Openness, Introversion, and Extroversion:

"When personality psychologists today talk about introversion as the opposite of extroversion that word is sort of left over from Jung's terminology but we are not talking about the same thing as the opposite of extroversion that he was. And that's just because empirically it is not. It turns out that what's at the other end of the trait dimension from extroversion is basically the tendency to be quiet and reserved, having less energy, less enthusiasm, but that doesn't necessarily go along with being intellectual and imaginative. So it turns out that's a separate dimension. That's the openness dimension. And so you can have extroverts who are high in openness and imaginative and thoughtful and even introspective. And you can have introverts who are imaginative and open and introspective. But you know it's a different trait."

Colin DeYoung

'Yeasayers and Naysayers'

Impro, Keith Johnstone:

>When I meet a new group of students they will usually be 'naysayers'. This term and its opposite, 'yeasayers', come from a paper by Arthur Couch and Kenneth Kenison, who were investigating the tendency of people answering questionnaires to be generally affirmative, or generally negative in attitude. They wrote in Freudian terms:

'We have arrived at a fairly consistent picture of the variables that differentiate yeasayers from naysayers. Yeasayers seem to be "id-dominated" personalities, with little concern about or positive evaluation of an integrated control of their impulses. They say they express themselves freely and quickly. Their "psychological inertia" is very low, that is, very few secondary processes intervene as a screen between underlying wish and overt behavioural response. The yeasayers desire and actively search for emotional excitement in their environment. Novelty, movement, change, adventure - these provide the external stimuli for their emotionalism. They see the world as a stage where the main theme is 'acting out' libidinal desires. In the same way, they seek and respond quickly to internal stimuli: their inner impulses are allowed ready expression ... the yeasayer's general attitude is one of stimulus acceptance, by which we mean a pervasive readiness to respond affirmatively or yield willingly to both outer and inner forces demanding expression.

'The "disagreeing" naysayers have the opposite orientation. For them, impulses are seen as forces requiring control, and perhaps in some sense as threats to general personality stability. The naysayer wants to maintain inner equilibrium; his secondary processes are extremely impulsive and value maintaining forces. We might describe this as a state of high psychological inertia - impulses undergo a series of delays, censorships, and transformations before they are permitted expression. Both internal and external stimuli that demand response are carefully scrutinised and evaluated: these forces appear as unwelcome intruders into a subjective world of "classical" balance. Thus, as opposed to the yeasayers, the naysayers' general attitude is one of stimulus rejection - a pervasive unwillingness to respond to impulsive or environmental forces.' ('Yeasayers and Naysayers', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 160, No.2, 1960.)<

More or Less:

Eric Barker, Barking up the wrong tree:

"We always think we need more: more help, more motivation, more energy. But in our current world the answer is often the exact opposite: we need less. Fewer distractions, fewer goals, fewer responsibilities. ... The question is what are you going to do less of? What are you going to quit or say no to in order to make time for what matters most?"

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"Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, did an exhaustive study of companies that turned themselves around and went from disappointments to huge successes. What he found was that most of the big changes they made weren't about new initiatives but about the bad things they needed to stop doing."

Das Ego:

Worauf fußt "das Ego", "der Stolz"?

Schließlich auf dem Wissen, tagtäglich Entscheidungen zu treffen. Ein Handelnder zu sein. (Eine Aussage, die wohl nur auf gewisse Verwirklichungsformen des Selbstbewusstseins zutrifft.)

Folgt man jenem Gedanken, könnte man das Ego letztlich auch als "ein Wissen um die eigene Entscheidungsmacht" bezeichnen.

Missmut:

Analog zur Stimmung des Übermuts färbt die Stimmung des Missmuts das Erleben mit Unlust und Unlusterwartung ein.

Deep Work

Deep Work, Cal Newport, 2016:

Deep Work:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work:

Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Self-Control (III):

"The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do."

Robert Sapolsky

Man könnte behaupten, die Default-Einstellung des menschlichen Entscheidungsverhaltens ist so beschaffen, dass der Mensch an einer Weggabelung dazu tendiert, den leichteren und momentan angenehmeren Weg einzuschlagen.

Erst durch bewusstes Gegensteuern gegen diese Tendenz wird er dazu befähigt, bei Weggabelungen  konstant steinigere, allerdings langfristig sinnvollere und zielführendere Wege einschlagen zu können.