Tom Cornwall 2013-05-22T22:20:25-04:00 Tom Cornwall http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=tom-cornwall Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Tom Cornwall Good old fashioned elbow grease. Think SMUTTY: The 6 Steps To Achieving Your New Years Resolutions tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2399252 2013-01-02T20:57:05-05:00 2013-03-04T05:12:01-05:00 Tom Cornwall http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-cornwall/
After recovering from yesterday's obligatory New Year's Day hangover maybe you went for that first run or maybe you are still waiting to put plans in to action. But how long do you think this 'new leaf' is going to stay turned over?

Researchers at the University of Scranton found that only 8% of people kept to their resolutions. Even after just one week 25% of people were found to have fallen off the wagon. So how can you set resolutions that you'll actually stick to? How can you join this holier-than-thou 8%?

If you ask the management consultants (and why would you?) about how to achieve goals then they'll give you a nice little acronym: SMART. This stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timed. They will tell you that if you set a SMART resolution then you'll "get results" - to put it in their terminology.

But who wants to think SMART? It sounds a bit clinical and dull doesn't it? Isn't this supposed to be fun? So let's spice things up a little and set SMUTTY resolutions. Okay - we're going to give the consultants the first two because S & M are smutty enough for us to work with (wink wink). Taken together this forms the six steps to setting resolutions that you'll actually achieve.

How do I know that this works?

A little while ago I was turned down by all six universities that I applied for and had to take a year out to re-take some exams - boo hoo, right? I've never been the academic type but I knew that a top degree would give me so many advantages. When I finally did get in to the course that I wanted I felt completely lost, overworked and confused by it all. And at the end of the first year I was averaging less than 50%. I knew that if this continued then I'd be just another statistic to add to the rising unemployment count. So I did what I had to do and tried something different. I probed and tested the assumptions of degree success and on the New Year of 2009 I wrote down some SMUTTY resolutions. What's the worst that could happen I figured?

So how does the story end? Well it worked. Not only did I improve my grades - in some cases by up to 70% - but somehow I graduated top of the class averaging close to 80% in my final year (read more about this here). I didn't give up socialising or live in the library - I did it all with the minimum required effort by finding out The Truth About University. The key to all of this was SMUTTY thinking. So let's run through these 6 steps in a step-by-step way and you can adapt these for whatever it is that your resolutions are.

Step 1: Specific

Let's say you want to lose weight. What do you mean by "lose weight"? Do you want to lose fat? Do you want to lose weight in one part of your body? What specifically is it that you are trying to achieve? Losing weight or otherwise, if you can nail this down then you're on the right path.

Step 2: Measurable

With some resolutions it's hard to really measure improvement - "live life to the full" etc - but you can always find something to judge whether you're making progress. Suppose you want to be a better friend, what does this look like to you? Are you going to call your friends more often or arrange to meet up with them? You don't need to get obsessed by this, just find something to keep you on track so that you can see whether you're progressing.

Step 3: Unachievable

Who wants a resolution that's achievable? Achievable is boring. You don't want a boring life so why would you want a boring resolution? Now of course you can't say "lose 100 lbs tomorrow" - that's just impossible - but if you set some ridiculous resolution, even if you don't achieve it you will probably have got further than you would have done with a boring achievable goal. In my case I set a resolution of getting a 90% grade - I never managed it but there's no way that I would have got close if I'd chosen something that I thought that I could achieve.

Step 4: Timed

It's so easy with resolutions to think that you'll get to it eventually. It's January, you've got plenty of time, right? But if you get caught in this mindset then soon enough the year will have passed and you will done nothing. Set a deadline. Set a stupid deadline if you must - you'll be amazed what you can do in a week. As an example, the first Facebook site was created in just 7 days. What if Zuckerberg had put it off?

Steps 5 & 6: Putting Words In To Action

By now you've got a resolution that's better than at least 80% of resolutions that people make. But writing it down means nothing if you don't act on it. So what are you going to do to turn talk in to walk?

Step 5: Today

What are you going to do today? It doesn't need to be a 24 hour gym session or studying 18 hours (or whatever it may be) but it needs to be something. If you add up those somethings over time then you'll get somewhere. Yippee!

Step 6: Yesterday

And what did you do yesterday? What went well and what could you improve? Habit formation takes time but if you stick at it and are willing to be honest with yourself then you'll have no troubles at all.

So there you have it: SMUTTY resolutions. If you're feeling brave then commit right now by posting your own resolutions in the comments section below. And if you're feeling all gloomy already then bare the following in mind. Just because 2012 wasn't the end, doesn't mean 2013 can't be a new beginning.

You can read more about SMUTTY resolutions and the new information revolution at TruthAboutUni.com. Let's crush 2013 together.]]> How to Avoid the Next Great Resource Disaster tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2152691 2012-11-17T22:17:36-05:00 2013-01-17T05:12:01-05:00 Tom Cornwall http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-cornwall/
As I've mentioned in a previous post, what we do is determined by what we see and what this means to us, that these associations shape our decisions and that decisions become our lives.

To understand the power of associations let's start near the beginning of our lives, with our education. This week the education secretary, Michael Gove, gave a speech in which he said, "Exams matter because motivation matters... our self-belief grows as we clear challenges we once thought beyond us." What Gove doesn't mention is that there are different types of motivation. This matters not just for exam performance but for the course of our society and our lives within it.

Exams are an example of extrinsic motivators - we do them in order to obtain a qualification. Financial incentives are another example - we do a task in order to get paid. But there is another type of motivators - intrinsic ones - the things that we pursue for the sake of doing so and nothing more. Gove and his sympathisers would argue that exams are necessary to get our children to learn, regardless of the source of the motivation. Now of course a looming deadline can help us to get things done but what matters in terms of fulfilment is the source of the motivation.

Are children learning because they enjoy it or because they are told that it is 'good for them'?

What we don't measure in exams is the source of the motivation behind wanting to pass an exam. And for so many education creates an association that achievement is linked to focusing on things that they have no interest in except as something to add to the CV. This isn't trivial.

In countless studies we find that those that are intrinsically motivated, far outperform those that are extrinsically motivated. And behind our greatest moments - the four-minute mile, climbing Everest, the Internet, to name the first three that come to mind - we find that the source of motivation is a not a pay-check but a dreamer with a passion.

Psychologists will tell us that our needs include things like; belonging, esteem and expression. If our needs are not met we feel incomplete, trying to fulfill them through what we do and who we do it with. And behind what we do are the associations that we have built up over the course of our lives.

If we grow up associating achievement from having to do things that we don't enjoy but do 'in order' to gain something else then this creates a synthetic pursuit of happiness. Just think of a time when you were motivated purely by money, did receiving it leave you asking, "is this it?"

It would be naive to say that money has no importance at all, of course it does, but seeking it has a price. Time is a valuable currency. What we often don't value in our pursuit of money is what we could have done with the time we've lost. If you are using your time doing things that you don't enjoy then one day you will run out of it, having spent it all on a life that you didn't want.

Because at it's heart this is the story of young people like John. John knew from a young age that he wanted to be a scientist, studying often in his own time - motivated by the love of the subject. But his grades didn't reflect his passion and he was at one time bottom his class of 250 at age 16. Around this time he was told by his teacher to give up because his dream was too ridiculous an idea. Maybe he should have listened, how many of us would have done?

However in 2012 John, or Sir John Gurdon to give him his full name, won the Nobel Prize in medicine. His prize was awarded for discovering that the specialisation of cells is reversible; that they can determine their own fate. The goal of our society should be no different.

In a society what gets measured gets managed. With GDP still the main focus of governments, hundreds of John's will grow up being told to 'do the sensible thing' and follow the money. How would the world be different if John, and others like him, hadn't pursued their own path? How would your life be different if you did?

Writing in 1930, the great economist John Maynard Keynes said of the possibilities of future generations that, "It will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes."

That abundance is now in our hands - we have more wealth than we know what to do with as a society. The task now is to promote something quite different. To create a society promoting and utilising our potential.

Only in doing this will we prevent the next great resource disaster being ourselves. And only when we achieve this will we be truly free.]]> Are You Right? What Makes You So Sure? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2144831 2012-11-16T11:18:47-05:00 2013-01-16T05:12:01-05:00 Tom Cornwall http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-cornwall/ TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!

Watch Beau Lotto's talk above on optical illusions and how information can differ depending on perception.

We all like to think that we are right. And we will often go to great lengths to persuade others that our view is the right view. But what Beau Lotto reveals in his powerful TEDTalk on optical illusions is that the reality is very different. He shows that our reality is merely a perception and, as Beau puts it, "the light that falls on your eye is meaningless". Or in other words what we see is merely our perception of reality. What's interesting is not just the way in which our mind can be tricked by these playful optical illusions but also how this affects our day-to-day decisions, our behavior and the world we live in.

Suppose that you were given a creative task to complete and that the test is given to you in a red font. Now suppose that another similar task was given to you the following week but this time in a blue colored font. Would this change in color have any effect on your performance? You like to think of yourself as creative so surely you would be creative regardless of something as trivial as the color of the font?

Behind every decision is an individual, and behind every individual is a perception. A perception based on what we see and what it means to us. -- Tom Cornwall


How about another type of task -- this time one that tests your attention-to-detail. Again the first test is in a red font and the second is in a blue font. You're a meticulous person so, again, why should the color of the font make a difference to this?

It turns out that color can play a surprisingly large role in task performance. Researchers at the University of British Columbia tracked over 600 participants' performance in a range of detail-orientated and creative tasks. In the detail-orientated tasks red boosted performance by as much as 31 percent, whilst in the creative tasks blue prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs than under red conditions. Why? Just as Beau explores, what matters is what the light means to us. When we see red we think of warning signs or red-ink on homework, whilst when we see blue we think of the sky or the oceans -- things that mean openness and tranquility to us. These effect how we perceive and how we respond. So, as an example, if we wanted to try to boost scores in computer-based tests, why not give the tests in blue fonts when asked to answer and red fonts when checking work through?

Color is just the start of the influence that real-world illusions can have on our decisions. We all like to think that we do the right thing when we are making choices involving risk. Are we right? A lot of the time, yes -- we're still alive, aren't we? But what's interesting is how our perception of risks can deviate from the reality.

Let's try another example. You are an official in charge of public health and you're faced with an outbreak of a rare and deadly virus that affects a population of 600. You've got two options to combat the outbreak, both with consequences:

Option A: 200 people will be saved.
Option B: 33.3 percent probability that 600 will be saved and 66.6 percent probability that no on will be saved.

Which option do you choose?

Now suppose you are given two different options to choose from:

Option C: 400 people will die.
Option D: 33.3 percent probability that no-one will die and a 66.6 percent probability that 600 people will die.

Compare your two answers: did you answer option A and option D? Take a further look at the options and you will see that they all save 200 lives. Yet the majority of participants in this study by Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow) and his colleague Amos Tversky answered A and D. Not only are these choices different but inconsistently so. Option A chooses certainty whilst D chooses to take risk. Why do we do this? What has been consistently shown is that presentation can influence perception. When facing gains we tend to be risk-averse but when facing losses we tend to be risk-seeking. Or that we like avoiding pain more than we like obtaining pleasure. Just think about this next time you watch a haircare advert that says "maintain your shiny hair" rather than "gain shiny hair". One is a loss and one is a gain but the way in which they are presented to you affects your perception and your response. Coincidence?

Aside from these examples though, reality isn't based on probabilities, it is based on perceptions of probabilities. How do we feel about the risk? Does it mean pleasure or pain? How strong is this emotional response? All of the answers to these questions affect how strongly we seek it out or how strongly we avoid it. This needn't seem abstract. It affects our purchasing decisions, our investment decisions, our friendships and our relationships.

This goes deeper than you or I though. For decades it has been assumed that decisions are rational -- that we weigh up options and make the best choice by our criteria. This is what our economic policies have been based on, what our financial system depended upon and what many of the leaders that made these decisions believed.

What Beau's talk, and the wider science of decision-making, reveals is just how wrong this view is. Because behind every decision is an individual, and behind every individual is a perception. A perception based on what we see and what it means to us. Understanding our perceptions allows us to understand our behavior and how to make better decisions.

So next time someone you're in a heated "difference of opinions" with someone, stop to consider whether you might both be right (or wrong). Could it be that both perceptions may be reality?

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TEDWeekends will highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas and allow them to develop in real time through your voice! Tweet #TEDWeekends to share your perspective or email tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com to learn about future weekend's ideas to contribute as a writer.]]> How to Be Happy: The Surprising Truth tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2133560 2012-11-15T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-15T05:12:01-05:00 Tom Cornwall http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-cornwall/ when asked.

And yet many of us cringe slightly if the topic of conversation turns to happiness. We picture cheesy motivational videos or that uneasy feeling you have if you find yourself browsing in the self-help section of a bookstore. But much of the cynicism towards happiness may be semantic - nobody would say that we shouldn't try to reduce misery, would they? Yet it's as if admitting that you might have a 'happiness problem' is something to be ashamed of.

Trivial Pursuit?

But you shouldn't feel this way. Happiness isn't a trivial subject. As Oscar Wilde once said "We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."

According to the research of acclaimed psychologist Ed Diener and colleagues, he's on to something. Happier people live longer, recover quicker from illness, perform better in the workplace and experience more fulfilling relationships. In fact almost every way we cut the pie, happier people are better off - and causation doesn't always run in the direction you may assume.

What's being discovered is that just as our fitness level will remain constant without effort, our happiness levels will remain constant without effort. But with intentional effort our happiness 'muscles' can be trained.

Develop the Happiness Muscles

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied the brains of average people versus Buddhist monks who had over 10,000 hours of meditative training. The surprising findings were that when meditating the level of activity in regions of the brain associated with happiness dwarfed anything the scientists had ever seen. The brain had been trained and rewired to be happier in a process known as neuroplasticity, with regions getting stronger just as muscles do with more use.

Meditative approaches such as mindfulness based cognitive therapy, which is now an NHS accredited mental health treatment, work by helping us to focus on being present moment - rather than being stuck thinking about the past or projecting about the future. This helps us to achieve peak performance or 'flow' - the moments where we are completely engaged in what we are doing.

Increasingly mindfulness is being used in some of the most successful companies to help foster creativity and focus, with a prominent example being Google's 'Search Inside Yourself' programme developed by engineer and self-proclaimed "jolly good fellow" Chade-Meng Tan.

Bounce Back

But deep breathing isn't the complete answer to happiness. A study focusing on very happy people found that they did experience negative emotions in the same way way as the average person does, but that very happy people were able to overcome these feelings faster. They had developed emotional resilience that got them through. According to Martin Seligman, the superstar psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, seeing setbacks as "temporary, local and changeable" is the key to overcoming them.

Friend or Foe?

To para-phrase Nick Hornby, no man (or woman) is an island. We've long known that our connections and relationships play a large role in how happy we are. But what's only become known recently is that emotions are contagious and can and do spread, just like a virus epidemic, through our social networks. So we should heed the advice of Tim Ferriss, author of the upcoming The 4-Hour Chef, when he says that "you are the average of the five people you associate with most. If someone isn't making you stronger, they're making you weaker." Similarly, if someone isn't making you happier, they are making you miserable.

Find Your Map

Because happiness is so hard to measure, when we think about our lives we spent more time focusing on the things that we can easily measure - such as our bank balance - and less time on the things that we can't. And as Dan Gilbert reveals in his acclaimed TED talk, many of the things that we think will make us happy really do not at all. For a year Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of The Happiness Project tried out many of the commonly held beliefs about happiness, finding that many were misguided.

So test things out, see what works and adapt what doesn't. But whatever you do, don't be fooled that happiness is trivial or that you can't do anything about it. How to be happy is a question that can be answered, you just need to pursue it with the right map.]]>