Why are so many successful people lonely?

Dan Pink talks to author Arthur Brooks who recommends that we ask ourselves, “Are my friends real friends or deal friends?”

Watch this short ‘Pinkcast‘ to find out what the difference is, and why we need more useless, real people in our lives!

This Merriam-Webster 10-question challenge tests your visual vocabulary.

An arrow points to the specific thing to be named. You have 15 seconds to answer each question. The faster you answer, the higher your score. The harder the question, the higher your score.

If you want to drive people away, use Latin terms in your writing!

Why? Because not everyone will understand them.

But it’s good to know what these words and expressions mean if ever you read or hear them.

Here are the most common ones:

et cetera (etc.)               and so on, and more
exempli gratia (e.g.)     for example
id est (i.e.)                       that is / in other words
et alia (et al.)                   and others
circa (c.)                            around / about
de facto                            in reality
ergo                                  therefore
per se                                by itself / essentially
re                                       about | concerning
vice versa                         positions reversed
pro forma                        for form’s sake
nota bene (NB)               take note | worth noting
per                                     for each
per annum                       for each year
per capita                         for each head
post scriptum (PS)         written later
versus (vs.)                       against

I confess that I still use PS, versus and vice versa. Old habits die hard, don’t they?

And you? Do you use any of these words and expressions in your writing?

Do you know the difference between brainstorming, brainwriting and braindumping? Or the difference between the 5 Whys and the Nine Whys techniques?

If you’d like to find out—and read up on more meeting terms and on all the activities we do in meetings, have a look at Lucid’s The Glossary of Meeting Terms. 

I think you’ll find it very useful.

“Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds.

Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.”

The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers.

We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints.

But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.”
Jonah Lehrer, Wired Magazine

One of the most powerful elements of “Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction” is the importance of asking questions.

Rosenshine gives us lots of great examples of the types of questions teachers and trainers can ask to help develop student learning and strengthen their long-term memory.

Here are some of them:

How are … and… alike?
What is the main idea of …?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of …?
In what way is … related to …?
Compare … and … with regard to ….
What do you think causes …?
How does … tie in with what we have learnt before?
Which one is the best … and why?
What are some possible solutions for the problem of …?
Do you agree or disagree with this statement: …?
What do you still not understand about …?

If you work as a trainer or have children at home, you might like to try out some of these questions.