Lifelong Learning

Thought for Today 2/13/11

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Get Your Goals Back on Track – Heidi Grant Halvorson – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

I think it’s important to distinguish between specificity and inflexibility. While I can’t think of a single study where specificity hurt performance, I can think of many where a dogged insistence on staying the original course proved harmful. People need to be able to respond to changing conditions. So one qualification might be “clarity is helpful when it does not rule out flexibility and responsiveness.” 

Second, I think a lack of specificity at the organizational level isn’t quite the same thing as a lack at the individual level. Even in the instances you mentioned, the individual employees probably had some specific shorter-term goals they set for themselves. If you are trying out different strategies and exploring possibilities, you still benefit from having a clear idea what “successful” looks like, so you’ll know when a strategy is promising and when to switch to something else.

Great short post on goal setting and motivation.  Be sure to read the comments section of this post for an interesting exchange between the author and a reader.  You’ll note the quote above comes from the comment section and not the post itself.

Mom Was Right – Eat Your Veggies

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Remember life is short and science takes too long.  Eat more fruit and vegetables to lower your IHD risk.

Medical News: Fruit, Veggies Cut Risk of IHD in Large Study – in Cardiovascular, Prevention from MedPage Today

Among the more than 300,000 participants in the study, those who consumed eight or more portions of fruit and vegetables each day had a reduction of 22% in their risk of fatal ischemic heart disease (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.95) compared with those who ate fewer than three portions, according to Francesca L. Crowe, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England, and colleagues. 

Lehman’s Journal Review 10.4.2010

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BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Lehman’s journal review, 4 October 2010

Like about 40% of adults of my age in Western countries, I have a fatty liver, though I don’t qualify for having nonalcoholic fatty liver disease because I drink too much. If I wanted to know what is really happening to my liver I would have to have serial biopsies, as would several million people in the UK. This non-disease correlates with a number of other non-diseases such as asymptomatic reduced left systolic ejection fraction and pre-diabetes, and some real risk factors such as actual diabetes and high blood pressure. So I might die of vascular disease; or liver failure if I really overdo the wine; or else from cancer or general crumble or whatever else awaits me and everyone else. This paper on the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease goes through the data and leaves me none the wiser: and by the way, these people are not patients and they don’t have a disease.

 

General crumble?

Read a Book a Week – 3Q 2010 Update

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Life has been rich, full, and busy.  Thankfully, business for me has been good.

These are my excuses for not reading a book a week.

I’ve managed to read about half a book a week this year through the end of September.  The 4Q has traditionally been a low reading period due to football, hockey, basketball, and baseball playoffs.  The number of RSS feeds I have decided to follow have increased.  This website is taking more time to maintain.

What to do…what to do?

Train Your Brain

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Underwriters love stuff like this!

How Your Brain Connects the Future to the Past – Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske – Your Health at Work – Harvard Business Review

In the business world, it’s a distinct advantage to have a brain that anticipates future demands and negotiates them well. Accurate predictions typically translate to success. Being able to envision future scenarios helps foster strategic planning and resist immediate rewards in favor of longer-term gains. The proactive brain flexibly recombines details from past experiences that, by analogy with your current surroundings, help you make sense of where you are, anticipate what will come next, and successfully navigate the transition.

Scary Charts of the Day – 09.20.2010

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Number of People Using Google Reader Minimum Once WeeklyNumber of Google Reader Items Read Per Day

Official Google Reader Blog: A welcome and a look back

These charts should be extremely scary especially to folks in the newspaper and media businesses.  If you wanted some hard evidence on consumer preferences for news outlets shifting to the Internet, here you go.  The top chart is the number of people who use Google Reader at least once a week.  The bottom chart is the number of items read on Google Reader.

Personally, we still buy a daily newspaper.