Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Surprise: How Embracing the Unpredictable and Engineering the Unexpected Leads to a Richer Life

In Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected Tania Luna and Leeann Renninger say that while most of us when faced with choices pick control and predictability, research shows that our best memories are full of surprise. Our aversion for surprise stems from the ambiguity of the present and the unpredictability of the future: “We see at lest two reasonable reasons that surprise aversion has always been a part of the human condition and is particularly rampant today: emotional intensification and vulnerability. [...] Unlike other emotions, surprise has no valence: it is inherently neither good nor bad. In this... Read more →

Tesla and How Change Happens

“Bring anger and pride under your feet, turn them into a ladder and climb higher… Don’t become its victim you need humility to climb to freedom.” [Rumi] Elon Musk talks about the importance of learning to learn. In a Reddit AMA, he says most people sell themselves short without even trying: One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. And in his... Read more →

Influencer Evaluation Questions

Mat Morrison tackles the question in a post about the different types of influence and evaluates different methods to think about measurement: The only problem is that no-one knows how the hell to value this stuff. There’s no clear, objective way to select talent. We’re all relying on personal relationships, gut feel, and our contacts at talent/artist management companies. It’s all a bit Ari Gold. [...] I’d strongly caution against adopting new metrics or KPIs for influencer marketing. Instead, try to judge influencer activity against your existing activity. Does adding incremental “influencer” activity increase efficiencies at an acceptable cost? Complement... Read more →

Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman: Do we Experience the World as it Really is ... or as we Need it to be?

We see the world as we are, or do we? Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman explores the relationship between our brain and our conscious experiences, such as how we experience the taste of chocolate or the feeling of velvet. This is not a recent mystery, Says Hoffman: In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but he didn't... Read more →

How Metaphors Structure the Way we Think and Talk

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. It is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects say Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon in Metaphors We Live By. Can metaphors be designed? Michael Erard in Aeon says they can. If you could ask Dante where he got the idea... Read more →

3 Books on Business Culture for your Summer Reading List

Margaret Wheatley said: “The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent – attributes found only in living systems.” Relationships activate information. The more access people have to one another, the greater the opportunities in the organization. Workplaces organized so that people get their work done while also maximizing the opportunity to have access to and collaborate with anyone also increase their ability... Read more →

“Buy in hope. Trust in fear.” and Other Useful Aphorisms

An aphorism (from the Greek apo (= from), and horos (= boundary)) is a poignant and memorable observation that petitions the reader to accept a universal truth. In The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism James Geary refers to aphorisms as “literature’s hand luggage.” Aphorisms are compact stories, honed precisely to reveal an entire world in highly economical form. In the book, Geary claims all good aphorisms share five essential components they’re: brief, definitive, philosophical, personal, and have a twist. He says: “aphorisms are not bits of uplifting text meant for passive consumption. They are challenging... Read more →

Dan Pink on Persuading with the Right Questions

We tend to think of persuasion or motivation as something that one person does to another. What social sciences tell us very clearly is that it is something people do for themselves. In this Big Think video, Dan Pink uses a simple example to explain a more universal concept. He says: Suppose that you're a parent and you have a daughter, say a teenage daughter, who's room is an absolute mess. It just looks like a bomb went off in there and you want your daughter to clean her room. You're trying to sell her on the idea of cleaning... Read more →

Play is More than Just Fun

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” [Plato] Stuart Brown says play is more than just fun. In Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul he says: “[...] work that is devoid of play is either boring or a grind. We can get pretty far through sheer willpower, and some people have prodigious powers of perfectionism, self-denial, and suffering. Ultimately, though, people cannot succeed in rising to the highest levels of their field if they don’t enjoy what they are doing, if they... Read more →

Natalie Portman: Accept your Lack of Knowledge, and Use it as Your Asset

Natalie Portman, 33, who attended Harvard College from 1999 to 2003 and earned an A.B. in psychology, reflected on her own experiences at the University and in her career as she battled self-doubt. Even 12 years after graduation, with an enviable body of work and a rich personal life, she confessed to still feeling pangs of insecurity: “Today I feel much like I did when I came to Harvard Yard as a freshman in 1999,” she said. “I felt like there had been some mistake, that I wasn’t smart enough to be in this company, and that every time I... Read more →