How To Be A Boss

A LOT of people say they want to be a boss without realising what it means for them.  You always have to give up something to get something else, and the trade off here is something that comes as a shock to many.

Ask any good boss — they will tell you that they found out early on that this means no friends in the workplace, and you have to accept that as the deal, but this causes problems for a lot of folk starting out.  In any workplace, it is easy to spot the serious, ambitious ones.  They shun small talk and fun in favour of climbing the corporate ladder. They do not need friends — that is the message.

Why You Have to Be Nice

EVERYONE ultimately has to be nice for survival.  This may appear counter-intuitive in a dog-eat-dog, cut-throat ambitious, capitalist and competitive world, but I shall prove it here as it is based on solid scientific evidence.

Psychologists Neils van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters of Tilburg University have shown that envy can be benign or malicious.  Benign envy can be “a good thing” in that the person being envied suffers no ill, and the person doing the envying gets motivated to at least try to become like their hero.  Malicious envy is more interesting (and surprising).

Why Lie to Children?

HALLOWEEN is completely made-up; there’s no truth in it whatsoever. Every year it grows bigger and bigger, yet it is all lies.  Why? Why do we do this — why is this happening?

There are no werewolves.  There are no Vampires, mummies and no zombies.  Frankenstein’s monster is fiction. There are no witches, no warlocks, and no wizards. Magic is fiction; there is no black magic, no white magic and no spells.  Voodoo is hoodoo. I know this may come as a shock because they are so commonplace and acceptable to everyone from about the age of two upwards.

How Good Are You?

MY ESSAYS on this site are about correcting so much that I encounter that is misunderstood, misinterpreted or wrong. I mix the anecdotal and personal with the scientific and philosophical — and even the religious. My aim is always to guide my reader to use his or her brains, to reconnect their experience to the truth, and not to correspond to the media’s revisionist version.

I like to think that I am not stating that I am 100 per cent right and everyone else is completely wrong, I just go on my own hunches, memories and knowledge base, and I ask my reader to consider the evidence and make up his or her mind.

Thank goodness too; the truth is that we are all very poor at estimating how clever we are, how skilled we are or even how stupid we are!

Round about the year 2000, came out the published experiments of David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University.  They came up with what-is-now-known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect has something of a wow-factor, and so I felt that I just had to share it here as it might prove useful to be aware of its existence.

Why People Stay Fat

OBESITY seems to be a problem.  There is a solution, but vested interests means that the solution is hidden or confused by misinformation.

Before I tell you the solution, I suppose I have to qualify the above statement, and I have to eliminate all the counter arguments to clear the way for the solution to surface.

When To Stop

WE are led to believe that we can finish things.  Indeed we are brought up with the clear understanding that things can only be “done” when they are “finished”.  It might therefore come as something of a shock to discover that this is a silly notion; almost everything we do — and therefore everything that has been “done”, is actually unfinished if you stop and think about it for a moment.

What Do We Know?

IT is a misconception that as one ages one becomes more wise; for it seems to me that as I get older many things I have held as truths are actually false.

I’m not merely talking about Santa Claus, Mohammed or Jesus — I am talking about so much more.  And I am not alone; it seems that there is enough misinformation out there to make a as many as seven series of Stephen Fry’s television programme, “QI” — which deals exclusively in misconceptions.

Who To Vote For

ELECTIONS for a new UK government are to be announced within the next few weeks.

My subscribers and lurking readers will know that I am not convinced that we have the best form of government, regardless of what party wins (See What is The Best Form of Government); I am not a democrat.

I know that this can be quite a stunning remark, but I try to explain that democracy is impossible to define, and a myth at the end of the day in “What is Democracy Anyway?“

However, we are where we are, and we

How Sport is Flawed

MY argument here is simple: sport is about athletes and spectators.  Human beings, individuals, and even teams — but not countries, and not political or religious ideologies.

Why Proportion is Important

A LOT of people today talk about “balance”, “ying and yang”, “karma“, and even “the golden mean“, but what they’re actually talking about is proportion.

It is not hippy airy-fairyness, it is not mystical or spiritual.  Proportion is dry and practical.  The word is mostly associated with arithmetic or mathematics — along with ratio, percentage, fractions and decimals.