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Featured Video: Raise Your Children As Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial skills are not a part of traditional education, even though they are important if we want to empower more people to make an independent living in a world where not everyone can find a good job.

In this TED talk, Cameron Herald argues that we should encourage and foster those skills in children. He makes a case that entrepreneurial traits occur quite naturally in children and can be encouraged and reinforced in playful ways. He gives many practical suggestions how parents can help their children develop those skills. For example, rather than giving children allowances and thereby getting them used to expecting a regular paycheck, children could be paid for specific projects.

Many important traits could be developed in that way, including such big ones as creativity, social skills, a proactive attitude towards working, and an understanding of what it means to create value for others.

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Savings and Retirement Decisions

How many Americans aged 30-54 believe they will not have enough money put away for retirement? According to the U.S. Census Bureau (retrieved from Statistic Brain Research Institute), as many as 80%.Savings and Retirement Decisions 1

How many Americans don’t save anything for retirement? The U.S. Census Bureau estimates 38%.Savings and Retirement Decisions 2

How many Americans who started working at the age of 25, have adequate capital stowed away for retirement by age 65? The correct answer is 4%, again according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as retrieved from Statistic Brain Research Institute.Savings and Retirement Decisions

Decision scientists have long been interested in savings decisions. They have found many reasons why people don’t save enough,

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Book and Video Recommendation: Skills Are More Important Than Passion

“Follow your passion” is a very commonly heard career advice, but Cal Newport argues it’s actually quite terrible as a guiding principle.

In his quest to figure out how people find great careers, he found not only that preexisting passions are very rare, but that they have little to do with how most people end up loving their work. The pressure to “find our passion” can therefore unnecessarily lead to anxiety, dissatisfaction and unproductive career changes.

Instead, passion for a career seems to come after you put in the hard work of becoming excellent at something that adds value to other people’s lives, not before.

This is the book that resulted from his research, and where he includes more advice on how to go about building a career based on skills:

Cal Newport (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You –

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What Are Your Strengths? Review of Two Self-Assessments

I’m featuring two self-assessments here that focus on clarifying what your strengths are: the Clifton StrengthsFinder®, and the VIA Survey.

The Clifton StrengthsFinder® was developed by the Gallup Organization. Based on a lot of interview data, they came up with 34 distinct patterns of strengths, or what they call “talent themes”. The online self-assessment tells individuals which of those “themes” are most pronounced in them. From the perspective of management consulting, the assumption here is that by identifying people’s strengths, an organization’s overall performance can be improved.

The VIA Survey was created by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, well-known researchers in the field of positive psychology. It is designed to identify a person’s profile of character strengths. The inventory informed the Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook (CSV), a counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) used in traditional psychology.

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A Career Development Tool For Academics

myIDPContinuing my series about self-assessments, the one I’m reviewing here is for academics:

the myIDP.

The myIDP is an Individual Development Plan for science careers, and is mainly targeted to grad students and postdocs, with the goal of helping them define and pursue their career goals.

It includes a self-assessment part covering skills, interests, and values. Aside from the online questionnaires that show your scores right away, can also download blank skills assessment forms to share with a mentor or colleague. Based on the assessment, it offers a long list of career paths and shows you how well each matches with your interests and skills. As you explore those options, you get suggestions of how to consider your values in those contexts.

After this assessment and exploration part, the website includes a personal planning system for setting your own goals and implementing next steps.

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Book Recommendation: Smart Choices

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, & Howard Raiffa. (1996). Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.

It’s time to recommend another classic. This book is a short and very useful guide, presenting a variety of decision tools. It doesn’t offer too much in the way of psychological explanations of why we need the tools and how they work, but it is a nice little toolkit.

by

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Creativity Tip – How to Make Other People Think for You

We’ve all experienced it: we’re talking to somebody, and suddenly they are trying to solve our problems for us or give us unasked advice. Our first impulse? Shutting them down. Saying, “yes, but …”, and making clear that their idea is neither new nor helpful. But here’s the thing: if we do that, we’re missing out on some great creative potential.

If you want to get into the habit of thinking more creatively, here’s a tip.

Whenever you feel like saying “yes, but…”

for example:

  • “yes, but I don’t have enough money for that”, or
  • “yes, but that will take too much time”,

instead say “Oh, yes!”, and then something to make your friends think even harder for you (since they seem to love doing that).

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Book Recommendation: Strategic Planning

Erica Olsen. Strategic planning kit for dummies.

If you’re a decision-maker in an organization and you’re serious about strategic planning, I highly recommend this book by Erica Olson as a very thorough but practical reference. It will give you more than you need, but it is very clearly structured so that you easily focus on whatever aspects are relevant to you. It also includes a DVD with worksheets, templates, and videos.

Book Cover Strategic Planning Erica Olson

Why does strategic planning matter?

Strategic planning offers a systematic process to figure out where you’re going – as a business or as any kind of organization.

Erica Olsen reports that CEOs of the Inc. 500 spend 50-90 percent of their time on strategy and business development. Why? Probably because they realize how much it pays off. According to her research, the firms with a high commitment to strategic planning had higher sales volumes as well as net incomes than those with  lower commitment.

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Book Recommendation: “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath (2013)

Chip and Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. New York: Crown Business.

Book Cover: "Decisive" by Dan and Chip Heath

I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers, a very helpful guide to decision making. It does not offer any formal tools to evaluate options, but a process with powerful ideas that are easy to apply to any personal or business decision.

They call their approach the WRAP process, an acronym standing for (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality test your assumptions, (3) Attain some distance, and (4) Prepare to be wrong.

Here’s a sample of some ideas that I’m finding very effective with clients as well as for my own decisions:

For widening your options,

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Interest Profiler for Career Choice and Development

Im my last post, where I discussed a free personality self-assessment, I promised to write more about self-assessments, in particular provide information about a test that is more geared towards career development.

Here is a website that offers several free career-oriented self-assessments and a neat way to explore information about hundreds of occupations: http://www.cacareerzone.org.

The interest profiler, for example, is based on the six Occupational Themes (developed by the psychologist John L. Holland). His idea assumes that people thrive most in career environments that fit their personality, and that jobs and career environments are classifiable in that way. The model classifies jobs and career along six occupational themes or “types”, and all the different combinations of those:

  • Realistic (Doers)
  • Investigative (Thinkers)
  • Artistic (Creators)
  • Social (Helpers)
  • Enterprising (Persuaders)
  • Conventional (Organizers)

As an acronym of those themes,

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Book Recommendation of the Month: Rational Decision Making

Eisenfuehr, Weber & Langer. Rational Decision Making.

This month’s pick is a classic textbook, presenting theory as well as practical methods on how to improve decision making. It is admittedly not the easiest read, but those who are truly interested in the formal methods of how to approach difficult decisions will find this book very rich and thorough.

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The Dark Sides of Positive Thinking

Illustrated by an artist in this RSA animation, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the problems of positive thinking:

Positive thinking, to the extent that it is delusional (and it often is), is not as harmless as it sounds. It can keep us in a powerless or complacent state, rather than forcing us to acknowledge the unpleasant reality and take action.

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Which types of decisions do we regret most?

In this TED talk, Kathryn Schulz makes the rather unusual
claim that regret is not always a bad thing:

It is a worthwhile talk for many reasons. One thing I found
particularly remarkable was a study she cites, which showed
that the kinds of decisions people regret most are decisions
concerning their education and career. Next up are romance
and parenting as fields where people experience considerable
regrets.

Interestingly though, people seem to have hardly any regrets
about finances or health, which are by far the most
extensively researched decision domains.
I do hope that more decision scientists will in the future
venture out into those other (messier?) domains, like
relationships or careers, where people seem to have a lot
more difficulties with their decisions.

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