What We Learned Today

“Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it. If you’re miserable in your current situation, chances are it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control—that there’s a problem you have no ability to solve, a problem that was somehow thrust upon you without your choosing. When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable”

“Consider the story of two NASA janitors asked to describe their jobs. One said it was to clean up and maintain the physical plant. The other said it was to help put an astronaut on the moon. It is not difficult to guess which one found his job more satisfying.”

“overall assessments of the quality of life are not a matter of simply adding up moment-to-moment experiences of pain and pleasure. Instead, such assessments are dictated by the broader meaning we give to our everyday experiences. Was the day spent cleaning up the beach a boring but dutiful exercise, or was it a satisfying opportunity to act in accord with important values in the company of like-minded companions?”

“Much of the moment-to-moment and day-to-day experience of raising a child—staying calm during weeks of colic, staying awake after predawn chauffeuring to swim practice, and staying civil during periods of adolescent rebellion—is anything but enjoyable. Yet many parents say that raising a child and persevering through such difficulties is the most rewarding thing they have ever done in their lives”

“Volunteers in these studies consistently rate watching television as pleasurable.4 But after spending a day watching TV, few of us feel much satisfaction. The moment-to-moment consumer of television is happy, but the retrospective evaluator who has spent hours watching reruns and reality TV shows is not”

“This distinction is captured in part by the difference between moment-to-moment pleasure (or the sum or average of such moments) and what philosophers have called eudaimonia—the broader sense of well-being that comes with the feeling that one’s life is worthwhile, meaningful, and well lived”

“One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.”

“Today, 30 percent of Black men without college educations have been to prison by their midthirties”

“You see, equality is not only a matter of mathematics and geometry, but it’s a matter of psychology,” King told his audiences. “It’s not only a quantitative something, but it is a qualitative something. And it is possible to have a quantitative equality and qualitative inequality.”

“Unlike most animals, whose eyes move in concert, a chameleon’s eyes move independently, allowing them to see almost 360 degrees. Chameleons’ tongues are equally impressive. They can be twice a chameleon’s body length and when catching prey, lash out at almost 15 miles per hour.”

“To build these skills, we must encourage risk tasking and originality, and give people the autonomy to decide how they learn and create. We must offer them the time they need for personal reflection, daydreaming, and inner exploration. We must make tasks more meaningful and relevant to their personal goals and help people find and develop their unique purpose and identity. To foster creativity, it is important to build people’s confidence and competence to learn new information and deal with adversity; make tasks conducive to flow by engaging them in the appropriate level of challenges; and help them develop supportive, positive social relationships”

“Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment”

“In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself. In other words, you could be mildly traumatized—on a par with, say, an ordinary rear-base deployment to Afghanistan—and experience long-term PTSD simply because of a lack of social support back home.”

“The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940.”

The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent.

“Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. … To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’ ” In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo. That’s what undoubtedly occurred in my early days of teaching when I mistakenly equated talent and achievement, and by doing so, removed effort—both my students’ and my own—from further consideration”