Wordy, are you?
How many words do you speak each day? Ten thousand? Twenty? Thirty? A quick Google search puts the average across both sexes at between fifteen and sixteen thousand words a day. If you accept these numbers, that means we speak close to 500,000 words a month and nearly 6,000,000 a year. That’s a lot of […]
The Ikea Effect
It’s named after a Swedish company that makes cheaply constructed furniture components and sells them in pieces, along with wordless cartoon instructions for assembly, packaged with a mixed bag of hardware, often including several wrong pieces and usually missing one critical component. (Has that ever been your experience?) In real estate “The Ikea Effect” is […]
One piece at a time…
How do we solve a jigsaw puzzle? We start with one piece at a time, and each one makes adding the next piece a little easier until we complete the puzzle. Puzzles have a lot of components just like our lives. It is hard to focus on everything at once-relationships, personal development, work, school, and […]
What we can’t see…
Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Our breath exists, keeping us alive, even though we can’t see it. The wind exists, too, but we only know this because we feel it on our skin and hear it moving the leaves on the trees. All around us and within us are […]
4 wimpy words!
Most of us will agree that words have power-the power to inspire, the power to hurt, the power to compel, the power to enrage. And I think we would agree that some words are wimpy! Try: Try implies failure. If you say, “I’ll try to call you tomorrow,” the person hears “I’ll call you tomorrow.” […]
What makes you happy?
I read about an experiment involving elementary school students who were asked to itemize a list of their wants. No one wrote that he or she wanted to be happy or more loving. Their wants were things and events. And the same was true when high school and college students were asked. When the researchers […]
Stuff you didn’t know you didn’t know…
Food for thought? Food for amazement? I checked these out before including them. See what you think! The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% (now get this…) the percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and life rafts have in common? All were invented by […]
Appreciate: Two Meanings
The first meaning is “to be thankful,” the opposite of taking something for granted. The second meaning is “to increase in value” (as money appreciates in the bank). Combined, these two meanings point to a truth that has been proven repeatedly in research on gratitude: when we appreciate the good in our lives, the good […]
Want to change your habits?
I read about a surprising way to form good habits and break bad ones. The article said to change your habits, change your identity. The concept was a reminder that how we see ourselves can dramatically affect our habits. A paper published in 2011 by a team of Harvard and Stanford researchers found that people […]
Why ugly and slow is okay!
My sister is a lot better at knitting than I am. It is painfully obvious when she tackles a complex pattern, makes changes in it, and then finishes it before I’ve figured out how to get my project going. She’s a regular wizard at it! And by comparison I’m slow and my projects are, if […]