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A Stanford scientist says we’re all suffering from ‘successaholism’ — and it needs to stop
Business Insider: In her new book, "The Happiness Track," Emma Seppala explains why happiness often paves the way for professional success. Unfortunately, she says, many workers have it backward, thinking that they need to be successful before they can ever be happy. That logic results in what she calls a fruitless "chase" for one achievement after another, thinking that the next one will finally make them happy. Call it workaholism or "successaholism" — Seppala, the science director for Stanford University's Center for Altruism and Compassion Research and Education, says it's a problematic cycle because it eventually leads to burnout and worse job performance.
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Bosses: Are You Too Gritty for Your Own Good?
The Wall Street Journal: Grit is great, most of the time. But some leaders may be too gritty for their own good. Long a hallmark of overachievers, grit is trendy nowadays—largely due to research byAngela Duckworth, a psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania. She finds that grit, defined as passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, better predicts success than talent or intelligence. Her 2013 TED talk about building grit has been watched nearly eight million times. “Gritty executives excel at their jobs and have the greatest potential to be promoted,” says Dean Stamoulis, head of the Center for Leadership Insight at recruiters Russell Reynolds Associates Inc.
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The Temptation of Co-Working Spaces
The New York Times: Technology has upended where we work. The line between work and play has been blurred, and the difference between the office and home has all but disappeared. As a result, there’s a new class of white-collar workers (or no collar, to be precise) who roam the earth looking for places to get their jobs done. Some of them work from home, curled up on the couch or in a home office — maybe with a drone hovering nearby. Others camp out at expensive cafes, refilling their mugs of fancy coffee throughout the day. (Yes, I’m referring to myself.) But increasingly, these untethered employees are gathering in a new kind of office known as the co-working space. ...
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Rumor has it: Gossip can actually be good for you
Mashable: Let’s face it: gossips get a bad rap. Smugly looking down from a moral high ground — and secure in the knowledge that we don’t share their character flaw — we often dismiss those who are obsessed with the doings of others as shallow. Indeed, in its rawest form, gossip is a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations and interests at the expense of others. Studies that I have conducted confirm that gossip can be used in cruel ways for selfish purposes. Read the whole story: Mashable
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Early Poverty Disrupts Link Between Hunger and Eating
How much you eat when you’re not really hungry may depend on how well off your family was when you were a child, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
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Psychologists Analyzed a Big Collection of Condemned Inmates’ Last Words
New York Magazine: It’s a strange and uncomfortable exercise: Imagine you’re about to be executed, and you’re given the opportunity to make a final statement. What would your last words be? To psychologists who study how humans cope with fear and death, condemned inmates’ final statements are — setting aside the ick factor — a rich potential source of information. There are few other situations in which you can hear the thoughts of someone who knows they will be dead in a few minutes. In a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers Dr. Sarah Hirschmüller and Dr.
