The Desktop Wallpaper Project. Week-End Reading: http://philippemora.us Also, find more on my pinterest boards. Have a great week-end, -Philippe. Read more on The Desktop Wallpaper Project: http://www.thefoxisblack.com/category/the-desktop-wallpaper-project/
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Start small—very small. It’s important because you can’t take on stress in a stressful way.
-Philippe [Thank You HBR | by Greg McKeown | 11.25.13] Bill Rielly had it all: a degree from West Point, an executive position at Microsoft, strong faith, a great family life, and plenty of money. He even got along well with his in-laws! So why did he have so much stress and anxiety that he could barely sleep at night? I have worked with Bill for several years now and we both believe his experience could be useful for other capable, driven individuals. At one time, no level of success seemed enough for Bill. He learned at West Point that the way to solve problems was to persevere through any pain. But this approach didn’t seem to work with reducing his stress. When he finished his second marathon a few minutes slower than his goal, he felt he had failed. So to make things “right” he ran another marathon just five weeks later. His body rejected this idea, and he finished an hour slower than before. Finally, his wife convinced him to figure out what was really driving his stress. He spent the next several years searching for ways to find more joy in the journey. In the process he found five tools. Each was ordinary enough, but together they proved life-changing and enabled his later success as an Apple executive. Breathing. He started small by taking three deep breaths each time he sat down at his desk. He found it helped him relax. After three breaths became a habit, he expanded to a few minutes a day. He found he was more patient, calmer, more in the moment. Now he does 30 minutes a day. It restores his perspective while enabling him to take a fresh look at a question or problem and come up with new solutions. Deep breathing exercises have been part of yoga practices for thousands of years, but recent research done at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital document the positive impact deep breathing has on your body’s ability to deal with stress. Meditating. When Bill first heard about meditation, he figured it was for hippies. But he was surprised to find meditators he recognized: Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Marc Benioff, and Russell Simmons among them. Encouraged, he started with a minute a day. His meditation consisted of “body scanning” which involved focusing his mind and energy on each section of the body from head to toe. Recent research at Harvard has shown meditating for as little as 8 weeks can actually increase the grey matter in the parts of the brain responsible for emotional regulation and learning. In other words, the meditators had increased their emotional control and brain power! Meaning is a mercurial concept.There is no one meaning of life, but rather, many sources of meaning that we all experience day to day, moment to moment, in the form of these connections. It’s also important to understand what meaning is not. Having a sense of meaning is not the same as feeling happy.
Millennials have been forced to reconsider what a successful life constitutes. By focusing on making a positive difference in the lives of others, rather than on more materialistic markers of success, they are setting themselves up for the meaningful life they yearn to have -Philippe [Thank You NY Times, by Emily Esfahani Smith and Jennifer L. Aaker | 11.30.13] FOR Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who wrote the best-selling book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the call to answer life’s ultimate question came early. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” But Frankl would have none of it. “Sir, if this is so,” he cried, jumping out of his chair, “then what can be the meaning of life?” The teenage Frankl made this statement nearly a hundred years ago — but he had more in common with today’s young people than we might assume. Today’s young adults born after 1980, known as Generation Y or the millennial generation, are the most educated generation in American history and, like the baby boomers, one of the largest. Yet since the Great Recession of 2008, they have been having a hard time. They are facing one of the worst job markets in decades. They are in debt. Many of them are unemployed. The income gap between old and young Americans is widening. To give you a sense of their lot, when you search “are millennials” in Google, the search options that come up include: “are millennials selfish,” “are millennials lazy,” and “are millennials narcissistic.” Do we have a lost generation on our hands? In our classes, among our peers, and through our research, we are seeing that millennials are not so much a lost generation as a generation in flux. Chastened by these tough economic times, today’s young adults have been forced to rethink success so that it’s less about material prosperity and more about something else. And what is that something else? Many researchers believe that millennials are focusing more on happiness than prior generations, and that the younger ones in that age cohort are doing so even more than the older ones who did not take the brunt of the recession. Rather than chasing the money, they appear to want a career that makes them happy — a job that combines the perks of Google with the flexibility of a start-up. Lots of people want to create another innovation hub like Silicon Valley. Here’s why they’ll all fail.
It’s understandable that so many places around the world want to re-create the economic engine of Silicon Valley, as MIT Technology Review wrote about in its recent business report (“The Next Silicon Valley”). But creating another Silicon Valley will be far harder than anyone imagines. That’s because the Silicon Valley ecosystem is now far more sophisticated than just startups. For one thing, it has a critical mass of serial acquirers, starting with Oracle, Cisco, HP, Intel, and Symantec, and joined in the past decade by companies like Google, Salesforce.com, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There is a sizable cluster of Silicon Valley companies with the balance sheets and foresight to make very large acquisitions. Second, these companies are used to disrupting things. Apple and Google have disrupted the mobile industry, Google and Facebook have disrupted the advertising industry. Apple has disrupted the music industry. Square, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, and dozens of others are beginning to siphon off billions of dollars in other industries. And finally, there is the trifecta of large, global, and weird: Silicon Valley has 400,000 workers broadly in the tech sector. If you count the supporting infrastructure of service providers, it might be twice that size. That workforce is global. Almost two-thirds of people working in Silicon Valley are “foreign workers.” People migrate to the Valley from all over the world. They bring a very diverse set of experiences on how industries in different countries work. And it’s weird. Some argue that Silicon Valley perhaps has higher rates of people with Asperger’s, people on the Autism spectrum disorder, and people with dyslexia, and that this in fact contributes to its enduring success. I admire and respect startup communities globally, and I’ve worked with many of them. They should keep doing what they’re doing. There is plenty of room to build new businesses—and if it’s a very high-growth disruptor and strategic, odds are a Silicon Valley company will buy it. There are now simply too many industry ecosystems in the Valley to let big opportunities like that pass them by. [Thank You MIT Technology Review | By Mark Zawacki 11.07.13] Mark Zawacki is the founder of 650 Labs, a Silicon Valley-based consulting firm. Read More: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/521486/why-the-next-silicon-valley-doesnt-really-exist/ |
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