Nigel Marsh on Work-life balance

Nigel Marsh presents his four observations on work-life balance:

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

To summarize his four key messages:

#1 Acknowledge your own reality: “the reality of the society that we’re in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quite screaming desperation, where they work long hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”

#2 Set your boundaries: “commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you they can get away with. (…) We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.”

#3 Find your middle way: “We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the “I’ll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I’ve got no mates or interests left…”

#4 Redefine success: “We need to approach balance in a balanced way. (…) Being more balanced doesn’t mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. (…) if enough people do it, we can change society’s definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like.”

RSA Animate – The revolution of learning

Sir Ken Robinson about what’s going wrong at our schools, and how we may overcome this.

– divergent thinking is not the same for creativity, but one of its foundations

– human capacity is greater than we trust it is

– get over the old concept of academic / non-academic / abstract / theoretical

– great learning happens in groups; collaboration is the stuff of growth

– what habits do schools have, what purpose do they serve
Read his biography here.

Source of video:Youtube.com

Wear sunscreen!

The classic from Baz Luhrmann, just give it a try: “Do one thing everyday that scares you.” – “Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.” – “Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”

Continue reading

TED – So you think you know…?

“Daniel Simons is the head of Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois. His recent research explores the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. For example, his studies reveal the surprising extent of inattentional blindness — the failure to notice unusual and salient events when attention is otherwise engaged and when the events are unexpected. More broadly, he tries to identify those aspects of our environment that automatically capture attention and those that go unnoticed. Other active research interests include scene perception, object recognition, visual memory, visual fading, attention, driving and distraction. His laboratory adopts methods ranging from real-world and video-based approaches to computer-based psychophysical techniques.

This talk was recorded at TEDxUIUC 2010 (April 10, 2010).”

Full quote from here.