10,000 Hours of reading about 10,000 hours

No, seriously, here's another nice take on the concept from Harvard Business Review.

"Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them."

Metaphor Mind

From a nice piece by Robert Sapolsky (John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University):

There’s another domain of unique human skills, and neuroscientists are learning a bit about how the brain pulls it off.

Consider the following from J. Ruth Gendler’s wonderful “The Book of Qualities,” a collection of “character sketches” of different qualities, emotions and attributes:

Anxiety is secretive. He does not trust anyone, not even his friends, Worry, Terror, Doubt and Panic … He likes to visit me late at night when I am alone and exhausted. I have never slept with him, but he kissed me on the forehead once, and I had a headache for two years …

Or:

Compassion speaks with a slight accent. She was a vulnerable child, miserable in school, cold, shy … In ninth grade she was befriended by Courage. Courage lent Compassion bright sweaters, explained the slang, showed her how to play volleyball.

What is Gendler going on about? We know, and feel pleasure triggered by her unlikely juxtapositions. Despair has stopped listening to music. Anger sharpens kitchen knives at the local supermarket. Beauty wears a gold shawl and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. Longing studies archeology.

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

Dictionary of the Near Future

Three Definitions from Douglas Coupland's Dictionary of the Near Future:

STANDARD DEVIATION Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, and yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.

IKEASIS The desire in daily life and consumer life to cling to “generically” designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information.

CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC MONEY THEORY The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species.

Country ETFs: debt, correlation, GDP

1. "...some markets seem to be less in tune with the dips and advances of the S&P 500 than others. In particular, three country ETFs stand out as exhibiting a relatively low correlation with the S&P over the past two years..."

2. Levels of Public Debt as a % of GDP from 2009, a list by country

3. put 'em together and you get: "five ETFs [OK, three] focused on countries with low debt-to-GDP ratios"

4. For bonus points, what country ETF is featured on both ETF lists?

Liffeytown is no more

"Moored between O’Connell Bridge and the Ha’penny Bridge, Liffeytown is a comment on the rise and fall of the property industry, bookmarking the end of an era. Throughout the boom, the city was surrounded by a forest of scaffolding and cranes constructing badly planned, badly designed, disposable architecture. ‘Liffeytown’ presents itself, hopefully, as the last of these ‘ghost estates’ — as a beacon that its time has passed and been replaced by a more sensitively attuned city."

Econ Gangs of New York

"The factions that are shaping the economic dialog these days are becoming every bit as colorful and distinct as the proto-gangs that once ruled New York's notorious Five Points area.  Their leaders, every bit as bellicose and recognizable. Here's a quick idea of who's who so you can keep up with the discussion."