Reading, Watching Listening – 21st Feb 2014

This year I dedicated a category in my goals to learning. I want to find new sources of information to grow my knowledge.

It is often very easy to seek out the same sources of information and stick with what you know. So instead of just sharing some links to read this year, I am going to share not only some great articles I have been reading, but also podcasts I have been listening to and videos I have been watching.

Reading

  • 10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse – I love the introduction in this post. “They may be of assis­tance to you. They may not. But then again, it’d be a shame if we were all work­ing off the same map, look­ing for the same treasure.” They are written by Frank Chimero who is an illus­tra­tor, graphic designer and writer based in Spring­field, Mis­souri. While focusing on creatives, there is still much everyone can take away from how he approaches his work and life.
  • How To Get Better at Spotting Opportunities – This post is written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. who is associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World to Power Influence and Success. Halvorson discusses research which highlights that you are more likely to spot opportunities if you are promotion focused. “You are promotion-focused when you think about what you might gain if you are successful — how you might end up better off.”

Watching


In some ways the less I say about this video {click through here if you are reading via email}.

I discovered this video form this post William James on Attention and the Road to Mastery. The article and the video both examine human’s ability to focus selectively on one thing, while blocking out almost everything else.

Listening

I stumbled across Freakonomics Radio and these are older podcasts from the middle of 2012. They are very professional and well produced podcasts.

  • You Eat What You Are – Part 1 – the first part looks at the state of American food and how it turned out this way. It examines the food paradox (food is getting better and worse at the same time). I learnt a significant amount about the post WWII history of food from this podcast.
  • You Eat What You Are – Part 2 – this podcasts explores whether or not buying locally is really the environmental saviour we may think it is. The Santa Barbara example they go through highlights how complex this issue is and there is still other issues to consider with buying locally.

If you have been inspired by something you have read, listened to or watched, please feel free to leave a link in the comments below.