How to Be Unhappy at Work
By Richard Nantel | May 13, 2008
As a reaction to the media attention being bestowed on the subject of positive psychology and happiness, Eric G. Wilson has written a book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, that focuses on the benefits of unhappiness. According to Wilson, melancholia can lead to inspiration and creativity. Would Vincent Van Gogh have produced such wonderful art had he not been depressed enough to slice off his ear? Nuff said.
Need more inspiration and creativity at work? Perhaps the problem is that you’re too happy. To embrace the miserable employee within you, you can do the opposite of what positive psychologists have learned generates happiness:
- Don’t pay attention to the present. Instead, just keep your focus on retirement. Only 15 years, 243 days, six hours, and 58 seconds left to go!
- Hate your coworkers. Working with people you like will generate a warm feeling of being part of team. Think Jane down the hall in accounting is a nice person? Get real. She would stab you in the back just to get your stapler and post-it note dispenser.
- Hold grudges. Did Hank in the IT department publicly humiliate you by disagreeing with your idea to reinstall Windows ME on all department computers? Put his name on a mental list. Act cheerful around him. Plot your revenge. Wait patiently. People who forgive have been shown to be happier. Don’t ever forgive or forget.
- Eliminate your social circle. Having a rich social life significantly increases happiness. So, try to work from home. Don’t speak with your neighbors. Have your groceries delivered. Ask the delivery person to place the bags at the door. Leave the payment in the mailbox.
- Don’t exercise. Research indicates exercise can alleviate depression better than medication. Stay as still as possible. If you must go anywhere, take the car even if it’s just to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspaper.
- It’s all about the money. Can you believe some people win the lotto and keep coming to work? Morons. There’s only one reason for you to haul your body in each day: moolah. If your job is stimulating and generates a sense of achievement, you should immediately look for something else.
- Multitask like crazy. Immersing yourself completely in a task can lead to a state of “flow” which has been proven to raise a person’s level of happiness. Check your e-mail and voicemail every minute, keep logged in to all your chat applications, keep your cell phone on at all times, and turn up the volume of that Youtube video while working on something else.
- Never be grateful. Something as simple as mentally making a daily list of five things for which you are grateful has been shown to make people happier. So never be grateful for anything. You deserve much more than you’re getting. Have you just received another raise? Like it’s enough! Other organizations would pay you twice as much.
I know. All this sounds like a lot of work. But, millions of people have achieved unhappiness at work and, by following these simple guidelines, you can too.
Topics: Positive psychology, Talent Management | 2 Comments »
First Spam Message Ever Sent Made No Mention of Mortgage Refinance or Viagra
By Richard Nantel | April 28, 2008
This coming week will mark the 30th anniversary of the birth of e-mail spam. According to technology writer Brad Templeton, the first spam message was sent on May 3, 1978 by a Gary Thuerk to 320 e-mail Arpanet addresses and read as follows:
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DEC SYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 <PDP-10> COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.
WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA
THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)
A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.
Apparently, old DEC computer keyboards didn’t have a way to turn off caps lock.
Many recipients responded and were not pleased with the commercial nature of the DEC e-mail. One respondent wrote:
ON 2 MAY 78 DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) SENT OUT AN ARPANET MESSAGE ADVERTISING THEIR NEW COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.
You can read other responses to this first spam message here.
Today, commercial spam accounts for an estimated 80-90% of all e-mail traffic.
More about the history of spam is available here.
Topics: Email, Learning | 1 Comment »
Facebook Chat: Yet Another Instant Messaging Application
By Richard Nantel | April 23, 2008
The new Facebook Chat application was installed into my profile when I logged in this morning. I can now chat with any of my Facebook friends who happen to be online and logged in.
That brings the total to three ways I can chat with people through the Web services and software I use on a daily basis:
- Gmail
- Skype
The new Facebook Chat application is bare-bones. Click a little icon to see who’s online, initiate a chat session, type a message and send. There are no bells and whistles such as file transfers. You can’t add a third person or others to a chat session.
Of everyone at Brandon Hall Research, I was probably the most resistant to using chat in day-to-day work activities. My past experience with IM was that it wasn’t more efficient than e-mail since so many chat sessions turn into long social conversations or brainstorming sessions.
This is going to make me sound square but I’m slowly coming around to adding a bit of chat in my life. I love being able to see if someone is online, ask a question, get an immediate answer and move on. Since I want to provide others with this ability, I try to keep logged into Skype and Gmail during the day.
Often, though, the phone starts to ring, the Skype and Gmail chat boxes both pop up, a flood of e-mail comes in, and I just start clicking wildly to set various profiles to “offline.”
I guess you can say I love chat when it gives me what I want but not when I’m providing a service to others. Yes, that’s totally selfish.
I suspect it’s only a question of time before other software I use daily will include proprietary chat features. So, my days will soon be filled with changing the status of my various chat apps to Online, Busy, Away, Offline, Invisible, etc. Perhaps someone will come up with a killer app that changes the status of all of these chat applications with one click of a mouse.
Topics: Learning, Social networking, instant messaging | 2 Comments »
TeachStreet: A New Social Learning Site
By Richard Nantel | April 21, 2008
A new social Web site has just appeared designed to put learners and instructors together. TeachStreet’s (www.teachstreet.com) beta launch currently focuses on the Seattle area and boasts a listing of 25,000 available classes. Topics include anything and everything:
- Languages
- Fitness
- Hobbies
- Academic subjects
- Etc.
How It Works:
- Search for a topic you’d like to learn. (Since I’m currently experiencing a bit of insanity in considering running a marathon this fall, I typed in “Marathon Training.”)
- The system provided a list of instructors who provide marathon training in the Seattle area.
- I could sort the list to find an instructor close to me geographically, or sort the list based on ratings by other TeachStreet users.
- Clicking on an instructor provided a description of the training provided, a Google map showing the person’s location, photos, links to see who “favorited” this teacher, links to send an e-mail to and write a review of the instructor as well as a link to forward the listing a friend.
The service is free and makes money through ads and providing links to related products on Amazon.
This looks like a great Web service. I can hardly wait for it to include resources in my geographic area. Well done TeachStreet!
Topics: Learning | 1 Comment »
Happiness: the Hottest College Course
By Richard Nantel | April 16, 2008
My colleague, Gary Woodill, thinks I’m getting all Oprah-like by reading books about happiness. I’ve been trying to convince him that positive psychology, the study of happiness, is just as legitimate as the study schizophrenia, depression, and other psychological ailments. So far, Gary’s unconvinced.
What should help convince my doubting colleague is that students in more than 100 respected universities are enrolling in positive psychology classes in very large numbers. How big? In his book “Happier,” Tal Ben-Shahar mentioned that the first year he taught a course on happiness at Harvard, a handful of students signed up. The second year, more than 300 enrolled. By the third year, more than 850 students had registered, making it the most popular undergraduate class offered at this prestigious university.
Adding even greater legitimacy, some universities now provide graduate level courses in positive psychology. The University of Pennsylvania has taken this even further by offering the first Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program in the world.
A key component of Tal Ben-Shahar’s class at Harvard and other courses on positive psychology is the notion that happiness can be taught. Although research indicates that individuals commonly have a set range in their level of happiness, their average level of happiness can be raised. Based on the number of people enrolling in these classes, this is certainly a promise that resonates with students today.
Dr. Martin Seligman is often referred to as the father of positive psychology. Realizing that psychology has for more than 100 years largely focused on mental illness, Dr. Seligman turned his attention in 1998 to the study of human happiness. Since then, studies into happiness have been producing interesting findings.
In his book, “Authentic Happiness,” Dr. Seligman reports that:
- A systematic study of 22 people who won major lotteries found that they reverted to their baseline level of happiness over time, winding up no happier than 22 matched controls.”
- “Within a few years, [paraplegics] wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.”
- “In wealthier nations … increases in wealth have negligible effects on personal happiness.”
Studies also indicate that happiness has a significant impact on health and longevity:
“In the largest study to date, 2282 Mexican-Americans from the Southwest United States aged 65 and older were given a battery of demographic and emotional tests, then tracked for two years. Positive emotion strongly predicted who lived and who died, as well as disability. (p40 “Authentic Happiness,” Martin Seligman)
Happiness also has significant impact on productivity. One study of 272 employees showed that happier people went on to get better evaluations from supervisors and higher pay. In addition, happier people have been shown to select bigger goals, persists longer, and perform better on a number of laboratory tasks.
As interest in positive psychology spills from academia into the workplace, it probably won’t be long before we start seeing happiness courses added to workplace training programs.
Topics: Learning, Positive psychology | 5 Comments »
In Praise of Unusual Courses
By Richard Nantel | April 10, 2008
I’ve taken a number of unusual courses in my academic life.
A college I attended offered a course titled “Introduction to Welding” which sounded like a good way to get three credits. I really enjoyed it. Getting metal pieces to stick together was great fun and the risk that the gas tanks might explode provided the perfect level of danger for a 17 year-old boy.
“Canadian Farming” was another unusual class. I learned about crop rotation, the species of chickens that produce white and brown eggs, and how to reach inside a cow to help her deliver a calf. The appeal of this class was often the grossness factor; again, perfect for a teenage boy.
(One thing that stands out today about the Canadian Farming class was that even though the course was taught by a 60 year-old farmer in overalls, the girls in the class were, “like, totally into him.” This should have inspired all the boys to become farmers but, being the 70s, we were much too busy wearing berets, reading depressing poetry, and attempting to look cool; mistakenly thinking this was what girls wanted.)
A few years after I graduated, students became much more focused on taking elective courses that were aligned with their core area of study. They abandoned the try-anything-especially-if-it-sounds-easy approach to picking classes and instead focused on selecting courses that would best prepare them for the outside world and a successful career in their chosen field. (How boring.)
Whereas I recall almost nothing of the vast majority of the classes I took in my late teens, I still remember much of what I learned in “Welding 101” and “Canadian Farming.” These courses were so outside of my comfort zone, every minute of the lectures was new and useful. Although I was after easy credits, I’m glad I enrolled in these classes. They taught me that engaging learning opportunities exist everywhere.
Thank goodness, unusual courses still exist. Browsing the web, I came across the following:
Topics: Academic, Learning | 2 Comments »
Schoolboard Proposes Limitations on Homework
By Richard Nantel | April 8, 2008
If their legs were long enough to reach the pedals of their parents’ car, young children would be emptying their piggy banks for gas money and immediately relocating to Toronto, Ontario.
Why the move? The Toronto District School Board, the largest public school board in Canada, is proposing to eliminate homework for kindergarten children and ban homework for all elementary and high school students on holidays, including winter and spring breaks. In addition, homework assigned to students in higher grades would be restricted to no more than two hours per night.
According to a news report, the Toronto School Board is recommending that:
- “Students shouldn’t be penalized for handing in assignments late or incomplete
- “Students shouldn’t be assigned homework on scheduled holidays or other significant days
- “The amount of workload should be broken down by grade: Those in Grades 1 to 6 should only get reading assignments, those in Grades 7 and 8 should get no more than one hour of homework a night and high school students should get no more than two hours.”
These recommendations come after the release of a report stating that the amount of homework assigned to some children is depriving them of leisure and family time.
What I see as a parent is that the amount of homework assigned has little to do with the individual needs of the child. Rather, two factors drive the amount of homework a child receives:
- The teacher to which the child is assigned. You can have two grade three classrooms in the same school with children of similar abilities in each. One class will get minutes of homework per night, the other class will get hours of homework. It’s demoralizing for children in the class getting large amounts of homework to hear that their fellow grade three friends get away with so much less. We’re out to teach kids learning is fun, not that life’s unfair.
- Pressure from parents. I’ve seen parents pull their child from one school and transfer them to another because the child was assigned to a teacher that gave little homework. Fearful that this would lead to a life of poor paying jobs and misery, the parents elected to transfer their child. I’ve also heard parents complain that their child was getting too much homework and threaten to change their child to another school if the burden wasn’t reduced.
I applaud the new Toronto District School Board homework guidelines and would add others:
- Homework, when assigned, should be fun. The plan is to get kids excited about learning. Ten pages of multiplication table exercises due the next day isn’t the way to do this.
- Homework should, when possible, encompass physical activity. Kids don’t play outside as boomers did when they were kids. Creative homework assignments encouraging physical movement would improve kids’ health and their academic results.
- Homework should never be assigned on one day and due the next. Children may not have time to work on the assignment on a given night due to other obligations.
Topics: Academic, Children, K-12, Learning | No Comments »
The Importance of Flow in Learning and Happiness
By Richard Nantel | April 1, 2008
I seem to come across the concept of “flow” everywhere I turn.
About two years ago, a large company approached Brandon Hall Research to see if we’d be interested in studying the effects of flow on learning. Then last year, in reading about brain plasticity, I came across research that suggested that flow is the state most beneficial to learning and forging new neural connections. Currently curious about positive psychology, I’m reading that flow plays an important role in generating happiness.
So what’s flow?
Flow is a term coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “cheeks sent me high”) to describe a state of complete immersion in a task. If you’ve ever been so engrossed in an activity that hours went by as minutes and you forgot to eat, you’ve experienced flow.
Flow is a state that can be achieved doing a wide range of activities, whether physical or intellectual. I’ve often experienced flow on bicycle rides. I’ll look down at my odometer to find that miles have been covered without my being aware. I’ve also experienced flow writing software, especially when debugging a problem. My pal Russ experiences flow carving beautiful and intricate wooden reliefs at his workbench each night.
According to psychologist Martin Seligman, flow requires the following:
- The task is challenging and requires skill
- We concentrate
- There are clear goals
- We get immediate feedback
- We have deep, effortless involvement
- There is a sense of control
- Our sense of self vanishes
- Time stops
The idea of flow being conducive to learning and happiness should make generating flow a top priority in every workplace:
- Encourage team members to turn off e-mail, IM, and phones for extended blocks of time. Flow occurs without distraction.
- Provide enough freedom at work to encourage people to pursue projects in which they are engaged. Google certainly seems to have embraced this strategy, allowing developers to spend 20% of their time on personal projects.
- A flow-inducing project for one person may not be the right fit for another. Ensure projects are aligned with personal interests and strengths.
Topics: Flow, Learning, Positve psychology | 4 Comments »
Patent Office Rejects Blackboard’s User Role Patent
By Richard Nantel | March 31, 2008
Back in February, a judge ruled in favor of Blackboard in a patent dispute case involving the concept of multiple user roles through a single login. The result was that Desire2Learn was found to have infringed on Blackboard’s patent rights and must pay damages of $3.1 million U.S.
The champagne must be flowing today in the offices of Desire2Learn because the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Blackboard’s patent. In covering this story, Campus Technology provides this quote by Desire2Learn’s CEO John Baker:
“We’re very pleased that the [USPTO] has rejected all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent. It was nice to see that the prior art that we submitted to the [USPTO] was used and reviewed thoroughly by the looks of it. Multiple pieces of prior art were enough to reject all claims of the … patent.”
Blackboard is rejecting all this saying the patent still stands. Stay tuned for round three.
Topics: Learning management systems | No Comments »
Apple Pushing Safari Through iTunes Update Applet
By Richard Nantel | March 25, 2008
Here’s a surprise. My Apple update applet popped up today. I assumed this was, as is usually the case, an upgrade for iTunes. I almost clicked the Install button before realizing the applet would install Safari, Apple’s Web browser.
I hate this type of thing.
These types of practices are more than annoyances. They erode the trust software users have in software providers.
We’re always shocked to hear that millions of computers worldwide are infected with malicious software that allows them to be controlled remotely, without the owners being aware, to send spam and launch denial of service attacks.
We rarely, however, hear outrage over the battle for our computer’s file associations by software companies we trust. In the past, I’ve had to endure media players battling it out for my desktop. I’d come across a Real Audio file I needed to listen to, would install the player, and would discover that the player had switched all media file type associations to the Real Player. I’d spend 30 minutes switching associations back and would need to repeat the same exercise again the next time Quicktime or Windows Media Player provided an update.
Lately, Google and Microsoft have been battling it out for possession of my documents and spreadsheets. If someone sends me a link to .Doc file located on the Web, Google Docs now opens the document instead of Microsoft Word. So, at some point in recent time, Google has decided to switch my computer’s file type associations without informing me. (It’s probably in the fine print of a user agreement somewhere that says I agreed to this.)
So now Apple has decided to try to sneak Safari onto my desktop to battle it out with Mozilla Firefox to become the provider of my Web browsing experience. I’ve heard good things of the Safari browser but today’s event has eliminated any curiosity I may have had to try it out.
For me, these practices fuel my desire to abandon desktop-based software altogether. With nothing on my workstation to update, I’ll not need to deal with file association battles. As an experiment, I’m installing Ubuntu, a version of Linux on an old computer with the intent of using it only with Web-based apps. I’ll keep you posted.
Topics: Web | No Comments »
