Archive - Sep 2008

I had the pleasure of speaking with my new friend Matthew Scott, who puts on the men@pause seminars (I love the name :-) My episode is up, and you can listen to it at Productivity Expert for Entrepreneurs. While you're there, you might want to browse through some of the other interviews, including ones with Jason Fried of 37signals, and Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art. Thanks, Matthew!

In the recent Harvard Business Review article "The Science of Thinking Smarter" [1], molecular biologist John Medina discussed stress implications of neuroscience research, especially the impact on learning. When I read that stressed people do poorly at math, the NASA engineer in me asked what productivity insights we could learn from the those four familiar operations. For a bit of variety, I'm keeping this short (!), so please contribute your insights. Happy calculating!

Addition

"Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." -- Arthur Conan Doyle

(Sidebar: I know I'm a late adopter, but I've been playing with Twitter. If you want to join in my experiment, I'm matthewcornell.)

I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis, and the first page sounds like a how-to for becoming more effective. From "The Inner Game of Tennis" is Genius:

The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own surprising ways to surpass its own limits again and again.