INTROVERTDEAR.COM -- "You should talk more." This is a phrase uttered by extroverts to introverts more times than there are grains of sand on a beach. It's said as if the speaker is trying to conjure up feelings of courage yet unknown in his introverted subject. The intention here, as far as I can tell, is that the extroverted party sees introversion as a disease, something broken in a person that should be fixed....
[H/T ISMAILI INSTITUTIONS FOR CANADA] -- RABBISACKS.ORG -- From four years of research, Putnam discovered that if you are a regular church or synagogue attendee, you ... are also more likely to do voluntary work for a charity, give money to a homeless person ... frequent worshippers are also more active citizens ... They turn up, they get involved, they lead. And the margin of difference between them and secular Americans is large. ...
THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: In 1999, Hazar Imam said he watches other (non-Ismaili) communities to learn how they retain their heritage, identity, and traditions.] ARTICLE: Formal instruction in religion seems to have disappeared in many places, but the younger generation still has a soul and still craves the infinite. The young Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz recently published an article that quickly went viral. In ...
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK -- Richard Smith, who edited the British Medical Journal for more than a decade, said there was no evidence that peer review was a good method of detecting errors and claimed that "most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense".... Dr Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, wrote in an editorial that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue" ...
THEATLANTIC.COM -- The former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz stirred up quite a storm earlier this month with his New Republic essay "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League" -- a damning critique of the nation's most revered and wealthy educational institutions, and the flawed meritocracy they represent. He takes these arguments even further in his upcoming book, Excellent Sheep: The ...
[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- NYTIMES.COM -- Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses ...
HBR.ORG -- HARVARD -- When you're a leader -- no matter how long you've been in your role or how hard the journey was to get there -- you are merely overhead unless you're bringing out the best in your employees. Unfortunately, many leaders lose sight of this.... This type of top-down leadership is outdated, and, more importantly, counterproductive.... Power, as my ...
NYTIMES.COM -- ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Please also see "Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace," on media addiction, posted last week in "Wednesday Wisdom" -- Apple has introduced new software designed to help users restrict the time they spend on their phones -- just change your settings and your favorite app will lock you out after a certain number of hours. It's ...
THOUGHTCATALOG.COM -- Very few of us sit down to create art or work they hope will disappear. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a writer, a designer, a journalist, a producer, a filmmaker, a comedian, a blogger, an actor, a whatever, the whole point is to make something meaningful, something that lasts. To make something "imperishable," to achieve, as a translator once said of ...
INC.COM -- Here are some of the most successful introverts in history [including Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, JK Rowling, Warren Buffett, Meryl Streep, Barack Obama and Michael Jordan] and how you can emulate their success. There are a lot of misconceptions regarding introverts. Some look at those they consider to be introverted and toss out all kinds of hyperbole, such ...
NYTIMES.COM -- Every summer for many years now, my family has kept to our ritual. All 20 of us -- my siblings, my dad, our better halves, my nieces and nephews -- find a beach house big enough to fit the whole unruly clan. We journey to it from our different states and time zones. We tensely divvy up the bedrooms, trying ...
[H/T SAHIL BADRUDDIN] -- HBR.ORG -- HARVARD -- Imagine you are a fly on the wall in a corporate training center where a management team of 12 is participating in a session on executing strategy. The team is midway through attempting to solve a new, uncertain, and complex problem. The facilitators look on as at first the exercise follows its ...
[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- THEAMERICANSCHOLAR.ORG -- ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Very highly recommended! -- If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means ...
NATURE.COM -- Survey sheds light on the 'crisis' rocking research. More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory ...
THEATLANTIC.COM -- More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis. One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone--she's had an iPhone since she was 11--sounding as if she'd just woken up. We chatted about her ...
VANCOUVERSUN.COM -- This summer marks the anniversary of an extraordinary moment in U.S. history: the 1972 match in which American genius Bobby Fischer defeated Soviet wizard Boris Spassky for the chess championship of the world. The battle probably should have been just one more headline in an eventful three months that saw the Watergate burglary, the expulsion of the Soviet military from Egypt ...
USC.EDU -- UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA -- In the first evidence of a natural intervention triggering stem cell-based regeneration of an organ or system, a study in the June 5 issue of the Cell Stem Cell shows that cycles of prolonged fasting not only protect against immune system damage -- a major side effect of chemotherapy -- but also induce immune system ...
