Tag: adam grant

Notes from 8 TED talks: Samina Ali, Tim Urban, Tom Chi, JJ Abrams, and more

I watched two TED talks on a flight yesterday, and then realized there were some old TED notes that I still hadn’t published. So here they are, in their scattered and collective glory. Some notes are thorough, and others are – at best – just passing scribbles.

Also, here’s my collection of 100+ TED talk notes. I haven’t updated this page in more than a year, but the notes (and talks themselves) are mostly evergreen.

Samina Ali: What Quran says about a Muslim woman’s hijab

  • 600AD – when woman awoke in middle of night, had to walk into dangerous territories to use restroom, group of men began to attack
  • if a woman wore a coat (status symbol) the woman was free and protected by her clan
  • if she dressed freely (didn’t wear a coat), or men knew she was a slave, men attacked her
  • Mohammed learned of situation, turned to God, and his verses were revealed
  • “draw upon yourselves the garments, so that she not be known, and molested”
  • idea was to have a conservative, uniform look among women, to make it hard to distinguish free from slave
  • in modern times, if wearing a veil leads to harassment, then it actually goes against the roots of why veils arose
  • The Qu’ran is 114 chapters and 6000+ verses
  • Only 3 refer to a woman’s dress: the one above, a second specifically about the Prophet’s wives, and a third which is specific to that time’s context – a scarf to wear on the head, which would cover exposed breasts
  • There is no mention of a woman’s veil
  • What “hijab” really means is “a barrier”, “a divide”, between human and divine, or between men and women
  • Women played an important and strong role in early Islamic and Arabic culture
  • Mohammed’s first wife was a successful CEO, import/export, hired Mohammed and eventually she proposed to him
  • His second wife rode into battle
  • Early women demanded to be part of Mohammed’s revolution
  • They even publicly debated with Mohammed himself
  • At that time, custom was for woman to select her husband, propose, and initiate divorce
  • Today, why does hijab = Muslim women, seclusion & isolation?
  • This isn’t an accident
  • Islamic clerics are responsible; they twisted and added words to Mohammed’s original verses (eg, they specified that the garment would be a veil, and exactly how long that veil should be)
  • They issued fatwas = legal rulings
  • Today Muslim women are heavily discriminated against
  • A woman only need finish elementary school
  • A woman must fulfill physical obligation to husband
  • Islam forbids a woman from wearing a bra
  • Sounds erotic, misogynous fantasy

Tom Chi: Everything is connected

  • Story of the Heart – blood transports hemoglobin and center of hemoglobin is iron; only way iron is created is supernovas, stars forming and exploding; most common formation of new stars is galactic collision, which itself is driven by gravity at the galactic level
  • Story of the Breath – 3B years ago, 80% nitrogen, not enough oxygen, but cyanobacteria came to rescue; slowly ozone layer forms, then multicellular life forms, then Cambrian Explosion; cyanobacteria descendants became chloroplasts in plants
  • Story of the Mind – piano invented in 1700; pianists use many parts of their brain to play; the piano, its brain patterns and music it produces, was not a thinkable thought until it was invented; like inventing a new color, like inventing computer science
  • “palette of being”
  • all spiritual positions have this same concept of connectedness

Adam Grant: The surprising habits of original thinkers

  • They’re quick to start, slow to finish
  • There’s a procrastination sweet spot for creativity, not too much, not too little
  • MLK’s famous “I have a dream” line for his speech wasn’t in his speech notes, it was likely improvised!
  • First mover advantage is largely a myth, improvers (followers) have a 5x lower failure rate
  • The opposite of deja vu is vujas de – surprising new idea and insight from seeing some old unoriginal thing in a new light
  • Firefox and Chrome users more creative than IE users, when normalizing for other variables because of one reason: they don’t accept the default (eg, IE comes pre-installed so it’s about questioning what you’re given and making a conscious choice)
  • Classical composers – one of the best predictors of success was sheer quantity of composition, how much output

Yuval Harari: Why humans run the world, a recap of his book Sapiens

  • What enables us to cooperate in such large numbers, and thus what separates us from every other species, is our imagination. Fictional stories from capitalism to religion
  • All about “flexible cooperation in large numbers”
  • Kevin’s note: this is the same as Karen Armstrong’s point that our chief religious faculty is imagination

Here are my highlights from reading Sapiens.

Amy Lockwood: Selling condoms in the Congo

  • The Congo is 2/3 the size of Western Europe
  • Sex workers’ hotel manager doesn’t sell condoms, there’s no demand, only 3% of DRC uses them
  • Despite similar prices and plenty of marketing, people don’t buy branded condoms, only generic
  • Branded messages: FEAR, FINANCING, FIDELITY
  • Generic messages: all about sex, nudity / sexuality, provocative, aspirational

JJ Abrams: The Mystery Box

  • Loved his grandfather who opened and studied electronics
  • Obsessed with letter printing and book binding
  • Loves boxes, even took apart his hotel’s Kleenex box
  • Was gifted a Super 8 camera at 10 years old
  • Bought Tannen’s Mystery Magic Box a long time ago, never opened it, memory of his grandfather
  • Damon Lindelof and him created Lost, had 11 weeks after writing to making a 2 hour pilot
  • What are stories but mystery boxes?
  • In TV the first act is called the teaser: “withholding information intentionally”
  • ET: you think it’s alien meets kids; but ET is really about heartbreaking divorce, same with Die Hard
  • Jaws: really about a guy dealing with his place in the world
  • Father to son: “C’mon…give us a kiss”. “Why?”. “Because I need it.”
  • The movie theater is another mystery box

Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator

  • Wrote a 90 page senior thesis in 3 days – was a terrible experience
  • Started waitbutwhy
  • Wrote about procrastination because it confused him
  • The Instant Gratification Monkey only cares about 2 things: what’s EASY and FUN
  • Dark playground – where leisure happens when it shouldn’t happen
  • Procrastinator has a guardian angel: The Panic Monster
  • The Panic Monster lies dormant until a deadline, or embarrassment, or career disaster
  • Everyone’s a procrastinator
  • The Monkey’s sneakiest trick is when the deadline isn’t there
  • “frustration isn’t that you’re not able to achieve your dreams, it’s that you’re not even able to start chasing them”

Tony Fadell: The first secret of great design

  • Steve Jobs hated when you opened a new gadget, and then you had to charge it before using
  • So he increased manufacturing time from 30 minutes to 2 hours to fully charge the battery so that when a customer opened the box, the gadget was ready to use
  • Habituation is incredibly powerful, but also because of it, you miss great opportunities
  • Built a custom screw for the Nest thermostat; it’s expensive, but easier to install on the wall
  • “Think younger”, kids haven’t been around long enough to be exposed to habits
  • “Stay beginners”

The Inverted-U: the research behind why there can indeed be too much of a good thing

The Inverted-U is a journal article by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz. It’s the pillar of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in David and Goliath, which is how I discovered it.

Reading academic papers is tougher than your regular blog posts and nonfiction books. It’s uncomfortable but I try to push through one or two each month. I can’t imagine how grad students (and law students) do it. I suppose as with all things that you get used to it.

Here are my notes. Reader beware – there’s a good chance some of the below is inaccurate, incomplete, or misrepresentative, since this is only one read-through in the eyes of a pure layman.

Adam Grant and Barry Shwartz are professors at UPenn Wharton and Swarthmore, respectively; I’ll refer to them below as GS.

The Inverted-U by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. – Aristotle

  • The academic term for too much of a good thing is “nonmonotonic inverted-U-shaped effects”
  • Psychology research has proven that certain behaviors increase happiness (eg, sending thank-you messages, spending money on others, making choices to increase autonomy), but GS believe there needs to be more discussion and research on the downsides of excess
  • Aristotle argued people need to find the mean, the “proportionate” response to things
  • Cited studies and examples include:
    • Learning (on the job) is good, but people too focused on learning can divert attention from performance, waste resources, distract from key priorities
    • Complex jobs provide satisfaction and fulfillment, but jobs that are too complex (I’m thinking anything in public office these days) can lead to stress, burnout, dissatisfaction
    • An NBA study showed that practice was helpful and improved performance, but excessive practice (and excessive experience, as measured in years) led to overconfidence, complacency, and lack of creativity
    • Detail-orientation is important to success, but when you are too detail-oriented – especially for simple, mechanical jobs, you can miss the bigger picture
    • Generosity is good, but too much consumes your time and energy. A study of volunteers showed that 100 to 800 hours per year is optimal
  • Other examples of the inverted-U include optimism (too much can lead to under preparation and under estimation of risks), self-esteem (can harm relationships and health), cheerfulness (can lead to engaging in risky behaviors), and life satisfaction (“moderately satisfied” people earned the most, “extremely satisfied” people earned less and had lower levels of education)
  • GS stress that most data are correlational, and thus causality is uncertain. We’re not sure if moderately satisfied people are driven to be more successful, or if more successful people, once they compare their BMW to their neighbor’s Porsche, are less satisfied
  • Why does this happen? I struggled through this part, but here’s my best shot:
    • One reason is “virtue conflicts”. In other words, life is zero-sum, and the more of one virtue you cultivate, the less time and energy you spend on other virtues (helping others is good, but so is investing in yourself)
    • The second reason is “good things satiate and bad things escalate”. So a good burrito is great on the first bite, but not so tasty near the end. And bad things – like substance addiction – can grow in magnitude
    • The third reason is the characteristics of some virtues, where one effect is harmful in excess (eg, motivation is a positive virtue, and increased focus is an effect, but too much focus can be bad for complex, big-picture tasks)
  • GS end by asking a few questions, including:
    • 1. How much of a specific trait is too much?
    • 2. Why does this happen?
    • 3. When – under what conditions, circumstances, contexts – does this inverted-U happen?
  • They believe that applying Aristotle’s concept of the mean and the inverted-U are helpful to understanding behavior and happiness. For example, researchers used to believe that the more choice we had, the better. It was only recently that the same researchers realized too much choice can make you less happy (the paradox of choice)
  • Are there any virtues where more is always better? What is known as an “unmitigated good”?

We believe that the search for the Aristotelian mean represents an opportunity for psychologists to answer fundamental questions about the limits of positive experiences. The inverted-U is a widespread phenomenon in psychology, and we believe it deserves more attention in psychology writ large and in positive psychology especially – Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Here’s the original article. Happy reading! I’d love to hear what you think and if you came across different insights than I did.

For more readings, check out my linkblog. There, you can see what I read and highlight. Thanks to Postach.io for building this tool, which integrates neatly with Evernote.