KG EMPIRE (PSYCHOLOGY).

Everyone knows the value of the to-do list, but this isn’t as helpful as you might think because everyone inherently kind of knows what they should be doing and when they need to do it by. The act of writing it down just helps remind them. This makes them more likely to do what they know they should be doing—more than if they didn’t have such a list. Sometimes when we’re struggling to get started, it’s because we can’t choose what to fixate on. Too many things have the potential to command our focus, and sometimes we can’t differentiate between what we should avoid and what actually deserves our attention. The underrated problem most of us deal with is that we can’t prioritize, and thus we don’t know what we should and shouldn’t be doing. Each day, we’re faced with choosing tasks that will create the biggest impact for us, and there are many hidden obstacles. Thus, along with your to-do list, it’s equally important to make a don’t-do list. The contents of a don’t-do list might be surpr...

Imagine you are at the beach. You walk into the sea up to your chest. The waves need to pass over you to get to the shore. If you try to hold the waves back and prevent them reaching the shore, you learn how powerful those waves are. They push you back and you quickly get engulfed and overwhelmed. But you don’t have to tumble and struggle against the waves. Those waves are coming no matter what. When you accept that, you can focus on keeping your head above the water as it passes. You still feel the effects. Might even get lifted off your feet for a moment. But you move with the water and brace yourself ready to land back on your feet. Dealing with emotion is much the same as standing in the waves. When we try to stop feelings in their tracks, we easily get knocked off our feet and find ourselves in trouble, struggling to catch a breath and work out which way is up. When we allow the emotion to wash over us, it rises, peaks and descends, taking its natural course. Emotions are real and...

Fairness starts with reciprocity.   Two norms influence whether people contribute to the common good i.e. equity and equality. Equity means that each person receives benefits in proportion to what he or she has contributed (e.g., the person who does the most work gets the highest pay). Equality means that everyone gets the same amount. Both kinds of fairness are used and understood much more widely by humans than by any other animal. People are designed by nature (so to speak) to belong to a system based on fairness and social exchange. As one sign of the importance of fairness to human nature, the feeling that one has no value to others—that you are a taker rather than a giver—is a major cause of depression. To be sure, there are plenty of obnoxious people who take more than they give, but most of them don’t see themselves that way. People who do see themselves as taking more than they give may become depressed. To avoid depression, people may seek to contribute their fair sh...

Living the life you want to live in the face of criticism means getting clear on: The opinions that truly matter to you and why. Whose opinions matter most to you? Saying ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks is rarely true and hides a world of insecurities. It stops us from creating meaningful connections with others because it closes off any avenue of communication in which both voices matter. But the list of whose opinions truly matter needs to be small. It is also worth pointing out that acknowledging who matters does not mean it is your responsibility to please them. It just means you are willing to listen to their feedback, even when it is not praise, because you know it is likely to be honest and in your best interests, therefore most likely to be helpful. Why you do what you do. The one person you most need the approval of is you. When the way we are living is out of line with our values and what matters most, life stops feeling meaningful or satisfying. Understanding the kind of pe...

Confidence is not the same as being comfortable. One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming self-confident is that it means living fearlessly. The key to building confidence is quite the opposite. It means we are willing to let fear be present as we do the things that matter to us. When we establish some self-confidence in something, it feels good. We want to stay there and hold on to it. But if we only go where we feel confident, then confidence never expands beyond that. If we only do the things we know we can do well, fear of the new and unknown tends to grow. Building confidence inevitably demands that we make friends with vulnerability because it is the only way to be without confidence for a while. But the only way confidence can grow is when we are willing to be without it. When we can step into fear and sit with the unknown, it is the courage of doing so that builds confidence from the ground up. Courage comes first, confidence comes second. This doesn’t mean that we have...

Are love and sex the same thing? Undoubtedly they overlap in many cases and are often intertwined. But a recent social theory proposes that they have two separate biological bases, which can sometimes result in confusion. This theory was put forward based on studies of female sexuality through time. The basic point is that humans form relationships based on two separate systems, which can reinforce each other or be in conflict. One of these is the attachment system. This is an urge to connect and form close social bonds with a few individuals. The other system is the sex drive, based on the principles of mating. Evolution probably shaped the sex drive to focus on the opposite gender (because only heterosexual sex can create children). The attachment drive, in contrast, is probably gender neutral. Most children (boys and girls) form their first attachment to their mother, and later develop close friendships or attachments to other people, often primarily of their own gender. If attachme...

Every life contains a measure of risk, threat, and challenge. As children and adolescents, we may draw on courage to confront separation from parents and changes at home or school. As young adults, courage may be needed to fi nd a mate or to secure a job. At any age, courage can help us deal with unexpected health problems or other external troubles. But courage also comes into play when we face our inner world with less obvious, but perhaps more challenging, concerns. Coping with intense and changing emotions, making sense of a developing self-image, and reaching for meaning and authenticity in our lives are a sampling of these inner struggles. How persons meet these external and internal challenges depends in part on the nature and quality of their courage, and the degree of courage may define the extent to which their lives are marked by active exploration, confidence, and a general sense of well-being. Courageous action is valued in all cultures, and people encourage and support ot...

  Withdrawal and isolation appear in a variety of forms. People who withdraw from society speak little or not at all, do not look other people in the eye, and are inattentive when spoken to. In even the simplest social relations they exhibit a certain coldness that alienates them from other people. Coldness is in their actions and mannerisms, in the way they shake hands, in their tone of voice, in the way they greet or refuse to greet others. With every gesture they seem to be distancing themselves from the rest of the world. In all these mechanisms of isolation we find an undercurrent of ambition and vanity. These people attempt to raise themselves above others by accentuating the differences between themselves and the rest of society; but the most that they can gain is an  imaginary glory. A belligerent hostility is evident in the seemingly harmless attitude of these social exiles. Isolation may also be a trait of larger groups. Everyone knows entire families whose lives are...

ᵖᵃʳᵗ ᵗʷᵒ❣️ The reproductive success of women doesn't depend on how many men she has sex with, but on her ability to get access to resources (like food, shelter, and protection) for herself and her children. Women are therefore more discriminating than men. She won't pick the first guy around. This causes women to compete with each other for access to resources. A man that is perceived as wealthy and having status has an advantage. So mating choices (showing up as unconscious preferences) are influenced by the fact that women have more at stake than men do. A study of thousands of men and women from 37 cultures around the world showing the ranking of qualities that are most important in choosing someone to date or marry, proved that, Women placed more emphasis on a potential mate's financial prospects. Women also preferred ambitious and industrious men. Women preferred older men. Men preferred younger women. Men ranked physical attractiveness higher than women did. The study...

ᵖᵃʳᵗ ᵒⁿᵉ❣️ What is the brain for? The smart-aleck answer to the question is sex. Put more completely, the brain exists to make better decisions about how to enhance reproductive success. Reproduction is the central act in the life of every living thing. Once an individual has survived past the age of reproduction, the individual is evolutionarily useless. The struggle to reproduce can sometimes have peculiar effects. In nature, things are not always what they seem. An ant climbs to the top of a grass stem, falls down and tries again and again ... until a sheep comes along and eats the grass (and the ant). WHY does the ant persist in climbing the grass? How does the ant benefit?  There is no benefit to the ant. Its behavior was manipulated by a parasitic flatworm that needed to get into the gut of the sheep in order to reproduce. By commandeering its intermediate ant host to climb to the tips of the grass blades, the parasite increased the ant's chances of being eaten by a grazing a...

It is a psychological truism that whoever gets into difficulties with the absolute truth and logic of communal life, will sooner or later feel the repercussions. Often the individuals who make these profound mistakes do not learn from experience, but view their misfortune as an undeserved personal disaster. It takes them  their whole life to demonstrate what bad luck they have had, and prove that they have never succeeded in anything, because everything they have laid their hands upon has ended in failure. Such unfortunates tend even to be proud of their ill-luck, as though some supernatural power had caused it. Examine this point of view more closely and you will find that vanity is rearing its ugly head again! These people act as though some sinister deity is singling them out for persecution. In a thunderstorm they believe that the lightning will strike only them. They are afraid that burglars will choose their house. If any misfortune is to occur they are certain that they are ...

When tragedy strikes, some people are devastated, unable to summon their coping mechanisms, they fall into deep depression or despondency, sometimes losing hope and even the will to carry on. They may become entirely preoccupied with the disaster and suffer nightmares, flashbacks, and anxiety attacks. Other people, however, react differently. They seem to manage not only the normal ups and downs of their lives, but also potentially overwhelming losses and traumas. Instead of becoming depressed and unable to cope, somehow they are able to deal with painful circumstances and move on. The difference between the people that are so deeply affected, and others that are seemingly able to “bounce back,” is resilience. Resilience is not a quality inherent within a person, but one that builds through a natural process.  “Alone, a child has no resilience… it is an interaction, a relationship.” We build resilience from developing relationships.  We are constantly “knitting” ourselves from...

  Make problems easier to solve. Turn complicated problems into simpler ones. Eliminate everything except the essentials. Break down a problem into its components but look at the problem holistically. Draw a picture of the problem. Put down on a paper the key factors and their relationship. Try to approach complex tasks by first disposing of the easy decisions. Be problem-oriented. Not method-oriented. Use whatever works. Why? Because the result is what matters, not the method we use to arrive at it. Look for good enough solutions appropriate to the problem at hand. Not perfection and beauty.  Make fewer and better decisions. Why? Because it forces us to think more on each decision and thereby reduces our chance of mistakes. It's just too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions.   "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." You've got whole categories of things you just bat away so your brain isn't cluttered with them. That way, you're bet...

  This is the blind spot in human nature: we are poorly equipped to gauge the character of the people we deal with. Their public image, the reputation that precedes them, easily mesmerizes us. We are captivated by appearances. If they surround themselves with some alluring myth, we want to believe in it. Instead of determining people’s character—their ability to work with others, to keep to their promises, to remain strong in adverse circumstances—we choose to work with or hire people based on their glittering résumé, their intelligence, and their charm. But even a positive trait such as intelligence is worthless if the person also happens to be of weak or dubious character. And so, because of our blind spot, we suffer under the irresolute leader, the micromanaging boss, the conniving partner. This is the source of endless tragedies in history, our pattern as a species. At all costs, you must alter your perspective. Train yourself to ignore the front that people display, the myth t...

It takes work to simplify one’s life, and perhaps that’s why most people are engaged in the undisciplined pursuit of more rather than less. Saying no is uncomfortable, so by default they say yes to new obligations. They don’t pause and ponder on how they use up their energy because it takes too much work. There’s always something urgent to do, and hence they never take the time to deliberately eliminate what’s unessential in their lives so they can focus on what matters.It’s particularly important to remedy a situation in which your non-priorities dominate your priorities.  When you stop and really think about it, conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you. Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, b...

  People who show more resilience are less emotional in general, but the pain is no less for resilient people than it is for others; it is a matter of how they choose to use it. The pain may continue, even over a whole lifetime, but for these people it raises a challenge that they decide to meet. The challenge is to overcome what has happened, to find strength in the experience instead of letting it defeat them, and to use the strength to move defiantly forward. Adopting this attitude depends on the quality of your self-love. If you feel terribly gripped by insecurities, your moments of resilience will be shallow. What you need is a complete acceptance of your character, including your flaws, which you can see clearly but even appreciate and love. From a position of genuine inner strength and resilience, you can more easily direct your attention outward. Think of it in this way: such strength comes from deep within the core of the person. It could stem from a mixture of certain fac...

We humans are naturally compelled to compare ourselves with one another. We are continually measuring people’s status, the levels of respect and attention they receive, and noticing any differences between what we have and what they have. For some of us, this need to compare serves as a spur to excel through our work. For others, it can turn into deep envy—feelings of inferiority and frustration that lead to covert attacks and sabotage. Nobody admits to acting out of envy. You must recognize the early warning signs—praise and bids for friendship that seem effusive and out of proportion; subtle digs at you under the guise of good-natured humor; apparent uneasiness with your success. With envy comes the secret desire to hurt, wound, or steal from the envied person, to right the unfairness that comes with his or her supposed superiority. Envy is a painful emotion, an admission of our own inferiority, something rather unbearable for  us humans. It is not an emotion we want to sit with ...

  What we are looking for is the proper ratio and balance, the one that leads to the most effective action. The ancient Greeks had an appropriate metaphor for this: the rider and the horse. The horse is our emotional nature continually impelling us to move. This horse has tremendous energy and power, but without a rider it cannot be guided; it is wild, subject to predators, and continually heading into trouble. The rider is our thinking self. Through training and practice, it holds the reins and guides the horse, transforming this powerful animal energy into something productive. The one without the other is useless. Without the rider, no directed movement or purpose. Without the horse, no energy, no power.  In most people the horse dominates, and the rider is weak. In some people the rider is too strong, holds the reins too tightly, and is afraid to occasionally let the animal go into a gallop. The horse and rider must work together. This means we consider our actions beforeh...

If you're someone aspiring to reach the greater potential, your first goal is to widen your relationship to time as much as possible, and slow it down. This means you do not see the passage of time as an enemy but rather as a great ally. Each stage in life has its advantages—those of youth are most obvious, but with age comes greater perspective. Aging does not frighten you. Death is equally your friend (the fear of death doesn't hunt you - you're pretty sure it is certainty and  will come to pass). It motivates you to make the most of each moment; it gives you a sense of urgency. Time is your great teacher and master. This affects you deeply in the present. Awareness that a year from now this current problem you are experiencing will hardly seem so important will help you lower your anxiety and adjust your priorities. Knowing that time will reveal the weaknesses of your plans, you become more careful and deliberative with them. Time is the longest distance between two plac...

  The most important question all women should ask their prospective husbands before marriage is, 'What is your attitude toward male dominance, especially in family life?' This question, however, is rarely asked and even less frequently answered. Women are sometimes striving for equality, and other times they are resigned to varying degrees. Men, on the other hand, are convinced from childhood that they have a more important role to play. They interpret this conviction as an implicit duty and focus on responding to life's and society's challenges in a privileged, masculine manner. Think what it means to a young boy who witnesses the prevailing masculine privilege from his earliest days. From the day of his birth he may be received with greater enthusiasm than a girl child. A boy senses at every step that, as the son and heir, he has greater privileges and social value. Chance remarks and incidents constantly call his attention to the greater importance of the masculine ...

  All these unhappy situations we experience today are the result of the mistakes of our civilization. If a civilization is marked by prejudice, then this prejudice reaches out and touches every aspect of that civilization, and evidence of it is found everywhere. The fallacy of the inferiority of women, and its corollary, the alleged superiority of men, constantly disturb the harmony of the sexes. As a result, an entirely inappropriate tension is introduced into all sexual relationships, thereby threatening and even destroying every chance for happiness between the sexes.  Our whole existence in relationships is poisoned, distorted and corroded by this tension. This explains why harmonious marriages are so rare; this explains too why so many children grow up with the idea that marriage is an extremely difficult and dangerous business. Prejudices such as we have described here may to a large extent prevent children from understanding what life is all about. Think how many young...

Fear is one of the most significant phenomena in the life of human beings. This feeling is complicated by the fact that it is not only a disjunctive emotion, but like sorrow it is capable of creating a one-sided bond with one’s fellows. A child escapes from a situation because of fear, and runs to the protection of someone else. The mechanism of fear does not directly demonstrate any superiority – indeed, it seems to denote a defeat. When we are afraid, we try to make ourselves as small as possible, but it is at this point that the other side of this feeling, involving a simultaneous thirst for superiority, becomes evident. Fearful individuals flee to seek the protection of others, and attempt to strengthen themselves in this way until they feel capable of meeting and triumphing over the dangers to which they feel exposed. With fear, we are dealing with a phenomenon that is a deeply rooted organic function. It is a reflection of the primitive fear that seizes all living creatures. Huma...

We are social creatures, and are immensely influenced by the tastes and desires of other people. Imagine a large social gathering. You see a man alone, whom nobody talks to for any length of time, and who is wandering around without company; isn't there a kind of self-fulfilling isolation about him? Why is he alone, why is he avoided? There has to be a reason. Until someone takes pity on this man and starts up a conversation with him, he will look unwanted and unwantable. But over there, in another corner, is a woman surrounded by people. They laugh at her remarks, and as they laugh, others join the group, attracted by its gaiety. When she moves around, people follow. Her face is glowing with attention. There has to be a reason. In both cases, of course, there doesn't actually have to be a reason at all. The neglected man may have quite charming qualities, supposing you ever talk to him; but most likely you won't. Desirability is a social illusion. Its source is less what y...

    Ctrl+A - Select All Ctrl+B - Bold Ctrl+C - Copy  Ctrl+D - Fill Down Ctrl+F - Find Ctrl+G - Goto Ctrl+H - Replace Ctrl+I - Italic Ctrl+K - Insert Hyperlink Ctrl+N - New Workbook Ctrl+O - Open Ctrl+P - Print Ctrl+R - Fill Right Ctrl+S - Save Ctrl+U - Underline Ctrl+V - Paste Ctrl W - Close Ctrl+X - Cut Ctrl+Y - Repeat Ctrl+Z - Undo F1 - Help F2 - Edit F3 - Paste Name F4 - Repeat last action F4 - While typing a formula, switch between absolute/relative refs F5 - Goto F6 - Next Pane F7 - Spell check F8 - Extend mode F9 - Recalculate all workbooks F10 - Activate Menu bar F11 - New Chart F12 - Save As Ctrl+: - Insert Current Time Ctrl+; - Insert Current Date Ctrl+" - Copy Value from Cell Above Ctrl+’ - Copy Formula from Cell Above Shift - Hold down shift for additional functions in Excel’s menu Shift+F1 - What’s This? Shift+F2 - Edit cell comment Shift+F3 - Paste function into formula Shift+F4 - Find Next Shift+F5 - Find Shift+F6 - Previous Pane Shift+F8 - Add to selection ...

  Sympathy is the purest expression of social feeling. Whenever we find sympathy in human beings we can generally be sure that they are mature individuals with a social conscience, because sympathy is a good yardstick of how far human beings are able to identify with others. Perhaps more widespread than the genuine feeling is its conventional misuse. This consists of posing as an extremely public-spirited, exaggeratedly sympathetic individual. Thus there are people who crowd to the scene of a disaster to achieve a mention in the newspapers and get themselves noticed without actually doing anything to help the victims. Others seem to take a delight in tracking down people suffering a misfortune. Professional sympathizers and alms-givers will not easily give up their activity, for they are actually building a feeling of their own superiority out of the sufferings of the miserable or poverty-stricken victims whom they purport to be helping.  As that wise judge of human nature, La...

  An anxious attachment style may present itself as the need for frequent reassurance that you are loved and that the other person is not about to abandon you. Those with an anxious attachment style may have grown up in an environment in which they did not feel safe that their caregivers would return, or one where they did not have access to consistent affection or responsiveness and availability was inconsistent. Anxious attachments can show up in people-pleasing behaviours; struggles in expressing personal needs or avoidance of confrontation and conflict, a focus on meeting the needs of the partner to the detriment of one’s own personal needs. The constant focus on preventing abandonment can become a self-fullfilling prophecy, as the relentless need for reassurance can feel controlling to those who may have an avoidant attachment style, and may lead to conflict. The anxiously attached partner may build up resentment towards a partner who does not consistently provide that reassur...

  Most people hold themselves back from real happiness. Most people don’t want to be happy, which is why they aren’t. They just don’t realize this is the case. People are programmed to chase their foremost desire at almost any cost. (Imagine the adrenaline-fueled superhuman powers people develop in life-or-death emergencies.) It’s just a matter of what that foremost desire is. Often enough, it’s comfort. Or familiarity.  There are many reasons people thwart the feeling of happiness, but a lot of them have to do with assuming it means giving up on achieving more.  Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them. Happiness is not a rush of positive emotion elicited by random events that affirm the way you think something should go. ...

  I think that when a person laughs, in the majority of cases he becomes repulsive to look at. Most often something banal is revealed in people’s laughter, something as if humiliating for the laugher, though the laughing one almost always knows nothing of the impression he makes. Just as he doesn’t know, as nobody generally knows, what kind of face he has when he’s asleep. Some sleepers have intelligent faces even in sleep, while other faces, even intelligent ones, become very stupid in sleep and therefore ridiculous. I don’t know what makes that happen; I only want to say that a laughing man, like a sleeping one, most often knows nothing about his face. A great many people don’t know how to laugh at all. However, there’s nothing to know here: it’s a gift, and it can’t be fabricated. It can only be fabricated by re-educating oneself, developing oneself for the better, and overcoming the bad instincts of one’s character; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change...

Some children exhibit a hostile attitude at a very early age. They interpret weaning and the natural separation from parents as hostile actions. Other children must deal with a parent who likes to punish and inflict hurt. In both cases, the child looks out on a world that seems fraught with hostility, and their answer is to seek to control it by becoming the source of the hostility themselves. At least then it is no longer so random and sudden. As they get older, they become adept at stimulating anger and frustration in others, which justifies their original attitude—“See, people are against me, I am disliked, and for no apparent reason.” People with this attitude have many subtle tricks up their sleeve for provoking the hostility they secretly want to feel directed at them—withdrawing their cooperation on a project at just the wrong moment, constantly being late, doing a poor job, deliberately making an unfavorable first impression. But they never see themselves as playing any kind of...

  The planning fallacy is only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias. Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic. Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preferenc...

  People-pleasing is more than just being nice to people. Anyone would recommend being nice to people. But people-pleasing is a pattern of behavior in which you consistently put all others before yourself even to the detriment of your own health and wellbeing. It can leave us feeling unable to express our needs, likes and dislikes, and unable to hold boundaries or even keep ourselves safe. We say yes, when actually we want and need to say no. We feel resentful of being taken advantage of, but unable to change it by asking for anything different. And the fear of disapproval never disappears because there is always the possibility of putting a foot wrong, making a wrong choice and displeasing someone – even if that person is someone we don’t like or spend time with. While it is in us all to care about the approval of our peers, people-pleasing takes it much further. If we grow up in an environment in which it is not safe to disagree or express difference, if disapproval is expressed ...