My morning train WFH reads:
• 35 Ideas from 2021: Right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve read, learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 35 of them, in no particular order of importance. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did. (Safal Niveshak)
• The most unusual job market in modern American history, explained Quits, big raises and severe labor shortages: 10 charts on the completely surprising 2021 labor market (Washington Post)
• A Comeback Year for Art: Kahlo, O’Keeffe and an $18.9 Million Coin Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips sold $15.6 billion worth of art in 2021. Here are 20 highlights spanning a resurgent year. (Wall Street Journal)
• Indexing the creator economy: In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators. (Stripe)
• Blame Bad Weather for Your Bigger Bills Wild weather around the world wreaked havoc on markets for raw materials, lifting prices for everything from electricity and heat to houses and breakfast cereal. (Wall Street Journal)
• 10 Ways Cities Came Back in 2021: Year Two of the Covid-19 pandemic brought about innovations in architecture, technology, equality, climate and transportation in cities across the globe. (Citylab)
• How to Become a Better Listener While listening is a skill universally lauded, it’s rarely, if ever, explicitly taught as such, outside of training for therapists. A 2015 study showed that while 78% of accredited undergraduate business schools list “presenting” as a learning goal, only 11% identified “listening.” (Harvard Business Review)
• Can we actually “brain-drain” China? No. But we can give America a big economic boost while boosting our moral image. (Noahpinion)
• The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging. (Quanta Magazine)
• How Nicole Kidman Learned to Love Playing Lucille Ball There are valuable lessons Nicole Kidman has learned each time she plays a real-life figure: How that person was misapprehended by society at the time. How that era of history is more like the present day than she realized. And, crucially, how to maintain her balance while traipsing barefoot through a vat of grapes. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Richard Nisbett professor of social psychology and Co-director of the culture and cognition program at the University of Michigan, focusing on culture and reasoning and basic cognitive processes. Malcolm Gladwell called him “The most influential thinker in my life.” He is the author of numerous research and books, most recently, “Thinking: A memoir.”
The return to the office has been pushed back
Source: Vox
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