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New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.

The metaphor designer isn’t trying to make something beautiful. She wants to change your view on things. Here’s how

“But more than that, I see my job as being able to assist understanding. My metaphors close the gap in people’s ability to grasp something, or speed up what they’re already on track to see. I’m not creating fantastical scenes of my own invention or distracting people from what they should be looking at. The windows and doors of the metaphor room are supposed to provide another way of looking at reality.”

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In an era characterized by political polarization and policy paralysis, one area of agreement is the idea that the key to inclusive economic growth is, as Tony Blair put in his 2001 reelection campaign, “education, education, education.” Unfortunately, it is an idea that simply does not hold water.

“Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in its schools. At most modern firms, fewer than 15% of the positions are open for entry-level workers, meaning that employers demand something that the education system cannot – and is not expected – to provide.”

“A country’s income is the sum of the output produced by each worker. To increase income, we need to increase worker productivity. Evidently, “something in the water,” other than education, makes people much more productive in some places than in others.”

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#education #economic growth #per capita income #growth strategy #labor force

Studying a game yields insights into what it takes to be great at something

“When people train on a task, they sometimes get better on similar tasks, but they usually do not get better on other tasks. They show “near” transfer, but not “far” transfer. (Practice SCRABBLE and you’ll get better at SCRABBLE, and maybe Boggle, but don’t count on it making you smarter.)“

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Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?

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The patient with bona fide depression will benefit from treatment with antidepressants or proven psychotherapies. For the lonely great-grandmothers, the junk food addicts, and the violent paraplegics, there has to be another form of intervention. We must turn from the inappropriate use of the disease model of emotional distress and understand that individuals’ psychological pain arises within social systems as well as within their own brains.

Germanwings co-pilot mental illness: Suicide is linked to depression but mass murder is not.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table.

YDN Cross Campus » KEEGAN: The Opposite of Loneliness

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The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument.

The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart | Khan Academy

The problem is that we are "habit machines". We suffer from "character sclerosis". "Left to [our] own devices, the result will be the downhill slide of a life dictated by whatever happened last, by happenstance and habit."

Vincent Deary: 'Are you living the life you want to lead?' | Books | The Observer HT thebrowser

But not doing things too disastrously is not some minimal achievement; it is a maximal achievement, rarely managed. Studying history doesn’t argue for nothing-ism, but it makes a very good case for minimalism: for doing the least violent thing possible that might help prevent more violence from happening.

Does It Help to Know History? HT - The Browser

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