The Principle of Affordable Loss, part of the business philosophy known as "effectuation." Instead of asking how likely some venture is to succeed, ask whether you could tolerate the consequences if it failed.

-Philippe.

[Thank You Fast Company | By Oliver Burkeman 11.13]
It sometimes feels as if the "happiness industry"--the self-help books, motivational speakers, corporate consultants and the rest--makes its money by being useless.

It's an ingenious business model, when you think about it: promise to help people think positive, then when your techniques fail, conclude that they weren't thinking positively enough--sending them back for more. Among the many myths and misconceptions dogging the subject of happiness, here are five of the worst, along with some suggestions for what to do instead.

IT'S CRUCIAL TO MAINTAIN A POSITIVE MINDSET

Good luck with that. Though it's the founding principle of the positive thinking movement, trying hard to focus on upbeat thoughts and emotions frequently backfires, generating stress. One culprit is the mind's susceptibility to "ironic effects": attempting not to think about certain negative things only renders them more salient. Research underlines the point: bereaved people who try not to feel grief take longer to recover; experimental subjects who were told to try not to feel sad about some distressing news felt worse. Much more fruitful is the Buddhist-inspired notion of "non-attachment:" learning to let negative emotions arise and pass, resisting the urge to stamp them out. In any case, it's often more productive to focus on behavior, not internal states. Next time you're feeling unmotivated about starting some daunting project, allow yourself to feel unmotivated--and at the same time, open up the file and begin. Doing meaningful work is challenging enough without the burdensome demand that you feel like doing it, too.

2. AMBITIOUS GOALS, RELENTLESSLY PURSUED, ARE THE KEY TO SUCCESS

Another self-help dogma that's being further undermined every year. A too-vigorous focus on goals, research suggests, can trigger a variety of unintended consequences: it can degrade performance, and encourage ethical corner-cutting. Moreover, it can badly distort an organization, or a life, by singling out one variable for maximization, regardless of how it's connected to all the others. (Consider the hypothetical entrepreneur who vows to become a millionaire by 35 and succeeds--but only at the cost of alienating his family and friends, and ruining his health.) Even the 1996 Mount Everest disaster has been blamed on the "overpursuit of goals.”

Deep down, what may explain our obsession with goals is the fear of uncertainty--the craving to know for sure how the future will turn out--whereas in fact it's only amid uncertainty that true creativity can occur. "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning," wrote the psychologist Erich Fromm. "Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." Besides, isn't there something dubious about a philosophy of happiness that locates it entirely in the future, which never seems to arrive?

Happy Thanksgiving! I am ‪#‎thankful‬ for my friends and family who make my life rich, funny, loving, worthy and awesome. Wherever you are today, thank you.

The best iPhone Photos of the Week. Week-End Reading: http://philippemora.us
Also, find more on my pinterest boards.
Have a great week-end, -Philippe.

For better or worse, the intelligence, values, and needs of whomever you interact with impact your success as much as your own resources. Throw in external circumstances that are beyond your control and it’s obvious that your destiny isn’t entirely in your hands. Something that the Snapchat founders will have to ponder pretty soon ….

-Philippe.

[Thank You HBR | by Michael Wheeler  11.18.13]
Bill Gates made a bad decision early in his career. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that some other people made even worse mistakes, we might not ever have heard of him.

Yes, Gates was and is brilliant, and he worked hard. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, attributes his success to the 10,000 hours he spent mastering computer programming at an early age. Like star athletes and musical prodigies, Gates invested serious time and effort to deepen his knowledge and hone his skills. Gladwell also acknowledges that Gates had the benefit of good education. He went to a private school with a computer lab long before such facilities were commonplace.

There is more to Gates’ success, however, than his talent, hard work, and education. It might be that we know his name only because of his amazing luck as a negotiator. The flip of the coin came up heads for him three times in a row at a critical point in his business life.

In 1980, Gates and a few fellow programmers had a small company in Seattle. IBM approached them about developing an operating system for personal computers that it was about to launch. Gates had never built an OS, however, so he referred them to Gary Kildall, a much better known programmer at Digital Research.

Luckily for Gates, though, those talks went poorly. Digital Research hesitated about signing a non-disclosure agreement. They later relented, but then wouldn’t budge in their demand for royalties instead of the $250,000 lump sum that IBM offered. It was only because of that deadlock that IBM came back to Gates.

There was a second twist after that. Both IBM and Gates knew of another operating system that had been developed by Seattle Computer Products. With IBM’s secret backing, Gates cheaply acquired the software — then called QDOS, an acronym for quick-and-dirty-operating system. Again luck came into play: SCP didn’t discover who was really behind the deal; otherwise the price could have been far higher. Microsoft then tweaked the program and rechristened it DOS: Disc Operating System.