To be successful at their craft, magicians must possess the well-honed technical skills to pull off their mystifying tricks and clever sleights of hand. But as magician Steve Cohen observes, they must also be “masters at attracting interest, holding attention, and leaving audiences with fond memories of their time together” — skills that everyone can […]
Like every modern consumer, before I buy new sneakers, book a hotel room, or make a restaurant reservation, I check the reviews for the product/business. While doing this in this past, I would sometimes think to myself: “I don’t know what kind of person takes the time to write a review for a $10 alarm
I turned 40 last December. No, I haven’t had a midlife crisis. But that number did cause me to self-reflect. How did the first 20 years of adulthood go? What can I do to make the next 20 years great? Around that same time, I happened to watch a documentary about one of my childhood
My flight was awful. The restaurant’s service was terrible. The traffic was horrible. My boss is the worst. Our culture is the stupidest. Whenever we get together with other people, we hear lots of complaints, and plenty come out of our own mouths. All this complaining may be ubiquitous, but it’s not entirely innocuous. Complaining
Throughout each day, all of us make little shifts in our roles and responsibilities; we take off one hat and put on another. Sometimes these shifts are physical, as when we commute from home to the office. Other times, the shifts are mental, as when we finish working on an administrative task and start working
The last time we had entrepreneur, professor, and author Luke Burgis on the show, he discussed the concept of mimetic desire, which says that we want the things we want because other people want them. Since that time, Luke has continued to explore the idea of mimesis, and how to resist its negative consequences, in his Substack:
If you’re an athlete, you know that it can be helpful to get psyched up before a big game. But getting in the right mindset is important in any kind of high-stakes scenario, whether you want to perform your best in a big meeting, presentation, interview, audition, or conversation. My guest has some tips
Personality tests sometimes come in for criticism these days for not being very accurate or helpful or for putting people into boxes. And it’s true that no test can ever entirely peg the complexities of personality, and they shouldn’t be applied with too much rigidity. But what these tests are useful for is serving as
There are tons of podcasts, blog posts, and books about how to get more focused. Focus is seen as the key to greater productivity and success. While focus is important, my guest says there are also amazing powers to be found in something that gets a lot less attention: the unfocused mind. Dr. Srini Pillay
When someone is dissatisfied with a product, group, or relationship, how do they remedy that dissatisfaction? A German economist and political scientist, Albert Hirschman, laid out a theory of how people respond to dissatisfaction in his influential treatise Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Hirschman observed that people who find themselves
