Your Ticket to the Future

Now through Sunday, get the least expensive Festival Pass that will be offered all year.

IdeaFestival 2013 promises to be the best festival yet! We are hard at work building schedules, lining up an incredible roster of presenters and working with allied organizations to bring you the finest meeting of the minds on the planet. So please don't miss this opportunity to stretch your horizons, to meet extraordinary people and to satisfy your curiosity.

And if you buy your pass before Monday, we'll toss in the dashing confidence and irresistible allure for free.

For the very latest on speakers, presentations and schedules, or just to tune into digital programming that presents the new, the inspiring and the just plain interesting, follow the IdeaFestival on Twitter, @ideafestival. Or catch us on Facebook.

Stay curious!

Wayne

IF Conversation with "Bully" filmmaker Cynthia Lowen

We are not hardwired to bully.

Cynthia Lowen and her production team came to the Bully project without bright lights, big name recognition and, most importantly, without a big budget. They were just there to see what kids who were being bullied experienced. Together with her writing partner, Lee Hirsch, she decided that it was time to present the lived reality of bullying, to debunk the myth that it is a "normal" rite of passage, or just "kids being kids," and to give voice to those who were suffering in silence or shame.

The result was shortlisted in December for a Best Documentary Oscar.

Lowen also spoke at the festival last year in a memorable and moving presentation on the subject, and is captured here shortly after her talk.

The IF Conversations series can be found on IFTV, our YouTube channel. Between now and IdeaFestival 2013, we will release a number of other videos featuring people who spoke at or attended last year's festival.

Rememer: you can get the absolute lowest price on Festival Passes for THIS year's festival from now through Sunday!

Wayne

Between linear order and chaos: music, transcendence

Music is pleasing when it mixes expectation and surprise in the right amount. But what you may not know is that pleasing music also follows a pattern that can be frequently found in nature.

Let "f" equal "frequency." "1/f" noise lives between "white," or undifferentiated, noise, and "brown noise," where each note is closely related to the prior note - resulting in a rather linear pattern to the human ear.

Musical sounds, however, will generally trace a separate profile. Science journalist Samuel Arbesman:

In between though, is what is known as 1/f noise. Sometimes also called pink noise, this music has some correlation, but less than brown music and more than white noise. It is defined as a power law decay in the correlations between pitch over time. The equivalent in motion include what are called Lévy flights, which are similar to how bank notes travel around the United States: sometimes traveling very short distances, and at other points hopping across the country. (Note: This type of power law is related to the normal type of power laws that many of us have heard of, where the “popularity” of phenomena follows a heavy-tailed distribution.)

Most music that we actually listen to is 1/f noise. It has the right combination of pattern and unexpectedness, and is pleasing to the human ear. And as a fun bonus, if you look at the shape of the curve described by 1/f music, it has a fractal shape. Just as shapes in nature are often fractals — self-similar objects at all scales — so is it true with human-created music.

If I understand the algorithm correctly, 1/f pattens should be infinitely recursive as well. It's probably too big a stretch, but I wonder if that is responsible for some of the transcendence I experience listening to Beethovan's Ninth Symphony or the cello and piano denouement in the second half of OneRepublic's "Waking Up," or the searing and haunted strains from the film "Watlz with Bashir." 

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by jonisanowl

Why nice guys finish last - and first

I love this little bit of research by the author of "Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success," Adam Grant, who appeared recently in this piece at Wharton on "the rise of givers."

You look across a wide range of industries and even countries, and you find these three styles exist everywhere. Indeed, the givers are overrepresented at the bottom. Putting other people first, they often put themselves at risk for burning out or being exploited by takers. A lot of people look at that and say, 'Well, it's hard for a taker to rise consistently to the top, because oftentimes, takers burn bridges. So, it must be the matchers who are more generous than takers, but also protect their own interests.' When I looked at the data, I was really surprised to see that those answers were wrong. It's actually the givers again. Givers are overrepresented at the top as well as the bottom of most success metrics....

A matcher is somebody who really believes in a just world. Of course, a taker violates that belief in a just world. Matchers cannot stand to see takers get ahead by taking advantage of other people. The data on this suggests that matchers will often go around trying to punish them, often by gossiping and spreading negative reputational information.

Just as matchers hate seeing takers get away with exploitation, they also hate to see people act really generously and not get rewarded for it. Matchers will often go out of their way to promote and help and support givers, to make sure they actually do get rewarded for their generosity. That's one of the most powerful dynamics behind the rise of givers.

Grant must be doing something right. He's the youngest tenured and highest rated professor at the Wharton School of Business.

Wayne

The key to getting motivated: give up

Here's a bit of useful insight from Oliver Burkeman. Could the key to motivation be giving up on getting motivated?

The real problem isn’t that you don’t feel like taking action. Rather, it’s the underlying assumption that you need to feel like taking action before you can act. Which explains the hidden pitfall of most 'motivational' advice: it’s not about how to get things done, but about how to get in the mood for getting things done....

But as research by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner and others has repeatedly demonstrated, our efforts to control our emotions through sheer force of will can end in self-sabotage: resolve to get 'psyched' about some unappealing task, and it’s all too easy to end up fixating on the gap between the emotion you feel and the one you wish you were feeling.

So when the world is going all Tony Robbins on you, call its bluff. Getting things done isn't about "getting in the mood to get things done," or of convincing ourselves that the we really, really want to do the thing we're resisting doing.

There will of course be times when the thing to be done is unpleasant and absolutely necessary. But as Burkeman says elsewhere in his post at 99U, just be the best imperfect person possible. It's good advice. I've discovered that the mood is brightened considerably when that first mistake is made and you realize no one is paying attention anyway.

Burkeman is the author of "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking."

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Martin Cathrae