Wandering Wandering Star

The local maximum is a point at which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…

It is as effective as it’s ever going to be in its current incarnation. Even if you make 100 tweaks, you can only get so much improvement; it is as effective as it’s ever going to be on its current structural foundation.

Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces – to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it – and makes it burn still higher.

The change in brain activity that occurs when a biopolar patient’s mood improves is the same change that occurs in individuals undergoing bouts of creativity.

So how does psychosis translate into creativity?

Elyn Saks, a mental health law professor at the University of Southern California, explained that because people with psychosis don’t filter stimuli as well as other people, “they’re able to entertain contradictory ideas simultaneously, and become aware of loose associations that most people’s unconscious brains wouldn’t consider worthy of sending to the surface of our consciousness.”

15. The Kindness Hack

Researchers at Wharton, Yale and Harvard have figured out how to make employees feel less pressed for time: force them to help others. According to a recent study, giving workers menial tasks or, surprisingly, longer breaks actually leads them to believe that they have less time, while having them write to a sick child, for instance, makes them feel more in control and “willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.” The idea is that completing an altruistic task increases your sense of productivity, which in turn boosts your confidence about finishing everything else you need to do.