How to practice emotional first aid

What Really Motivates Us

Dan Pink argues that money does NOT make people perform better. When people are financially driven, bad things happen -- people perform worse, they end up with inferior products and services, and they behave unethically.

Pink argues that people are truly motivated to perform by a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Innovative ideas aren't generated by financial incentives; they are created when people are given the autonomy to work on their own ideas.

The Secret Powers of Time

via kottke:

A fascinating 10-minute animated talk by Philip Zimbardo about the different "time zones" or "time perspectives" that people can have and how the different zones affect people's world views.

The six different time zones are:

- Past positive: focus is on the "good old days", past successes, nostalgia, etc.
- Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
- Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
- Present fatalism: life is governed by outside forces, "it doesn't pay to plan"
- Future: focus is on learning to work rather than play
- Transcendental Future: life begins after the death of the mortal body

See more talks by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo on TED.

Barry Schwartz TED Talk: The War on Practical Wisdom

Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz claims that the rules and procedures of contemporary society retard a person's "practical wisdom" (which, according to Aristotle, is nothing more than a person's moral skill and moral will).

A wise person:
1. knows when and how to make the "exception to every rule."
2. knows when and how to improvise.
3. uses these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims.
4. is made not born.

Schwartz observes that society generally use two tools when things go wrong, rules and incentives. Unfortunately, neither rules nor incentives fix problems on their own; in fact, they tend to make situations far worse in the long run. "Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and to learn from our improvisation. And moral will is deprived by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging a war on wisdom."

Every person, let alone every head of an organization, should view this talk.