How to make better decisions

Eric Barker's summary: The five step process for making better decisions: Maintain a feeling of control over your situation. Emotional preparation. Consider how things could be worse. Monitor your breathing. Controlled empathy. Ask “What advice would I give my best friend in this situation?”

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The Danger of Positive Thinking

From NYT:

My colleagues and I have since performed many follow-up studies, observing a range of people, including children and adults; residents of different countries (the United States and Germany); and people with various kinds of wishes — college students wanting a date, hip-replacement patients hoping to get back on their feet, graduate students looking for a job, schoolchildren wishing to get good grades. In each of these studies, the results have been clear: Fantasizing about happy outcomes — about smoothly attaining your wishes — didn’t help. Indeed, it hindered people from realizing their dreams. Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals.

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The kind of people who persevere with the practice of law

Conclusions like these do make me stop and think, given that I've survived the practice of law for more than 30 years.

Law firms seeking to hire lawyers more likely to stay in law practice should be forewarned: Lawyers with “higher levels of resilience, empathy, initiative and sociability” are more likely to leave law practice than those with lower levels of those traits. That finding is from an online assessment of more than 1,400 people by Right Profile and JD Match that sought to improve hiring by matching lawyers’ practice areas with personality traits,

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