Tag: Young Adults

Listening in English is hard, and it stays hard for longer than the other parts. The place to start is with the belief that you can speak and understand it fluently. Even when the early going is difficult, that settled expectation is what keeps a learner in the work long enough to get anywhere.

Do all three, not the comfortable one

Do not only read English. Speak it, and listen to it. Each of the three keeps you alert in a different way and opens up quite different methods of study.

There is a reason the comfortable one is reading. You set the pace, you can stop, and you can look back at the sentence. Speech gives you none of that. It arrives at the speaker’s speed, once, and the words run together in ways the page never showed you. Time spent on each skill separately is what makes you usable in an actual situation rather than only on paper.

Start with what already interests you

Choose listening material on subjects you care about. Attention is most of the battle, and you will stay with a recording about something you would have listened to anyway.

Then deliberately choose what does not

Once that is going, pick topics you are unfamiliar with, because that is where the vocabulary you do not have is kept. Branching into different kinds of entertainment builds the word stock and puts a real load on memory and comprehension.

Both halves are needed. Familiar material builds fluency and confidence. Unfamiliar material is the only thing that adds range. A learner who does only the first plateaus pleasantly and stops improving.

Guess ahead of the speaker

This is the technique on the page and it is the one worth taking away. Pay attention to what you are hearing and to the situation you are hearing it in. Ask yourself continually what is likely to come next, based on what you know and on what would simply make sense. Then take the chance and guess.

The reason this works is not that your guesses are right. It is that a prediction gives the next few seconds something to attach to. A listener with no expectation has to identify every word from nothing, which is slow, and slow is fatal when the speaker does not stop. A listener who is half a sentence ahead only has to check.

It also means you can follow a conversation while missing individual words, which is what fluent listening actually consists of. Nobody hears everything. They simply lose nothing that matters.

Consider somebody with real gifts and a clear road ahead who has no particular ambition attached to any of it. When the pressure arrives, or the setback, or simply the long uninteresting middle of the work, there is nothing pulling them forward. Talent does not supply that on its own.

The claim made for ambition is a strong one: that it is the single most useful instrument for finding fulfilment and making progress, and that it outruns both talent and resources by a wide margin. An ambitious turn of mind can carry any person towards achievement and towards being satisfied with what they have done. Here is why it usually wins.

It supplies the motivation

The greatest talent in the world amounts to nothing without something driving you towards a result larger than the one you already have. Ambition is what gives a purpose its fuel and what keeps you going after a goal without letting up.

It keeps you humble, which sounds wrong

Nobody warms to arrogance, and people do warm to somebody humble and committed. The reason ambition points that way is mechanical rather than moral. Being ambitious means constantly measuring yourself against what you have not done yet, and that is a difficult posture from which to feel superior. It keeps the mind off itself and on the goal.

Talent left alone goes to waste

There are people who waste their abilities, and it is generally not laziness. It is that talent by itself does not produce anything. Things start moving only when talent has ambition mixed into it. Meanwhile somebody with very little apparent gift, or none, can take an ambitious drive and build an opportunity out of it.

The part that is still argued

Whether ambition can be taught is a real dispute and the page is honest enough to say so. The optimistic reading is that a person with enough drive who puts in the time can end up as capable as somebody who was born able, which would mean ambition manufactures talent.

I would add a caution and a second thought. The caution is that the word covers two different things. There is wanting a large outcome, which is cheap and which almost everybody has. And there is the willingness to do the same unglamorous thing for two years, which is rare and is what actually produces the result. Praising ambition usually means praising the second while picturing the first.

The second thought is more encouraging. What looks like ambition from outside is often just a clear next step plus a reason to take it. That combination can absolutely be handed to somebody, which may be the honest answer to the question of whether it can be taught.

Seen from a corporate desk the startup looks like the softer option: flexible hours, an open workplace, nobody counting minutes. Those parts are real. The job underneath them is considerably more demanding than the advertisement lets on.

Such a company runs on an ideology of its own, and its method of working is close to the reverse of corporate business, which is where both the appeal and the difficulty come from. That makes joining one a decision worth evaluating carefully, since the environment is genuinely challenging. Undergraduate, bored of a corporate job, or simply after something outside the usual box, the same factors apply. Here is the set of skills the place expects you to possess.

Data analysis

They want professionals who have spent a long enough period in the field to be useful immediately, because an organisation that has only begun functioning, or is new to its industry, has nothing to steer by except what it can measure.

Collected with current innovation, that material becomes knowledge about what the customer actually needs, as against what the founders assumed. It then supports decisions about which activities are beneficial to survival in the market and which are not, and those conclusions become the strategies. How much any firm gains varies, since it turns on how carefully it analyses its buyers and aims its own products and services at them. Understand them better, gain more.

Problem solving

Every professional must possess this and in a young company it is load-bearing. The aim is to resolve the difficulty quickly and with some judgement, arriving at an answer everyone can live with.

What is wanted is your own solution, unexpected rather than standard, because supplying one is how a good image forms in a small room where everybody watches everybody work. Handling problems independently comes close to the definition of succeeding here, and it is also what fetches a promotion.

Appetite for learning

Some visible proof is expected that the enthusiasm you brought to this employment has not dropped below where it stood on the day you joined, and ideally has grown. Willingness to take up challenges matters, because new businesses hunt continually for better approaches and lean on whatever innovations have just arrived, and somebody has to learn them.

That means being pleased about developing yourself, chipping away at your own aptitudes, and accepting that plenty remains unknown to you.

Selling yourself

Startups look for people who do not rely on a settled apparatus of systems, processes and resources. Much of what a big budget employer would have handed you is absent, so you work with whatever limited opportunities exist and stay speedy and efficient about it. And you have to project yourself and the work so that both register on the consumers you are trying to reach, because in a company this size nobody else will do it for you.

Patience

Uncertainty and lengthened hours are part of the arrangement, and they examine even workers with years of experience and real dedication behind them. Anybody without passion, and without belief in what the company hopes to achieve, tends to abandon ship during the hard stretch, and a hard stretch always comes.

The page adds one more skill, and it is the one holding the rest together: emotional intelligence. It helps you bag the job, and afterwards it helps you handle the pressures that working at a startup brings.

Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, and his account of evolution by natural selection changed how our species understands itself and everything around it. Darwinism, put plainly, says this: organisms differ slightly from one another, some of those differences are inherited, and the ones that help an individual compete, endure and leave offspring accumulate until a new species has formed.

The twelfth of February is kept as Darwin Day, marking his birth in 1809 and standing more broadly for science and for reason. The facts below tend to be left out of the textbook paragraph.

He shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln

The same day, the same year, and about as different a beginning as two lives can manage. America’s sixteenth president arrived in a one-room cabin of logs somewhere in the Kentucky backwoods. Darwin arrived in a large Georgian house standing on an estate above the River Severn, next to the medieval market town of Shrewsbury.

He was meant to be a doctor

He went to Edinburgh intending to become a physician like his father, and gave it up quickly because he could not stand the sight of blood. The fallback was the church. He turned to divinity with the intention of becoming a country clergyman, a post that would have left him plenty of time for his hobby, which was natural history.

It is worth pausing on that. The best-known naturalist in history arrived at natural history as the thing he did around two careers that did not take.

He ate the specimens

Darwin did not only study unfamiliar animals from around the world. At Cambridge he founded what the members called the Gourmet Club, whose stated purpose was to dine on birds and beasts unknown to the human palate. The curiosity that took him to the Galapagos appears to have had a literal appetite attached to it.

He was on the money

From the year 2000, the reverse of the British ten-pound note carried a portrait of the bearded Darwin, set beside a picture of HMS Beagle, the ship that took him on the voyage out of which the work came.

One correction to make here, since the clipping this came from is some years old. That note has gone. It was replaced in 2017 by a polymer note carrying Jane Austen, and the Darwin note stopped being legal tender in March 2018. If you have one in a drawer, it is a keepsake rather than currency, though the Bank of England will still exchange it.

There is an old tale worth retelling, and then there is the reason it has lasted.

The story

An elderly man put it about that his neighbour was a thief. The younger man was arrested on the strength of it. Some days later he was cleared, and he walked home through the same streets carrying the humiliation of having been taken away in front of them. He then took the older man to court for accusing him falsely.

In the courtroom the old man offered the defence such people always offer. They were only remarks. Nobody was hurt.

The judge did not pass sentence. Instead he told the old man to write down every remark he had made, on paper, and to cut the paper into pieces, and to scatter the pieces on the way home. Come back tomorrow, he said, for the sentence.

When the man returned, the judge issued one instruction ahead of any sentence. Go out, he said, and collect every scrap you scattered on your way home.

The old man said what anybody would say. That is impossible. The wind has taken them and I would not know where to begin.

And the judge said that this is exactly what a few careless remarks do to a person’s good name. They go too far and into too many hands to be called back. The old man understood what he had done and asked to be forgiven.

Why it holds

The moral attached to the tale is plain enough. Do not accuse anybody of anything before you know whether it is true, because your words can destroy a reputation that was never at fault.

What makes the story more than a pleasant lesson is the asymmetry it describes. An accusation is interesting, so it is repeated. A correction is dull, so it is not. The two pieces of information travel at completely different speeds through the same set of people, which means a retraction almost never reaches the whole audience that heard the original.

And there is a second effect layered on that. People remember that they heard something about a person far longer than they remember what it was or whether it turned out to be true. A name acquires a faint cloud. Nobody can say why.

What it costs to be careful

Very little, which is the point. Before repeating something about somebody, ask where it came from and whether the person telling you actually knows. If the answer is that somebody else said so, you have not learned anything, you have only been handed something to carry.

The judge in the story could have fined the old man. Making him try to gather the paper was better, because a fine ends and the understanding does not.

Openness is treated as a virtue and mostly it is one. But a handful of things reliably cost you something when they leave the room, and the cost is different in each case. Here they are, with the reason attached, because a rule without a reason does not survive contact with a good evening and a willing audience.

What happens at home

Difficulties inside a household are settled best inside that household, among the people who actually have to live with the outcome. Taken outside, the same difficulty acquires an audience with opinions and no responsibility, and the people in it acquire reputations that outlast the argument.

What you own

The designer watch on the wrist, the well-known sunglasses, the expensive smartphone produced at the table and flashed around the circle. It feels good to hold some repute in your group, and it remains unwise to let others become aware of the size of your family wealth.

Two separate risks sit under that. One is plain: somebody visibly worth robbing is likelier to be robbed in the street, and likelier to have burglars take an interest in the house. Strangers you never wanted the attention of now have a reason to give it. The other risk is slower. Money corrupts friends and relatives who were perfectly decent before they knew the figure, and once they are jealous they are around you constantly, which is not the compliment it looks like.

What you believe privately

Convictions about spirituality, about meaning, about life and death. What you conclude on such topics should be your own belief rather than something you set about inculcating into other people. Choose to make one of them a topic for discussion and reactions of every diverse kind arrive, few of them useful. The thing to hold on to is this: what you think is an interpretation you arrived at, not the objective fact of the matter, and forgetting the difference is exactly how such a discussion turns into an argument with ill outcomes nobody wanted.

The brave thing you once did

Recounting your own bravery and heroism leaves you looking self-obsessed, whatever the episode was. All of us face difficulties in the inner world and the outer one, and all of us somehow cope with them. Everybody has their virtues. Do not take yourself too seriously.

The common version of this mistake is the careful one: recounting the episode as though you were not boasting, merely mentioning it, which fools nobody and quietly feeds the ego anyway.

The philosophy you live by

Everybody needs to believe in something in order to go on with their life in a healthy way, and we all keep a few things that make living easier and soothe the soul. But any inference you draw from your own life concerns you and only you, because it is what you can see from your own small window, and nobody else was standing at it. Hold it. There is no need to share it or to push it onto others.

What frightens you

Every person alive is afraid of something, and however large and threatening a particular fear appears from inside it, human beings do in fact cope.

Here is where I would part company with a strict rule of silence, and this is my own view rather than the page’s. Fear broadcast is a burden you hand to other people. Fear told to one person you trust, when you actually need help, is the single most useful sentence in this whole list. The rule is not to keep everything in. It is to know which of these you are doing.

Each person carries a manner of moving through life that belongs to them alone. That is easiest to take seriously once you notice that every human being stands in a distinct position, and nobody else is standing quite where they stand.

We grow up in different places, shaped by a range of influences nobody chose. The preferences, values and beliefs we hold are bound up closely with where we came from, and the impulse to make our own experience particular is instinctive, because doing so is what lets us cope when we have to face things alone. The result is that each of us carries a perspective that is genuinely ours and not quite anybody else’s.

What that means in a difficult room

Interacting peacefully and usefully with people from every walk of life is first a matter of understanding where they are coming from. Once you have some of that, you can adjust your expectations, which stops you making assumptions about them that were never warranted.

Because in the middle of a disagreement, the assumption arrives on its own. They are being difficult. They are being unreasonable. They are just stubborn. We become frustrated when somebody close by does not share our opinion, or will not support what we are trying to do.

It is far more likely that the person in front of you simply holds a different notion of what matters in a life. Stubbornness and a different set of priorities look identical from the outside and require completely different responses.

The move that opens it

When there is a barrier between you and somebody else, think of questions you could ask that would give you a fuller picture of their point of view. Not rhetorical ones. Actual ones, to which you do not know the answer.

What you often discover is that the difference in perspective dividing you is not really about the matter under discussion. It is attached to an insecurity or some personal difficulty that shapes how they see everything, and the argument you are having is a proxy. Asking what they are protecting will get you further than establishing who is correct.

Two honest limits

The first: you will never fully grasp the complexity of another person, and you do not need to. You can go a very long way on the simple habit of reaching towards people in a spirit of sympathetic comprehension, and stopping there is not a failure.

The second, and this one matters more. Accepting that somebody was formed elsewhere is not the same as accepting whatever they do. Understanding why a person behaves badly explains the behaviour, it does not licence it, and there is a version of tolerance that quietly becomes an excuse for putting up with harm. Respect the right of every person to determine their own course. That right ends where it starts costing somebody else theirs.

Average college scores run well below average school scores, and the usual explanation is that the work got harder. Some of it did. But something else changes at the same time, and it is almost invisible: students stop asking.

In a school classroom the asking is normal and slightly compulsory. In a lecture hall it is optional, the room is large, and the cost of looking slow in front of two hundred people feels enormous. So the hand stays down, and nothing happens, and nothing continuing to happen is precisely the problem.

Why silence is expensive

A lecturer reads a quiet room as a room that has understood. There is no other signal available. So the pace stays where it is, the next session assumes the last one landed, and a gap that was one step wide in September is four steps wide by November. Subjects that build on themselves, mathematics, statistics, anything with code in it, punish this hardest, because every session is constructed on top of the one you missed.

The fear is the wrong way round

The thing that keeps the hand down is the belief that asking advertises incompetence. The research points the other way. Alison Brooks and colleagues ran a series of experiments on advice seeking and found that people who asked for advice were rated as more competent than those who did not, not less, and the effect held across several settings. Asking reads as engagement. It also flatters the person asked, which is not a cynical observation, just a true one.

Most professors are, genuinely, enthusiastic about the subject they teach, and are approached by a surprisingly small fraction of the people they teach. Approach them freely whenever you have a doubt. You will actually learn the thing, and you will also make a good impression as a sincere student, which is worth more than it sounds when references are being written.

Ask early and ask small

The useful question is the narrow one asked the same week. Not “I do not understand chapter four”, which nobody can answer, but “I lost you at the step where the sign changed”. If the room is hard to speak in, ask afterwards, or in two lines of email. The format matters far less than the timing.

And the timetable

The other half of this is ordinary and worth repeating. Write the week down, keep to what you wrote, and make certain the plan is one a human being could follow, with hours left in it for friends and for doing nothing at all.

The reason so many study plans collapse is not weak character. It is that people are consistently optimistic about how long work will take, a bias Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named the planning fallacy, and a plan built on that optimism fails in the first fortnight and takes your confidence with it. Build the evenings off into the plan from the start. A modest timetable you actually follow will beat a magnificent one you abandon.

Laughter therapy, sometimes called humour therapy, is the deliberate use of humour to improve how a person feels. Hospitals run programmes. The claims attached to it have grown enormous, and that is a pity, because the modest true thing underneath is genuinely interesting and gets buried under the rest.

The claim that holds

Robin Dunbar and colleagues ran a series of studies in which people watched either comedy or neutral material and then had their pain threshold measured. Threshold rose after genuine, helpless, breathless laughter, and it did not rise after material that people found pleasant but did not actually laugh at.

That distinction is the whole finding. The active ingredient appears to be the physical exertion of laughing, the repeated forced exhalation, which is the kind of effort that triggers endorphin release much as other exertion does. Polite social laughter does not involve that exertion, and it does not produce the effect.

This also explains why laughter is so relentlessly social. Laughing is many times more likely in company than alone, and the pain threshold that rises is a rough measure of endorphin activity, which is the same system implicated in social bonding across primates. Shared helpless laughter is closer to grooming than to medicine.

The claims that do not hold

Ten to fifteen minutes of laughter burns forty calories. This traces to a single small laboratory study of energy expenditure while people watched comedy. Forty calories is a few almonds. It is a charming fact and it is not a plan.

Laughing releases endorphins that outdo an equivalent dose of morphine. Nobody ever measured any such thing. The sentence sets a hormone against a drug in units that do not exist, and it has survived for decades purely because it startles.

It protects against heart disease, builds immunity, and lowers the blood sugar spike after a meal. Each of these rests on a small study measuring a marker, not on any study showing fewer heart attacks or fewer illnesses. A marker moving is where research starts, not where advice starts.

What to do with all that

Nothing medical. If something is wrong, the person to talk to is a doctor, and no amount of comedy substitutes for that.

What the evidence does support is smaller and easier. Laughing properly, with other people, for long enough to lose your breath, makes the next hour more bearable and the people you did it with feel closer. That is not a miracle cure. It is a decent reason to spend an evening with the friends who make you laugh like that, which very few of us schedule and most of us miss.

You did everything correctly. You set the goal, you took action, and somewhere along the way it did not work and the result you wanted did not arrive.

Then comes the account of why. It was a bitter winter. The supplier delivered late, or delivered the wrong item, or the right item in the wrong colour. The schools closed and the children were at home. You caught a cold. The dog died. You have heard every one of these and you have offered most of them.

The test

Here is the thing that makes this hard. Every sentence in that paragraph may be entirely true. A reason and an excuse are not distinguished by honesty, because both of them are usually honest. They are distinguished by what happens next.

A reason changes the next attempt. The supplier was late, so this time there is a second supplier, or a longer lead time, or a penalty clause. An excuse changes nothing. It closes the matter and leaves the arrangement exactly as it was, ready to produce the same result.

So the question is not whether it was your fault. It is whether anything about Monday is different because of what you have just explained.

Start with what actually matters

A great deal of time goes on work that does not really matter, and the tasks that do matter go unfinished. The excuse then arrives to account for the productivity problem, which is a neat way of justifying poor decisions about where the hours went. Identify the few tasks that genuinely matter, finish those, and give the remainder whatever is left over.

Watch for a belief that has set a ceiling

What you hold to be true about your own limit governs what you attempt, and what you attempt governs what arrives, so a belief of that kind behaves less like an observation and more like a forecast that quietly arranges its own weather. It shows in the thinking, then in the talking, and most of all in the doing. Conceding that one of these is wrong is uncomfortable, and it is the only thing that opens the loop.

Or is the method itself the problem?

Where the same approach keeps producing the same disappointing result, change the approach. Most people will not, because an untried method carries risk while the familiar one has a known ending, even a mediocre known ending. Courage is cheaper here than it looks, precisely because the familiar method has already shown you where it stops.

Or are you simply being impatient?

In an age of immediate everything it is easy to forget that some things take the time they take. You may not have failed at all. The results may simply not have arrived yet, and doubt at this stage will stop you taking the one action that would let them. Decide in advance how long you will keep going, and do not hold the verdict before the window has closed.

And sometimes it is genuinely not you

Worth saying plainly, because the whole genre pretends otherwise. Take the economy as an excuse for a business that will not grow. People are spending more cautiously and the easy customers are not there any more. That is real. What is also real is that the remaining customers, higher up, are committed and keen, harder to find and worth considerably more when you find them. The external condition was true. It just was not the end of the sentence.