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February 8 - February 8, 2024
As Philippe Incorporated had grown, Robert had become famous for dragging big-city businessmen from New Orleans and Atlanta out to ramshackle bars and forbidding them from leaving until the ribs were picked clean and bottles sucked dry. Then, while everyone nursed painful hangovers the next morning, Robert would convince them to sign deals worth millions. Bartenders always knew to fill his glass with club soda while serving the bigwigs cocktails. Robert hadn’t touched booze in years.
This sounds like it may not hold up in court
Stephanie A. liked this
The chief of neurology, Dr. Richard Strub, put Robert through a battery of tests. Vital signs were normal. Blood work showed nothing unusual. No indication of infection, diabetes, heart attack, or stroke.
Really? Because it sounds like a stroke
Dr. Strub administered an MRI, which allowed him to collect images from inside Robert’s cranium. Deep inside his skull, near the center of Robert’s head, he saw a small shadow, evidence that burst vessels had caused a tiny amount of blood to pool temporarily inside a part of Robert’s brain known as the striatum.
So...a stroke then
Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
You have not met my brain
This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. If you are struggling to answer a tedious stream of emails, decide to reply to one from the middle of your inbox. If you’re trying to start an assignment, write the conclusion first, or start by making the graphics, or do whatever’s most interesting to you. To find the motivation to confront an unpleasant employee, choose where the meeting is going to occur. To start the next sales
...more
And what if you have pathological demand avoidance
San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot
Took me a solid minute and a half to parse this. Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. No one says the geographic location first
Initially, there were long days of forced marches, endless sit-ups and push-ups, and tedious rifle drills. Instructors screamed at him constantly. (“We’ve got an image to uphold,” Krulak told me.)
lmao
A group of residents at a nursing home in Little Rock violated the institution’s rules by moving furniture around to personalize their bedrooms. Because wardrobes were attached to the walls, they used a crowbar—appropriated from a tool closet—to wrench their dressers free. In response, an administrator called a meeting and said there was no need to undertake independent redecorations; if the residents needed help, the staff would provide it. The residents informed the administrator that they didn’t want any assistance, didn’t need permission, and intended to continue doing whatever they damn
...more
God I love crotchety old people
The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.”
Usually that just makes the toddler in my brain throw a bigger tantrum
One night in the writers’ room, Beatts made a joke that they were lucky Hitler had killed six million Jews because, otherwise, no one would have found an apartment in New York City. “Marilyn Miller didn’t speak to me for two weeks,” she said. “Marilyn was completely uptight about jokes about Hitler.
Nah man, it just wasn't a funny joke
A transoceanic flight had once required as many as six pilots. By the time of Flight 447, thanks to automation, Air France needed only two people in the cockpit at any given time.
And what happened when those two pilots stopped paying attention because the computer did it all for them
Two seconds later, the plane plunged into the sea.
This is not an ideal thing to be reading a few days before a transatlantic flight
Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.
So...ADHD
In the cabin, panicked passengers rushed to their windows and pointed at the screens embedded in their seats, which, unfortunately, were broadcasting the view of the damaged wing from a camera mounted in the tail.
Further reasons those cameras are shit
Going forward, every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable and timely objectives, would also have to identify a stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it. Everyone, Welch said, had to partake in “bullet train thinking.”
This sounds like hell
Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.
Just makes me panic
There is an important caveat to the power of stretch goals, however. Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
Lol there's the panic. Also, how the fuck do you find the line between panic and motivation then?
Yes, he may have gotten drunk and had sex in the warehouse where they stored Chevy seats, but unlike many of his coworkers, he didn’t snort coke while attaching brake pads or smoke weed from bongs built from muffler parts. He hadn’t been a patron of the parking-lot RV where prostitutes offered services perfectly timed to union-mandated work breaks. Nor had Madrid ever deliberately sabotaged a vehicle like those who put empty whiskey bottles and loose screws behind door panels so they would bang around after the cars were sold.
...Bro.
The decentralization of decision making can make anyone into an expert—but if trust doesn’t exist, if employees at NUMMI don’t believe management is committed to them, if programmers at the FBI aren’t trusted to solve problems, if agents aren’t encouraged to follow a hunch without fear of admonishment, organizations lose access to the vast expertise we all carry within our heads. When people are allowed to stop the assembly line, redirect a huge software project, or follow an instinct, they take responsibility for making sure an enterprise will succeed.
We all have a natural proclivity to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors.
...Maybe *you* do
Inside the story trust, the conversation about Frozen was winding down. “It seems to me like there’s a few different ideas competing inside this movie,” Lasseter told Buck, the director. “We’ve got Elsa’s story, we’ve got Anna’s story, and we’ve got Prince Hans and Olaf the snowman. Each of those stories has great elements. There’s a lot of really good material here, but you need to make it into one narrative that connects with the audience. You need to find the movie’s core.”
Yeah, they failed at that
The opening is musical: half-danced, half-mimed. It is primarily a condensation of the growing rivalry between two teen-age gangs, THE JETS and THE SHARKS, each of which has its own prideful uniform. THE JETS—sideburned, long-haired—are vital, restless, sardonic; The SHARKS are Puerto Ricans.
LMAO WOW with the racism
“I was so happy,” Lee told me later. “So relieved. We had struggled for so long, and then we heard ‘Let It Go’ and, finally, it felt like we had broken through. We could see the movie. We had been carrying the pieces in our heads, but we needed someone to show us ourselves in the characters, to make them familiar. ‘Let It Go’ made Elsa feel like one of us.”
Right. So. Here's the thing. Let It Go is...actually, I hate it, but it's objectively a decent song for what it's trying to be. The problem is, THERE IS NO STORY AROUND IT. All these things y'all keep saying didn't actually make it into the final cut. There are fourteen different little quirks that might, maybe, at some point develop into a plot, but never actually do. The only reason the movie was such a success is that Disney threw so much insane marketing money at it that it basically couldn't fail. Also, four year olds aren't known for their discerning artistic taste.
General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: “Most recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep going.”
That’s why Marine Corps recruits ask each other “why”: “Why are you climbing this mountain?”, “Why are you missing the birth of your daughter?”, “Why are you cleaning a mess hall, or doing push-ups, or running onto a battlefield when there are safer, easier ways to live?” Forcing ourselves to explain why we are doing something helps us remember that this chore is a step along a longer path, and that by choosing to take that journey, we are getting closer to more meaningful objectives.
Yeah...see, I can't remember why I stood up even if my bladder is screaming at me. Joys of ADHD
Stretch: Find an aviation story (a narrowly averted crash?) that demonstrates mental models.
Yeah, I really wish you'd chosen something else for this one. Also, that's a stretch goal? I'd have assumed a stretch goal was way bigger than that. That's something I could sort out how to do in about ten seconds.
