One of the most important lessons I learned from Karen Pryor’s amazing Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training is that operant conditioning can be humane — so humane that you can use it successfully on yourself. In doing so, you can improve your results and more reliably engage your powers of self-discipline and follow-through.
Read MoreI was on my way to work one morning in my early twenties when I saw someone at a stoplight who changed the way I saw the world.
As a young adult in a new city, I had a rigid set of rules about how to live and, at the same time, a limited ability to operate in accordance with them.
These rules governed what I could eat and when, what I could spend, and how I could spend my time. It was my best attempt to tame the chaos of my circumstances.
Read MoreWhen I wake up in the morning, if I have been unwise enough to charge my phone beside my bed overnight, my phone is the first thing that I reach for in the morning. After all, it’s my alarm clock, my weather report, and my connection to everything else in the outside world.
It’s also huge distraction. Every morning, under such circumstances, I have to be aware that every moment spent looking at my phone is another moment in which the traffic is stacking up outside; I’m not only delaying my arrival at my office, I’m increasing the total amount of time that I will spend commuting. Unfortunately, my phone is set up so as to increase the perceived rewards of engaging with it and to decrease the sense of immediacy I have about my obligations. With every click and swipe, I get a little hit of dopamine that creates a conflict: Will I listen to the little voice inside the tells me it’s time to put down the phone and go, or will I linger and keep hunting for the next thing that will give me that little neurotransmitter high?
Read MoreThe elementary school I attended had a series of playgrounds made mostly of tires in interesting configurations.
Back in the olden days, when multiple recesses each day were standard, there was a separate playground for the kindergarteners, another for the first and second graders, and another for the third and fourth graders.
One of my classmates, who went on to become my best friend, remembers, at age five, peering through the chain link fence that separated the kindergarten playground from that of the first and second graders. Gazing at the older kids at play (So worldly! So sophisticated!), she said to herself sorrowfully, “I’ll never make it.”
Read MoreWe’ve seen the moving TED talks where kids in Kenya or India talk about how desperate they are to have an education and how grateful they are to be able to go to school. But to kids who already have the amazing privileges of speaking English, living in the United States, Internet access, and literate parents, formal education doesn’t carry as dramatic a promise of advancement. It doesn’t feel like an incredible gift — it feels like a burden and a bother.
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