The difference in life-expectancy between CEOs and doormen, even controlling for other factors (like access to medical care and blah blah), can be explained almost entirely by how much choice they [perceive themselves to] have.
Having choice on the mind >> actually making choices. It is important to feel that you have choice, but you also don’t want too many.
People find it gratifying to exercise control – not just for the future it buys them but for the exercise itself.
Being effective – changing things, influencing things, making things happen – is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seems naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.
While gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, losing control can be worse than never having it at all.
(These are from Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, I think.)
Power = Not having to make sense to be believed.
Powerless = Not being believed no matter how much sense you make.
“There’s really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is conscious experience. Seeing the great pyramids or remembering the Golden Gate Bridge or imagining the International Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them.” –Dan Gilbert
For groups to flourish we need authority, predictability, traditions, deviants punished, and laws enforced. In other words, we need to keep conservatives around.
Thomas Jefferson said that one of the secrets to life is the avoidance of pain. Not that I disagree, but I would also say that one of the secrets to life is using the force of pain to your advantage. You know you are an entrepreneur when you are excited to discover a new "pain".
Bankruptcy tourism
1 hour ago
