled upon a 2008 Business Week article titled “Personality and the Perfect Job.”  Books titled along the same themes, such as Do What You Are follow a similar paradigm as well.  For those who needed a faster fix, the internet offered solutions too.  Stuck in life?  Oprah has a 28-question quiz to find who you really want to be!

The implication is clear: if you failed, it’s because that was not your real passion; pick another dream.

Over the past year, I began to wonder whether the endless pursuit for pre-existing passions is missing the mark altogether.


Photo Credit: Urbanesia.com

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