How a Group of Volunteers Beat Microsoft

In the early 1990s Microsoft had a great idea: create a digital encyclopedia to be distributed on CD-ROM and online. There would be hundreds of well-paid employees working on this important project. It looked and sounded like a great idea at a time when people still connected to the internet via dial-up modems and the thought of having the information of twenty of more heavy books (think Encyclopaedia Britannica) on one CD was truly revolutionary. But less than twenty years later, in October of 2009, Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN Encarta. What had happened?

Special Deal

Everybody likes a good deal, right? What about 100 deals? Sounds too good to be true? It's not. The Book Depository, my favorite place to get new reading material, is starting a special campaign this Thursday: 100 different books on offer during a time period of 25 hours, starting at noon (GMT) and ending on Friday at 1 p.m. Every 15 minutes a new book will be on offer. Sounds like something you could enjoy taking part in? Just click on the banner below and find out everything you need to know about this special offer!

When Cash Hurts

Dan Ariely on the "Pain of Paying". Very interesting and practical video. Some of the highlights include:

• What's more painful? Cash or credit card? Prepayment or paying after the event?
• How to increase the pain of paying (and when that might make sense)
• How to decrease the pain of paying (and when that might make sense)
• Method and timing of payment matters more than you think
• What's an ideal gift?
• And the interesting case of America Online (AOL) and its modem users

Source: danariely.com

Are You Homeless?

Something I recently read...

     The first thing you notice when you're homeless is how long the nights are. It's hard to realize that a night can be so long; but in time you get used to it. You don't really sleep, especially in the beginning, because you wake up every fifteen minutes worried someone will come upon you. Your imagination runs wild with what terrible things would happen if you fell asleep and let that happen.
     The world at night when you're without shelter feels like the Twilight Zone, another dimension, another planet, where the normal laws of time and space don't apply. When the sun comes up, you're so happy knowing that soon people are going to be out and you'll be back in the world again, on terra firm, although you're tired and worried about how fast night comes again.
     Before you know it, you're seeing the shops close down, lights diminishing down streets, cars becoming fewer and fewer; on residential blocks you enviously watch working mothers and fathers pulling into driveways, arriving home to their families; and you stand outside talking to them in your head, saying, Don't go inside, not yet, stay out a little longer!
     Your hearing changes as the general noise of the workaday world goes silent and other sounds become more pronounced. A car engine sputtering. Tires squealing around turns. Even sounds that are far away: distant trains, speeding cars, gunshots, police and ambulance sirens.

Play Offense Instead of Defense

The annual Superbowl (championship game of the National Football League) is approaching fast, but don't worry: this will not be a post on American Football strategy or on what my team needs to do on Sunday night in order to win the title. Instead it's a summary of what I have learned from the reading of Willpower: Why Self-Control is the Secret to Success by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. I have made a list of 15 things you should keep in mind and rules you should follow if you want to improve your willpower and self-control. If it's not all clear, post your questions in the comments section or go and read the book for yourself! ;-)

Receiving Help From Above

The famous English guitarist and singer-songwriter Eric Clapton was an alcoholic and drug addict. "Drinking was in my thoughts all the time," he writes in his autobiography. All the time... until, that is, he started praying. Here's how he describes the night he finally sank to his knees and started asking for help from above: "I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether. I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn't allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn't going to make it, so I asked for help, and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered." According to Clapton, he's never again even seriously considered taking another drink.

Where did all the willpower to quit (which he didn't have before) all of a sudden come from? Even Clapton can't really explain it, but he now prays for help every morning and night. Telling his story in their book Willpower, it becomes clear that Roy Baumeister and John Tierney aren't quite sure how to explain it either and since neither is particularly religious it's understandable that they have decided to focus on the social component of religious denominations in order to explain how faith benefits people looking for more self-control in their lives. Put simply, being alone sucks:

Getting Into The Habit...

Does the name Henry Morton Stanley ring a bell? I'm impressed if it does, since Mr. Stanley is not quite as well-known as the man he found in the African jungle in 1871 after months of searching: the great missionary Dr. David Livingstone. But according to the authors of Willpower. Why Self-Control is the Secret to Success, it is hard "to name any explorer in history who endured such sustained misery and terror so deep in the wilderness" as Henry Stanley. How did he do it?

Stanley was actually a journalist (not a scientist or explorer primarily) and definitely didn't get his willpower from his upbringing: Born to an unmarried eighteen-year-old woman who abandoned him to her father, he never knew his own father and ended up in a workhouse by the time he was six years old. But for some reason he saw the benefits of having self-control early on and worked on improving his own continually. So by the time he went on his first expeditions to the interior of Africa, he was well prepared - mentally probably even more so than physically.