Continuing the series… Trying to understand human motivation and behaviour, a few years ago I finally came across this article: Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence, by Robert White (1959). According to the current APA abstract: Theories of motivation built upon primary drives cannot account for playful and exploratory behavior. The new motivational concept of “competence” [...]
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It’s about preparing for the future. Since we don’t know what the future will bring, we can’t know exactly how to prepare. What we can be sure of is that we’ll need to be creative, nimble, knowledgeable, open, adventurous, experienced… We need to be ready to capitalize on emerging opportunities and challenges (ones that never [...]
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We tend to reduce faraway conflicts by figuring out who’s the good guy and who’s the villain, then working out the rest of the narrative around those simple distinctions. And more often than not we decide who the good and bad guys are based on how we associate them with particular good and bad guys [...]
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A felicitous find in a used bookstore yesterday: The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs. Two bucks. The paper cover claims it was a “#1 National Bestseller” (in Canada, in 2000) but I doubt whether everyone who bought it actually read it. [They should!] I suspect a lot of left-leaning folks (as Robert Fulford pointed out, ironically, [...]
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A coincidence of events this week has led me to a surprising (and perhaps controversial) insight: war is not as complex as it may seem; at least compared to times of peace, it may even be fairly simple. During war there is a concentration of purpose. When we’re not at war, activity is less focussed, [...]
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