Round-up: Tipping points

There’s no real theme to this week’s links, so I’ll just throw them out here.

Caitlin of Healthy Tipping Point blogged about 168 Hours and what she learned by tracking her time. She also started keeping her List of 100 Dreams. Have you made yours? She’s a widely read blogger and the comments are fun.

After watching HBO’s Weight of the Nation (often while eating junk food in bed, which is so, so wrong, but anyway) I have been nudging my kids to eat more vegetables. This has turned into a fascinating study of human psychology. No one wanted to eat baby carrots, but when two brothers were pitted against each other to see who could make the loudest crunch, miraculously, the baby carrots got eaten.

Over at Wandering Scientist, Cloud blogs about Rebuilding Career Capital. We all go through periods of time (sometimes children are involved) when we start drawing down the balance in our career bank accounts. We call in chits, we ask for flexibility, we don’t necessarily volunteer for all extra assignments. But after a while, if the account is dwindling, you need to start filling it back up. How? This post gives some ideas.

I read Practice Perfect this week and enjoyed it. This book (by Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, and Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi) gives 42 rules for “getting better at getting better.” How should you use feedback? Are drills or scrimmages better? While the authors normally train teachers, the rules are applicable in multiple fields.

I also read We’re With Nobody. I had some long train rides and a night alone in a hotel to fill. (BTW, I don’t have an affiliate account with Amazon; those two links are just the most obvious to put in).

Over at CBS MoneyWatch, I elaborated more on What to do if your kid wants to be an artist. I also asked Does social media really kill productivity? I’m always a bit skeptical of calculations on how much productivity in the US economy is lost due to cause X, Y, or Z. If people weren’t on Facebook, they’d be doing something else, like smoking. I don’t think we’d immediately all become productivity machines.

I welcome fodder for round-ups, so feel free to email me links: lvanderkam at yahoo dot com.

 

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