Interesting Link: Negotiation and Cupcakes

I saw this over on The Negotiation Blog  and it covered two of my pet topics, Negotiation and Willpower

http://thenegotiationblog.com/2013/10/22/eating-cupcakes-will-make-better-negotiator/

The punchline is that your willpower/mental energy depletes glucose, so giving in to another temptation (like the cupcakes) helps avoid further depletion (and in the case of food-based indulgences, restores glucose).  The whole willpower-as-a-muscle analogy seems to be getting a lot of support by recent experiments..

(added bonus:  Dan Green has an excellent podcast (ConMan Talk) about various conflict management techniques.  I recommend it to anyone who has to interact with other humans)

Interesting Link: The Secret to Success

Laura Vanderkam had an interesting article in Fortune about using accountability to force yourself to do the important-but-not-urgent things in your life.  Nothing earthshaking, but the key is that the accountability partner should be someone whose opinion you care about.

Inertia -or- the Bed Paradox

"Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it." - Sir Isaac Newton


Even if they don't put a name to it, everyone has an intuitive feel for the effect of inertia (which is pretty much just a lack of any other effect).  If I set a bag down, i don't expect it to start moving for no reason.  When I approach a stop light, I know it will take a little bit of distance to stop because the car wants to continue moving forward.

I see the same effect in myself when it comes to sleeping, and a lot of other things.  If I'm awake, I want to stay that way. There's a reason people shell out good money to sell Real-Estate-Secret-System-To-Make-More-Money-Than-Buffett-For-No-Money-Down at 3 am in the morning. I am that reason.  On the flip side, it takes the threat of impending job loss and homelessness to get me out of bed in the morning.  It takes every ounce of willpower to get out of that same bed I was avoiding just 6 short hours earlier..

The effect seems to be the same in a lot of ways.  House/yard/career work, exercise,  healthy eating, etc.  I'm pretty good at maintaining them, but getting started is a bear.

I guess the million dollar question is - how do I/we overcome it?

Interesting Link: Stuff You Should Know

This is one of my favorite podcasts.  Their recent willpower podcast was right down the middle of my interests and they did a good job of explaining.  They, too, seem to subscribe to the "willpower as a muscle" model.

http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/willpower-works/

Interesting Link: Improving your Powers of Persuasion

Bonus link for Christmas:

http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2012/12/21/improve-your-powers-of-persuasion/

Parminder Bahra of the Wall Street Journal interviews Steve Martin (no, not that one) about the power of peer pressure as a persuasion tool (i.e.  all of your neighbors are doing x...)

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone!

Interesting Link: Failed New Year's Resolutions

As the last person with a print subscription to Newsweek, I though I would share an article I ran across. It's about New Year's resolutions, and motivation in General.  The Author, Oliver Burkeman, theorizes that the self-help industry is based on (and requires) our difficulty making major changes.   He mentions the idea of willpower as a finite resource, and proposes "small wins", or ridiculously minor goals, as a way to make progress while not tapping into the willpower reserve.

Interesting Link: Back to Work

Now that my musical tastes are pretty much stuck in my early-90s college era, I've found myself gravitating more toward podcasts for entertainment.  One that I've found particularly interesting/entertaining is Back to Work.  The hosts are Dan Benjamin, who is the Rupert Murdoch and common thread of the 5by5 Network and acts as the straight man to Merlin Mann, who made a name for himself in the productivity arena.  I had been a casual follower of some of Merlin's earlier work, like 43 Folders and stumbled across this show by happy accident.

The basic format of the show is a collection of tangents with a theme/topic thrown in at some point.  Dan and Merlin let their geek flags fly proudly, discussing Star Wars, Comic Books and Software Development Tools with equal ease.  The side discussions are entertaining on their own, and the hosts bring their own insightful and often counter-intuitive views on various life topics like persistence, productivity, etc.  They tend to be long shows (90 minutes is not uncommon), and riddled with inside jokes, but are definitely worth a listen.