Link Roundup for 28 September 2012

Despite seeing references to it for a while, I’ve only recently started reading Grantland, the sports and pop culture website helmed by ESPN’s Bill Simmons. Here are some of my favorite articles from the last few months.

• How to boost your country’s Olympic medal count in seven easy steps.
• Speaking of the Olympics, what if National Anthems was an Olypmic event?
• This pair of articles got me strangely excited about professional wrestling.
• The end of Tecmo Bowl-style football?
• Somehow, Black Sabbath can still rock.
• The remarkable fame of Edward Payson Weston.

Link Roundup for 26 September 2012

I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve seen a lot of improvement recently in my ability to focus and get things done. Here are some ideas that helped me do that.

• The problem, of course, is that we often get stuck in the “busy” trap.
• To get out, we have to find ways to slow down.
• To help with that, here are five things that you should share with your CEO (and do yourself).
• Following that advice, you’ll probably need to find exercise in life’s margins.
• And while you’re doing that, eat mindfully.
• And in order for whatever changes we make to stick, we have to make them habits.

Link Roundup for 24 September 2012

Over the first half of this year, several articles (and responses) about the practice of brainstorming caught my eye. Given that one my interests right now is discovering how to enable groups to do their best thinking, I was intrigued. Here’s the chain, collected in one place.

• The Rise of the New Groupthink by Susan Chain
• Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth by Jonah Lehrer
• The Problem with the New Groupthink by Scott Berkun (a response to Cain)
• In Defense of Brainstorming by Scott Berkun (a response to Lehrer)
• Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming by Daniel Sobol
• The Brainstorming Process is B.S. But Can We Rework It? by Cliff Kuang
• Yes, You Can Brainstorm Without Groupthink by Vijay Govindarajan and Jay Terwilliger

What’s your take on all this?

Link Roundup for 14 March 2012

Four things that summarize how I’m trying to live now.

• Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown talk about being able to turn an obstacle into an asset.
• Ira Glass on fighting through the gap between your good taste and work with a lot of potential.
• Kathryn Schulz explains what being wrong really means.
• And in the single most important talk I’ve seen in the last year, Dave Morris explains improv is a process and what the seven principles that underlie it are. (Key line: “Listening is the willingness to change.”

Link Roundup for 7 March 2012

Time to burn down the backlog of “things I’ve read that I think other people should, too.” The one thing these five pieces have in common is that they’re longer than my usual link roundup fare.

• Evan Hugh details the bizarre life story of sea monkey inventor Harold von Braunhut.
• Michael MacCambridge annotates Gay Talese’s classic Esquire profile of Joe DiMaggio.
• Joe Nocera interviews Sheila Bair, chair of FDIC during the financial crisis of 2008.
• Ernest B. Furgurson lays out Sir Winston Churchill’s alternate history of Confederate victory in the American Civil War.
• And Kathleen McAuliffe explains how your cat is making you crazy. (Mine is doing it by trying to walk on the keyboard while I’m typing this.)