Tuesday, September 1, 2015
If I Really Cared
If I Really Cared . . . • Who you are would be more important to me than who I am. • Where you hurt would be more important than that I'm well. • What you feel would be more important than what I know. • I'd look you in the eyes when you talk to me; • I'd think about what you're saying rather than what I'm going to say next- • I'd hear your feelings as well as your words. • I'd listen without defending. • I'd hear without deciding whether you are right or wrong. • I'd ask you why and how, not just when and where. • I'd laugh with you but not at you. • I'd talk with you and not to you, and I'd know when it's time to do neither. • I wouldn't climb over your walls. • I'd wait until you let me in the gate. • I wouldn't unlock your secrets; • The performances would end. If I really cared about you, • I'd be myself with you • And give you the right to be the same.
Don't Aim For Success
Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run - in the long-run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
Care Enough
"Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep people away, but to see who cares enough to tear those walls down."
What Is The Answer?
One of the biggest challenges of teaching is trying to get people to pay attention. We live in the ADD generation and almost everybody has at least a trace of it. What makes things impossible is the addiction people have to their contraptions. Today at mincha, I was standing next to a guy who was very busy with his blackberry, took a ten second break to beat his chest for his sins, then went right back to his silly toy, not realizing the incongruity of saying vidui right before and after doing something so inappropriate.
Teaching young people today is so difficult for they are so attached to their and toys and getting them detached is like trying to pull a tooth with tweezers. It ain't going nowhere. Many boys will take out their machines right in front of the Rebbi and type and click away. Others have the "derech eretz" to hide them under their desks.
Nothing is so irrelevent to them at that moment as dvar Hashem רח"ל. What is the answer?
I don't know but I suffer a great deal from the question.
A recent article.....
-------------------
Science of Us
As I [not me Elchonon but the author of this article...] write this, my phone is on my desk, but face-down and off to the side, which seems like enough to keep it from distracting me, especially since it's on vibrate. But this is probably not doing much good, according to new research from a trio of psychologists at Florida State University. The results of their study published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, suggest that you can be distracted simply by hearing or feeling your phone buzz — even if you don't pick it up.
The researchers had 212 undergrad study participants take a standard test to measure their ability to keep their attention focused on a particular task -- basically, they sat at computers as numbers and symbols flashed across their screens, and they were to hit a key when a number was shown, unless that number was three. Got that? It doesn't matter; it's kind of supposed to be complicated. They did the test twice; during the second round, experimenters sent calls or texts to about half of the participants' phones.
The study volunteers, by the way, hadn't been given any specific instructions regarding their phones — they hadn't been told to put them on silent or vibrate or to turn them off. But the researchers eliminated from their analysis anyone who picked up their phones when they rang, as they were interested only in those who were very earnestly trying to ignore their phones in order to concentrate on the task at hand. But in the end, the students whose phones made some kind of noise were more likely to make errors than the students whose phones had stayed completely silent.
And this, as Robinson Meyer points out over at The Atlantic, does not bode well for the promise of the Apple Watch, which, with a gentle buzz to the wrist, was supposed to free its users from the distraction of actually interacting with their phone. These findings, on the contrary, suggest that simply making space in your mind to acknowledge that something is happening on your phone is enough to divide your attention, thus increasing your likelihood of making errors. “Our results suggest that mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device," the study authors phrase it. “As mobile phones become integrated into more and more tasks, it may become increasingly difficult for people to set their phones aside and concentrate fully on the task at hand, whatever it may be.”
Teaching young people today is so difficult for they are so attached to their and toys and getting them detached is like trying to pull a tooth with tweezers. It ain't going nowhere. Many boys will take out their machines right in front of the Rebbi and type and click away. Others have the "derech eretz" to hide them under their desks.
Nothing is so irrelevent to them at that moment as dvar Hashem רח"ל. What is the answer?
I don't know but I suffer a great deal from the question.
A recent article.....
-------------------
Science of Us
As I [not me Elchonon but the author of this article...] write this, my phone is on my desk, but face-down and off to the side, which seems like enough to keep it from distracting me, especially since it's on vibrate. But this is probably not doing much good, according to new research from a trio of psychologists at Florida State University. The results of their study published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, suggest that you can be distracted simply by hearing or feeling your phone buzz — even if you don't pick it up.
The researchers had 212 undergrad study participants take a standard test to measure their ability to keep their attention focused on a particular task -- basically, they sat at computers as numbers and symbols flashed across their screens, and they were to hit a key when a number was shown, unless that number was three. Got that? It doesn't matter; it's kind of supposed to be complicated. They did the test twice; during the second round, experimenters sent calls or texts to about half of the participants' phones.
The study volunteers, by the way, hadn't been given any specific instructions regarding their phones — they hadn't been told to put them on silent or vibrate or to turn them off. But the researchers eliminated from their analysis anyone who picked up their phones when they rang, as they were interested only in those who were very earnestly trying to ignore their phones in order to concentrate on the task at hand. But in the end, the students whose phones made some kind of noise were more likely to make errors than the students whose phones had stayed completely silent.
And this, as Robinson Meyer points out over at The Atlantic, does not bode well for the promise of the Apple Watch, which, with a gentle buzz to the wrist, was supposed to free its users from the distraction of actually interacting with their phone. These findings, on the contrary, suggest that simply making space in your mind to acknowledge that something is happening on your phone is enough to divide your attention, thus increasing your likelihood of making errors. “Our results suggest that mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device," the study authors phrase it. “As mobile phones become integrated into more and more tasks, it may become increasingly difficult for people to set their phones aside and concentrate fully on the task at hand, whatever it may be.”
If You Don't Succeed....
By Tom Jacobs
We all know how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice. But that ancient punch line refers to honing one's technical ability, not developing greater creativity. According to conventional wisdom, you either are an imaginative thinker or you aren't, and if you don't have the gift, pushing yourself to come up with innovative ideas is simply a waste of time.
A new study suggests that's entirely wrong. Researchers report that people consistently underestimate how many creative ideas they can come up with if they continue to work on a problem, rather than giving up in the wake of mediocre initial results.
What's more, the study finds the most creative ideas tend to arise after many others have been considered and discarded. If you give up too soon, chances are you're not allowing your most promising notions to emerge.
"People consistently underestimate the value of persisting on creative tasks," Northwestern University researchers Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Adjusting beliefs about the value of persistence may promote creativity by reducing the possibility that people quit too early, leaving their best ideas undiscovered."
Lucas and Nordgren demonstrate this in a series of seven studies, the first of which featured 24 university students who were instructed to "generate as many original ideas for things to eat or drink at a Thanksgiving dinner" as they could muster. The students were notified that their answers would be rated for originality by outside judges, and those rated as above average would earn a raffle ticket into a $50 lottery.
Participants generated ideas for 10 minutes, then took a short break, after which they were instructed to spend another 10 minutes on the project. In between the two sessions, they were asked: "How many ideas do you think you will generate with the additional 10 minutes?"
The researchers underestimated the number of ideas they would come up with in that second session. What's more, the outside raters found "the ideas generated while persisting were significantly more original than ideas generated initially."
Similar results were found in the follow-up studies, most of which featured larger groups of people recruited online. But the most fascinating bit of research featured 45 people you'd think would know better—"professional comedy performers from SketchFest, the largest sketch comedy festival in the U.S."
The performers were provided with a set-up of a comedic scene and asked to create as many endings as they could. (Example: "Four people are laughing hysterically onstage. Two of them high five, and everyone stops laughing immediately and someone says....") Participants worked on the task for four minutes, predicted how many endings they would come up with during an additional four minutes, and then spent another four minutes working on the problem.
Remember, this is the sort of thing these people do for a living. And yet they, too, significantly underestimated the number of ideas they would come up with on their second attempt. "This speaks to the robustness of persistence undervaluation," the researchers write, "and demonstrates that it is not limited to novices in novel domains."
So why do we doubt ourselves? Basically, Lucas and Nordgren write, because coming up with creative ideas is hard. When a task feels effortful, they write, "people decrease their expectations about how well they will perform."
This is generally true of assignments that do not involve creativity. If you can't wrap your head around a relatively simple math problem, you're not going to do well at calculus, so it makes sense to leave that line of work to someone else.
"Creative thought is a trial-and-error process that generally produces a series of failed associations before a creative solution emerges."
But we mistakenly apply that rule of thumb to creative work, where it doesn't necessarily hold true.
"Creative thought is a trial-and-error process that generally produces a series of failed associations before a creative solution emerges," the researchers note. It's often difficult to know when you're nearing a breakthrough; that "Aha!" moment may occur immediately following a period of deep frustration.
But as several of the researchers' follow-up studies showed, we tend to interpret that feeling of difficulty incorrectly, assuming that it means we're simply no good, and might as well stop.
While researchers have proposed many ideas for boosting creativity in recent years, Lucas and Nordgren have come up with the simplest and, perhaps, most effective one of all: Just keep at it. As Thomas Edison said: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."
And Edison knew something about light bulbs going off in one's head.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
