Merce Cardus's Blog, page 94
June 2, 2015
From Authentic Happiness To Well-being
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While certainly a part of well-being, happiness alone doesn’t give life meaning. In Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
,Seligman now asks, What is it that enables you to cultivate your talents, to build deep, lasting relationships with others, to feel pleasure, and to contribute meaningfully to the world?
Authentic happiness theory versus Well-being theory
I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was ha...
Before I Die, I Want To…
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In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turnedanabandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: “Before I die I want to ___.” Her neighbors’ answers — surprising, poignant, funny — became an unexpected mirror for the community. (What’s your answer?) She is the author of Before I Die.
In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me. And her death was sudden...
TUESDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Creating Space
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Quote of the dayWhether or not it’s convenient or efficient, creativity is healthy and necessary. Some kind of creativity has been hard-wired into all of us. It’s aching to come out of you.
~ED CYZEWSKI, author ofCreating Space: The Case for Everyday Creativity
WRITING & SCREENWRITING
4 Tips to write a better character point, The Write Practice| TweetA portrait is a description of a person or a group of people.From Cheryl Strayed, however, I...
June 1, 2015
Gladwell On The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
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Based on his in-depth research spanning a number of different fields, indus
tries, and scholarly disciplines, Gladwell identifies three key factors that each play in role in determining whether a particular trend will “tip” into wide-scale popularity. Gladwell’s discussion and illustration of the concepts of the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context comprise the majority ofThe Tipping Point.
What’s the tipping point?
The ti...
Stephen Hawking’s Big Ideas
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It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Itsa crazy world out there. Be curious.
~STEPHEN HAWKING, author ofThe Universe in a Nutshell
We all know that Stephen Hawking has worked on some of the biggest questions about our cosmos. But what are those ideas?
What’s at the centre of a black hole?
Black holes are incredibly dense objects...
MONDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
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Quote of the dayFrom a young age, economically privileged children are socialized into interactional styles emphasizing independence, self-expression, agency, and entitlement. Just as affluent parents are more likely to advocate for placing their kids into classes with good teachers or to dispute poor treatment of a child, affluent children similarly learn to act on the social world to get the resources they need.
~LAUREN A. RIVERA, author ofPedig...
May 29, 2015
10+ 1 Keys to Creativity, Ignoring Everyone
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InIgnore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
, Hugh MacLeodexpands on his sharpest insights, wittiest cartoons, and most useful advice. Here are 10 + 1 keys to creativity:
1. Ignore everybody.
The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the biz card format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest. i.e. cutey-pie...
Collecting Half a Million Secrets
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Secrets can take many forms — they can be shocking, or silly, or soulful.
Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret.com and author ofPostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
, shares some of the half-million secrets that strangers have mailed him on postcards.
His name is Frank, and he collects secrets
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. They were blank on o...
WEEKEND LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Everyday Etiquette
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Quote of the dayThe power of a thank-you note is more vital than most of us realize. Thank-you notes are so important because they hit all the senses. You see them, you hold them and feel them, and when you read them, it’s emotional.
~PATRICIA ROSSI, author ofEveryday Etiquette: How to Navigate 101 Common and Uncommon Social Situations
WRITING & SCREENWRITING
Steps to stop fearing writing research, Positive Writer | TweetFinding out the facts of...
May 28, 2015
The Four Things That Matter Most
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The Four Things That Matter Most 
reminds us how we can honor each relationship every day.
‘Please forgive me’, ‘I forgive you’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I love you’ are four simple phrases with enormous power, which are important to say to people we care about, even if we might think that they are already implicitly understood. We can often hang on to grudges unconsciously, creating distance and eroding joy in our relationships, without realising what we...
