Things that matter

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. Read the rest of this post »

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… Read the rest of this post »

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Before I knew anything about it, I was attracted to the ideal of philosophy. I thought of it as a practical subject that could make a real difference, that might have wise things to say about everyday worries – like

failing in a job, not having any friends. Philosophy promised something that might sound a little naive, but was in fact rather profound: “the way to learn to be happy.”

And as I found out more, I discovered that there were a few ancient philosophers I was particularly interested in, because they had the wisest things to say about the areas of life that I thought were rather problematic.

Anger

Anger refers especially to that faculty of the mind which subsists between reason and desire and which seeks to direct the latter in accord with the former – a faculty which seeks to ordinate the self and its environment. It is part of the brain response to a perceived threat of pain – mental of physical.

Anger may be expressed actively or passively. When expressed actively, an angry person “lashes out” verbally or physically at a target. When expressed passively, it is often characterized by silent sulking, passive-aggressive behavior, hostility and tension.

Anger is usually magnified and lasts longer when a rational decision is made about the intent of the source of the disturbance. In other words, if one decides the pain infliction was intentional or deliberate, the emotion of anger that results is usually more intense. This also happens when one thinks he can do something to change an unchangeable painful situation.

Getting angry is not a hard thing to achieve. Is is sufficient for one to drive through a city, especially if it is a crowded one, to get very frustrated because of the careless drivers that seem to be everywhere.

The world we live in is a very frustrating one and most of us seem unable to respond very philosophically to it. Anger seems as much a part of our lives today as bad driving and traffic jams. Read the rest of this post »

Because many readers responded positively to a previous post that required a simple counting of how many F’s are in a text, I thought of posting another brain exercise. This one will get your brain on its knees using some simple colors.

What you’ll need to do in this exercise is to read aloud the color of the words below – not the color named by them – and time your performance. Read the rest of this post »

Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it. – Brian Tracy

Teamwork is the concept of people working together cooperatively, as in a sports team – soccer makes the best example.

Business projects require multiple people to work together, and so teamwork is a very important concept in the business field.

Our daily lives can be very well guided by rules and guidelines from the business environment, so it is always worthwhile to learn something new on this subject even if it at first it doesn’t seem to relate.

What exactly is a team?

According to Webster’s On-line Dictionary a team is “a group organized to work together.” However, this definition doesn’t do much to help us understand what a team truly is. A more useful definition comes from Parker & Kroop (1999, p. 7), who define a team as “a group of people with a high degree of interdependence focused on the achievement of some goal or task.“

Teamwork basics

Not all the work that is done together or in close proximity of others is teamwork. Teamwork is the work done by a group of people that fits these four characteristics.

1. Shared goals. Members of a team have a common goal. Simply put: teams have work to do. Each component of the team works toward the same goal as the one next to him, even if they do different types of work.
2. Interdependence. Team members cannot achieve their shared goals single-handedly, but instead, must rely on each other.
3. Cooperation. This results from the interdependence of the members. Since members depend on one another, it is of absolute importance that they cooperate.
4. Boundedness and stability. Boundedness means the team has an identifiable membership and that its members, as well as nonmembers, know who is and who isn’t on the team. The stability aspect refers to the fact that the members of the team work together for a long enough time in order to accomplish their goal.

Now that we have a pretty good idea about teams and teamwork, let’s extrapolate a little.

I believe it’s safe to say that most people – if not all – want to be wealthy. By wealth I’m not referring only to money or other material aspects of wealth, but more to the fullness of the human existence. And if most of us want to be wealthy, it means that we have a shared goal.

Now let’s say that you want to become a movie director. It is obvious that you cannot simply go to a film studio and start directing films. You have to go through various causes and conditions and channels. You cannot achieve your goal all by yourself and must rely on others. This means that we’re interdependent in achieving our shared goal.

Most people know that we create our own destiny and some are even aware that we’re doing it in cooperation with the rest of the world. We only exist in cooperation with everything there is around us; we depend on working together. We continuously cooperate.

The last two characteristics of teamwork can also found in the daily life: the different organizational methods of our society (cities, countries, etc) have a certain amount of boundedness and stability.

The whole mankind is a big team. We should become aware of this and help each other out more often.

All that I can hope for is that by raising my voice I can help you help the greatest cause there is: “goodwill among men and peace on earth.” (Albert Einstein)