- There’s More to Life Than Being Happy | The Atlantic
“‘It is the very pursuit of happiness,’ Frankl knew, ‘that thwarts happiness.’ This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness… ‘Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,’ the authors write”. - What are the three ways to train your brain to be happy? | Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Sounds like mumbo jumbo pseudo-science, but for people who find that they’re perpetually pessimistic/down/depressed/unhappy, consider doing this. - Life Skills: Ivanka Trump, Thich Nhat Hanh And Others On The Things Everyone Should Master By Age 40 | The Huffington Post
Some things you learn in school. Others, you learn from experience. But some things can neither be learnt at school nor should they solely be learnt from experience. This list has most of what you need to know. - Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss | The New York Times
“Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.‘The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,’ Mr. Bock says. ‘So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?'”
- 37 Conversation Rules for Gentlemen from 1875 | The Art of Manliness
Relevant for both women and men, even in this day and age.
Tag - life
A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.
— Neil Gaiman, Keynote Address 2012 (The University of the Arts)
I’ve been using Astrid, a to-do list manager, for a while but it’s gonna be shut down in a bit, no thanks to Yahoo!’s acquisition of the app.
I’ve been searching for a new task management app to use but I haven’t found anything as user-friendly and as intuitive as Astrid.
Seriously, Astrid is one of the best apps I’ve ever used, which is why I’m pretty pissed with Yahoo! for making such a stupid decision to take-over the app.
Why it was a stupid decision:
- Bad PR for Yahoo!.
Astrid users are pissed that Yahoo! has gone and killed a good thing (check out Astrid’s Facebook Page).
There’s quite a bit of unhappy murmuring going on, so the bad press means no one’s gonna be inclined to use Yahoo! products now.
- No one’s using Yahoo!.
Furthermore – and I’m calling this right here and now – Yahoo! is going and will go the way of the dinosaur.
Even if Yahoo! develops its own task-management app based on Astrid, no one’s going to use it because there isn’t any faith in Yahoo’s continuity and longevity.
- Customers won’t return.
Even if Yahoo! reverses its decision i.e. it keeps Astrid alive, no one is going to use it!
Everyone has migrated to other platforms in droves; even I’ve moved to Todoist, after a long and lengthy search for an Astrid replacement.
So users will need damn good reason to return – either that, or a miracle.
Anyway, if I had the skills, I’d build an app to manage my tasks the way Astrid has been doing so, and as a bonus, design it such that it can be synced with Google Calendar to help me organise my schedule.