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No professional guitar player has ever called me to do an interview. Until now. It’s a sign of how desperate COVID has made people for entertainment. Mike Godette is a NYC guitar player who also has a cool video podcast where he interviews people who have “day gigs” but who play music on the side. After seeing my cameo in the movie “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead,” he learned I played saxophone in a rock cover band. His video podcasts dish out a diet of great guitar player interviews, and he must have thought a sucky sax player would give it some spice. He’s an interesting interviewer, and he posted his podcast this week. After listening to it, I realized he pulled a lot of crazy stories out of me I wouldn’t have otherwise told. Like . . .
 You might have zero interest in eighth-notes, Led Zeppelin, or playing funk music on an Amsterdam canal boat bar, but you probably do have an interest in re-creation – in feeling happier. Webster's definition of the word “recreation” says “The things you do to screw around when you’re not working.” Instead, it should be hyphenated it as “re-creation:” Things you do to re-create yourself so you have bounce in your step the next day. Endless types of hobbies can re-create: Gardening, DIY, crafts, photography, even sucking on the saxophone. COVID gives us that chance to recapture these – or find new ones: time travel, taxidermy, witchcraft . . . whatever. Unfortunately, most of what people do doesn’t re-create them. Look at most kids. They spend endless free time texting, tic-tocking, surfing, or watching TV. Granted, these things are amusing and effortless ways to kill time until they can fall asleep again, but they don’t re-create. They’re no bouncier the next day when they wake up. We have surprising amounts of time to re-create hobbies that re-create us. What did you once like to do that you could dust off and try again? It’s easy to think we don’t have the time and energy to do it again or to pick up something new. What’s funny is that once you start messing with a hobby, all of this energy magically reappears. After doing this interview a couple weeks ago, I committed to myself to play my sax at least 20 minutes every night. Now my family has to drag me to bed. It's the only way they can prevent hearing loss and get some sleep. *********************************** What’s a new hobby you’d like to try or an old one you’d like to dust off for re-creation? My dear Dad passed away on June 2, 2020. He was one of the greatest generation -- selfless, modest, team-focused, honest, hard-working, and tireless. He had 91 years of great health and good humor, followed by a couple stinker years due to him breaking his hip the day after my Mom died. Still had his sense of humor to the end.  I keep thinking that his last 18 months would have been easier had we moved him in to live with us. My wife wanted to, but I thought there were too many uncertainties. Instead, we moved him into assisted living about a mile from my brother, who could then see him most days, and where we would travel the 10 hours down to see him every couple months. Thinking back, if he had moved in with us, he might not have lived longer, but I think he would have been happier. When a heroic, single-surviving parent can no longer live by themselves, the decision about where they should go deserves a lot of heartfelt thought. Perhaps more than I gave it. * * * John Charles Wansink, 93, of Sioux City, Iowa, died on June 2, 2020, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. John was born October 28, 1926, in Sanborn, Iowa, to Henry and Clara Wansink. After graduating from Sioux City East High School, he studied business at Morningside College, where he also lettered in football and basketball. He had a number of unusual experiences in his life, including working as a cowboy in Montana and playing basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters. After running his own business in his 20s, he went on to work on the production line at Metz Baking Company for over 30 years. John married Naomi Fullerton on March 21, 1948. With their two sons, Brian, of Ithaca, New York, and Craig, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, for years they enjoyed trips to Montana, summer family camps, and Friday night Jeopardy games, complete with popcorn and M&Ms. John had an active mind and loved crossword puzzles, reading, and movies. He was a lifelong athlete, playing golf into his late 80s. Along with Naomi, he enjoyed both square dancing and volunteering at nonprofit agencies for over 20 years after he retired. For over 50 years, he was an active member of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sioux City. For the last two years of his life, he was a proud member of Second Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia. Those left to honor his memory include his sons, Craig (Nancy) and Brian (Jennifer), and five grandchildren, Katrina, Teddy, Audrey, Valerie, and Lieve. John will be remembered as a good, decent, fair, thoughtful, and hard-working man. He was deeply loved. He will be deeply missed. Memories of him will be deeply treasured. Condolences may be expressed at www.candfservices.com.  This is a COVID adaption of a post from last year. It's about how to be productive, and given some of the oscillation in motivation that has been happening with homebound workers, it has a new relevance.
On a late afternoon about 20 years ago, I stepped into a slow elevator with my college’s most productive, famous, and taciturn senior professor. After 10 seconds of silence, I asked, “Did you publish anything yet today?” He stared at me for about 4 seconds and said, “The day’s not over.” Cool . . . very Clint Eastwood-like. Most of us have some super-productive days and we have some bad days, but most lie in-between. If we could figure out what leads to great days, we might be able to trigger more of them in our life. Think of the most recent “great day” you had. What made it great, and how did it start? For about 20 years, every time somebody told me they had a great day, I’d ask “What made it great? How did it start out? About 50% of the time its greatness had to do with an external “good news” event like something great happening at work, great news from their kids or spouse, a nice surprise, or nice call or email from a grateful person or an old friend. The other 50% of the time, the reason for “greatness” was more “internal.” They had a super productive day, they finished a project or a bunch of errands, or they had a breakthrough solution to a problem or something they should do. External successes are easy to celebrate with our friends. Internal successes are more unpredictable. What made today a great day and what sabotaged yesterday? When people had great days, one reoccurring feature was that they started off great. There was no delay between when they got out of bed and when they Unleashed the Greatness. People said things like, “I just got started and seemed to get everything done,” or “I finished up this one thing and then just kept going.” One of the most productive authors I've known said that got up six days a week at 6:30 and wrote from 7:00 to 9:00 without interruption. Then he kissed his wife good-bye and drove into school and worked there. When I asked how long he had done that he said, “Forever.” About a year ago, I started toying with the idea that "Your first two hours set the tone for the whole day." Think of your last mediocre day. Did it start out mediocre? That would also be consistent with this notion. We can’t trigger every day to be great, but maybe we have more control than we think. If we focus on making our first two hours great, it might set the tone for the rest of the day. What we need to decide is what we can we do in those first two hours after waking that would trigger an amazing day and what would sabotage it and make it mediocre. For me, it seems writing, exercise, prayer, or meditation are the good triggers, and it seems answering emails, reading the news, or surfing are the saboteurs. Here’s to you having lots of amazing days.  Here's a repost from my "Academics Only" blog. It might also be of interest here. In 2018, six of my research articles in JAMA-related journals were retracted. These retractions offer some useful lessons to scholars, and they also offer some useful next steps to those who want to publish eating behavior research in medical journals or in the social sciences. These six different papers offer some topic-related roadmaps that could be useful. First, they were originally of interest to journals in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) network, and they would probably be of interest to other journals in medicine, behavioral economics, marketing, nutrition, psychology, health, and consumer behavior. Second, they each show what a finished paper might look like. They show the positioning, relevant background research, methodological approach, and relevance to clinical practice or to everyday life. I think all of these topics are interesting and have every-day importance. This document provides a two-page template for each one that shows 1) An overview why it was done, 2) the abstract (or a summary if there was no abstract), 3) the reason it was retracted, 4) how it could be done differently, and 5) promising new research opportunities on the topic. Making specific hypotheses and testing them followed by open science principles will be the best next way forward on these topics.[1] Academia can be a tremendously rewarding career both you and for the people who benefit from you research. Best wishes in moving topics like these forward, and best wishes on a great career. [1] A useful description of these principles can be found at Klein, O., Hardwicke, T. E., Aust, F., Breuer, J., Danielsson, H., Hofelich Mohr, Al, …. Frank, M. C. (2018). A Practical guide for transparency in psychological science. Collabra: Psychology, 4 (1), 20. 
(This is one version of the blog I wrote as the Executive Director of Research for VitalSmarts).  “Woo-hoo! I get to work from home!”
Before the coronavirus, a lot of companies were hesitant to let people work from home. “Working from home” rhymes too closely with “Shirking from home.” It includes surfing, posting, grazing, running errands, crushing Candy Crush, calling your brother “just because,” rereading online stories about the coronavirus, updating your LinkedIn resume, spacing out on conference calls, and telling your boss, “I’m still waiting for Bob to get it to me so I can work on it.” But what if working from home looked different? What if working from home made you 13% more productive, made you feel more satisfied with your job, and made you half as likely to quit? This is exactly what was found in a 2015 Stanford study of a large Chinese travel firm called CTrip. Researchers randomly split 249 call center employees from Shanghai into two groups. For nine months, half of them kept working at their desks as usual, and the other half were told to work from home four days a week (one day a week they came into the office). Then the researchers measured everything from the number of calls they made, to job satisfaction, to breaks taken, to sick days… everything but Facebook Likes and Candy Crush scores. One conclusion: Working from home can make people more productive. But wait. Before you try to sell the conference table on eBay, there’s a huge caveat from this study (aside from country and culture): These workers had very specific measures of productivity—phone calls per minute and the amount of time spent on the phone. Whereas those in customer service, copywriting, or design might have very specific measures of productivity (dollars, calls, pages, or projects), other workers might have to deal with more collaboration and face-to-face meetings. For them, working at home can be challenging. It requires accountability, better work habits, and a general ability to get things done when there are roaring distractions all around. Since working at home requires a discipline muscle that many of us need to strengthen, it’s easy to let our first days or weeks at home be structured by meetings and not our mission. That is, we might view the phone or web meetings on our calendar as the “Big rocks” of our day instead of seeing our biggest projects as our biggest rocks. After you conduct a weekly review of the projects that are most pressing, these suggestions might help. • Identify the three biggest project tasks you need to complete each day (not including meetings). • Make a promise to complete these tasks and deliver results to another person (boss or coworker). • Check in for a follow-up after making the delivery. This is the productivity side of working at home. But there’s another side to working at home that has been widely ignored. It’s the human side. There’s a story of three people who find themselves stranded on an uncharted desert island. Sort of like Gilligan’s Island, but without commercials. After years of learning how to smoothly work together to survive, the trio one day finds a bottle with a genie in it. The genie grants each person a wish. The first wishes to be back home in California, and—poof—she’s gone. The second wishes to be reunited with his family in Texas, and—poof—he’s gone. The third person looks around the empty island and says to the genie, “You know, I miss my two friends. I wish they were back.” Here’s the rest of the story about the Chinese workers. After nine months of working at home, the study was over. The workers were told they could continue working from home four days a week or they could come back and grind it out in-office for the full five. Slightly more than half of these workers wanted to come back and work in the office. They reported they were too “lonely.” There’s a human side to working at home. We can use VitalSmarts tools to strengthen our communication muscle and our productivity muscle, but we might still feel like something is missing. Leaning in (versus spacing out) during meetings might help, and checking in or following up after finishing a project piece might help. But this human solution will need some personal thought and personal tailoring for each of us. If we’re feeling restless after 4 days at home, the human side is where we might want to look. And maybe call your brother “just because.” (This is the one version of the blog I wrote as the Executive Director of Research for VitalSmarts).  Congratulations. You’ve just been asked to assemble the smartest team in your organization. This will be the Einstein, Ninja, Go-To, Delta Team that will have to solve the toughest problems you face: How to increase growth by 70%, how to cut costs by 25%, how to rebrand the company, and what to do if the CEO’s spouse repeatedly staggers up to monopolize the Christmas Party Karaoke machine again next year.
Who would you choose to be on your Brainiac Committee? You could line everybody up by their IQ scores and pick the ones at the head of the line, or you could pick people who have a cool British-sounding accent, or you could pick that one person on the second floor who was a runner-up nominee for the Supreme Court. But according to an article in the journal Science, if you really want the smartest team that was going to make the best decisions, you should use a different approach. The article dives deep into collective intelligence. The authors analyzed 699 people who were working in teams of two or five to solve a wide range of problems like brainstorming, moral judgements, and negotiation. As it turned out, two things differentiated the teams that made the smartest decisions from the rest. First, teams where one or two people did most of the talking made less intelligent decisions than groups where everyone spoke up. Second, teams with higher percentages of females made better, more effective decisions. They were more sensitive about getting input from everyone; they were better able to reach compromises, and they were generally more effective. This is consistent with an earlier 2006 study by Wellesley professor, Sumur Erkut, who showed that having two or more women on a corporate board brings “a collaborative leadership style that benefits boardroom dynamics by increasing listening, social support, and win-win problem solving.” The research shows women are less polarizing, more collaborative, and more likely to reach a solution that makes everyone happy. The New York Times columnist, Bruce Feiler, recounts a story of having dinner with a Google executive who said, they always make sure there is more than one woman at a meeting. Their decision was based on this study. Turns out “diversity” isn’t just a fair word, it’s also a smart word. The high-performing teams in the Science study tended to weigh options, encourage everyone to speak up, and to compromise better. These may be skills that come more naturally to some people than others, but they are all skills we can learn. In fact, they’re skills we’ve been teaching for 30 years. And yet, we just can’t assume they come naturally to everyone. Find ways to enable your people to learn the dialogue skills the enable everyone around the table—regardless of power, position, or authority—to speak up. And look carefully at the makeup of your teams. Be sure they are diverse enough, in gender and experience, to create a dynamic where thoughtful and smart decisions are made. If you get it right, that diverse, dialogue-armed team of yours might also be able to solve that Christmas Party Karaoke problem. More karaoke, yes. More eggnog, no.  There are 100 things on your mental To-Do list. Daily duties (like email and planning dinner) and pre-scheduled stuff (like meetings and appointments). But what remains are the big things that are easy to put off because they don’t have hard deadlines – things starting a new initiative, exploring a great idea for a side hustle, finishing a pet project, or taking the first step to follow that crazy dream you’ve had for 10 years. These are the things that could have the biggest impact on you, come the end of the year. But these projects are also the easiest things to put off or to only push ahead 1 inch each week. If you push 100 projects ahead 1 inch each week, you’ve made 100 inches of progress at the end of the week, but your desk is still full and you’re feeling frustratingly resigned to always be behind. This is an incremental approach. A different approach would be to push a 50-inch project ahead until it is finished and falls off the desk; then you could push a 40-inch project ahead until it falls off; and then you can spend the last of your time and energy pushing a small 10-inch project off your desk. This is the “push-it-off-the-desk” approach. Both approaches take 100-inches of work. However, the “push-it-off-the-desk” approach changes how you think and feel. You still have 97 things left to do, but you can see you made tangible progress. For about 12 years, I tried a number of different systems to do this – to finish up what was most important for the week. Each of them eventually ended up being too complicated or too constraining for me to stick with. Eventually I stopped looking for a magic system. Instead, at the end of every week, I simply listed the projects or project pieces I was most grateful to have totally finished. Super simple. It kept me focused on finishing things, and it gave me a specific direction for next week (the next things to finish). It’s since evolved into something I call a “ 3-3-3 Weekly Recap.” Here’s how a 3-3-3 Weekly Recap works. Every Friday I write down the 3 biggest things I finished that week (“Done”), the 3 things I want to finish next week (“Doing”), and 3 things I’m waiting for (“Waiting for”). This ends up being a record of what I did that week, a plan for what to focus on next week, and a reminder of what I need to follow up on. It helps keep me accountable to myself, and it keeps me focused on finishing 3 big things instead of 100 little things. Here’s an example of one that’s been scribbled in a notebook at the end of last week:  Even though you’d be writing this just for yourself, it might improve your game. It focuses you for the week, it gives you a plan for next week, and it prompts you to follow-up on things you kind of forgot you were waiting for.
Sometimes I do it in a notebook and sometimes I type it and send it to myself as an email. It doesn’t matter the form it’s in or if you ever look back at it (I don’t), it still works. I’ve shared this with people in academia, business, and government. Although it works for most people who try it, it works best for academics who manage their own time and for managers who are supervising others. They say it helps to keep the focus on moving forward instead of either simply drifting through the details of the day or being thrown off course by a new gust of wind. I’ve also used this with others who I work with, and we usually use it as a starting point for our 1-on-1 weekly meetings. They usually email it to me and it’s a useful check-in. It helps them develop a “Finish it up” mentality, instead of the “Polish this until its perfect” mentality. Also, you can give feedback on what they’re choosing to focus on, and you might be able to speed up what they might be waiting for (especially if its something on your desk). Good luck in pushing 3 To-Dos off your desk and getting things done. I hope you find this helps. [Note: This post was originally done for my "Academics Only" blog, but I also think it's important enough to post here, even though it's a departure from my usual posts on this page.] In 2017-19, about 18 of my research articles were retracted. These retractions offer some useful lessons to scholars, and they also offer some useful next steps to those who want to publish in the social sciences. Two of these steps include 1) Choose a publishable topic, and 2) have a rough mental roadmap of what the finished paper might look. That is, what’s the positioning, the study, and the possible contribution. The topics I’ve described here offer one set of roadmaps that could be useful. First, they were of interest to journals in medicine, behavioral economics, marketing, nutrition, psychology, health, and consumer behavior. Second, they each show what a finished paper might look like. They show the positioning, relevant background research, methodological tips, and key implications. I find all of these topics super interesting and of practical importance. This document provides a two-page template for each one that shows 1) An overview why it was done, 2) the abstract (or a summary if there was no abstract), 3) the reason it was retracted, 4) how it could be done differently, and 5) promising new research opportunities on the topic.
In this document, I lay out an estimate of how much effort it might take to do studies on these topics, and I’ve also estimated what I think the practical impact each research project might have. These are my own subjective estimates, but you might find them a useful starting point if you’re looking for a tie-breaker between two different topics. I would strongly encourage anyone who’s interested in publishing in these areas to closely follow principles of open science, from preregistration of hypotheses and analytic strategies to open materials and open data. Making specific hypotheses and testing them by following open science principles will be the best next way forward. A good introduction to these principles, along with hands-on advice, is this: Klein, O., Hardwicke, T. E., Aust, F., Breuer, J., Danielsson, H., Hofelich Mohr, A., … Frank, M. C. (2018). A practical guide for transparency in psychological science. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 20. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.158 Academia can be a tremendously rewarding career both you and for the people who benefit from you research. Best wishes in moving topics like these forward, and best wishes on a great career.   No one has a cousin named Tarzan. No one has a best friend named Goat Boy. That’s because we’re not raised by apes or goats, but we're all raised, socialized, and helped by other people.
Some of these people are obvious: parents, close relatives, coaches, and some teachers. But a lot of others aren’t nearly so obvious. They might be that person who recommended we go to one school versus another, helped get us a job, helped lend a hand during a difficult time, or saved us from a desert island that one time by paddling through shark infested waters using only his right arm. With Thanksgiving coming up, it can be a nice chance to hit pause and think of 2-3 nonobvious people who might have done a small thing that made a big difference in our life. Doing something as simple as this can do your soul good. On one extreme, it reminds us that we aren’t the self-centered Master of our Universe as we might think when things are going great. On the other extreme, it reminds us that there are a lot of people silently cheering for us when we might think things aren’t going so great. What do you suppose would happen if you tracked these people down and game them a call? It’s four steps: 1. Find their phone number and dial. 2. “Hey, I’m ___; remember me? How are you?” 3. “It’s Thanksgiving. I was thinking of you.” 4. “Thanks” For about the past 30 years, I’ve tried to do this each Thanksgiving. It used to be the same 3-4 people (advisors and a post-college mentor), then a couple more, and this year I’m adding a new one. For some reason, I always look for an excuse why I shouldn’t make these calls. I always find myself pacing around before I make the first call. Part of me thinks I might be bore them, or they already know it, or it’s interrupting them, or that it’s too corny. Yet even if I have to leave voice messages, I’m always end up smiling when I get off the phone. I feel more thankful and centered. Maybe they feel differently too. Still, there’s some years I never made any calls, because I had good excuses. Maybe it was too late in the day, or they were probably with their family, or I called them last year, or I didn’t really have enough time to talk. I’m sure they had some good excuses – way back when – as to why they didn’t have time for me. I’m thankful they didn’t use them. If you can think of 2-3 people you’re thankful for who might not know it, you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving next year to tell them. They won’t care that you’re a little bit late or a whole lot early. It’s only 4 steps. Halloween is like Thanksgiving for candy bars. Today I was at an amazing company that made Halloween the focus of their day. Costume parties with five categories of winners, a cooking contest and taste test, a catered lunch, a haunted hallway, and a 3:30-5:00 office-to-office trick-or-treating for families who had kids. I gave away toothbrushes and Dollar Store toys to the 80 or so kids who come by with 10-lb trick-or-treat bags: Toys = 78; Toothbrushes = 2. What this reminds me of is a very cool research study we did that showed that every year American's start gaining more weight from today and for the next two months. The key take-away is that we shouldn't wait until January 1st to make a resolution to lose weight. We should make a Halloween resolution to not gain weight. (Or a November resolution.) Below are some nice details related about the study.  Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving . . . the summer is almost over but the indulgent holiday season is near. This study we conducted found that many of us spend months getting rid of that excess weight gained during the holiday season. The study showed that according to yearly national weight patterns, it takes American’s nearly 5 months to lose weight gained between Thanksgiving and Easter.
From their analysis of the weight patterns of over 2800 individuals researchers found that, in the US weight patterns begin rising around Thanksgiving, and peak around Christmas and the New Year. It isn’t until after Easter, about a 5 month period, that weight patterns even out with only slight fluctuation between April and November. The researchers also analyzed yearly weight patters in Germany and Japan. Similar to the US, those in Germany weighted the most around Christmas/New-Year period and those in Japan weight the most during Golden Week in April – a major Japanese holiday. Each country also showed a peak in weight for New Years. “Everyone gains weight over the holidays — Americans, Germans, Japanese," explains , co-author Brian Wansink, author of Slim By Design, “Instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, the best time to make a resolution to keep the pounds off this holiday season is now!”
For about 20 years I've wanted to spend a week camping in the Nevada desert, surrounded by 70,000 people and endless adventure. They call it Burning Man, and it's filled with hippies, techies, cool people, nerds, and Nobel Prize winners (more below). Two of my post-docs have gone to it, but since it was always during the first week of school, I could never go because I was always teaching while they were burning stuff. At Burning Man, there are 500 camps that offer different adventures (from a meditation camp to a Thunderdome camp) and only 8 days to do as many as you want between sand storms and heat waves. The greatest t-shirt I saw said: "THAT'S A HORRIBLE IDEA! What time?" My second favorite was "Safety Third". Did radio and documentary interviews, and had tons of fun. Learned to direct an orchestra, walk a circus tightrope, do sign language (in painfully slow motion), throw an ax, and make hippy jewelry. Ran a 5K race, won a Tom Waits poetry reading competition, drank Kirschwasser from a shell (ala Steely Dan), won Forbidden Desert, and was repeatedly accused of being an undercover cop. If you're an adult with adventure ADD, it's a super great experience. Slightly less than super great if you hate to camp in the dust. Next year: Burning Man Hampton Inn
The 10 Principles of Burning Man
Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception. Radical Inclusion. Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community. Gifting. Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value. Decommodification. In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience. Radical Self-reliance. Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources. Radical Self-expression. Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient. Communal Effort. Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction. Civic Responsibility. We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws. Leaving No Trace. Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them. Participation. Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart. Immediacy. Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience. In the last two weeks, I had two totally divergent adventures with some converging insights you might find useful. One was GenCon and the other was the Global Leadership Summit. GenCon 2019
GenCon invades Indianapolis every year with 70,000 people who crowd into the convention center, the football stadium, and into five hotels because of one reason: They all love games. Not things like Monopoly or chess, but super-complicated European boardgames, role-playing games, strategy games, deck-building games, and so on. Over the four days of the convention, there are over 1500 different events ranging from tournaments, film festivals (about games), dances, concerts, auctions, costume parties, virtual reality dungeon crawls, and lots of long lines. It was my first time, and it's a people watching spectacle. I had tons of questions for people, such as 1) Why do you come here for 4 days and only play one game over and over, 2) Why did you get married here? and 3) Why are you dressed up like a hawk? I realized that when I asked these "Why?" questions, people would often give me short, unthinking answers. My big breakthrough was when I asked the same questions without using "why": 1) What is it about this game that makes it so addictive, 2) When was it you decided to get married here? or 3) What were some other costumes you were thinking about, and how did you narrow your costume down to a hawk? At this point people really opened up, and our conversations were a lot more interesting and fun. One Take-away: Rephrase Why questions into What or When questions. Why: I don’t know, but it seems to work Global Leadership Summit 2019
The Global Leadership Summit is held in Chicago about the same time as GenCon every summer. But it's also simulcast to 400 locations and over 405,000 people. You also don’t have to dress up like a hawk to go there. For two days you hear great business speakers. (You can download the notes from the speakers below at the link at the bottom). One speaker was a hostage negotiator with the FBI for many years, and he had tons of great insights: ● Mirroring - Repeat the last words that they just said. It lets them know you are listening. With upper inflection, it is an invitation to expand on what they just said. ● "You’re right" is what we say to people who we have to maintain relationship with and you just want to shut up. It's better to say "That's right." It's what husbands always say. ● Effective pauses - give people the chance to talk. 2/3 people are not comfortable with silence. ● Don't say "I understand." That's what people say when they want you to be quiet so they can talk. But one thing he said really caught my still sensitive GenCon ear. He said, “People get threatened and defensive when they hear the word ‘Why?’ It reminds them of having to explain why they did something wrong as a child, or it reminds them of when they have had to justify a less-than-intelligent decision as an adult.” Instead he said that using other words – like when, what, or how – causes a person to think more and to think more collaboratively: • What happened that led you so see things that way? • Where have you seen this before? • How are we going to [go to Disneyland if your grades don’t improve]? This whole cast of speakers was great. The conference sent around bullet points from all of the speakers, and you can download them below. Definitely worth downloading and either reading now or copying over to your notes app to read later. No Darth Vader costume required. One Take-away: Rephrase Why questions into What or When questions. Why: It makes people less defensive and more collaborative
When you ask people what they’re most proud of, people usually mention about the same types of things: their kids, a career accomplishment, or how they lived their life. But it’s an unfair question that totally catches people off guard and they usually blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. It’s like when you see somebody blindsided on a talk show by being asked, “What’s the funniest, most hilarious thing that ever happened to you?” or “What’s the most amazing, incredible, phenomenal experience you’ve ever had?” You’re just not going to get the real answer with 1.2 seconds of thought. But what’s interesting is when people voluntarily say what they’re proud of or what their most amazing, incredible, phenomenal experience was. When they volunteer this out of the blue, it means they’ve given it a lot of thought. There’s an famous man at the University of Chicago and who’s a legend in academia in the area of how people make decisions. Let’s call him Adam. We became friends and during a late dinner Chicago a couple years ago, our conversation turned to parents. Although Adam’s parents had passed away long ago, he said – out of the blue – “What I’m most proud of in all my life, is how I was there for my parents in their later years.” What? That’s what he’s most proud of? I don’t even know what that means. Here’s a guy who’s published libraries of stuff, whose work has changed at least one industry, who has two successful kids, and what he’s most proud of is “how I was there for my parents in their later years”? This wasn’t a “tell me the funniest thing that ever happened to you” kind of answer. He had clearly thought about this a lot. Taking care of aging parents is particularly very emotionally hard. It’s good if you can see it as a blessing, but even a saint can’t see it as a blessing day after day while they are trying to juggle the rest of their life. Having both a wife and brother who do this daily, I can see the grinding burden it can have even on very strong people. What’s interesting about Adam’s perspective is that it is very forward looking. It says “Regardless of how I feel today, how will I look back on this moment in the future?” If the answer is “With great pride in how I handled it,” that’s powerful to keep in mind. It even goes beyond “no regrets” thinking. Right now it’s 4:08 AM, and for the next week, I’m sleeping here on the couch in my 92-year old Dad’s room in the retirement home (or trying to). Although I’d rather be staying and eating with my brother, I think it means more to my Dad that I’m staying here. If someone asked you today what you’re most proud of, what’s a nonobvious answer you might answer? It's useful to also think about how this looks down the road. If you think about what going to do today, or this month or this year, what will you be most proud of having done in five years? It’s a great set of farsighted glasses to try on.   I retire from Cornell tomorrow, two days after I turned 59. My Mom and Dad both retired from their union jobs within days of their birthdays, and I never remember them saying much about their jobs after they retired. Someone else took my Dad’s place on the production line, and someone else took my Mom’s place filing papers. But academia is different. It’s one profession you never really have to retire from. A lot of us have a lot to say, and we’re passionate about saying it even when we’re officially through with our job. Many academics imagine themselves retiring in their early 70s, and then transitioning to half-time until they pad-lock our office door shut to keep us out. Even retirement parties are somewhat pro forma. If you feel you have a calling, you don’t feel any different the day after retirement except you're just no longer being paid. I just had my retirement party last month, and it seemed like a birthday party, except that people gave speeches and gave me a nice, cherry wood Cornell captain’s chair with a metal plaque on the back of it. In 30 years of academia, I only once went to a retirement party that didn’t seem like a birthday party, and it had a striking effect on me. It was about 15 years ago and I was asked to be one of two faculty speakers at the annual Spring meeting of the university’s Business Advisory Committee. What excited me the most was the other faculty speaker. He was one of the most notable economists at the University. He had won a boatload of awards and occupied a rare niche at the intersection of economics, real estate, finance, and law. He was widely published, widely influential, and people—even his economist colleagues—often spoke of him in awe. This year was his retirement year, and his speech would perhaps be his Last Waltz in front of a group like this. We got to know each other throughout the day and at the closing reception. On the rainy long ride home, we sat next to each other in the back of the chartered bus. I asked him which of his many accomplishments he most proud of, and which had the most impact. At one point, however, I asked a question that was not met with the same warmth and candor. I asked, "In light of all of the remarkable things you’ve accomplished so far in your career, what’s your biggest professional regret?" Silence .Then he said, I don’t have any regrets. If I had to do it again, I would do everything pretty much the same way. After another much longer pause he said something like this: “Well, maybe I have one regret. My work lies at the intersection of four areas – economics, finance, real estate, and law. I have a very complete picture of how these interact and how they influence everything from real estate prices in ghettos to land speculation prices in the middle of nowhere. The problem is that I’m the only one who sees the big picture. My papers are published in econ journals and finance journals, while others are published in real estate journals and law reviews. Nobody else sees the big picture because they only read one type of journal.” I said, “Would it be easier for people to see the big picture if you were to write a book that pulled all of this together? That way, everything would be in one place and you could connect all the dots.” He chuckled and immediately dismissed this, “I don’t know about marketing, but in economics they don’t reward books.” After 45 years of research, he was retiring with one needless regret. This was unfinished business that he would now have the chance to finish, but he was still letting a now irrelevant barrier get in the way. The metaphor of an "unwritten book" can be a useful metaphor for us who are feeling that our routine is getting too predictable, who are feeling restless, or who find themselves retiring with a feeling there's something more to contribute. Most people have at least one metaphorical book that would take our ideas or interests to a new level of expression. Importantly, it doesn’t need to be writing a book. It might be starting a website and blog, or teaching an adult ed course we’ve wanted to teach. It might be mastering a musical instrument and joining a band, starting a photo travelogue, moving to that lake house you always dreamed of, or starting an online business. What’s interesting is that most of these “unwritten books” probably wouldn’t even have to wait until you retired. They were something that could have been started much earlier if we would have removed our make believe barriers. Time to start the next chapter.
 $4.99 on Ebay, baby. Someone once told me that he was such an efficient teacher that he usually spent less than 10 minutes preparing to give an hour-long lecture to his college class. Sometimes he said he even did it in real time when he was at the front of the classroom -- he just opened up his folder to see what the topic was for that day and started talking. He was an efficient, but not engaged teacher. He also didn’t enjoy teaching, and saw it as an interruption in other things he’d rather be doing. “Mailing it in” became a popular phrase at about the same time “I’m working at home” became popular. It means being efficient, but it also seems to mean doing something with the minimal amount of work that is acceptable. Being efficient without being engaged. I saw the exact opposite of this through a fog of pot smoke this past weekend. Every May, one of the great parks in Rochester, NY holds a 10-day party in the park called the Lilac Festival. They ship in tons of fried dough and dinosaur-sized turkey legs. They also book really cool bands to play every evening until the police close them down at 8:30. Last Friday they had booked a great concept called something like Classic Album Concerts. They would pick a classic album and then assemble top-rate musicians who could play the album note-by-note and word-by-word perfect. It would be the perfect live recreation of the album, but with musicians who aren’t dead or in heroin rehab. The first of these was going to be a recreation of the classic Led Zepplin album – “Led Zepplin II.” Since Led Zepplin was my very favorite, most ultimate, highly awesomest band when I was in high school, I rescheduled my Friday afternoon meetings so I could be smunched into the front row. The plan was to drive up to Rochester and sing along with the band for 41:38 minutes while my wife and visiting sister-in-law looked at their watches and occasionally tapped them to see if they were still running. The band hit every single note and every nuance. Even the spacing between the songs seemed the same length as between the tracks on the album or 8-track. But after we had burrowed through the crowd and pot smoke to get to the front, there was something a little weird happening on the side of the stage. There was a woman with huge head phones who looked like she had jumped on the stage was going to wave and gesture at the crowd until the security guards tackled her to the ground. Then I realized that she was using sign language – she was a sign language translator for people who were deaf or otherwise hearing impaired. This would include people who had stood too close to Led Zepplin amplifiers in the 1970s. I went back to singing along with the music until there was a 10-minute drum solo. At that point, I started spacing out and again noticed the sign language translating woman. Although there were no words to sign, she was air drumming. Instead of waiting around until the band started singing again, she got so much into the song that she was using her down time to flail around like she was playing Rock Band on the PS4. When they did start singing again, I noticed she then had the same idea during guitar solos. Any time there was a guitar solo, she would switch instruments and play a Guitar Hero solo for the hearing impaired.  From a “Mail it in” perspective, she was ridiculously inefficient. You don’t play have to play your interpretation of the air drums when the real drummer is right next to you. You don’t have to play air guitar for hearing impaired people when you could instead just back up a little bit so that they could better watch the real deal themselves. She didn’t have to do it. She would have been paid the same amount if she had spent the drum solo in the Beer Here Tent. But from a “Be Engaged” perspective, this is brilliant. She was doing it all: the hair tossing, the tortured face gestures, the sweating . . . everything. I started watching her every time they stopped singing because she would again start playing Guitar Hero. Again, she could have spent the guitar solos tweeting a selfie or buying a Led Zepplin 8-track online, but she instead spent every minute being fully engaged in that minute. Mindlessly mindful. Electric Zen. If someone told her she was being inefficient, she could have said, “Yeah, but I feel totally alive.” That might be one big trade-off between focusing on being efficient at a task or being engaged with it. If you’re efficient, you have the satisfaction of saying, “I’m done.” If you’re engaged, you have the satisfaction of saying, “I feel totally alive.” There’s a place for both. With some tasks, you just want to get them done. If you don’t like cleaning, grading, answering email, or doing your receipts, it makes sense to be more efficient. All of these things can take a variable amount of time, and you want that to be short. Other tasks, take a fixed amount of time. You have to be in class for 50 minutes, you have to be in a 60-minute meeting, you have to watch a 2-hour dance recital for your third grade daughter, or you have to be a sign language interpreter for a 41:38 minute concert. It’s hard to make these efficient because you have to be there for the entire duration. So you might as well consider being engaged while you’re there. It’s going to take a more effort, but the worse that can happen is that you like it more and that you "feel totally alive." By the way, if you decide to go on stage and play the air guitar at your daughter’s third grade dance recital, make sure to get a video of it. Party on, Wayne.  On a late afternoon about 20 years ago, I stepped into a slow elevator with my college’s most productive, famous, and taciturn senior professor. After 10 seconds of silence, I asked, “Did you publish anything yet today?” He stared at me for about 4 seconds and said, “The day’s not over.” Cool . . . very Clint Eastwood-like.
Most of us have some super-productive days and we have some bad days, but most lie in-between. If we could figure out what leads to great days, we might be able to trigger more of them in our life. Think of the most recent “great day” you had. What made it great, and how did it start? For about 20 years, every time somebody told me they had a great day, I’d ask “What made it great? How did it start out? About 50% of the time its greatness had to do with an external “good news” event like something great happening at work, great news from their kids or spouse, a nice surprise, or nice call or email from a grateful person or an old friend. The other 50% of the time, the reason for “greatness” was more “internal.” They had a super productive day, they finished a project or a bunch of errands, or they had a breakthrough solution to a problem or something they should do. External successes are easy to celebrate with our friends. Internal successes are more unpredictable. What made today a great day and what sabotaged yesterday? When people had great days, one reoccurring feature was that they started off great. There was no delay between when they got out of bed and when they Unleashed the Greatness. People said things like, “I just got started and seemed to get everything done,” or “I finished up this one thing and then just kept going.” One of the most productive authors I've known said that got up six days a week at 6:30 and wrote from 7:00 to 9:00 without interruption. Then he kissed his wife good-bye and drove into school and worked there. When I asked how long he had done that he said, “Forever.” About a year ago, I started toying with the idea that "Your first two hours set the tone for the whole day." Think of your last mediocre day. Did it start out mediocre? That would also be consistent with this notion. We can’t trigger every day to be great, but maybe we have more control than we think. If we focus on making our first two hours great, it might set the tone for the rest of the day. What we need to decide is what we can we do in those first two hours after waking that would trigger an amazing day and what would sabotage it and make it mediocre. For me, it seems writing, exercise, prayer, or meditation are the good triggers, and it seems answering emails, reading the news, or surfing are the saboteurs. Here’s to you having lots of amazing days. One’s where you can channel your best Clint Eastwood impression and say, “The day’s not over.”  It's been said that the most frequent last words of adventurous, partying males are probably: 1) “Hey, watch this,” or 2) “Here, hold my beer.” If we heard either of these, we'd probably yell “STOP, Don’t Do That!” But giving well-intended advice in less obvious situations is trickier, so we've grown more hesitant to do so. We’ve all been burned by giving advice and having someone stare a hole through us. As a result, even as mentors we can we be hesitant to giving a young person advice about their future. We might say “I will give them advice if they ask.” Yet even if they us ask "What do I do?" we can be too carefully non-committal in giving them any advice that's useful (“Well, what do YOU want to do?”). Last month I had an interesting conversation with a person who said his son had been adrift in high school. It all turned in the right direction for him one day when an adult he casually played chess with said, “If you work hard, you could be a high-school chess champion.” He focused, and it happened. The Dad then said something similar had happened to him 50 years ago. He had been adrift in high school – good grades but adrift – when a someone told him “If you work hard, you could be on the debate team.” He focused, and it happened. These two mentors (even if they didn't know they were mentors) had each given these young people a specific vision of what they could be: A chess champion and a debate champion. They just didn't say “You’re sharp,” or “You talks good.” They gave a specific direction that an adrift student could paddle toward. They decided to Be the One who pointed at an island the students could paddle to. It can be easy to say “Good job,” or “You’re creative,” to a young person. Those are compliments, but they don't give useful paddling directions. A student might be earnestly good at school but not see where to take their life other than in the general direction their parents, friends, or placement office talked about. Suppose we took the risk that those two mentors took, and we told a younger person “You’d make a great ________,” or “Have you ever considered ____; I think you’d be really good at it.” They might feel a bit flattered, but they might also feel a bit motivated to paddle in a direction they hadn’t thought of. Even if they went in a totally different direction, if we motivated them in a hopeful way, we accomplished more than if we would have said, "Well, what do YOU want to do?" Let’s circle back to last month’s conversation about the two mentors who laid out specific visions to the guy and to his son. Things worked out for both of them. Ten years later, the son had graduated from college, started his own business, and was coaching chess champion hopefuls on the side. Forty years later, the dad had retired as a Fortune 500 CEO to produce a movie. Partly because two mentors decided to "Be the One" who gave them direction. There's a reemerging movement around this Be the One notion. Although it's sort of aimed at teachers, a surprising amount of it still applies to any mentor who takes the extra effort to say the right words at the right time. You can check out Ryan Sheehy's Twitter for a booster shot.
Can you trick yourself into eating better? You can easily set up your kitchen (and some habits) that lead to eat better or less. But since you will know what’s going on, you won’t have to feel tricked. Quartz used this catchy title for a catchy story on my Cornell Food and Brand Lab colleague, Aner Tal. It’s about 3 minutes long and has a lot of eye-opening tips and insights. What’s unusual is how Aner describes why these work in a suave James Bond style and how Quartz cleverly illustrates them. Too cool for school.  Here’s some of what they mentioned:
1. Use lighter plates 2. Use smaller plates 3. Cut your food into pieces 4. Don’t watch TV when you eat 5. No scary movies 6. Don’t shop when you’re hungry 7. Deprivation always backfires Some of these might sound pretty basic, but it’s Aner's description of how they work and Quartz's funny illustrations that really make them pop. Aner flew out to visit me from Israel a while back, and we were talking about how people react after they hear about some of these discoveries. Some people hear about suggestions like these and say to themselves “That would never happen to me,” so they don’t try to do anything different, and nothing changes in their life. Other people say to themselves, “Yeah, that makes sense” but they never do it, so, again, nothing changes in their life. No one is going to hear about 7 discoveries and make 7 changes in their life. It’s too much. But you can make 1 or 2 of them. After they become habits, you can always come back to the table for another course.  A lot of people don’t look or act their age. We all know 40-year-olds who act a curmudgeonly 60, but we also know people who look and act much, MUCH younger than they actually are. They do it without crazy plastic surgery, crystal meth energy vitamins, Dorian Gray mirrors, or vampire rituals. We visited some friends like this in Cleveland a couple weeks back. Even though they’re past retirement age, they look and act 25 years younger. They look it – they’re trim and fit. They act it – they’re engaged, curious, interested, funny, and excited about new things. One night I learned more about their secret sauce. We were at a basketball game, and my friend brought back a bunch of concession food to eat and drink. As he passed them out, he said, “It’s one of the 4 Splurge Days.” I channeled my inner Homer Simpson and mumbled, “Can’t talk . . . eating.” After I recovered from my nacho binge, I asked what he meant. He explained that when you’re thinking about what to eat when, it’s too easy to think of reasons why you can splurge any day you want. To prevent that, he and his wife have 4 Splurge Days a year. Wow. Some diets give you one “cheat day” every week. It’s the one day a week where – if you’ve been a good boy or girl – you can eat whatever you want. This sounds great because it means only six more days until you can put on the sweat pants and head back to the buffet. But 4 Splurge Days a year is extreme. My friend’s view was that a weekly cheat day or splurge day is the same as 52 splurge days a year. Before long, however, 52 splurge days a year can easily turn into 62 and then into 162. At that point, you can think of a reason why you could splurge on any occasion: “I had a bad day; I had a good day; it’s Friday; it will be a Friday,” and so on. They call this the Tyranny of the Moment. Any moment of any day, we can come up with a reason why we can do whatever it is we want to do. There is only one thing that is strong enough to defeat the Tyranny of the Moment. Habit. My friend’s 4 Splurge Day rule built a habit of not overeating. It might seem extreme, but it also might help explain why he and his wife look and act so really extremely young. If only I hadn’t used my 4 Days up last week.    You missed last night’s “Cookies and Carols,” which is the $6 cover-charge fundraiser for our local school band and chorus. They pass 160 trays of cookies up and down the middle-school auditorium rows until the kids run out of songs to sing. This is also timed to when parents feel like they're getting diabetes. Cookies and Carols is about kids -- and cookies. Normal kids sing and play music. But the cool kids get to take it to the next level. Because they’re too cool for music school, they get to dress like an elf and be a Cookie Monitor Elf. At Cookie and Carol night, the guy behind me was on a diet. I had a certain sense about this. My intuition was based on 30 years of careful investigation, detailed analyses, and because every time a Cookie Monitor Elf passed him a platter of cookies, he said, “I’m on a diet.” Yes, this is the season of weight gain. But this is a horrible month to be on a diet. You ruin the JOY for you and the joy to the world. So, what’s a person to do when cookie trays are a passin’ and Christmas Carols are a pumpin’? We've been running a 4 year study (the Healthy Weight Registry) to discover what perpetually skinny people do to stay perpetually skinny. One thing we've asked them is what they do during the holidays that the rest of us don't do. They do a lot of crazy cool things they need testing, but one that's relevant to us cookie lovers is this: When they were at a holiday party and they tried something they didn't absolutely LOVE, they simply didn’t eat the rest of it. They either didn't take it or they didn't finish it. They left it. • That no-bake brownie-mix brownie? They left it. • That gluten-free Avocado Cupcake? They left it. • That Thumbprint cookie with the real thumbprint? They left it. When we first read this "Leave it if you don't love it" idea, my researchers and I were all trying to finish up our Avocado Cupcakes so we could be the first to say "That's nothing new. That's totally obvious." There's never been a cookie in the world that isn't worth choking down, but there might only be 2 out of 10 that are really worth LOVING. "Leave it if you don't love it." Sorry, Lefty. -------------------- When I got back from Cookies and Carols, I had a message from Marcus Sidhu at N1Fitness telling me a podcast chat with me was just posted earlier that that day (links below). It has some ideas about some other things you might want to consider this season to enjoy the cookies and carols while you forget about your diet.  Podcast URL - https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/n1-fitness-podcast/id1303218443?mt=2
Direct Download Episode URL - http://traffic.libsyn.com/n1fitness/Episode_39_-_Mindless_Eating_w__Brian_Wansink.m4a Permalink Episode URL - http://n1fitness.libsyn.com/39-mindless-eating-w-brian-wansink It was time to move this website over to this new account. Good news
It means having to rebuild every page from scratch. Bad news. The last three or four months of blogs are being transferred over and posted. Ones that are older than that are available here (for now). Thanks for moving with me. All or nothing. That's the mindset that a lot of people have when it comes to a lot of things. It's either all good or all bad. It's either all wonderful or all horrible. It's either all healthy or it's all junk food. This is also what seems to sabotage a lot of our best intentions toward eating better. We think we're going to start our new health kick and eat only kale and tofu (all), but after our willpower caves in to a chocolate muffin, we throw up our hands and say, "What the Heck," and we fall off the bandwagon (nothing). Tonight is Halloween and this all or nothing thinking is at a peak. Little Twix and Snickers bars, little bags of M&Ms and Skittles. It's easy to say "What the Heck," and eat until they're gone. In one of our studies we analyzed weight gain and showed for Americans it steadily starts rising from about now until January. Here's something you can do tonight. Put a bowl of fruit out on your counter as an antidote to the candy that will be probably be sitting there for the next week. It least the candy will have some competition. It seems to be working for the police.  As a researcher, I am very sorry for any mistakes I have made in my papers. I apologize about how they negatively reflected on my colleagues, my wonderful school, and on social science research in general.
This is a time when it’s important for me to listen and reflect upon how I can make amends. It’s always been my hope that my research make people healthier and happier. I want to find a way to support and further the work of the next generation of scientists. If there are concerns or other ideas you have and if you would want to talk one-to-one, I’d be interested in hearing from you. |
Solve & ShareI'm Brian Wansink, and I've been lucky to work with lots of wonderful researchers to discover insights on how to help people become more effective, happier, and more meaningfully connected with each other. See what works for you, and share it with others. Categories
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If you're interested in classic eating insights, secrets, and solutions we discovered in earlier research, you'll find a series of them here. Archives
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