Getting Smarter and feeling for alive - in a week

Everyday do something different - break the routine, simple as that.

Brush your teeth with your 'wrong' hand;
Take a shower with your eyes closed;
Do the crossword or Sudoku puzzle;
Take a brisk walk;
Change the food you eat - perhaps have oily fish for dinner (omega 3's for your brain);
Cycle, walk or take the bus into work;
Select unfamiliar words from the dictionary and work them into conversations;
Go to yoga, Pilates or a meditation class;
Talk to someone you don't know;
Take a different route to work;
Avoid caffeine or alcohol;
Memorise your shopping list.
Take a different route to work;
Use your mouse with the other hand;
Close your eyes and walk around your home;

Others......

http://tailrank.com/posts/562949953495154/Simple_ways_to_make_yourself_far_cleverer

Matchpoint

Welcome back Woody.

Kind of slow to start this movie really heats up. Follows the usual Wood formula - 2 female personality traits: one a spontaneous, energetic, offbeat artist and the other a motherly care-giver type and his main male character will have to chose between the two.

Nice twist at the end but never really gets going. 3 out of 5 seems about right

Average only performance from Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a little wooden at the start and somehow missed the potential that this role had. Scarlett Johansson was excellent.

Worth seeing but not at the top of the list I think.

Plot Summary - At a turning point in his life, a former tennis pro falls for a femme-fatal type who happens to be dating his friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law.....

Some funny blogs

The Dog
http://blog.alfiedog.me.uk/

Interesting Movie reviewer:

http://www.bacheson.com/reviews.html

Orbiting the big giant hairball.

This is a great little book - a series of thoughts, observations and learning from a life at Hallmark Cards - a company that needs creativity to live and where 5% of the employees are in the "creative" department. Here is a summary of the lessions:

Orbiting the big giant hairball.

Goal to be a person orbiting the organisation as hairball – in the effort to be different, but close enough to be attracted by the gravity of the organisation but not absorbed into it. Concepts of Normal, original and Create.

The Pink Buddha

The leaders without leading. The visionary, the administrator of chaos

A chickens fate

Chickens memorized by the chalk line on the ground – We can all become memorized by the line (the line is policies, procedures, politics). This is simply the way we are.

Thou shalt not have it easy

Cultures and assumptions. If a person makes a job look easy then perhaps that is because they have mastered it.

Heroically overloaded – make your job difficult, stretch yourself then, stress yourself out and eventually you too may be honoured with executive approval. If you desire the blessing of the almihgly fathers then work longer (that is sensible), take on more responsibility (than is sensible) and make your job harder ( that is sensible). Do this and your sacrificies will be celebrated and your worth confirmed.

Pool wizard makes pool look easy and crushes you.

What your don’t see is what you get

Creativity is mostly invisible - Cow is working on producing / creating the milk. To many people have concluded that if you cannot measure it or see it then it is not real.

No Access

Climbing down the cliff – getting stuck – finding it difficult to say I am stuck. Courage to admit idiocy.

1st there’s grope. Then there's rote

Course on creativity – goal to have the team going “what the hell was that all about – 1st time no agenda. 2nd copied the 1st and did not work – Rote – the hairball is real and alive.

Entropy – the degradation of matter and energy to the ultimate state of inert uniformity – (bureaucracy)?

Containers contain

Roles and responsibilities are container – we all need containers from the dawn of time. What about dancing – less rules but we still don’t bump into each other and can live together and work with boxes

Cage Dwellers – Did not really get this one

About Teasing

Big stop sign – Stop risking, Stop Growing, Stop sharing, Stop Living so that you are no longer a threat to me.

Is teasing how you show affection? – if so FIND A BETTER WAY

High Tech Peaches

Peaches are not like they once where. Not juicy and tasty. Like the business world – monomania for tough minded, cold blooded competitive correctness.

Milk cans are not allowed

People view different as bad and don’t look at the facts (office space was cheaper but different – all kinds of resistance). People did not like the milk can gabbage containers or the wall colour etc etc.

Babies

Fun Commercials

Take a look

http://funnycommercials.blogspot.com/

This is funny

http://jokesandfunnypictures.blogspot.com/

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink is about our hunches, how they arise, and how their reliability can be enhanced or diminished by our experiences. He sets out to understand how and why we make snap judgments and leap to conclusions - both good and not so good - and why some people are much better at this than the rest of us.

Examples:

Ancient Greek statue for $10M and proceeds to spend 14 months assessing its authenticity. It consults with many art experts to certify that the statue's features reflect its purported era, and hires scientists to estimate the statue's age using electron microscopes and mass spectrometers When an art historian takes just one glimpse of it, it's a fake. Realized that the statue was fake when he looked at its fingernails. He felt something was wrong - he could not articulate why. Pentagon officials recruit a retired general and Wall Street traders to play the role of a rogue military commander in war simulation. By linking weapons, sensors, and other theater assets to a vast information system of databases and computer models, JFCOM would be able to "read an enemy like a book" and deploy the right assets at the right time and place to inflict predictable reductions in the enemy's capabilities. General believes that the military functions best when decisions are pushed out to commanders in the field. Within days of the exercise's opening, the general's team hands JFCOM a rapid and surprising defeat, sinking 16 US ships. Tennis coach figures out he can predict doubt faults – but he does not know how he is doing this. John Gottman has figured out that we can predict is a couple will stay together. He knows what to look for the key elements that count and the key ones that don’t A hospital emergency manager figures out heart attacks will happen based on 3 criteria, if not present then the patient much go to their doctor

Gut feel, which Gladwell calls the adaptive unconscious, arises from our ability to "thin-slice" a situation by focusing only on the data that matters most. Our ability to thin-slice can be hampered when we force ourselves to rationalize every decision and overload ourselves with more information than we need.

But Gut feel is affected by perceptions that ingrain us

Examples –

• Car salesmen – offer better discounts to white mans – successful saleman make not assumptions up front
• Word association tests. http://www.implicit.harvard.edu/
• Ekman is one of the world's experts on the physiology of emotions. He studies how emotions trigger contractions of facial muscles in set patterns.
  He studies how emotions trigger contractions of facial muscles in set patterns. In other words, a person's facial expressions are a signature of what is going on in the person's head - at least emotionally. While a person can hide their emotions, they cannot do it perfectly or instantaneously, and so learning to recognize these patterns allows one to essentially read another's mind.
• Blacks do worse in test when they are reminded of there ethnic background are the start of the test

What I would have called the devil in the detail now I call them key understanding of the system under review:

Examples

• More consumer choice can lead to less sales in Jam test 3% buy with more than 6 varieties and 30% buy with less than 6 varieties
• Kenna – singer – not successful because early testing did not have context needed to make good decision
• Speeddating
• Coke vs Pepsi – sip test – bias toward sweet (pepsi), but Pepsi market share not growing
• Louis CHESKIN – Sensation transference - product and the package are one. Colors have symbolic meanings. Asking customers what they think of a package design is not a useful way to measure effectiveness. Eg 7up adding yellow to label – more people thought added lemon/lime flavour

Summary – successful decision making:

• Balance of deliberate and instinctive
• Needs to be good in the moment (ER and War games)
• Frugality matters – look for the underlying patters - Codifying key rules works
  

Your Beautiful

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw you face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.

Yeah, she caught my eye,
As we walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was,
Fucking high,
And I don't think that I'll see her again,
But we shared a moment that will last till the end.

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw you face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.
You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
There must be an angel with a smile on her face,
When she thought up that I should be with you.
But it's time to face the truth,
I will never be with you.

Peace and tranquility please.

My eyes now open,
Fear rules my everything
What will does that man think?
Why is he motionless?
Why am I hiding? Why am I alone?
Each sighting calling me down
Down to the River, calling

My eyes wide open now
Alienation abounds, lifeless meaning nowhere and everywhere
Affectionless, powerless, drifting, motionless
Where angry and fair collide

My eyes wide open now
I don’t know how to say anything, how to be an equal
How to create sentence, how to ask a question now eludes me
Fear rules, my heart shivers
Somewhere there is peace but I cannot driver there, not get a plane or a train
Down by the River, calling me to a new home in the sun, there is peace

The my eyes are shut and the ice is thin.
I am frozen to unknown depths. I am lost in the depth.
I can walk with my eyes open, not to the trees but walking talk.

Eyes now I see.
Fear of abandonment, the empliness, where neglect is more than abuse
Fear of acceptance, acceptance of fear
I am scared. Nervous,to the horror
Fear drives speed
Down by the river of my life the purple water runs
Down by the river I am desparate and empty

Run yes run like the wind and
Run and be free, Run Run Run and leave this all around me.

Anselm Kiefer

First impressions are this is a little messy, with obvious thought or meaning, but look closer, stare for a while in the detail, let your mind wonder and wander. These really need to be seen in person to appreciate them...

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kiefer/

Also try:

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/kiefer_anselm.html

Leaders

Leaders are individuals who make ordinary people do extraordinary things in the face of adversity. - Andy Grove

I likes this when I read it, but now I am not sure.