Philip Zimbardo – The Secret Powers of Time

RSA ANIMATE: The Secret Powers of Time

There are 6 main time zones that people life in.

2 where people focus on on the past

  • Remember all of the good old times
  • Family records
  • Birthdays
  • Good times
  • Bad times
  • Family rituals

2 where people focus on the present

  • Hedonistic: live for pleasure and avoid pain
  • Seek knowledge
  • Seek sensation
  • It doesn’t pay to plan
  • My life is fated by my religion, my poverty, my conditions that I’m living under

2 where people focus on the future

  • To resist temptation
  • To work rather than play
  • Depending on your religion life begins after the death of the mortal body
  • To be future oriented you have to have trust that the things you do to prepare for the future will be carried out
  • The closer you are to your family the more likely you are present oriented

Italy has a La Lega movement where they want to cut the country in half.

  • They feel the top half of the country (the northern portion) does the majority of the work where the southern half is “lazy”
  • They found in general the northern half of the country is future oriented where people in the south tend to be present or past oriented

Book: Geography of Time – Robert Levine

  • Went around the world doing experiments on the pace of life
    • How much time has elapsed when you do certain activities?
    • In different cultures people do things at different paces
    • You can identify cultures by their life pace
    • Cities with the highest pace of life: men have the most coronary problems

We all begin life as present hedonists

  • We want pleasure and we want to avoid pain
  • He believes schooling takes present oriented people and makes them future oriented people

American children

  • In America a child drops out of school every 9 seconds
  • Study: By the time a boy is 21 years old, he’s spent 10,0000 hours playing video games alone
  • Brains are being digitally rewired and they will never fit in a traditional analog classroom
  • Its boring
  • They control nothing
  • Its passive
  • Learning in school is all about the delay of gratification

All addictions are addictions of present hedonism

  • Food
  • Drugs
  • Sex
  • Gambling
  • Etc

If kids are future oriented

  • They understand that they should not smoke
  • Understand they should not have sex
  • Understand they should not do drugs

Present oriented kids

  • Know the consequences but that knowledge never feeds back to change their behavior

We are under estimating the power of technology in re-wiring young people’s brains

USA Today study asked how busy Americans are

  • 50% busier now than I was last year
  • Sacrificed friends, family, and sleep for my success
  • Supposed you had an 8th day
    • They said “I would work harder to achieve more”

Sit Down Dinners

  • 20 years ago only 60% of American families had sit-down family dinners
  • 5 years ago 1 in 5 had sit-down dinners
  • You can’t have family values if you don’t have family meals together

Trapped In An Elevator

Footage of a Man Who Spent 41 Hours Trapped in an Elevator

If Nicholas White wasn’t claustrophobic before his ill-fated 1999 elevator ride, he probably is now. White found himself trapped alone in an elevator car for 41 hours, a horrifying ordeal more than 5 million people have shared in since the New Yorker posted time-compressed footage of White literally bouncing off the walls.

My Nephews

Warning: this is going to be a busy weekend with lots and lots of pictures of my nephews (and Tyler tomorrow).  Went to pizza tonight with my sister, brother-in-law, Christina, and nephews.  I’m taking the day off tomorrow to watch the boys, so it should be fun!

Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible

Why Change Is So Hard

“You hear something a lot about change: People won’t change because they’re too lazy. Well, I’m here to stick up for the lazy people. In fact, I want to argue that what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. The proof comes from a psychology study that is absolutely fascinating.

So picture this: Students come into a lab. It smells amazing—someone has just baked chocolate-chip cookies. On a table in front of them, there are two bowls. One has the fresh-baked cookies. The other has a bunch of radishes. Some of the students are asked to eat some cookies but no radishes. Others are told to eat radishes but no cookies, and while they sit there, nibbling on rabbit food, the researchers leave the room – which is intended to tempt them and is frankly kind of sadistic. But in the study none of the radish-eaters slipped – they showed admirable self-control. And meanwhile, it probably goes without saying that the people gorging on cookies didn’t experience much temptation.

Then, the two groups are asked to do a second, seemingly unrelated task—basically a kind of logic puzzle where they have to trace out a complicated geometric pattern without raising their pencil. Unbeknownst to them, the puzzle can’t be solved. The scientists are curious how long they’ll persist at a difficult task. So the cookie-eaters try again and again, for an average of 19 minutes, before they give up. But the radish-eaters—they only last an average of 8 minutes. What gives?

The answer may surprise you: They ran out of self-control. Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I don’t mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision—any time you’re paying close attention to your actions, like when you’re having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you’re writing. This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we’re more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many—we’ve depleted our self-control.

And here’s why this matters for change: In almost all change situations, you’re substituting new, unfamiliar behaviors for old, comfortable ones, and that burns self-control. Let’s say I present a new morning routine to you that specifies how you’ll shower and brush your teeth. You’ll understand it and you might even agree with my process. But to pull it off, you’ll have to supervise yourself very carefully. Every fiber of your being will want to go back to the old way of doing things. Inevitably, you’ll slip. And if I were uncharitable, I’d see you going back to the old way and I’d say, You’re so lazy. Why can’t you just change?

This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.”

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/video/why-change-is-so-hard-self-control-is-exhaustible