Eric Barker: How to Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships

Eric Barker is back with another episode, offering us psychological insight and analytics into friendship. He summarizes some fascinating research, including the work by Robin Dunbar, making his entire article well worth a visit. That said, here are Barker's take-aways on how to make and sustain emotionally intelligent friendships:

  • Stay in touch: Friendship is not an arena where you want to play hard to get. What are you, a carnival prize?

  • Gratitude: If we’re more kind to strangers than to friends, we are definitely doing something wrong.

  • Quality > Quantity: Share emotional experiences. That’s the secret to those friendships where you can just pick up where you left off.

  • Budget appropriately: Time is limited. Allocate it wisely. And this is yet another reason to ditch the jerks in your life.

  • How to party: Eat. Laugh. Reminisce. Avoid small talk. The more the merrier. (And maybe a bit of booze.)

  • Make your best friend better: You influence each other more than you know. Make yourself better and help make them better, because, in the end, those two are the same thing.

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They have all the energy in the world. Why? Often because they aren’t building anything.

Haters almost always accuse you of what they themselves are guilty. When they do, listen: It’s about them. You can’t chase these people. They have all the energy in the world. Why? Often because they aren’t building anything. They aren’t saying what they are for except for saying that they want things to be just. And just, often disappointingly, may mean you built stuff they now want.

Lastly, don’t confuse your critics with your haters. Critics see good in you too. Learn to value your critics. They aren’t trying to mess with you. They may not be correct but critics aren’t haters. Learn to spot the differences.

Eric Weinstein

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A Non-Carpenter Looks Closely at Carpentry

My deck boards kept rotting through, so I decided to switch to "no maintenance" composite decking, which comes with a 25 year guarantee. I fix a lot of things at my house, but I suspected that the joists were rotted out and that work is over my head. Luckily, my favorite carpenter, "Matt," had a couple days open. He allowed me to be his carpenter's helper for 12 hours yesterday.

It's amazing to watch a professional carpenter solve challenge after challenge, many of them not obvious to non-carpenters until pointed out. This was notably imperfect existing construction that needed to be torn out. I helped to cut material, make runs to the hardware store, and carry around a lot of material, including 60 lb joists. I was mesmerized by Matt's physical stamina and his thought process as much as his skills in fitting things together into a rock solid new deck and perfect new set of stairs. Even setting up requires unloading and moving probably 700 pounds of equipment off the truck. It also involves significant planning, because getting the job done uses up lots of supplies, including blades and bits. He needs to stock an entire workshop on his truck, including backup tools.

I got back to my routine today, but Matt does this every day. His job requires skills honed over a lifetime and constant physical exertion where mistakes can be expensive and sometimes dangerous. So kudos to those of you who do physically demanding high-skill work. These are people (including carpenters, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and many others) with a central role in keeping this country running. Maybe it's time to set aside a day in their honor . . .

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An Excellent Two-Fer: Walking and Thinking

Does walking help you think? Absolutely, I would say!  In my experience, walking gets the mental juices flowing.  Problems sometimes get reframed on a walk.  Or a new question pops out at me.  I walk for the exercise, but equally because it turbo-charges the way I think.  Or is it that walking physically calms me down so that I don't get in my own way? Exercise is suggested for people like me who sometimes seem to struggle with ADD. My own routine is 10,000 steps per day, usually divided up into 2 or 3 sessions of walking.  My Fitbit keeps me honest (about both my walking and my sleeping).

Jeremy DeSilva's "On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking" perambulates the topic of walking and thinking. He begins with the story of Charles Darwin, who took many walks along his "D" shaped path. Then he moves on to the science. Here's an excerpt:

A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill. The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.

Wow! Here's one more: Half of 65 couch-potatoes were put a moderate exercise routine (treadmill walking 3 times per week). The result? "[T]he walkers had significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain understood to play an important role in our ability to think creatively."

So get out there and take a walk! Perhaps the cheapest form of exercise--and it might get your brain revving.

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Something from Nothing?

What caused the universe? "God" is not an answer for me because this mysterious "God" seems entirely made up and "He" creates many new answerless questions. So "He" is not an explanation.

Back to the question. What caused the universe? Why is there something rather than nothing. I generally conclude "I don't know." But then Roger Penrose comes along . . .

"There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future," he said, according to The Telegraph.

He added, "We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon."

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