Serendipity and Learning

Ever since our house discovered Wordle, there is a family ritual. Each day, we solve the clues independently. Until now, I am the only one who has a loss to his name. The others have an unbeaten winning streak. Why is solving wordle so good from a psychological perspective? You get a boost - I solved something, I overcame a challenge There is a social angle - you share with each other It is not too much - the time investment is a maximum of 10 minutes There is no race - there is only wordle a day - unless you want to try out the numerous clones it has spawned. It is just enough Except on rare occasions, failure rate is low And in the 10 minutes, the brain is sufficiently challenged! Thats a nice dopamine boost.

When I started writing a blog years ago, I wrote a few posts and I thought what next! The ideas seemed to have dried out. But no. Just as I finished writing, in came the next set of ideas and the next and the next. Creativity has to be used - like a skill it is something you have to access again and again and build over time.  And now, this blog is nearly 10 years old, 400 odd posts....

One of my favourite analogies to test how effective any material is the Airline safety placard and and the airline safety instructions. I ask people the last time they flew, did they really hear what the instructions were or did they just hear some noise. The thing is that most people dont. Like google ads, they dont 'exist' because your mind is so attuned to it that those instructions just do not register. The attendants are doing their job -because it a regulation and you are there as a captive audience. This is a great example of how many of our trainings are. The moment they come into a 'class' see the familiar settings, the familiar templates - thats it - it is a cue for the mind to switch off. In both these examples, there are two arguments. One is that content need not be exciting, because it is their job/their responsibility whatever. The other is that the content can and should be different (if not exciting) because very often the mind ne...