—Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
A personal life philosophy in my more seasoned days is to focus on making happy choices.
It follows naturally from a core piece of counsel I have always given young people, which is to make the big decisions with your heart, the little ones with your head. You might call it the 'joy maximization framework,' given how the man who made Amazon looks at it.
Jeff Bezos shares a smart approach. In the zone of what I would call ‘making happy choices’ is what Jeff calls a 'regret minimisation framework.' In a 1999 interview in which he spoke about his decision to leave his well-paid Wall Street job to start Amazon, he said he wanted to live his life in a way that minimized the number of regrets he would hold when he’s older.
Not doing something because of fear of regret or failure is kind of ironic considering that it’s the things we haven’t done that we usually regret. Overthinking, and worrying, just uses up your bandwidth for happiness and getting ahead in life quicker. Stop thinking, start doing, and make stuff happen. Take a chance, run some risks. Be excessive in a good way. Be active, and when you try and fail as all do, fail fast, learn fast and fix fast.
In 2018, make happy choices, the ones that feel right in the core of your gut, true at the time in your heart. They are the ones that you will always smile about.
Happy New Year.
A pair of smart soldiers figured out that their gas masks could also be used to avoid crying while peeling onions.
It follows naturally from a core piece of counsel I have always given young people, which is to make the big decisions with your heart, the little ones with your head. You might call it the 'joy maximization framework,' given how the man who made Amazon looks at it.
Jeff Bezos shares a smart approach. In the zone of what I would call ‘making happy choices’ is what Jeff calls a 'regret minimisation framework.' In a 1999 interview in which he spoke about his decision to leave his well-paid Wall Street job to start Amazon, he said he wanted to live his life in a way that minimized the number of regrets he would hold when he’s older.
Not doing something because of fear of regret or failure is kind of ironic considering that it’s the things we haven’t done that we usually regret. Overthinking, and worrying, just uses up your bandwidth for happiness and getting ahead in life quicker. Stop thinking, start doing, and make stuff happen. Take a chance, run some risks. Be excessive in a good way. Be active, and when you try and fail as all do, fail fast, learn fast and fix fast.
In 2018, make happy choices, the ones that feel right in the core of your gut, true at the time in your heart. They are the ones that you will always smile about.
Happy New Year.
A pair of smart soldiers figured out that their gas masks could also be used to avoid crying while peeling onions.
MigratingTowards Outcomes-Based Approaches conference | Sydney, March 2018
Gain lessons from commissioning and deliverology by attending this conference. Download the brochure.
Reviewing
the evidence on evidence-based policy.
Evidence-based policy is a simple and alluring concept — who could disagree with the idea of basing decisions on facts? So why don’t we have it yet? Figuring out ‘what works’ can be more complicated than it seems.
Evidence-based policy is a simple and alluring concept — who could disagree with the idea of basing decisions on facts? So why don’t we have it yet? Figuring out ‘what works’ can be more complicated than it seems.
Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Exploitation, Cultural Genocide: Problems of Neoliberal Diversity ManagementZero Anthropology. UserFriendly: “Bullzeye”.
… ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities,’ 30 Years Later
This was almost the year of the viral recruitment video, satire, and flexible working. And it might have been, but for all the hatches, matches and dispatches.
Ten years ago, on Bonfire’s 20th anniversary, Anne Barnard looked back on it in the New York Times, noting that while much of it (such as the portrait of Reverend Bacon) was prophetic, it also depicted a New York that, to a remarkable extent, had already disappeared by 2007. In a city that had seemed in 1987 to be hurtling toward anarchy, a mayor named Giuliani had overseen a stunning recovery. Crime rates had plummeted; slums whose underclass residents Wolfe had seen as destined to multiply and spread out, overrunning even the tonier parts of Manhattan, had themselves become rapidly gentrified. These trends have continued. Rereading the book recently, I imagined that to some young readers today, it might feel as old-fashioned as Middlemarch. It’s pre-cellphone, pre–World Wide Web. There are pay telephones; the bond traders’ ultra-high-tech computer screens are black with green letters and numbers on them. The Soviet Union still exists; 9/11 lies in the future; McCoy’s view of himself as a “Master of the Universe” seems quaint when one considers the wealth and power of today’s Silicon Valley billionaires.The top Mandarin 10 picks made in 2017.
This was almost the year of the viral recruitment video, satire, and flexible working. And it might have been, but for all the hatches, matches and dispatches.