You probably don’t have any trouble finding ways to spend your time. But are you using your time to its fullest? Probably not. Most people (including yours truly) struggle with wasting time to some extent. That’s a shame. Not only does this make it more difficult to move up in your career, it’s easier to fritter away the wonderful life you have.
Source: Weath Pilgrim
Title: Scarcity
Summary:
In the blockbuster tradition of Freakonomics, a Harvard economist and a Princeton psychology professor team up to offer a surprising and empowering new way to look at everyday life, presenting a paradigm-challenging examination of how scarcity – and our flawed responses to it – shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.
Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all are examples of a mindset produced by scarcity.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before.
Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus.
My Comments:
Still reading this…thus far really enjoying it with a more thorough update…
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My Phoenix Rising
The year 2012 was not my best year by far; I suppose I could also say that 2011 was not that much better either. I made quite a few personal missteps and only now, at the start of this new year, am I feeling my Phoenix rising again. I intend to make this year count.
Here are my goals for this year:
Lots have happened over the last 2 years – this is my year to open my eyes and rise again!
Title: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism
Summary:
Thing 1: There is no such thing as the free market.
Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.
Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst.
Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer.
If you’ve wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn’t ask what they didn’t tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists – the apostles of the freemarket – have spun since the Age of Reagan.
Chang, the author of the international best seller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world’s most respected economists, a voice of sanity – and wit – in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism equips listeners with an understanding of how global capitalism works – and doesn’t. In his final chapter, “How to Rebuild the World”, Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.
Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the best-selling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
My Comments:
Really great read. I did not have a decent understanding of what the Free Market means, this breaks it into pieces and provide a pretty concise and interesting treatment of how it affect impacts modern (primarily U.S focused) society. Â Thoroughly enjoyed and very much recommend.
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A Nepalese man who stands no taller than a newborn has been declared the world’s shortest man in history.
Chandra Bahadur Dangi, who says he’s 72, earned the title with a height of 54.6 centimeters (21.5 inches), Guinness World Records announced Sunday.
Source: CNN
My Comments:
Wow! 21.5 inches?!! Now that is short. Â I am always perplexed by this type of information. Â Where has this guys been all his life, he certainly did not just become the shortest man on earth, in fact, he looks to be quite advanced in age. Â At any rate, pretty interesting stuff.
Title: One Second After by William R. Forstchen
Summary:
In a small North Carolina town, one man struggles to save his family after America loses a war that will send it back to the Dark Ages.
Already cited on the floor of Congress and discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon as a book all Americans should read, One Second After is the story of a war scenario that could become all too terrifyingly real. Based upon a real weapon – the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) – which may already be in the hands of our enemies, it is a truly realistic look at the awesome power of a weapon that can destroy the entire United States, literally within one second.
This book, set in a typical American town, is a dire warning of what might be our future and our end.
My Comments:
At first I thought that this was going to be a long read, but it turned out quite good. Â I am not a big fiction reader per se, but this really give you something to think about. Â The fact that it is also possibly, although not likely, add to the mystique of it. Â Really enjoyed it. I recommend it.
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