We feel better and perform better when four core energy needs are met: sufficient rest, including the opportunity for intermittent renewal during the work day; feeling valued and appreciated; having the freedom to focus in an absorbed way on the highest priorities; and feeling connected to a mission or a cause greater than ourselves.
.. At the most basic physical level, employees who took intermittent breaks through the day reported 28 percent better focus and a 30 percent higher level of health and well-being. Feeling treated with respect made employees feel 55 percent more engaged and 110 percent more likely to stay at the company. Employees who felt the most recognized and appreciated were 100 percent more likely to stay with their organizations.
Only one-fifth of respondents said they were consistently able to focus on one thing at a time at work, but those who did reported that they were 29 percent more engaged at work – and far more productive during the day.
The Virtue of Contradicting Ourselves
Using neuroscience to track the activation of different brain regions, Professor Harmon-Jones and colleagues found that inconsistent beliefs really bother us only when they have conflicting implications for action. People have little trouble favoring both abortion rights and tax cuts. But when it comes time to vote, they confront a two-party system that forces them to align with Democrats who are abortion rights advocates but against tax cuts or Republicans who are anti-abortion but for tax cuts. If I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and I want to vote for a candidate with a decent shot at winning, my beliefs are contradictory. One way to reconcile them is to change my opinion on abortion or tax policies. Goodbye, dissonance.
.. That consistency is especially appealing to political conservatives, who report a stronger preference for certainty, structure, order and closure than liberals. If you favor predictability over ambiguity and stability over change, a candidate who holds fast to his ideology has a lot of curb appeal.
.. When historians and political scientists rate the presidents throughout history, the most effective ones turn out to be the most open-minded. This is true of both conservative and liberal presidents. Abraham Lincoln was aflip-flopper: He started out pro-slavery before abolishing it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a flip-flopper, too: Elected on a platform of balancing the budget, he substantially increased spending with his New Deal.
.. “Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw observed, “and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
Bob Dylan and the “Hot Hand”
What’s clear is that when it comes to the life of the imagination, the hot hand is a matter of historical fact. Novelists, composers, painters, and poets are apt to experience stretches of intense creativity that might derive from any number of factors—surrounding historical events, artistic rivalries, or, most mysteriously, inspiration—but the streak is undeniably there.
.. Dylan was exploding with things to say and sing. As he later acknowledged, it was as if he were taking dictation from somewhere, from somebody.
.. “I couldn’t go on doing what I had been,” he said later. “I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. … I probably would have died if I had kept on going as I had been.”
.. Dylan’s “electric period,” of course, was not contained in that manic, fifteen-month period.
..Depending on your level of fanaticism, “The Cutting Edge,” which covers the 1965-66 period in the studio, comes in a two-CD version, a six-CD version, and an eighteen-CD, three-hundred-and-seventy-nine-track, five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar version that brings the listener every rehearsal, every false start, every giggle and cough, every exchange between Dylan and his musicians and engineers, as well as some in-the-moment interviews conducted in London, Glasgow, and Denver.
.. The idea is to reveal the artistic process—or as much of that process as countless spools of studio tape can provide. Maybe you’ve got to be some kind of Dylan nut to listen to all of it. I am that kind of nut. I’ve got to think that, soon enough, someone’s going to want to listen to everything Kanye West did in the studio for “The College Dropout,” “Late Registration,” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Wouldn’t you have wanted someone to plant a hidden microphone in Bach’s church as he rehearsed the performers for the next Sunday’s cantata?
.. He told Keith Richards, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man.’ ” Richards laughed and told Dylan he was right.
A jungle no more: How Temple Grandin’s designs have reformed the meat industry
Ms Grandin has played a big part in the change. She is a star in two seemingly separate firmaments: animal welfare and the understanding of autism. Half the cattle in America and Canada today are slaughtered in equipment for restraining cattle designed by Ms Grandin, and around 35% of all cattle in America are handled in her curved chute and stockyard design. She has trained workers in more than 200 slaughterhouses all over the world. Meanwhile, she has become a sought-after speaker and writer on autism, a condition she has herself. “I was severely autistic as a child,” says Ms Grandin, who credits her mother for pushing her to lead a life as normal as possible and make use of her talents, which include an unusual facility for reading drawings in three dimensions.