Every now and then ‘the news’ produces an interesting story that flies dangerously close to the ground.  It therefore fails to register on our radars, which are primed to catch those important-sounding-but-personally-irrelevant ones instead.

I thought it might prove useful if I gathered some of these together at semi-random intervals for your perusal.  Their general theme is covered by the four main training areas of Sensei: Thinking, Learning, Communicating and Performing.

So here goes.

The secrets of changing the world looks at the personal qualities of the world’s greatest contemporary innovators: an indestructible will, passion beyond reason, outrageous optimism, a super-sized ego, and the rebel yell.  Oops, I only have one of these.  As for the rest, optimism can be learned.  The super-sized ego thing makes me flinch, even though I suspect it’s true.

Market trading: How hard can it be? Darn good question.  This article surprised me in that it doesn’t place skill with numbers at the top of the list.  Instead it talks about the importance of the right kind of psychology instead, one that looks to the long-term and evaluates risk dispassionately.  But above all, information is king.  There’s also a good glossary of ‘trader speak’.

Superheroes ‘poor role models for boys’ says some idiot psychological society.  Makes me sick.  But wait!  Turns out what they mean is contemporary superheroes in contrast to the heroes of yesteryear who had a strong sense of responsibility and ethics.  I’m half convinced.  Big difference between The Lone Ranger and The Punisher, true.  Frank Castle kills the bad guys instead of just knocking them out.  But which character is more realistic and nuanced?  Isn’t there value in this?

Add to this blog by sending in your almost-missed stories!

Image credit: rutlo.

The relationship between optimism, pessimism and the economic downturn is a fascinating one.  I’ve blogged before about how some American thinkers have tried to blame the recession on a surplus of optimism, untempered by the sense of realism that pessimism brings.  But it now seems that too much pessimism is bad for you too.  In fact, increasingly, the US is positively – or should that be negatively? – drowning in it.

A recent article in the business section of the Wall Street Journal warns that a polarised and pessimistic US is a big threat.  Hardly a major insight.  What is informative, however, are the reasons why US economic pessimism is on the increase.  Two reasons are suggested:

“The big question is why have Americans become so pessimistic? The most striking explanation is political polarisation. Many Americans at both ends of the spectrum are actually hoping for a double dip, since this will discredit the Obama administration … Another reason for US pessimism is that national prosperity is dependent on the world economy as never before, and acknowledging this is proving traumatic.”

National party politics and American stress due to globalisation – not much we can do about either of these, is there?  Go here to read the perspective of British journal Mark Mardell.  If you want to get a taste of how sharply divisive all this is, take a read at the hundreds of comments.

Or maybe not.  Reading the might make you, well, pessimistic…

Whatever, it seems that from the far side of the Atlantic, we’re not done with (the) depression yet.

Image credit: Beverly & Pack.

An Australian psychologist has claimed that feeling grumpy ‘is good for you’.  At least that’s the spin the popular media put on the findings of Professor Joe Forgas of the University of South Wales.  What the guy actually says is a little more nuanced.  His claim is that there are some advantages to negative moods, just as there are to positive moods.

For instance, negative moods foster these sort of effects:

• attentiveness
• careful thinking
• paying greater attention to the external world

Positive moods are valuable to promote:

• creativity
• flexibility
• co-operation

He actually claims that mildly negative mood may promote

“…a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style… Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages.”

This is interesting to me due to my recent rant on one Americans journalist’s attempt to blame the recession on optimism.  It seems she might at last have some scientific backing from this study.

My own viewpoint is to wonder whether there is a key distinction missing here between optimism as an emotion and optimism as a thinking strategy.  Forgas talks about mood, which is nothing other than a relatively long lasting emotional state.  Martin Seligman’s version of optimism is as a habit of mind that is learnable rather than an emotion.  In the jargon, optimism is an ‘explanatory style‘ or a way of explaining your successes and failures to yourself.  The opposite of this learned optimism is learned helplessness rather than pessimistic feelings.

It’s worth noting that Seligman recognises the limits of optimism by itself and prefers to advocate what he calls and flexible optimism.  John Braithwaite, an academic at the Australian National University, suggests that in modern society we undervalue hope because we wrongly think of it as a choice between hopefulness and naivete as opposed to scepticism and realism.  It depends how you define your terms.

So perhaps we can admit that a naive optimism, with its risk-taking abandon, unbalanced by realistic worst-case scenario planning and black-hat thinking, might have been a factor in the recession.  (My money is still on a mixture of natural economic cycles and the emotion of greed as the prime causes.)

It hardly follows from this at all optimism is bad, or that optimism has no part in getting ourselves out of recession!

True, optimism doesn’t in itself change reality.  But it does help your resilience to reality, and drive your motivation to go on and change it.  Pessimism asks ‘why?’  Optimism asks ‘how?’  There’s a worldview of difference between the two.

Image credit: dabert.

The whole ‘nature versus nurture’ debate is increasingly fought out in the field of education.  In an interesting article called Nature, nurture and exam results, Mike Baker looks at the current state of play.  Which is, that a child’s family background largely dictates their potential for academic success.

According to Professor Chris Woodhead – former controversial Chief Inspector of Schools in England – genetic inheritance plays the decisive factor.  He has a swathe of anecdotal evidence on his side.

Yet others, coming at matters form a more policy-making agenda, want to play up the part of social class as a determinant.

However kids start off, “subsequent educational success is more likely to go to those with affluent, middle-class parents” says the article.  Those nefarious suburbanites are at it again!

I have only a few points to make.

The first is that intelligence is not the same as academic skill.

The article, and most of those in the education sector, seem to equate the two.  One would think that they had never heard of Multiple Intelligence Theory, probably the best theory in the world (in a Carlsbergian sense).  Traditional academic skill in words and numbers is one way of expressing intelligence.  There are others – bodily movement, personal interactions, attunement with nature, capacity for self-reflection, spatial awareness, and musical appreciation.

So the question is not whether you are intelligent, but in what way you express it.  The education system in the UK has still not faced up to this liberating truth.

In my opinion, monkeys can be taught to pass exams.  It’s not the big deal we were told it was.

My other point is that motivation is more important than raw ability when it comes to life success.

The world seems increasingly full of academically smart people (i.e. university graduates) who aren’t making much of their lives.  They don’t know what they want, they aren’t interested in self-improvement, they work for money and nothing more.  The averagely bright person with enthusiasm will always ace the smart person who can’t be bothered trying or who fades out at the first setback.

And the twist is, this very ability to motivate yourself is in itself a form of intelligence!  (Emotional intelligence writers call motivation “the master aptitude” for a good reason.)  So perhaps that supposedly ‘average but optimistic’ kid isn’t so average after all.

The great thing is that you can learn this optimism. You can grow your own self-motivation skills.  You can teach yourself to be resilient when the chips seem down.

You can become gifted.

Image credit: Werwin15.

Is the glass half empty of half full?  Is the current recession an opportunity or a catastrophe?  Depends on your perspective.  And for those with an optimistic spirit, the Recession sparks new business ideas.  What do Disney, McDonalds, Burger King, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, and Microsoft have in common?

They all started during a recession or depression, that’s what!

No state handouts needed.  No government intervention.  No union whinging.  Just an entrepreneurial mindset and a good idea.

According to business sources,

“The recession is causing a spike in interest in setting up small businesses. Newly jobless people, flush with redundancy money, are flooding to workshops on how to do it.”

Hold on.  Isn’t getting made redundant a bad thing?  Doesn’t it leave you on the heap, bereft of self-esteem and with a pointless future?  Depends on what sort of person you are.  Here’s what you need (according to the article).

Catherine’s story is a lesson to the enthusiastic people at the workshop in Stratford.  But so is her passion for the business: the walls are covered with fairies and princesses which she painted herself, there are shelves of Glitterbugz beauty products which she makes the labels for, and she ends the interview to start a face-painting session with 15 kids who have arrived for a sixth birthday party.  She says she works 70 to 80-hour weeks.  “I’m very lucky to do something I love doing,” she says. “The recession won’t last forever. I’m not an economist, but things will get better.”

Enthusiasm.  Passion.  Hard work.  Optimism.

To which I would also add self-reliance, or what psychologists now call self-efficacy.  The more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded that these qualities are the heart of the entrepreneurial adventure.

Money is its gravy, not its meat.