Room to Think

A week ago (practically), I suggested you all watch Shawn Achor's TEDtalk on Changing the way we achieve happiness .  I also said I was going to put up a Part 2. Due to an etiquette dinner, a volleyball game, a career fair, a group project, two days of dressing up professionally, and an incredible amount of lazy time laying in bed, I could not effectively finish this post until now.  I sincerely apologize for having a life.  =) But upon refreshing my memory on my last post, it occurred to me that I didn't really do his talk much justice.  Here's a better summary, written at a more sensible hour: Shawn Achor is CEO of Good Think, Inc. where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.  Shawn's work concerning positive psychology questions why there are those positive outliers in his psychological research. For Shawn, that dot off in the upper left-hand corner of your graph is an above-average person, not a measurement error.   He says that

I'm blogging from a classroom today ( A classroom, not the classroom), in response to this post that my professor, Brenda, put up on the class blog. The class itself is "Online Writing as Literature", which is how I ought to refer to the course, instead of saying "oh yeah, I've got a class on blogging"  in that drawling sort of voice that implies an eye-roll, or lifting my eyebrows expectantly, as if to say, "you jealous ?" With this class, we're attempting to establish the importance of blogging in a "literature" sense, and I'm not exactly sure what that entails.  Let's see what wiki says .  (That's right, I'm calling up wikipedia during a midterm...you jelly ?) Wiki says: Literature is the art of written works , and is not bound to published sources.   The word "literature" literally means "acquaintance with letters" . The two major classifications are poetry and prose . It is u

Roman Amphitheatre in Volterra Good morning!  It's a beautiful Florence Friday and I'm cheery not because of the weather, but because I just skipped an interview with a potential employer...on purpose.  (but that is a post for another time) In truth, I'm still in my bed, so I can't see what Bellingham looks like today, but it's certainly not sunny. And I just checked the weather in Florence... It's not so cheery there, either.  30degrees Fahrenheit and it's drizzling. (shouldn't it be snowing then?) Regardless of the weather, I'm still terribly excited about Italy.  I haven't made much progress in planning my Italy trip since last Friday, and blogging has made me acutely aware of how quickly the weeks go by.  I'm still a little disgruntled about Mr. Franco's email to me. But one of the reasons I've always been drawn to Italy (and Greece) is the ancient history built into the cities. I'm a huge fan of Gre

You know, I really seem to be on a happiness binge with these TEDtalks--or maybe that's just TED. Either way, here is your TEDtalk for today (I started this at 11pm on Tuesday, it still counts!) This guy's name is Shawn Achor, and he "accidentally" broke his sister's arm when she was five in order to save her from being in the path of an imaginary sniper bullet. He still has yet to be thanked.  =) He also applied to Harvard on a dare...and he got in.  O_O In all seriousness though (kinda?), he has some hugely important messages to share with all of us: "...if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average."--on research it's possible to be a male medical student at Yale named Bobo who has leprosy AND menopause.  (5:54) and most importantly: The formula for success is wrong. (9:11) "If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier.

The following post is a lie. I told you that Sunday Scribbles was to get me to draw every week.  Well...I have been drawing.  In fact, I've drawn quite a bit over the last couple days.  But I just don't have time to scan them in tonight!  So, as a placeholder, and a reminder, I drew this quick little guy on my computer for today's Sunday Scribbles: I named him "Kidney Man" because his head is shaped like a Kidney bean.