Popular insights from the WiseAmigo Community
Here are five insights to fuel your development journey. Whether it’s about using your distraction to your advantage, developing Leadership skills or battling self doubt, these articles are sure to shift your development up a gear.
What sets exceptional business leaders apart? One thing, says Sydney Finkelstein, is their ongoing commitment to giving direct reports one-on-one instruction. Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, has studied world-class leaders for more than a decade. He’s found that they make a point of personally imparting memorable lessons that fall into three categories: pointers on professionalism, technical knowledge and skills, and broader life lessons.
Do you find it difficult to ignore the chatter of a radio station playing in the background? Or that your best ideas come not from where you were looking, but from something you saw out of the corner of your eye? Your story fits with a new line of research that’s showing highly creative people tend to have minds that pay attention in a particularly “open” kind of way.
Specifically, psychologists say people who’ve had creative success often have “leaky attention”. Meaning that when they are concentrating on one thing, other irrelevant information can still seep into their consciousness. This information is irrelevant to their current task, but potentially very useful longer term.
What makes humans special? Some credit should go to the opposable thumb and the larynx, says neuroscientist David Eagleman. But a lot of it has to do with our ability to be creative and constantly think up new ideas.
Eagleman, a professor at Stanford University and writer, collaborated with composer and Rice University professor Anthony Brandt to write The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, published this month by Catapult. Throughout the book, which is filled with photographs and illustrations, they narrow down and explain the three main components of creativity: bending elements (Frank Gehry’s buildings), blending elements (mash-ups), and breaking (Picasso).
You manage your own emotions at work — and your coworkers’ and customers’ emotions, too. How do you do it without burning out? To find out how to get into character, deliver a great performance and avoid exhaustion, Adam Grant talks with actor John Lithgow and takes you inside the call center at Zappos as well as the hospitality philosophy of an acclaimed restauranteur.
Every other creative professional you know has succeeded largely because of their talents and dedication. You, on the other hand, have got where you are thanks to a mix of luck and the extra effort that was needed to compensate for your lack of true giftedness.
Does this harsh assessment match your own worldview? If so, it sounds as if you’re suffering from a crisis of self-doubt psychologists call the Imposter Phenomenon. Quite likely you live in professional fear. Fear that one of these days, you are going to be exposed.
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Additionally, you can find more selections of great development inspiration here and here too.
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