Merce Cardus's Blog, page 121

Happiness Comes From Within And From Without, According To Psychologists

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

~SHAKESPEARE

How Can Humans Find Happiness?

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and teacher, presents different hypothesis:

1.- It comes from getting what you want but it’s short-lived;

2.- It comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to your desires;

3.- He concludes it comes from within and from without.

The Paradox of Abundance

He starts by saying that we are facing the paradox of abundance. There is an infin...

HUMP DAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing and Better Living: Read a Lot and Widely

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Quote of the day

Productive writers read a lot, and widely.

~RACHEL TOOR

THE MIND

How humans learn to communicate with their eyes, WSJ

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

When to book your plane ticket: a guide, The Atlantic

LIFESTYLE

The first site to exchange homes for vacations only for designers and visual artists (sorry, no writers), Behomm

BOOKS

How the Strand keeps going in the age of Amazon, Vulture

FOOD

Here’s what Thanksgiving would look like around the world,...

Prose Is First Of All An Attitude Of Mind

What aspect of the world do you want to disclose? What change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure?

In What is Literature?Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher, novelist and playwright, challenges us, the writers, to formulate some questions: ‘What is writing?’ ‘Why write?’ ‘For whom does one write?’ and ultimately ‘What is Literature?’

The writer deals with significations

The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social i...

TUESDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: People Want to Be Touched, Noticed, and Connected

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Quote of the day

You may know how to use fancy design tools, but if there isn’t that leap that leads to connection, it doesn’t matter….you’re not making art. We didn’t build stuff because we need more beautifully laid out menus. We did it because people want to be touched, noticed, and connected.

~SETH GODIN, author ofThe Dip

CREATIVITY

Does kindness kill creativity? (The Upside of Your Dark Side), The Creativity Post

VIDEO

Keep making a ruckus,...

Seeking Wisdom

And men should know that from nothing else but from the brain come joys, laughter and jests, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations. And by this… we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and we see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what sweet and what unsavory… and by the same organ we become mad and delirious and fears and terrors assail us.

~HIPPOCRATES

Seeking Wisdomis about how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking. In th...

MONDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: Be Generous and Brave

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Quote of the day:

No one is asking you to be original. We’re asking you to be generous and brave.

~SETH GODIN, author ofTales of the Revolution

CREATIVITY

Courage outweighs originality and and perfection in creativity, Creative Something

AGING

The real roots of midlife crisis, The Atlantic

PRODUCTIVITY

Business Travelers skip in-flight Wi-Fi to increase productivity and money, Forbes

Why Germans work fewer hours and produce more, Knote

TECHNOLOGY

Amazon is giv...

MONDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: We Are All Confident Idiots

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Quote of the day

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an appropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

~DAVID DUNNING

SOCIAL SCIENCES

We are all confident idiots, Pacific Standard

TECHNOLOGY

What’s to be done about iTunes? Tweak? Strip? Split?, MacWorld

Who’s winning the consumer cloud storage wars? Fortune

CITIES

The internet of eve...

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Quietpresents exciting discoveries on the dichotomy between introverts and extroverts. Many psychologists have been arguing over these two antagonistic concepts since Carl Jung stated the central building blocks of personality in Psychological Types

Susan Cain tells us that one out of every two or three people you know are introverts, and that some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to b...

WEEKEND LINKS ~Reads on Writing & Better Living: Share Your Wisdom

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Quote of the day

If wisdom were offered me on the one condition that I should keep it shut away and not divulge it to anyone, I should reject it. There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.

~Roman Philosopher SENECA.

MOTIVATION

7 pieces of wisdom that will change the way you work, 99u

PSYCHOLOGY

Great Vacation? Don’t brag to your friends, NYT

HEALTH

A glass of red wine worth an hour of exercise, The Indi...

Stephen King Picks His Favorite Books

Author J. Peder Zane asked scores of writers about their favorite novels for his 2007 book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. Stephen King picks the following books:

1.The Golden Argosy, The Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language,edited by Van Cartmell and Charles Grayson

2.Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

3.The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie.

4.McTeague, by Frank Norris.

5.Lord of the Fliesby William Golding.

6.Bleak House by Charles Dicken.

7.1984 , by...