When people in developing countries worry about migration, they are usually concerned at the prospect of their best and brightest departure to Silicon Valley or to hospitals and universities in the developed world. These are the kind of workers that countries like Britain, Canada and Australia try to attract by using immigration rules that privilege college graduates.
Lots of studies have found that well-educated people from developing countries are particularly likely to emigrate. A big survey of Indian households in 2004 found that nearly 40% of emigrants had more than a high-school education, compared with around 3.3% of all Indians over the age 25. This "brain drain" has long bothered policymakers in poor countries. They fear that it hurts their economies, depriving them of much-needed skilled workers who could have taught at their universities, worked in their hospitals and come up with clever new products for their factories to make.
I can pick a date from the past 53 years and know instantly where I was, what happened in the news and even the day of the week. I've been able to do this since I was four.
I never feel overwhelmed with the amount of information my brain absorbs. My mind seems to be able to cope and the information is stored away neatly. When I think of a sad memory, I do what everybody does try to put it to one side. I don't think it's harder for me just because my memory is clearer. Powerful memory doesn't make my emotions any more acute or vivid. I can recall the day my grandfather died and the sadness I felt when we went to the hospital the day before. I also remember that the musical play Hair opened on Broadway on the same day they both just pop into my mind in the same way.
Most people would define optimism as being endlessly happy, with a glass that's perpetually half full. But that's exactly the kind of false cheerfulness that positive psychologists wouldn't recommend. "Healthy optimism means being in touch with reality," says Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard professor. According to BenShahar, realistic optimists are those who make the best of things that happen, but not
those who believe everything happens for the best.
Ben-Shahar uses three optimistic exercises. When he feels down — say, after giving a bad lecture he grants himself permission to be human. He reminds himself that not every lecture can be a Nobel winner; some will be less effective than others. Next is reconstruction. He analyzes the weak lecture, learning lessons for the future about what works and what doesn't. Finally, there is perspective,
which involves acknowledging that in the grand scheme of life, one lecture really doesn't matter.
Think about driving a route that's very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it's easy to lose concentration on the driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has.
This is the well-travelled road effect: People tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route.
The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a well-known route, because we don't have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can't remember the journey well because we didn't pay much attention to it. So we assume it was shorter.
The supermarket is designed to lure customers into spending as much time as possible within its doors. The reason for this is simple: The longer you stay in the store, the more stuff you'll see, and the more stuff you see, the more you'll buy.
And supermarkets contain a lot of stuff. The average supermarket, according to the Food Marketing Institute, carries some 44,000 different items, and many carry tens of thousands more. The sheer volume of available choice is enough to send shoppers into a state of information overload. According to brain-scan experiments, the demands of so much decision-making quickly become too much for us. After about 40 minutes of shopping, most people stop struggling to be rationally selective, and instead begin shopping emotionally which is the point at which we accumulate the 50 percent of stuff in our cart that we never intended buying.
My dream has always been to work somewhere in an area between fashion and publishing. Two years before graduating from secondary school, I took a sewing and design course thinking that I would move on to a fashion design course.
However, during that course I realized I was not good enough in this area to compete with other creative personalities in the future, so I decided that it was not the right path for me. Before applying for university I told everyone that I would study journalism, because writing was, and still is, one of my favourite activities.
But, to be honest, I said it, because I thought that fashion and me together was just a dream I knew that no one could imagine me in the fashion industry at all! So I decided to look for some fashion-related courses that included writing. This is when I noticed the course "Fashion Media & Promotion."
A fifth grader gets a homework assignment to select his future career path from a list of occupations. He ticks "astronaut" but quickly adds "scientist" to the list and selects it as well. The boy is convinced that if he reads enough, he can explore as many career paths as he likes. And so he reads - everything from encyclopedias to science fiction novels. He reads so passionately that his parents have to institute a "no reading policy" at the dinner table.
That boy was Bill Gates, and he hasn't stopped reading yet - not even after becoming one of the most successful people on the planet. Nowadays, his reading material has changed from science fiction and reference books: recently, he revealed that he reads at least 50 nonfiction books a year. Gates chooses nonfiction titles because they explain how the world works. "Each book opens up new avenues of
knowledge to explore", Gates says.
It is easy to underestimate English writer James Herriot. He had such a pleasant, readable style that one might think that anyone could imitate it. How many times have I heard people say, "I could write a book. I just haven't the time." Easily said.
Not so easily done. James Herriot, contrary to popular opinion, did not find it easy in his early days of, as he put it, "having a go at the writing game". While he obviously had an abundance of natural talent, the final, polished work that he gave to the world was the result of years of practicing, re-writing and reading. Like the majority of authors, he had to suffer many disappointments and rejections along the way, but these made him all the more determined to succeed. Everything he achieved in life was earned the hard way and his success in the literary field was no exception.
It's almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. But, the wonderful thing about failure is that it's entirely up to us to decide how to look at it.
We can choose to see failure as "the end of the world". Or, we can look at failure as the incredible learning experience that it often is. Every time we fail at something, we can choose to look for the lesson we're meant to learn. These lessons are very important; they're how we grow, and how we keep from making that same mistake again. Failures stop us only ifwe let them.
Failure can also teach us things about ourselves that we would never have learned otherwise. For instance, failure can help you discover how strong a person you are. Failing at something can help you discover your truest friends, or help you find unexpected motivation to succeed.
We tend to think that friends and family members are our biggest sources of connection, laughter, and warmth. While that may well be true, researchers have also recently found that interacting with strangers actually brings a boost in mood and feelings of belonging that we didn't expect.
In one series of studies, researchers instructed Chicago-area commuters using public transportation to strike up a conversation with someone near them. On average, participants who followed this instruction felt better than those who had been told to stand or sit in silence. The researchers also argued that when we shy away from casual interactions with strangers, it is often due to a misplaced anxiety that they might not want to talk to us. Much of the time, however, this belief is false. As it turns out, many people are actually perfectly willing to talk—and may even be flattered to receive your attention.
