I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. - Woody Allen
A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods. - Author unknown, from an editorial in New York Tribune, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren
Whether it’s the giggling of a child or the enthusiastic hollers of a talk show’s studio audience, we hear laughter every day. And we love hearing it, because we all love to laugh!
As a motor reflex, laughter is usually present by the time a child is 4 months old, and the instinctual development of smiling and laughing very early in life suggest a high level of importance.
Laughter ringing, laughter pealing, laughter roaring, laughter bubbling. Chuckling. Giggling. Snickering. Snorting. These are the sounds of soul saving laughter which springs from our emotional core and helps us feel better, see things more clearly and creatively weigh and use our options. Laughter is an incredible gift in many aspects, both psychological and spiritual.
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Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life - Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder. - Robert Fulghum , “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”
Remember kindergarten? You know, the good old days of naps, fingerpainting, playtime, milk and cookies and learning the basics? How long has it been since you have been to kindergarten? If you’re on this page, reading this post, I think it’s a safe assumption to say that it’s been awhile… And while the kindergarten memories can accompany you for your whole life, people usually forget the basic lessons learned in those blissful, carefree years.
I have a lot of memories from my kindergarten years. A lot of friends I had back in kindergarten are still some of my closest peeps. I feel I have their back no matter what and they feel the same.
I remember one time when they took the swings away from us because one kid was swinging too high and for some reason he jumped off, straight into a wall…
I could probably write a whole book about my memories from the kindergarten years, but what I want to talk about here are the lessons learned back then. They are so simple and yet so easy to forget.
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A conversation is communication by two or more people, or sometimes with one’s self, on a particular topic. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, because they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other.
Paul Grice, a British-educated philosopher of language who spent the final two decades of his career in the U.S., noted that all conversations follow a basic set of rules which people use to express themselves when speaking.
Imagine what would happen to language if there were no rules to follow during conversations. It would be perfectly acceptable to follow “Hi, how are you doing?” with “birds fly in the sky”, or to simply lie with every statement you make. But then conversations would be impossible to have. And while everyone follows Grice’s rules, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are aware of what the rules are or how they work. In fact, Grice’s maxims often work outside of our immediate awareness.
The question now is, what exactly are these rules? Continue Reading »
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Thomas Huxley
Obedience is defined as receiver compliance to source authority. The classic example of obedience is the officer giving orders to the soldier. The soldier complies with the officer because the officer has legitimate, organizational power. The compliance does not occur because the soldier likes the officer or necessarily respects his judgment and expertise, but rather simply because the the officer has power and the soldier was trained to obey.
As demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures.
Stanley Milgram carried out his experiments to discover how the Nazis had managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murder of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that compliance to authority was the norm and not the exception.
In “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View” Stanley Milgram writes:
“Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action which is spontaneous.The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders. Continue Reading »
Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves. - Lord Chesterfield
Everyone seems crazed by the desire to best manage their time in order to achieve an increased productivity. Such a great intention that is!…
The common definition of time management sounds something like this: management of time in order to make the most out of it. However, David Allen, in a 2001 interview, observed:
“You can’t manage time, it just is. So “time management” is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time; and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do.”
To better understand why time management is a mislabeled problem, you need to know what the word management means and what is its etymology.
Management is the guidance and control of action or resources that is necessary to reach a goal.
The verb manage comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle), which in turn derives from the Latin manus (hand).
Knowing these things about management enables us to find out what time management really says: handling time to make the most out of it.
In a nutshell, what time management advertises is the ability to control time. A thing which, in my opinion, is false advertising… Continue Reading »
