Here are the same pictures as from the previous post in a slide show, randomly ordered. Funny, I was thinking about the questions I asked. They feel like leading questions, but reading them, they seem open-ended. I guess you can tell my values. I could have asked questions about market share, returns on investment, competitive strategy, and so forth to get different pictures to rank higher. Things have different values[…] Keep reading →

My post on Variety, choice, the manufactured illusion of it, and creating more yourself prompted more people emailing me about the images than most others. The way all the corporate stuff trying to catch your eye glosses over. I decided to contrast the corporate image with images from nature. I just did three images searches, on “fruit,” “vegetable,” and “forest,” and posted a couple of the images from the first[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] As a final note on empathy gaps, I wanted to note a few examples of empathy gaps — using them, observing them in others, and observing them in yourself. Researchers normally present empathy[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Now we are familiar with empathy gaps — that when you feel one emotion you generally can’t conceive of your motivations when feeling a different emotion. We get how insidious they can be[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] As usual, understanding ourselves better helps us overcome the problems of empathy gaps — that when you feel one emotion you generally can’t conceive of your motivations when feeling a different emotion. Yet[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on empathy gaps. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday I talked about the effect that when you feel one emotion you generally can’t conceive of your motivations when feeling a different emotion, nor do you realize you can’t, also known as[…] Keep reading →

I remember as a kid in the 70s being taught a policy to turn off lights when I was the last to leave a room. People put stickers on light switches with that message. I don’t see that message that much any more. People seem to generally project that saving energy is better than not saving energy, but I see the idea more used to market selling products than changing[…] Keep reading →

I haven’t read anything by Arthur Schopenhauer and hardly know anything about him, but I agree with this quote from him: Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. One can choose what to do, but not what to want. People contrast emotions with reason, see they differ, and conclude emotions are irrational, unpredictable, and follow no system. I agree they are hard to[…] Keep reading →

At the risk of posting too much on the recent storm and handling challenges, one more angle. Imagine a storm destroys two neighbors’ houses equally. Imagine they also have equal material resources to handle the situation. One neighbor looks at the wreckage and says My home is destroyed. I have to start from scratch. But I built my life up in the first place. I can do it again. I[…] Keep reading →