a man will turn over half a library to write one book"-- Samuel Johnson
Varied reading helps my writing move along, so I've been reading a random
collection lately. It really doesn't matter what I read, as long as it's complex.
I've been reading two nonfiction books lately related to psychology
1) "The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking" by Oliver Burkeman
Slow introduction, the book really begins happening on chapter 2, otherwise a great book chock-full of varied facts and quotes, including Epicetus's comment that "If you kiss your child, your brother, your friend... remind yourself that you love a mortal, something not your own; it has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever, but like a fig, or a bunch of grapes, at a fixed season of the year." He further recommends you should consider that your child or other loved one could die tomorrow, since it will make you love your child more. He also discusses how premediation of evils can actually help with dealing with anxiety by forcing the anxious person to focus and name the worst-possible consequence ever.
And with that jolly thought he launches into some solid journalistic writing; discussing Stoicism by interviewing some modern Stoics, the author's experience with a Buddhist meditation retreat, meeting Eckhart Tolle, the self, research on positive visualization vs anxiety, or, actually working on stuff. As some studies showed, visualization can be a form of procrastination, and give you the illusion you've already done the work, causing you to work less hard on actually achieving your goals.
He talks about survivor bias in researching the traits of sucessful people. As he points out, not enough unsuccessful people have been interviewed to know for sure these traits are unique to success. It is a human trait to deny failure, even in scientists who are presumably trained to expect failure as part of the method.
There is even a museum devoted to failed commerical products in Ann Arbor,MI near the airport, with a fascinating explanation of how it came to be, and why many marketers pay to come see it.
The book picked up steam all the way through, with many delightful quotations from classical authors, ancient and more recent (Seneca, Dickens, Yeats). Well-recommended for those who long for a more balanced look at life.
2) "Top Dog: the Science of Winning and Losing" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.
Starts with skydiving and competition ballroom dancing: one's more stressful. I was wary of the initial premise that the difference lies in competition and the social anxiety of being judged alone, since ballroom is very strenuous and the rigid upper carriage affects breathing, but everything else was very solid and well explained after that. This is highly researched from many fields; around 70 pages of sources and references at the end.
Topics range from politics, academic achievements, sports, childrearing, emotional equilibrium, how our hormones affect us, the deep link between cooperation and competition, why it is crucial for kids to learn how to play by the rules, even if they lose, why roughhousing can teach kids self-control, why variations in one gene(COMT) can affect what level of arousal we need to think at our best. I liked the behavior studies, business, sport, educational, social, and gender psychology references.
The book seriously discusses competition, how people vary in their reactions to it, gender differences in competitiveness. Ironically, women do well in "infinite competition" games where there's no finish line, the goal is to stay ahead, as they care less about winning every single match. Women also assess risk much better and are much more risk-adverse, which is why women excel as Wall Street analysts yet enter politics less often; they like good odds on winning.
Along the way, they discuss the copious research on how competition really does pay off, how much, and when too much shuts things down, and why. Along the way, they point out that teamwork is often misapplied in the business world, and the best team is always the smallest that can get the job done; using examples from an ER reorganization, and how "near-misses" are often chalked up as successes when in fact luck was the only reason they weren't utter failures, and how to put safeguards in place from people blindly ignoring serious problems because "nothing's happened so far."
I liked the researched arguments on why roughhousing can teach emotional regulation, and sports can teach social morality, and how "teamwork" can have disadvantages when misapplied to business; when hierarchy and clear division of labor matters for efficiency, why smaller teams do better. I concur with the assessment that 90% of a team's success depends on what happens before the first task is even begun. Communication, division of labor, etc, but if you want to know how well or how badly a team can fail, just read the passage on the CIA "Blue and Red Team" mock exercises-- one team was all about finding out each other's strengths and weaknesses BEFORE planning anything, while the other identified mainly with titles and did not find out anything about the individuals' strengths. As a result, a computer scientist was ignored when she accurately spotted a pornographic picture had a code message in it, which resulted in their team losing the game.
You also learn about the respective strengths and weaknesses of "Warriors" (fast-acting COMT genes that result in boredom in low arousal levels, but optimum performance under stress) and "Worriers" (slower COMT genes that perform best in normal situations.) Studies of airplane plots with both gene variants showed that relatively inexperienced Warriors dealt with emergencies well (but the worriers didn't fall apart), but that the expert Worriers outperformed even the expert Warriors since they had better long-term memories and were able to be good problem solvers. Essentially, variants in this gene is no bar to any field, but it may influence what sort of job within a field would best fit somebody's arousal needs.
Most importantly for sports nuts, you end up knowing how to articulate why competition is good in youth sports, and why organized sports matter to a less-corrupt, more fair society.
New insights into human nature: never a bad deal for two random plucks from the nonfiction bookshelves.