Knowing yourself has extraordinary prestige in our culture. It has been framed as quite literally the meaning of life. Self-knowledge is important for one central reason: because it offers us a route to greater happiness and fulfilment.
A lack of self-knowledge leaves you open to accident and mistaken ambitions. Armed with the right sort of self-knowledge, we have a greater chance of avoiding errors in our dealings with others and in the formulation of our life choices.
It can happen to the best of us. We’re human. We all make mistakes.
Mistakes are bad, no doubt, but not learning from them is worse. It’s not the failures in life that define us as much as how we respond to them.
Social media has come to dominate the marketing landscape: 83% of marketers say they’ve used online platforms to boost the perception of their organisations. Here are eight trends to watch for as social media continues to mature in 2017:
“We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.”
Read how psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses this central paradox with clarity and elegance in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life in this article from Brainpickings.
The story of humanity’s love affair with alcohol goes back to a time before farming—to a time before humans, in fact. Our taste for tipple may be a hardwired evolutionary trait that distinguishes us from most other animals. Alcohol isn’t just a mind-altering drink, however; it has been a prime mover of human culture from the beginning, fueling the development of arts, language, and religion.
“Personal finance is more personal than finance.” There are so many factors that affect a person or family’s finances: where you live, what career path you take, how much financial support you receive from family, good luck, bad luck, how much money you make, poor choices, hard work, student loans, healthcare spending, a lack of education or understanding about how to run your own finances, what your lifestyle inflation looks like, what your personal relationship is with money and the list could go on and on. Ben Carlson offers some common-sense guidelines.
One lie leads to another, goes the old adage. And now we’ve got neuroscience to back it up. Research shows that you can actually train your brain to lie. Scientists don’t know if the change in brain activity caused the lying, or if the brain activity was simply a reflection of psychological changes, or if it’s all kind of a cycle.
Emotion can be very powerful when trying to reach an audience, and it can be boosted by linking it with the way memory affects human behaviour. It’s not easy to be effective with the ever-increasing mobile audience, but emotion (building trust) can contribute to a more meaningful relationship between a brand and a consumer. Read more about the ways to activate brains in a mobile world.
The easier you make it for people to understand what you’re all about, and why they should care about you, the better the odds are that they’re going to want to know you, interview you, or drop everything to hire you. Most people, however, when faced with the task of shouting out what’s so great about themselves go about it in a way that comes out all wrong and leaves those on the receiving end with the wrong impression. Just how do you make it abundantly clear that you’re great at what you do without coming off like you’re full of yourself? Have a look at these four quick ways.
Ad blocking is a rising trend and over the last year (in particular) the conversation around ad blocking has increased significantly. That is largely due to the fact that ad blocking has moved away from a fringe practice, adopted by only tech-savvy individuals, to the mainstream, where it is easily accessible and readily adopted. What do marketers need to know about ad blocking in order to ensure that marketing efforts and, equally importantly, their ad spend are not wasted?