Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address (by StanfordUniversity)

I read the transcript of this a while ago, but it’s so much more powerful watching it.

How Self-talk can improve your life and your athletic performance

This is a great idea on how talking to yourself (in your head) during sports can focus your attention and improve results. 

Read the whole article.

This section shows the applicability beyond sports.

In fact, the technique originally came from cognitive behavioral therapy, as a tool to help people overcome persistent thought patterns, behaviors, and interpretations of events. You talk to yourself to direct your own attention, instead of letting it be directed by something else, and in so doing, you learn to manage your behavior.

The technique has proven effective in everything from learning to coping with depression. A specific type of self-talk, self-affirmation, has been shown to help in test performance and learning, in overcoming social stress, and in dealing better with negative situations. In fact, whenever you need to enhance your attention or overcome a thought pattern or behavior that you find disruptive, self-talk is one strategy that can come to the rescue.

How to Resist Temptations

She placed three groups of people in a room containing a delicious-looking chocolate cake and the implements to divide and eat it.

The first group was put into the room and told to think about the shame and guilt they would feel if they ate it.

The second was told to think about how proud they would be ofnoteating it.

The third group, the control group, was put in the room and given no instructions.

Here were the results:

The control group ate the most.

The group that was told to think about pride ate the least.

MacInnis concluded that shame and guilt do not work as well as a sense of pride to help resist temptation.

I believe I know why: Shame and guilt consume energy, subtracting energy from our will to resist temptation. Pride, on the other hand, gives energy, allocating more energy to the willpower to resist.

Applicable to all sorts of life temptations.

What clothes do women like on men?

clothes that fit well. Men often wear what is comfortable, but if it fits like pajamas, it probably looks like pajamas. Comfort is 50% mental. Wearing clothing that fits properly means you may have to “get over yourself” and get accustomed to a non-pajama feel. The compliments and attention you will get from others, especially women should make it worth it.

Is it true that "less intelligent" people are happier than smart people?

No. Here’s a really good meta-analytic review of the many studies done in this area.

Some key findings in this research area:
  • In a meta-analysis of 26 studies of individuals, intelligence was NOT found to be correlated with happiness. In short, cognitive abilities do not, on the average, lead to more or less happiness.
  • The effect was found for both longitudinal studies and snapshot studies.
Here’s also a much earlier (1934) study showing the same thing. So what’s clear is that this is a very stable and consistent finding.

What is the best way to motivate yourself to improve?

the Arnold Schwarzenegger approach: put your weaknesses on display so others can see them and you get social pressure to improve.

As a young bodybuilder, his calves weren’t as developed as the rest of his body. Instead of hiding them, he cut off the bottoms of the sweat pants he worked out in so that every day, everyone else in the gym could see his small calves. It was constant motivation to him to improve this area of his physique.

If you are a man, what are the pros and cons of dating models? - Quora

Pros:

Models are almost always mellow in daily life. They’re used to gliding through life without a ton of responsibility, and so they don’t tend to be as high-strung as the average woman (or man, for that matter). 

They tend to value you, as a guy, on something other than your looks, because they’ve spent time with male models and have fished those waters.

If you’re susceptible to the siren call of external validation, you will be serenaded every moment of your public life. Guys will stare; their girlfriends will stare and then quickly glare at their mates; and random people will ask you what your secret is, if they don’t just give you the smile and nod.

Cons:

Models are used to being objectified by men, and tend to be a little suspicious at first of your motives. It takes a little more effort to get through to them than to the average woman, in my experience. They ‘test’ you more at first, check to see if you’re just a guy hunting for a trophy.

Models are, on average, average in everything else besides looks. They’re not stupid or brilliant, not sweet or cruel, not cultured or boorish. Their looks set high expectations and their personalities usually fail to deliver. Imagine having a lunch with a billionaire….who turns out to be as boring as an accountant and leaves you peeking at your watch. It’s a downer.

Back to the external validation from above; people will assume that you’re just dating her for her looks, and no one will take her or the relationship seriously. Ever. It doesn’t matter how much time they spend with her, or what you do together, etc. The attention from strangers gets incredibly tiresome after a while, and you start to understand why some women put off such an ice shield when in public. I was doing it myself after a while.

There are really just two archetypes in the mainstream modeling world for women: fashion model and swimsuit model. Fashion models usually are very tall, very skinny, usually flat-chested; swimsuit/lingerie models can be average-height and tend to have more of a classic hourglass shape. These are two tiny, limited corners of the wide landscape of actual feminine figures. This will sound downright bizarre, but after a while, those two body shapes start to seem ordinary, even boring. It’s hard to explain. You don’t start to see other body shapes as more attractive, but the aesthetic shock of ‘perfection’ wears off.

So I really liked this answer on Quora. This type of thinking really applies whenever you meet a beautiful girl or a good looking. Your impulse should be… ok they’re probably average in every respect except their looks so be prepared for that.

I also agree with the comment that good looking people care less about looks, because they’ve sort of been there and done that, and they attract good looking people of the opposite sex, so the appeal of good-looking-ness wears off. 

Yeah, but that averageness comment - it so resonates and it’s something to remember wherever beauty/good looks appear.

Facebook is all too often your past life...not your present and other shortcomings

I’ve been using Facebook for years and will keep doing so.
During this long journey as a Facebook user, I realized some very interesting facts

  • History Book: The biggest use of Facebook is to connect with people who ‘mattered’ to you most in the past rather than who actually matters right now. e.g. 90% of people on my Facebook are the ones with whom I was associated in the past. Facebook’s desire to digitize all the relationships in the world makes you connect with everyone you ever interacted in the real world. Most of them becomes part of your past as you move along in your life. Now, when you’re on Facebook you are mostly living in the past.
  • Waste of Time: As you keep interacting with people in the past life, you keep spending your time. This is where you are living your past life rather than the present life. Once, you come back to the present, you realize that you spent a lot of time on the ‘past’ with people who mattered once upon a time. None of the interaction or conversation is really useful right now. This happens often.
  • Source of Guilt: Now you realize the two facts above and you keep doing the same thing time and again. You get used to living in past and coming back to present. This results into a consistent source of Guilt.
  • Private to public usage: Initially when you join Facebook, you’re connected to most close friends. Now, Facebook pushes you to add more people that you may know. Facebook keep suggesting to you to the point you give up and you end up adding everyone you ever interacted in real life. Now, your friend list is not private anymore. Everything is public. Facebook didn’t do it, It made you do it. Whose fault?
  • Makes you a Creep: More and more of your friends keep sharing their pictures, private photos and travel etc. Now, It becomes your innate desire to check ALL the stuff out. There is nothing bad about checking it out - Just that you are now spending so much of time doing what can be considered creepy.
  • Makes you Less Social: This might sound confusing, but If you really dig deeper there are some facts about being social - A phone call is always more social than Facebook sharing or online chat. Facebook can’t get closer to meeting friends face to face. More you start doing Facebook, less time you spend with your current friends. Your life of past becomes an obsession and now you are way less social in real life.
  • It’s Not Real: Whatever you do on Facebook, doesn’t impact the bottom line or top line of your current life. All you do is kill some time and feel guilty about doing so. You also feel guilty about losing your productivity.

Can people change their personalities or are they always the same? - I just wrote this on Quora

Personalities can change. It usually happens unconsciously and people usually don’t even realize that they are changing.

I say this from experience. I spent a long time with one person and I picked up a lot of her mannerisms and behaviors (including a lot of her style of talking and joking around), and I didn’t even realize it until later.

There is actually psychological research to back this up. People who have been in a relationship a long time become similar to their partner in some ways, so this is a pretty common experience.

It’s similar for your friends or anyone else who you spend time with. You will pick up mannerisms and behaviors and you probably won’t realize it.

It’s similar for the TV you watch and the books you read. When Seinfeld was popular, a lot of people joked around in ways that reminded me of Seinfeld. You can notice these things if you look for it. When I read about 5 books by one particular author, every now and then I noticed myself talking in a way that reminded myself of the way he wrote.

Emotional events in your life will also change you. I know someone who died of alcoholism and her sister immediately stopped drinking. She didn’t try to change. It just happened.

Similarly thought and reflection can change you - if you realize that you made a mistake in one particular situation, that in itself is a change in the way your brain operates and it will inform your future decisions without you making a further conscious effort to change.

Similarly if your priorities change, that can change you. As a kid, I was ridiculously curious, so I bothered everyone with endless questions. As I grew up, my priorities shifted more towards enjoying myself and that then came to inform my behavior.

On the other hand… some people try to force themselves to change and it can feel fake. They think they should act a certain way for whatever reason and it can feel like they are acting. If people try to be someone else, it usually doesn’t feel genuine or authentic and it can actually cause uneasiness, and thus be counterproductive. It also weakens people’s ability to respond to their natural impulses and it can become an unfortunate habit. 

So I would say that if you are acting a certain way just because of a desire to change yourself, that’s not productive, but on the other hand if you realize that your values have changed, that will naturally change you and inform your behavior.

I should also mention therapy, because I’ve seen people get very really and valuable results from it. Quiet people can learn to come out of their shell with cognitive therapy. People with OCD can obsess less with cognitive therapy. Therapy can also have a real impact for those struggling with depression or a variety of other problems. These are real changes.

Update : there were some comments since deleted on the distinction between personality and mannerisms. Personality as defined by Google is : “The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.” Google defines character as “The distinctive nature of something.” Therefore, personality is pretty all encompassing and would include both values and mannerisms/idiosyncracies.

Hedonic treadmill

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness

The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year. If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

Op-Ed Columnist - The Sandra Bullock Trade - NYTimes.com

From a larger article on how money doesn’t buy happiness…

Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have — imagine gratitude — divided by having what you want — gratification. The Bhutanese aren’t on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don’t have. Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one.

The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out — an object that we’re supposed to get, or maybe many objects. Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to “chase with hostility.” Do we pursue happiness with hostility? Good question. But back to Bhutan.

Bhutan’s actually bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world’s population. Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that actually influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? Bhutan’s actually created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being. And there are 40 countries around the world today that are actually studying their own GNH. You may have heard, this last fall, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a “joie de vivre index.” I like it. Co-branding opportunities.

Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile | Video on TED.com

To be happier, give your money away, spend it on others, or spend it on experiences with others...

One of the most consistent findings of the happiness literature is that having a strong social network is an excellent predictor of happiness
they surveyed 632 Americans on their general happiness, along with what they spent their money on, and found that higher “prosocial spending” - gifts for others and donations to charity - was indeed correlated with higher self-reported happiness.
But was the happiness caused by giving money away, or were charitable people simply happier to start with? To show a causative link, they then performed an experiment in which volunteer test subjects were given a small windfall of $5 to $20. Some of the subjects, chosen at random, were told to spend it on a bill, an expense, or a gift for themselves. The others were told to buy a gift for someone else or make a charitable donation. Afterwards, the second group - the ones who had given the money away - reported being significantly happier than those who had spent the money on their own needs.
“By that I do not mean give all your money away and live in a shack,” she says. “I just mean think about increasing it slightly. Just reallocating as little as $5 on a given day can make a difference in happiness.”

Spending on experiences also makes people happier because experiences are usually more social - involve others, etc.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don’t usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor’s newer, nicer car, but we don’t like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.
And while we quickly grow accustomed to a new suit or a bigger house, no matter how much we originally loved it, experiences instead tend to get burnished in our memory - a year after a vacation, we look back not on the stress of dealing with lost luggage or the fights over which way the hotel was, but the beauty of the scenery or the exotic flavors of the food.

As an aside, that first line also resonated with me on the importance of creating a strong social network and how that’s correlated with happiness

the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn’t make them any more jovial in the mornings.

….
High incomes don’t bring you happiness, but they do bring you a life you think is better

Study: Money Buys Happiness When Income Is $75,000 - TIME
a study led by Princeton researcher Alan Krueger found, of all the things on the planet, we’re at our happiest when we’re involved in engaging leisure activities.

Joe Robinson: The Key to Happiness: A Taboo for Adults?

As someone who used to work to much, I love seeing little studies like this.