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I’ve been reading some material related to Human Behaviour and choice (Predictably irrational, great book) and ended up stumbling on 2 TED gems.

The “Paradox of choice” is one of my favourite books. This guy just keeps you thinking and thinking …

Too much Information

It’s no news that we have to much information available and that we consume too much of it (34Giga a day apparently).

IQ is growing 3 points per generation it seams, but some kind of loss of wisdom seem to happen. People spending more time absorbing stuff than socializing (when the man is a naturally sociable being… is that going to be lost?)

I tend to feel that.

Leadging to too little productivity(?)

Can too much information drive to less things done? People do turn of their Internet, gadgets, mobiles, skype’s to be able to work. The apparent haunt for information leaves immense trails on productivity. The guy checking his friends on Facebook when he ought to be working, the guy (ME included) clicking trough amazing links in Twitter or Wikipedia loosing myself into it, and failing to do what was planned only to end up catching up until 4am…

I personally find myself having too many ideas and not executing that many because I just can’t. My recent focus has been about making a few really happen and kick-ass on them.

What about Happiness?

Is happiness affected by the huge amount of information we consume? Linking human behaviour, racionality and paradox of choice, another gem from TED (Why are (/are not) we happy?) seem to point in that direction.  By knowing too much humans tend to want too much. It’s natural, and probably an evolutionary thing that led us to where we are today.

A cool study made me think: people with immediate memory loss were given the option to choose their favourite paintings. On the cases where they were said that some paintings were theirs, they find those more beautiful: people tend to believe that their own life is better that actually is. 30 minutes later, they choose other paintings just because that time they weren’t told the painting was theirs…

This is basically being “Content” which is a word that on it origin links to contained/restrained and at the same time  ”Happyness”: in fact “Contente”, is a Portuguese word for “being happy” (portuguese is a latinic language, FYI .

Meaning: people that contain themselves (under different levels) tend to be happier. A I am not talking about huge containment here… just a little ….  Now this makes me think… A LOT!!!

Winning the lottery vs Getting paraplegic? We’ll the choice is easy but research constantly proves that winning the lottery makes people less happier and that paraplegic learn how to be happier, even more than they were before.

Finally the importance of rewards: Carrots and sticks don’t work anymore. After years of climbing Maslow’s hierarchy trough better living standards, modern civilization find other motivators to be happy on what they do. Money is strongly related to LOSS OF PERFORMANCE, and yet, bonuses drive business today (read banker’s bonuses while a freaking crisis is affecting everyone).

Something stuck with me:

Bounded Ambitions  = work joy, sense of achievement

Unbounded objectives lead to frustation, unfullfilment and some times to theft, fraud, and so on

Having so much choice and possibilities ahead, it’s good to have achievable goals, to split goals into more immediate steps so quick wins can leverage the resulting attitude. Long-term is good, but humans don’t relate to long-term/obscure things that much: Try to achieve long-term objectives trough small but tangible steps.