Are you still human when you're under general anesthesia?

I'm getting knocked out for my outpatient surgery on Tuesday, and it occurs to me whether I'm a higher order creature while I'm unconscious. (My wife might argue that I'm never one.) I wonder because there's apparently no subjective time between when you go under and come back, including dreaming. If that's the case, and if it's our self-conscious nature that separates us from the rest of the kingdom, then am I technically (i.e., not simply physiologically) human during that time?

What do you think? Any good references you like around this topic?

Wish me luck!

What caught your attention? Some recent WOWs

What caught your attention? Some recent IdeaMatt Wows Two things. First I'll be recovering from some surgery next week, so I leave you with a list of ideas that activated the IdeaMatt WBC (Wow Brain Center). The last similar entry was Is Life Is A Series Of ... Wows? I hope you enjoy them. Second, in my continued battle with comment spammers (whose results are threatening to have my host give me the boot), I've signed up with Mollom. Please let me know if you have trouble commenting.

• Beautiful patterns?: "There are behavior patterns in success. If the process is as beautiful as the product you know it will succeed. A beautiful product is inherently based on a beautiful process" -- My Think, Try, Learn partner Liza



• *Is* there a pattern?: Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error, and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real. -- Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World



• Wait for it: The ability to delay gratification for better rewards in the future is a fundamental skill in success. -- Delayed gratification and the science of self-control



• What if you don't know what you're looking for?: "Their goals are kind of very, very imprecise. They don't plan anything in advance, they work sort of by trial and error. They do endless iterations of the same idea. They're constantly redoing and redoing and redoing in this kind of poking around and trying to find something, work toward some kind of distant, imprecise, and badly understood goal. They're searching, in other words, for what it is they want to create, and that searching can very often take an entire lifetime... groping towards something they can't quite define." -- "Age before beauty" by Malcom Gladwell



• What keeps you going?: "Performance is increasingly determined by factors that can't be overseen: Intelligent experimentation, ingenuity, interpersonal skills, resilience in the face of adversity, for instance." -- The Competitive Imperative of Learning, Amy C. Edmondson, HBR, July–August 2008



• Tasks and failure: "In psychologically safe environments, people are willing to offer up ideas, questions, concerns - they are even willing to fail - and when they do, they learn. In her studies, Dweck found that some children - those who early on were rewarded for effort and creativity more than for simply giving the right answer - see intelligence as something malleable that improves with attention and effort. Tasks are opportunities for learning; failure is just evidence they haven't mastered the task yet. Driven by curiosity about what will and will not work, they experiment. When things don't pan out, they don't give up or see themselves as inadequate. They pay attention to what went wrong and try something different next time. In adults, such a mind-set allows managers to strike the right tone of openness, humility, curiosity and humour in ways that encourage their teams to learn." -- ibid.



• Information: Too much or too little?: "Learn to feel comfortable ignoring information. I'd rather deal with a flood than a famine." -- Questions, Not Answers, Make Science the Ultimate Adventure



• Path of least resistance: "You want to make it easier to do something you want done and harder not to." -- The Easiest Way to Change People's Behavior



• I gotta' figure this out: "Science is a process of trying to figure out how the world works by making careful observations and trying to make sense of those observations." -- Project 2061 ~ AAAS "What people expect to observe often affects what they actually do observe. Strong beliefs about what should happen in particular circumstances can prevent them from detecting other results." -- ibid.



• What goes "pop?": "A single atom of uranium is strong enough to twitch a grain of sand." -- Tom Zoellner in Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World



• Interesting...: "Our brains have obviously been designed to find learning fun .. Brains that learnt well had more offspring, and so learning evolved to be rewarding. .. In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focuses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is." -- Learning Should Be Fun



• Your calendar: Up or down?: "The calendar should be used as a tactical, not a strategic, tool." -- Reader Greenman's comment on The World's Simplest Productivity Method, With Bonus Mini-Processing Examples



• Half > whole? "The more perfect I THINK it is, the less willing I'll be to let anyone change it." -- Why Doing Things Half Right Gives You the Best Results



• Let me think a sec...: "Note that we can switch this critical thinking unit on or off. As I noted earlier, we may switch it off entirely if dealing with religious or other transcendental matters. Sometimes, we deliberately switch it on: 'Hold it a minute, let me think this out,' we might say to ourselves when someone tries to extract money from us for an apparently worthy cause." -- Belief Engine

Life, Death, and Questions

If questions are all we have when we're brought into the world, what are we left with when we die? Answers, or more questions?

Help me celebrate a little success!

I invite you to celebrate a little success with me. My motivation here isn't to generate new business, but to follow one of the practices of our Think, Try, Learn philosophy: Celebrate the Data (language still in process). In this case the data are comments from folks who took recently my full-day workshop, "Improving Work Performance, Results and Productivity." These comments were especially tasty because I came into this work with very little background - no social skills (face in front of a computer screen for 15 years), no presentation skills, no experience creating training material, no marketing knowledge, and no industry network to tap into. Whew!

A bigger thought here is that if we fixate looking for the giant success or result, we risk skipping over those moments between action where reflection and gratitude can naturally take place. After all, what is life if not a sequence of these little triumphs? Related is the idea of overnight success takes years. This is standard how-to-enjoy-life wisdom, I know, but I think our high-speed onward-and-upward culture encourages us to move on too quickly. Here's a little example Liza shared: Think of graduation time, e.g., high school or college, and remember the first question that's asked of the graduate. No, not "How late did you celebrate last night?" but the more typical What's next? Perhaps this bias isn't surprising. After all, we in the U.S. live in a country whose economy is based on, and is measured by, growth. And growth, at least in this sense, is all about moving on.

I'm curious...

• How good are you at pausing between moments to relish?



• What methods do you use to do so?



• Finally, any recent good results you'd like to share?

A big thanks to my client. Cheers!

What are the instructor's greatest strengths?

• His dry humor add a great relief to the day.



• Provided excellent and useful information. Has a great presentation style, knowledgeable and entertaining. Great handouts. Very practical.



• Energy and passion, enjoys hearing feedback, likes to hear both positive and negative stances.
  



• Provided a lot examples.



• Teaching skills, topic organization, ability to transfer knowledge to practice.
  



• Able to keep the classes attention! Can find humor in organization!



• His in depth knowledge of the subject matter, and his ability to entertain our questions and provide practical solutions.



• Excellent instructor. Nice command of adult learning principles.



• Great presentation skills - kept the audience engaged at all times. Very practical tools that can be implemented immediately, with visible improvement almost instantaneously!

Did this course meet your objectives? Why or why not?

• This course far exceeded my objectives. The information was useful immediately - and it works.



• Exceeded. Have taken time management classes similar in the past and found them to be, frankly a waste of time. This was great information that could be applied right away in manageable pieces.



• Incredibly. I have an empty inbox!



• It did, In fact I have employed his ideas at home.



• This course actually exceeded my expectations. It is one of the most practical courses I've ever taken.
  



• It improved my organizational skills immediately following the first class and at the same time and productivity.

How would you evaluate the textbook and/or materials used in this course?

• Excellent



• Great



• Very good.



• great...



• Excellent



• very helpful and useful



• Very good



• Excellent. The instructor provided not only his slides, but talking points as well. This will be helpful when looking back at the materials at a future date, and also to support training for future employees who did not benefit from attending the class.

Would you recommend this course to colleagues or others? Why or why not?

• yes helps in all aspects of life ..very beneficial



• Absolutely. Very helpful, practical, and interesting.



• yes...particularly those who have difficulty with prioritization and project planning



• absolutely, already have



• Yes, particularly with this instructor. I have taken several similar courses that were boring and useless.



• Matt Cornell did an excellent job with somewhat dry material.



• Absolutely! The information is applicable to all, regardless of the type of work you do. Immediate rewards for implementing learnings - better organization, greater productivity and less stress.

How OK are you with what you did today?

I created my daily planning guide mainly because I needed it. I would get to the day's end feeling dissatisfied with what I accomplished, which was sad because I, like you, get a lot done. But unless I made it tangible, I would stay up late second-guessing myself. Questions like "Why didn't I get more done?" and "Did I make the best choices?" were common. This self-nagging moved me from celebration towards judgement.

Does this happen to you? If so, here's a simple productivity hack for you to try: For one week, work each day from a daily plan then bring it home at night for reflection. Review it an hour before going to bed, and then again before you turn out the light when you hit the sack. Don't worry if your plan fell to pieces during the day (let's be realistic - it happens). Just keep it up-to-date as well as possible.

After a week ask yourself: How did your self-image change? Were you generally pleased with how much you got done? What about your choices - did they seem mature to you in hindsight? Finally, how might this change your future during the day?

I'm curious...

• Have you tried anything like this before? How'd it go?


• What other methods do you use to stay positive about your accomplishments, i.e., to not look for the negative space?

Happy doing!