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Learning Round Up: Insights on HR, L&D, Productivity, Personal Development

Similar to that of gallery and museum curators whose job it is to showcase wonderful art and artefacts, the job of content curators (including tools like Mix, Flipboard, and Pocket) is to highlight some of the most relevant, popular, or surprising objects floating through cyberspace, matched to your interests.

While I make no claims of being a capable curator myself, one thing I’m profoundly thankful for with my work is that I’m given time to explore the web, learn from better minds, and update my thinking.

This “round-up” post is intended to feature insightful, uplifting, or rare content — mainly on topics such as HR, L&D, psychology, productivity, decision making, and personal development — from sources both mainstream and obscure.

These are just a few things I was grateful to stumble across in recent months.

610_-_the_10    The Best HR & People Analytics Articles of May 2018

By David Green | LinkedIn | 7 June 2018

  • “Last month I highlighted that people analytics had emerged as the joint top trend in the Deloitte 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report… Further reinforcement also came with the publication of the HR Open Source (#HROS) Future of Work Report which, (as Figure 1 below shows) highlighted that people analytics is now regarded as a foundational capability by HR professionals themselves.”

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610_-_evernoteIntrovert or Extrovert? Here’s How to Boost Your Productivity

By Evernote | Medium | 11 June 2018

  • “Few of us are pure introverts or extroverts. We generally fall somewhere in the middle, complete with our own individual quirks and habits.”
  • “According to a paper written by Wellesley psychologist Jonathan Cheek and his graduate students, there are actually four levels of introversion: social, thinking, anxious, and restrained.”

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610_-_open_planOpen-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social

By Leonid Bershidsky | Bloomberg | 4 July 2018

  • “But in a just-published paper, Harvard University’s Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban showed, on the basis of two field studies of corporate headquarters, that the modern open office architecture tends to decrease the volume of face-to-face interaction by some 70 percent…"

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610_-_ultimate_guide_stress    The Ultimate Guide To Stress Management

By John Parrott | Relaxlikeaboss.com | June 2018

  • "Did you know that 79% of us struggle with stress? It's undeniable, learning how to manage stress is a crucial skill in today's world. So in this guide, you'll learn everything you need to know about stress management."

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610_-_big_think    The One Factor Causing Depression and Anxiety in the Workplace

By Johann Hari | Big Think | 25 June 2018

  • "87% of people in our culture don't like the thing they're doing most of the time... [Michael Marmot] discovered the key factor that makes us depressed and anxious at work: if you go to work and you feel controlled — you feel you have few or limited choices — you are significantly more likely to become depressed."

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610_-_one_wayThere’s Only One Way to Truly Understand Another Person’s Mind

By Ephrat Livni | Quartz | 3 July 2018

  • “Our experiments found no evidence that the cognitive effort of imagining oneself in another person’s shoes, studied so widely in the psychological literature, increases a person’s ability to accurately understand another’s mind,” the researchers write. “If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment.”

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610_-_rationalist    The Rationalist’s Paradox: How to Not Cheat Yourself Out of Life’s Joys

By Zat Rana | Medium | 7 March 2018

  • "When I see an act of kindness, I can’t help but analyse the group dynamics of the situation. When I witness a moment of courage, my first thought is always why. When I encounter something genuinely inspiring, skepticism lingers… I find that the impulse of reason is still always there. Unfortunately, all it ever does is cheapen the experience."

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610_-_turing    The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong

By Charles Chu | Medium | 8 July 2018

  • “Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.” (From Kathryn Schulz’s book, Being Wrong.)

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610_-_certain   Why Are We So Certain About Our Mistakes?

By Ryan Holiday | Medium | 6 July 2018

  • “As Frederick Buechner wrote, we cringe at what we wrote long ago, wondering how on earth we could have been so ‘callow and wrongheaded, so alternately glib and pontifical.’ Seneca, a wonderful writer and observer of the human condition, made it more universal: “When I think of all the things I have said, I envy the mute.’”
  • “Why couldn’t I have said simply that this is what I thought at the time and knew to be true to the best of my ability?”

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610_-_beetle      On Coincidence

By Cody Delistraty | Aeon | 11 July 2018

  • "One of the most commonly experienced ‘meaningful coincidences’ is to think of your friend for the first time in a long while only to have her telephone you that instant. Any self-respecting statistician would say that if you tracked the number of times you thought of any friend, and the number of times you had that friend immediately ring you, you’d find the link to be statistically insignificant.”
  • “… is a belief in meaningful coincidences something vital to our survival as humans?"

> Read More

610_-_bullas    The Morning Happiness Ritual That Will Make You Flourish and Thrive

By Jeff Bullas | Jeffbullas.com | 9 July 2018

  • "Joseph Campbell the famous author of the ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ described it: 'Create a sacred place. You must have a room… a certain time of day. You don’t know what took place in the newspapers that morning. Who your friends are. You don’t know what you owe to anybody. Or what anybody owes to you. Have a sacred place, use it and take advantage of it. For creation. A place where you can experience and bring forth what you are.""

> Read More

610_-_russell   How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

By Maria Popova | Brain Pickings | 3 July 2018

  • "Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” (Bertrand Russell)

> Read More

That’s all for now. Sorry about the length! Hopefully you found an article or an author that matched your interests. Thank you for reading.

Theo Winter

Theo Winter

Client Services Manager, Writer & Researcher. Theo is one of the youngest professionals in the world to earn an accreditation in TTI Success Insight's suite of psychometric assessments. For more than a decade, he worked with hundreds of HR, L&D and OD professionals and consultants to improve engagement, performance and emotional intelligence of leaders and their teams. He authored the book "40 Must-Know Business Models for People Leaders."

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