Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Winter is coming! I gassed up the snow blower and generator today and brought the snow blower from our storage shed up to the garage. That has become an annual ritual on the weekend before Thanksgiving. No snow is in the forecast yet, but it could come any time now.
Last week I talked about the idea that “you are a mash-up”. This week I had a memory pop up on Facebook of a quote I shared from Seneca along the same lines:
Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.
I love Seneca. His Letters From a Stoic is soul food.
I didn’t have time to create any original material this week. I’m hoping to have a new financial management video out next week.
I hope you all have a lovely Thanksgiving holiday with your family.
Enjoy the links!
Read
What: The Decision Lab, Why do we take mental shortcuts? Heuristics, explained.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics/
Why: I talked about heuristics a bit in my financial management video last week. Heuristic is a fancy word for rule of thumb. Rather than carefully examining the evidence in a situation, we make a quick judgment using a heuristic. This sounds like a bad idea - and sometimes it is, and can lead to bad outcomes. Heuristics can create biases. Racism is a kind of heuristic anchored in beliefs about people who are different from you: all Italians are in the mob, all Polish people are dumb, etc. Some Italian people are in the mob, and there are in fact dumb Polish people, but if you carry that generalization around, you make a lot of mistakes. This article talks about a few heuristic errors - availability bias, anchoring, representativeness, etc. So you might come away thinking all heuristics are bad. But in fact heuristics are mental tools that economize on decision making effort. A good heuristic would be “never buy anything from a telemarketer”. You might miss out on a couple of good deals in your life, but almost all telemarketers are scammers, so just hanging up on telemarketers is a useful heuristic. Most of the financial management tools I plan to talk about - keep 3 months salary in a savings account, for example - are useful heuristics that simplify your decision making and are good for you. You could literally not make it through the day without relying on heuristics. But it’s useful to reflect every now and then on your assumptions about life.
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What: Matt Yglesias, "Critical Race Theory" and actual education policy, part one
Why: Yglesias is the co-founder of the Leftist Progressive media juggernaut Vox Media. He has some nuanced thoughts on so-called “Anti-Racism” and DEI in schools. I’ll let you read them. My only comment is I think the Democratic party is self-destructing on the culture war.
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Watch
What: SpinLaunch (3 min)
Why: Throw a satellite into space using a giant centrifuge? Why not! Let’s give it a spin! (ha ha!) This is perhaps the most inspiring and beautiful promotional video I have ever seen. I have no idea if the science can really work - that is to put an actual satellite into orbit - but they apparently put something into space. Here is a video of an actual launch. I read some of the comments criticizing the concept, but I still get goosebumps watching it (and turn up the sound!). There is an associated short article here. I love seeing this kind of science - even if it is more like science fiction. It really makes me hopeful, especially when we compare it to the s*%t show that politics is.
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Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Andrew Calkins, CEO of Sage Family of Companies (90 min)
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2021/11/andrew-calkins-ceo-of-sage-family-of.html
Why: This month I interview Andrew Calkins, the CEO of Sage Family of Companies, a hospice provider. Andrew has a long history of leadership in healthcare, mostly in the long-term care space. I met Andrew when I was invited to speak to the board of Alliance Health and Human Services about my undergraduate internship program. What struck me about Andrew’s story when we chatted the first time was how many companies he had been involved with through mergers and acquisitions, and that was why I wanted to have him on the podcast - to talk about those experiences of buying and being bought. His career is another great example of making one’s own luck. He was a communications major in college, and happened to get hired as a mail clerk in a long-term care company. From that humble beginning he worked his way up through various experiences through the finance side to the operations side. It’s a great story.
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What: The Jordan Harbinger Show, Robert Greene, The Daily Laws Part (57 min)
https://www.podcastone.com/episode/581-Robert-Greene--The-Daily-Laws-Part-One
Why: I just discovered the Jordan Harbinger Show, so I was poking around and found this interview with Robert Greene (who also wrote The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery, which is on my “to read” bookshelf). I’ve listened to Greene talk a few times and I really like his frankness. The whole interview is great, with Greene talking about his career and finding his way to becoming a writer. He claims to have had something like 60 jobs before he settled into being a writer, most of which he failed at. The tidbit that really grabbed me in this interview was how he talked about nurturing the part of yourself that makes you a little weird. He has a lot to say about that, and it’s worth listening to. It resonated with me because I’ve mostly embraced my weirdness and I’ve managed to thrive by doing things a little differently from most people. How many people write a weekly newsletter? A lot if you count up all the Substacks - but as a percentage of the population, not many. But that’s just one dimension in which I am a little different. And it’s not so much that I write a weekly newsletter, but that I am driven to write a weekly newsletter. And I am not so much driven to write a weekly newsletter as I am driven to share and teach. What are you driven to do that makes you a little weird? Have you embraced it?
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend?
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
"Were there none discontented with what they have, the World would never reach anything better." - Florence Nightingale