James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?

“Yes!” says futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal. All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures — using what she calls “futures thinking.” 

“Futures thinking isn’t a superpower, and you don’t have to fix everything or save everyone,” McGonigal writes in her new book called Imaginable. “But futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Her book draws on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to show you how to train your mind to think the unthinkable. In this excerpt, you’ll get a taste of how you can start thinking like a futurist — and create a better future for yourself. 

.

Meredith Schomburg

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a half-hearted compliment, whether it was a generic “nice work” from a colleague or a chirpy “you look nice” from someone who couldn’t pick out our outfit from a police lineup. And being human, we’ve probably handed out our own fair share of faint praise.

But what if we all made a collective vow today and said “No more bland compliments!”

It takes only a tiny bit more effort to turn a vague comment into the kind of praise that will make someone’s day, says Winnipeg, Canada, high school music educator Cheryl Ferguson. Here are the three basic components of an effective compliment.

.

Illustration by Raúl Soria

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Life seems full of ever-increasing piles of paperwork – bills to pay, appointments to make, forms to sign, carpools to organize – so much tedious, time-consuming, unpaid labor. Call it the homework of adulthood, and many of us are earning a failing grade.

Columbia Law School professor Elizabeth Emens calls this work “life admin,” and wrote a book about it by the same name.

“Life admin is all the invisible office work that steals our time,” Emens explains. “It’s the kind of work that managers and secretaries get paid in an office to do but that we all do invisibly, and for free, in our own lives.”

.

Hero Images/Getty Images/Hero Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Not too long ago, a colleague and I were lamenting the process of growing older and the inevitable increasing difficulty of remembering things we want to remember. That becomes particularly annoying when you attend a conference or a learning seminar and find yourself forgetting the entire session just days later.

But then my colleague told me about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, a 100-year-old formula developed by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who pioneered the experimental study of memory. The psychologist’s work has resurfaced and has been making its way around college campuses as a tool to help students remember lecture material. For example, the University of Waterloo explains the curve and how to use it on the Campus Wellness website. I teach at Indiana University and a student mentioned it to me in class as a study aid he uses. Intrigued, I tried it out too–more on that in a moment.

The Forgetting Curve describes how we retain or lose information that we take in, using a one-hour lecture as the basis of the model. The curve is at its highest point (the most information retained) right after the one-hour lecture. One day after the lecture, if you’ve done nothing with the material, you’ll have lost between 50 and 80 percent of it from your memory.

.

Photo by Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________