Everyone is making New Years Resolutions these days, but not me.  Please forgive me but I just have to brag about myself today - I didn't need to make any new years resolutions this year because I am actually doing so well on some old resolutions that my only goal is to keep up the ones I already have going. I took some of my own advice and it has been working extraordinarily well. It's kind of a dumb trick, but you know, we are dumb people, so dumb tricks can work really well. What is my trick?

In the last lesson we began to explain the Big 5 person traits, including Creativity, IQ, and Conscientiousness. They are by far the biggest indicators of success. But today we will look at Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, which are also critical.

Great stories often say twice as much with half as many words. Through clever double meanings, oxymorons, and paradox, good writing often rewards multiple readings. Movies and television are no different. 

As teams, we need to interact, update each other, and remain flexible so that we can consider new ideas, while also being allowed to keep our heads down and focus without distraction. So how do we both manage and produce when the two seem to be at odds with one another?

How do the software companies of Silicon Valley grow from two man teams in garages, to world dominating monoliths like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook? How is it possible that teams of engineers could completely revolutionize the way we interact with the world. Or at the very least, how can we organize our teams to solve problems as quickly and effectively as they have?

How quickly can we get to critical mass or just the right cultural catalyst to trigger a viral response from the community? We need advocates who are so passionate that the audience will generate on its own so long as we keep providing the platform. And as anyone who has survived this recent pandemic knows, virality can be measured.

What would you need to start an organization? What does it take to make a new business successful? Does it take a lot of money to make money? Not according to Eric Ries, the author of the popular book on entrepreneurship titled, “The Lean Startup.”

Have you ever wondered how two guys living in San Francisco starting a small business out of their garage could disrupt an entire industry? And yet time and time again, we have seen Stanford school dropouts become international billionaires and outperform corporate giants like the music industry, Walmart, and IBM. What is the slingshot that is allowing these Davids to strike these Goliaths down?

Have you ever thought about starting a business, a side hustle, or a non-profit? Or maybe you dream of starting a movement, or being a pivotal part of one. Well for those of us who do, I think there is a lot we can learn from the world of entrepreneurship. 

Classrooms are designed to have us sit down and focus on the speaker, but some students are more creative, some like to dance or be physically active, and some are more easily distracted. In America a lot of students are being prescribed Adderall and Ritalin for ADHD which floods their brain with dopamine like a narcotic. What do medical health professionals have to say about this?

Do you think a great leader would typically be higher or lower in openness? Conscientious? We might expect extraverts to be great leaders, but why wouldn’t introverts be good at leading? Extraverts might be more willing to try and win elections but that doesn’t necessarily make them better leaders does it?

The Big 5 personality traits have become the standard by which psychology uses data science to determine what are the major differences between people. How are you different and similar to others? Let’s find out.

Thousands of years ago Socrates told us, “Know Thyself.” But this turns out to be much harder than we might have thought. If we look at the brain, it doesn’t appear to be just one, but two brains. And ourselves too, are we really just one person? Or multiple personalities all fighting for control over this one person moving through space called you?

Have you ever had to compete against someone way out of your league? What strategy should you employ when you are in way over your head?

I love to write things down. Especially things that I want to remember, but don’t want to deal with at the moment. I feel especially proud of myself when I make lists. But how many of us feel good about those same lists when we see them again later in the day or revisit them the next day?

While there is a lot of self help and self improvement gurus out there explaining about how to be happy, research has shown that most of these techniques may temporarily boost your happiness but most people soon return to what for them is a certain consistent base level of happiness. But there is one technique that research has shown dramatically and consistently raises people’s reported base level happiness.

I love learning. I find it both meaningful and fun, which is a magical combination. This is also why I love teaching and why I love school. But somehow schools have managed to take the fun out of learning. While I love a great class, I no longer believe the best learning is taking place in schools. The best learning is taking place on YouTube.

What do you think life after death looks like? Is it so different from the life we are living now, is it the end, or just another beginning? Today let’s talk about life after life.

Want a clever way to time travel and cheat death? Play your favorite music from when you were a teenager and take a look at some old photos or journal entries. Write an email or letter to your future self and write your own eulogy to be read at your funeral. But if you are going to go on this adventure, there is one critical ingredient you will need...

We would all love to be people who really get big things done. But so much of our day is spent procrastinating and avoiding the work we really need to do, and we are so busy doing things we really don’t need to do. By the end of the day we are left wondering whether we really made progress or not. So today I want to introduce a really great tool for discerning the difference between work that is urgent and work that is important.

Even Jesus the Messiah of Christianity and the ultimate archetype of all that is good got angry and publicly denounced the religious leaders of his time period. Obviously those benefiting from the status quo are not going to agree with these revolutionary thinkers and will find such self-righteousness to be condescending. So who can judge between these opposing factions?

In the last lesson we spoke about the two leading political ideologies, liberalism and conservatism, and how they might be related to differences in common personality traits. This episode talks about how we talk about politics.

Which do you consider more important? Equality or Patriotism? Compassion or Societal Order? Which do you prefer, dogs or cats?  Through personality tests and questions about preferences we can often tell which side of the political spectrum people fall into. When it comes to political ideologies, do you fall into the left also known as liberal, or the right, also known as conservative?

Whether in a galaxy far far away like Star Wars, or in the very near, very possible future like Black Mirror, science fiction deals with issues that we face in the here and now. Issues like race, politics, and religion might be too hot to discuss directly for a lot of us, but fictional realities allow us to take a step back and talk about what ifs. So let’s explore today’s world by looking at stories about tomorrow.