Why asking childlike questions is so important to science | Hope Jahren

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink I think it's surprising and really pleasing to think about those things that you do know but you haven't turned them over in your mind. It's almost like a rock that when you flip it over you see all kinds of bugs and dirt and the whole thing is just moving, et cetera—And it's the same rock you've just flipped it over. So here's an example. So, an oak tree. Maybe you've had an oak tree in your life or your yard or whatever, so I do the experiment where I say, what if every single acorn that oak tree ever produced turned into another tree? What if every acorn that was ever produced by every tree turned into another tree? Well, animals would never have evolved. I mean the earth would be so packed we'd be so up to our eyebrows in trees, nothing else could move. And that allows me to step into the very interesting story of how plants approach reproduction so differently than we do. They put out mind-boggling numbers of offspring. And then those offspring have very, very low odds of success. They have very low odds of germinating. And of the ones that even start to grow, a vast, vast subset will actually root. And of those a vast subset will grow to any kind of height. And then of that, another tree, right? And then if an oak tree produces acorns for a hundred years in a row, all it needs is one of those acorns to become the replacement tree to still have an oak inhabiting that chunk of the planet. So then what is a seed? Why make a seed? So the seed, and you've seen hundreds of thousands of seeds just in one month probably, let alone in the food you eat, you come across seeds all the time but each one of those seeds is an impossible thing. It's a piece of hope that's produced with almost no chance of success. And then you can flip that over and say, every tree that you see was once a hopeless seed like that. And so the trees in front of us are this impossible thing. It's this impossible journey that almost never happens, and yet it results in something that's the biggest, oldest, longest living life form on the terrestrial surface. And so I think the real joy for me is that I can take things that are already familiar to you and by sharing the story of how I've learned to look at them, you can see those things you've been seeing a little differently with a little more joy and a little more connection. And tahat's what I really like to do. So I talk about curiosity-driven research as questions that we try to answer: “Why is that tree growing successfully in that place but never in that place?” That's a curiosity question. It's the kind of question a little kid could come up with. “Why don't we have those trees at our house?” Now buried in the answer might be something that could give us better fruit someday that we can sell in the marketplace and feed hungry people with, but that result, that application to growing food for people is buried several steps below that answer. My part of that is to look at that first answer: “What is that tree? What does it do? Why is it there?” And we call that the curiosity-driven piece because that answer will be basically turned over to other experts who know how that might play out into something that is important for the marketplace. But there's no substitute for that first step, for that little kid question. And all the work that goes, you've got to get a bus ticket and go to that place, you got to go to that place, you've got to count them, you've got to bring some of the tissues back. There's an expense associated with that particular type of work, and I talk very much in my book about where that funding is coming from and how it's diminishing rapidly and how it's not nearly enough to support all the curiosity that the public has and all the science that we've trained a generation to do.

3 Ways To Improve Your Communication Skills

FREE Morning Ritual Cheatsheet: https://ift.tt/2HYH1jt In this video, I talk about 3 ways to improve your communication skills. Communication skills are important in every aspect of our lives. In simplest terms, communication is the act of transferring information from one person or place to another. People communicate in order to facilitate the spread of knowledge and share messages with one another. However, because people have different communication styles, sometimes conflict can ensue. You can read all the books on communication skills, but if you don’t actually practice them and do the work, you won’t make any progress. In my opinion, communication skills are critical to success in life, which is why it's imperative that you make it a priority to develop them. Are you ready to learn 3 ways to improve your communication skills? ★☆★ VIEW THE BLOG POST: ★☆★ https://ift.tt/2zGT8Tt ★☆★ SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON YOUTUBE: ★☆★ Subscribe ► https://ift.tt/2bO65dq ★☆★ FOLLOW ME BELOW: ★☆★ Blog ► https://ift.tt/1dffKI5 Twitter ► https://ift.tt/1dqLWDZ Twitter ► http://www.twitter.com/stefanjames23 Facebook ► https://ift.tt/1fz9bjo Facebook ► https://ift.tt/2cF3pE1 Instagram ► https://ift.tt/1Rm9ph0 Instagram ► https://ift.tt/2hxFAeT Snapchat ► https://ift.tt/1TshMIR Periscope ► https://ift.tt/2bO3EYo iTunes Podcast ► https://ift.tt/1dqLWUg ★☆★ ABOUT PROJECT LIFE MASTERY: ★☆★ The Project Life Mastery YouTube channel is the place to be for motivational, inspiring, educational, and uplifting self improvement videos. You can also follow for videos about online business, Amazon, and making money online! ★☆★ MY PRODUCTS & COURSES: ★☆★ Life Mastery Accelerator ► https://ift.tt/2o41BJp Online Business Mastery Accelerator ► https://ift.tt/2nT1z6p Morning Ritual Mastery ► https://ift.tt/1kochwV Affiliate Marketing Mastery ► https://ift.tt/1VtqUis Kindle Money Mastery ► https://ift.tt/1pfGXhJ 24 Hour Book Program ► https://ift.tt/1s85K9g Kindle Optimizer ► https://ift.tt/1QI3p3i ★☆★ MERCHANDISE: ★☆★ Mastery Apparel ► https://ift.tt/2p8CFSc ★☆★ RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: ★☆★ https://ift.tt/1qtEz5E If you found this video valuable, give it a like. If you know someone who needs to see it, share it. Leave a comment below with your thoughts. Add it to a playlist if you want to watch it later.

How science separates fact and emotion | Heather Heying

Heather Heying knows that a true understanding of the world comes not from the answers alone. Sure, they help, but the questions are of equal importance. And the right questions can make science that much more appealing and three-dimensional. Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2NTgJ6c Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Heather Heying: I started most of my programs, when I was teaching, with an exercise that I call 20 Questions, which I borrowed in part from the Organization for Tropical Studies, which does this exercise with graduate students who it’s got in Costa Rica or other tropical field sites. It involves taking people out—you have to have access to nature, you have to have access to a fair bit of nature—Taking people out and asking them in advance to just take out pen and paper; no phone, water if they need it but no food. Promise them that they’re not going to die out there, and be true to your promise, make sure that you don’t abandon them. You take people out and you drop them in some spot, and if you have a group of people you drop them out of sight of one another and you say, “Sit here for two hours. I will be back in two hours. But for these two hours just sit here and be, and let your senses start to tell you what you’re experiencing.” For a while (and depending on how long it’s been since you’ve really spent time in nature), it’s just going to be your brain yammering at you telling you that you have things to do, this is a waste of your time, that you’re bored, that you wish you weren’t being told to do this. At some point, two hours is usually long enough for that to fade away. And so the instruction is let that all that wash over you, but try then to start watching and hearing, and smelling if you like, what it is that is going on around you. And at whatever point you feel like it start writing down questions that you have about what you’re experiencing. The goal is to write down 20, but if you write down five that’s fine, if you write down 40 that’s fine too, and try to make the questions be about what’s going on external to your head as opposed to questions that your own brain is generating that has nothing to do with what you’re actually experiencing right now. So, people spend two hours out in nature doing this and I’ve done this in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve done it in the San Juan Islands, in the high desert of Washington, in Ecuador, in Panama, in the Amazon, all sorts of places, and you get different results in each of these places, because the questions that people can ask when there are parrots around (versus mountains) are quite different. But you pick them up you say “Okay you're free now.” And you're free “either for the rest of the day and we’ll come back together bring your questions tomorrow”, or “at least for a few hours, like you don't have to think about this but go just let this percolate.” We come back together, say it’s in the afternoon of the same day, you break people up into groups four or five and say, “Okay give your questions to the person on your left and have them choose their favorite question from your list, and you choose your favorite question for the list.” And so in a group of five end up with ten questions that people really, really like that they had written down. And now start to categorize them. In the case of an educational environment that’s about discovering evolutionary truths I tend to ask them to categorize questions on the basis of, is this a factual question? Is it a ‘what is’? “What was that bird?” “What is the name of that cloud formation?” Is it a ‘how’-style question, a proximate question? Like “How does the bird find the flower?” Or is it a ‘why’-style question, an adaptive question, an ultimate level question? “Why is that bird moving back-and-forth between those two flowers the entire time I was here?” And so you have the students categorize, which begins to establish borders around types of questions. And you can begin to see that the “what” questions are the kinds of questions that with the right expert or the right search term you can pretty quickly answer, the kinds of questions that people who are newly spending time in nature are going to ask about, “what is that,” are probably answered already out there by someone and probably a lot of people know the answer to and it’s discoverable, and it doesn’t go very far very interestingly. “What is it?” We’ve got a name for it. There you go. Move on. But the “how” and the “why” questions are where we can really start to explore how we know what’s true, how we make claims of truths. This is the basis of epistemology: how is it that we make claims of truth, and how would we begin to know if what we think is true is actually true?

5 Problems with Positional Leadership | Qasim Ali Shah (In Urdu)

In this video, Qasim Ali Shah talking about on the topic "Leadership". He is also sharing his experience, wisdom and knowledge that will be helpful for all of those who want to understand about leadership. ===== ABOUT Qasim Ali Shah ===== Qasim Ali Shah is a Public Speaker- Teacher- Writer- Corporate Trainer & Leader for every age group- Businessmen- Corporate executives- Employees- Students- Housewives- Networkers- Sportsmen and for all who wish everlasting Success- Happiness- Peace and Personal Growth. He helps people to change their belief & thought pattern- experience less stress and more success in their lives through better communication- positive thinking and spiritual knowledge. ===== FOLLOW ME ON THE SOCIALS ===== - Qasim Ali Shah: https://goo.gl/6BKcxu - Google+: https://goo.gl/uPyGvT - Twitter: https://goo.gl/78MVoA - Website : https://goo.gl/Tgjy6u ===== Team Member: Waqas Nasir =====

The art of argument | Jordan Peterson

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Jordan Peterson: So how do you deal with situations where your words are likely to be used out of context, let’s say. And that’s a situation I’ve encountered. Well, you see, you encounter a situation like that very frequently. Everyone does in their life. If you’re having a discussion with someone you live with, for example, so someone you have to be with for a long time – a lover, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband—sibling for that matter. You’re going to have contentious discussions about how to move forward and it’s very frequently the case that your words will be – that you’ll be straw-manned. Your words will be taken out of context. The other person (and you too!) will try to win instead of trying to solve the problem. What you have to kind of decide is – well two things. The first thing is: you’re probably wrong in some important way. And you might think “Well, so what?” But no, it’s not so simple. Being wrong in some important way is like having a map that doesn’t correspond to the streets. If you’re wrong in some important way, when you go to where you’re going you will get lost and you might end up in a neighborhood that you don’t want to visit! So it actually matters if you’re wrong. And so now if you’re talking to someone who is acting in opposition to you, it’s possible that during your contentious discussion they will tell you something—about how you’re wrong—that’s accurate. Now you’re not going to be very happy about that, because like who wants to discover that they’re wrong? But it’s better to figure out that your map is inaccurate than it is to get lost. And so one of the things you have to remember when you’re discussing things with people, even if they’re out to defeat you, let’s say, is that there is some glimmering of the possibility that you could walk away with more knowledge than you walked in with. And that’s worth – that can be worth paying quite a price for. And so I’ve had the opportunity to engage in public debate of an exceptionally contentious nature for let’s say 18 months nonstop, fundamentally. And it’s been very stressful. But the upshot of that is that my arguments are in much better shape than they were, and—I shouldn’t say that. My THOUGHTS are much more refined than they were at the beginning of this process. It’s not my arguments are in better shape. That’s not the right way to think about it. It’s that I’m clearer about what I know. I can articulate it better. And that’s all forged in the heat of conflict. If you’re discussing a contentious issue with someone you love and that you have to live with and put up with, you want to listen to them. Because what you really want to do is establish a lasting peace, and you might even have to make their arguments for them. Maybe you’re more verbally fluent than your partner (which doesn’t mean, by the way, that you’re more right, it just means you can construct better arguments on the fly. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re more accurate). You might have to help your partner formulate their arguments so that you can really get to grips with what it is that they’re trying to say. So that you can alter the way that you’re constructing your own narrative and your joint narrative, so that you’re not butting heads unnecessarily as you move forward through life. It’s not a very good idea to win an argument with your wife. That isn’t what you want, because then you have a defeated partner. And a defeated partner is not happy. And a defeated partner is often out to reclaim the defeat. And so as a strategy for moving forward with someone who you’re going to wake up beside 5,000 times it’s not a very advisable strategy. It’s better to listen, to flesh out the argument on both sides, and to see if you can come to a mutually acceptable negotiated settlement. And that’s the case in most encounters in life if you can manage that. But it’s easy to want to win.

Spiral Dynamics - Stage Turquoise

Spiral Dynamics - Part 5 in this mini-series explores the holistic global collectivist stage Turquoise and how to embody it. The Ultimate Life Purpose Course - Create Your Dream Career: https://ift.tt/29w9I9y Leo Reviews Top 200 Self Help Books https://ift.tt/29Z66uZ Leo's Blog: https://ift.tt/2mWWGH7 Actualized.org Forum https://ift.tt/2a7wTJl Contribute subtitles & translations for any Actualized.org video, watch how: https://youtu.be/b9cKgwnFIAw Disclaimer: Advice provided without warranty. This is NOT medical advice. By watching & applying this advice you agree to take 100% responsibility for all consequences.

Why now is such a cool time to be alive | Chris Hadfield

What does it take to be chosen by NASA to fly to space? Astronaut Chris Hadfield explains the path to becoming a space-farer and what you can do with all the knowledge you gain once your flying days are over. Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2Lifwns Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink It is a really interesting moment in space exploration right now. The technology has just started to get good enough that we can really start having reliable and relatively inexpensive access to the rest of the universe. It’s never happened before in all of human history. It’s opening doors of possibilities for business, for improving the quality of life around the world by allowing us to communicate and understand the world better, but also for us as people to start leaving the world like we never have before. It’s a really interesting moment and it’s only going to continue to accelerate. Things will never be this slow again. And be part of it! Become part of that amazing capability that we’ve built for ourselves of the cool stuff that’s just coming down the pike. It’s a pretty cool time to be alive right now, especially if you’re interested in exploring the rest of the universe. Flying in space is a huge amount of work. It’s decades of work getting all of the university degrees and life experience so that NASA will even look at you when they’re selecting astronauts. In the last astronaut selection 18,300 people applied for 12 positions, so how do you even get your foot in the door? But if you’ve done enough things in your life that you’re competent enough that maybe they’ll look at you and then they phone you and say “We’d like you to be an astronaut,” now suddenly you’re starting a whole new phase of life. You come over this watershed and now there’s probably ten or 15 years of work ahead of you to get ready and be competent enough to be trusted to fly a spaceship, and then some day get into a rocket, and it takes you above the atmosphere and the engines shut off, and you’re there! And you’re doing all your work and flying the rocket and docking with the space station, but at the end of it what do you do with that experience? Now you’ve done all these incredibly complex and extremely dangerous things in order to push back the edge of human capability and of our understanding of the world itself, but now what do you do with the sequence of things that have turned you into who you are and the things that come in through your eyeballs and you’ve tried to understand?