Munro Stewart

Remember everyone is emotional and people are all going through the ups and downs of life, so try not to take it personally when people get angry, and try to comfort or support others when they are in a bad mood.

• Perhaps this is an exaggeration.
• But the core of the message is that people tend to have stronger feelings about something than they let on.
• People who regularly have outbursts of anger, depression or flamboyant enthusiasm are generally frowned upon in most cultures.
• This especially applies to men (for women trying to figure us out).
• The application of this rule is to not assume everything is fine just because someone isn’t having a nervous breakdown.
• We all have our individual problems, angst and upsets that are normally contained.

The critical 7 rules to understand people - Scott H. Young

Your beliefs and thoughts influence your mind and your life, so any expectations you have about your self, your character, your abilities, your goals, and your dreams can and often will come true if you believe they will.

• A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that said prediction would come true.
• In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to making the expectations come true.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are an example of the more general phenomenon of positive feedback loops.
• A self-fulfilling prophecy can have either negative or positive outcomes.
• Merely applying a label to someone or something can affect the perception of the person/thing and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy - Wikipedia

The solution or explanation with the fewest amount of steps or assumptions should often be preferred in order to simplify the solution down to its essential factor or factors.

• In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
• It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae).
• Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used these exact words.
• Popularly, the principle is sometimes inaccurately paraphrased as "The simplest explanation is usually the best one."
• This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires the fewest assumptions and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.

Occam's Razor - Wikipedia

Have a growth mindset by believing that you can grow, learn new things, improve your skills and knowledge, and realizing that temporary and recurring failure are a necessary part of learning and growing.

• Dweck, like many adults, had learned to hide her frustration and anger, to politely say "I'm not sure I want to play this anymore" instead of knocking over the board.
• She figured the successful kids would be the same - they’d have tactics for coping with failure instead of getting beaten down by it.
• But what she found was radically different.
• The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it!
• When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said "I love a challenge."
• They’d say stuff like "The harder it gets the harder I need to try."

Believe you can change - Aaron Swartz

Positively influence other people's lives by telling them you believe in them, you think they are a good person, they possess particular good qualities, and you expect they will perform well because they have the ability to do so.

• The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse.
• It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he created that the statue came to life.
• According to the Pygmalion effect, the targets of the expectations internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly.
• A similar process works in the opposite direction in the case of low expectations.
• The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that increasing the leader's expectation of the follower's performance will result in better follower performance.
• Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class.

Pygmalion Effect - Wikipedia

Each technology we create is transforming society and we need to be careful about considering if and when different technologies may be affecting us either negatively or positively.

• A report commissioned by the National Science Foundation and made public today speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.
• The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to ''maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society.''
• There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.

Study Says Technology Could Transform Society - NY Times (1982)

Live your life by being true to yourself and following your dreams and passions, in order to make your life and the lives of others better and happier, instead of only doing things that other people want or expect you to do.

• I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all.
• When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
• Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
• It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way.
• From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late.
• Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

Top 5 regrets of the dying - Huffington Post