If you’re like many people these days, glancing over your work emails may be the first thing you do after opening your eyes in the morning. In fact, your work is probably in your pocket, travels with you on holiday, sits with you during a romantic dinner, and accompanies you to the playground with your kids.
Even if emails aren’t really your thing and you work in construction, nursing or some other non-office-based industry, the move to a 24/7 economy might mean you have expectations placed on you to work at short notice or during antisocial hours.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, another major trend is that more people work from their homes, which now contain persistent reminders of work that lure them to finish this short email or that little task just before going to bed. And far from us slacking when remote-working, research conducted during this period showed that, on average, people work more hours when at home than at the office.
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Many successful professionals struggle to enjoy their accomplishments. Our brains’ reward system, especially the neurotransmitter dopamine, drives us to achieve goals and rewards us with a great sense of pleasure when we do. But that pleasure is short lived, as our brains are hardwired to also seek balance from extreme emotional states. That leaves us with an empty longing to repeat whatever experience brought us that pleasure in the first place. This ostensibly addictive cycle throws our “enoughness” barometers completely out of whack, preventing us from being able to objectively gauge if what we’ve achieved is, in fact, satisfying. That’s why, although most of us intuitively know that happiness isn’t realized from the pursuit of money, status, or fame, we can’t stop ourselves from trying. If you really want lasting satisfaction in life, you’ll need to relearn your approach to finding it. The author presents several strategies.
As 2022 came to a close, I was enjoying a year-end reflection session with an executive client, whom we’ll call Logan. As we looked back over his accomplishments for the year, he said something that utterly astonished me: “You know, I was almost happy.” Probing into what he could have possibly meant, he reflected that despite having met or exceeded nearly all his goals, he was obsessed with the one goal he fell short on (which, frankly, was inconsequential to his year’s runaway success). I thought we’d met to revel in the many fruits of his hard work. Instead, his ability to feel well-earned joy was hijacked by only partially achieving one of his goals.
Composing myself, I asked him, “So you’re telling me that had you completely achieved that one goal, you’d feel happy about all of it, but since you didn’t, you’re not happy about any of it?”
Even more telling, he replied, “What’s the point of being happy about failure?”
Read the rest of this article at: Harvard Business Review
The actor, filmmaker and budding mogul on the disruptive production company he launched with Matt Damon, why he’s done with D.C., getting Michael Jordan’s blessing for his new film and the advice wife Jennifer Lopez gave him for this interview.
It’s been 25 years since Ben Affleck became the youngest person to win the Oscar for best original screenplay at age 25 for Good Will Hunting, which he wrote with Matt Damon; 16 years since he directed his critically acclaimed first feature, Gone Baby Gone; and a decade since he won best picture for Argo, a film Affleck directed, starred in and produced. His four features as a director — all thrillers and dramas instead of the kind of franchise films that drive the modern box office — have made nearly $450 million worldwide.
It’s an enviable filmmaking résumé, and one that pretty much nobody brings up when you say the name Ben Affleck. But while the world has been scrutinizing his marriage, his mood and his coffee order, Affleck has been quietly building a new production company, Artists Equity, with Damon, founded on the premise of profit-sharing among not only directors, producers and actors but also crewmembers such as cinematographers, editors and costume designers.
Read the rest of this article at: The Hollywood Reporter
Nolan Bushnell had a glimpse of the future on his hands.
So in a savvy marketing maneuver, he decided to package it in a 6-foot-tall shell of amorphous yellow fiberglass. It smelled of noxious chemicals but exuded science fiction. He called it Computer Space.
Bushnell and his business partner Ted Dabney had created the world’s first coin-operated video game as a side hustle while working in Silicon Valley for electronics heavyweight Ampex. They completed a prototype in the spring of 1971, a decade before arcade classics like Donkey Kong, Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man would fully capture America’s imagination (and quarters). In fact, at the time that Bushnell and Dabney wheeled a working version of Computer Space into Stanford University hangout the Dutch Goose, very few Americans had ever seen a video game before.
“We just had one little rocket ship on the screen, but it was impressive,” Bushnell told SFGATE. “I thought we had a huge win on our hands.”
Read the rest of this article at: SF Gate
At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.
There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.
These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.
Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore.
Dow, a major producer of chemicals used to make plastics and other synthetic materials, in the past has launched recycling efforts that have fallen short of their stated aims. Reuters wanted to follow a donated shoe from start to finish to see if it did, in fact, end up in new athletic surfaces in Singapore, or at least made it as far as a local recycling facility for shredding.
Read the rest of this article at: Reuters