Heidi Grant Halvorson: Why No One Understands You (and What To Do About It)

Ever get the feeling you and a client or colleague are just talking past one another? Miscommunication and misunderstandings are one of the biggest culprits of career acrimony. That’s why, in this 99u talk, researcher and author Heidi Grant Halvorson shares how we can get out of our own minds and make sure our message is heard. Using research from her latest book, Halvorson demonstrates the importance of overcoming the assumption of false consensus, and how subtle cues like eye contact and nodding can make all the difference. 

Rethinking Work

Barry Schwartz explores what motivates us to work in The New York Times: 

Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.

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Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.

A complement to this essay is Daniel Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. 

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life

It’s no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind.

Dr. Sacks, who died on Sunday at 82, was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life — the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination.

That's how Michiko Kakutani's examination of Oliver Sack's life begins in today's The New York Times. Sacks was the very embodiment of smarter creativity. 

Not an Introvert, Not an Extrovert? An Ambivert

Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal: 

Ambiverts have introverted and extroverted traits, but neither trait is dominant. As a result, they have more balanced, or nuanced, personalities. They aren’t the folks yammering your ear off. Nor are they the totally silent ones happily ensconced in the corner.

Ambiverts move between being social or being solitary, speaking up or listening carefully with greater ease than either extroverts or introverts. “It is like they’re bilingual,” says Daniel Pink, a business book author and host of Crowd Control, a TV series on human behavior, who has studied ambiversion. “They have a wider range of skills and can connect with a wider range of people in the same way someone who speaks English and Spanish can.”

Worrying About Stuff Is a Sign of Intelligence

Melissa Dahl for Science of Us: 

The tendency to worry about stuff could be a sign of a certain kind of intelligence, according to a paper in an upcoming edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences (hat tip to Christian Jarrett at the British Psychology Society's Research Digest for spotting it first). A team led by Alexander Penney of Ontario's Lakehead University gave 126 undergrads a litany of surveys and questionnaires designed to measure both their intelligence and how much they tended to stress about events in their lives. (For instance, they were asked how strongly they agreed with statements like, "I am always worried about something.") After analyzing the results, Penney and his team found a correlation between worrying and verbal intelligence.