   
CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time! The Biology of Mindfulness and Mindlessness - A Neuroscientist's Perspective
 If you're persistently anxious, angry, or self-loathing, your brain will eventually take that shape. At the same time, however, you can shape your brain in a much more positive direction. By harnessing the power of neuroplasticity via regular mindfulness practice, you can become more resilient, develop sharper focus, and manage your emotions more effectively.
The images here are scans of my own brain. The one on the left was conducted as part of a study in 2013 - when I was only two days clean, after 15 years of addiction. The one on the right was taken in May 2018 as part of a TV documentary about stress.
My brain was so different that the person analysing the scans could not identify a visual marker to make a comparison by eye.
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Feeling Anxious? Try This Science-Based Technique to Quiet the Negative Voice in Your Head
 When it comes to anxiety, we've got everything backwards.
Just consider the last time you felt a wave of raw fear minutes before a big presentation or a difficult conversation. If you're like most people, your first instinct was to say to yourself, "Stop freaking out. Calm down."
And yet, according to Harvard Business School professor Allison Wood Brooks, this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Her research shows that shifting from anxiety, a negative state of high arousal, to calm, a positive state of low arousal, is both extremely difficult and counterproductive.
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Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things
 As someone who's worked remotely for several years, I know the challenges of a virtual workplace. Building relationships with colleagues I've never actually met (in person), working across various time zones, technology that doesn't work the way it's supposed to-- handled wrong, any of these can sabotage your team's chances at success.
Google knows this, too. The company has nearly 100,000 workers spread over 150 cities. In more than 50 countries. On five continents.
In a quest to discover what makes some remote teams successful, Google's People Innovation Lab (PiLab) spent the past two years studying more than 5,000 employees. They measured well-being, performance, and connectedness (among other things) and came up with recommendations on how to keep things consistent, even if your team is spread out across the globe.
So, what did they find?
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How Will You Measure Your Life?
 On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I'll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I'll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it's not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys - but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
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Why We're Drawn to Leaders Who Emphasize the Negative
 We humans create social hierarchies to preserve order and form rich expectations of how the powerful will behave. We have evolved to be sensitive to the behavioral cues that signal these power dynamics. For instance, we often associate a person's physical height with power, which leads us to attribute more power and status to tall people. These kinds of associations may be particularly influential when we're just getting to know the person and initially sussing out our relative places on the social hierarchy.
My own research focuses on whether people interpret naysaying - the act of negating, refuting, or criticizing (without explicit intention to hurt a particular target) - as a similar kind of power-signaling cue.
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Why You Should Start A Productized Service Business
 Instead of doing freelancing and consulting
In the freelance and consulting models, doing more may help bring more profits and more of your own individual flavour to your client's work. If you want to earn more, you can raise prices and take less client work. Freelancing and consulting can be profitable if you want them to be. Sad truth is, no one can multiply oneself, nor can anyone add more time to one's day.
The good news is, there is a way you can remove the limitations on your earning potential with what you know. One way is to identify a set of common items that a large percentage of the market would want to buy. Then package it up, grow a team to produce the same thing and sell one thing to as many clients as you want.
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Mathematicians have solved traffic jams, and they're begging cities to listen
 Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. "They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance," says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University. "If engineers manage to achieve local improvements, after a while the flows rearrange and the same traffic jams appear in other places." Burn!
Krylatov would like to solve urban traffic jams forever, so much so that he has coauthored a book of new math approaches to traffic and ways to implement them. (Translation: Engineers, Let Us Handle This.) Four takeaways:
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Why Hiring 'Rebel Talent' Is the Best Way to Grow Your Business
 By their very definition, rebels represent a threat to a leader who has a command-and-control mentality. Such leaders issue commands to their workers and reward the people who carry out those commands the most effectively. If you are such a leader, it seems to me that you'll have trouble hiring rebels and letting them do their thing.
Companies that encourage rebel talent -- who share five traits: novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity, and authenticity -- achieve better outcomes. For instance, Francesca Gino, (the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School) cites studies that tie novelty to engagement at work. A case in point is Pal's Sudden Service, a burger chain in Tennessee and Virginia known for fast service and low turnover, where employees are continually challenged to do new tasks.
Here are three principles leaders should follow to get the benefits of rebel talent:
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Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
 There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?
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The Average Human Body Temperature Is No Longer 98.6 F
 One of the most widely accepted standard measurements of the human body, a normal temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, has declined gradually for more than 150 years in the United States by about 1.6% since the pre-industrial era, a new study published in the journal eLife finds. The cooling off owes largely to improvements in health and medicine and in part to increasingly cushy lifestyles, the study's researchers think.
It's not known for sure why we're all chilling out, but the researchers have some ideas. "Mostly, I think this is due to our triumph over infectious diseases that affected humans since we descended from apes," Parsonnet says. "We continue to see drops in inflammation even in the last few decades." Less inflammation of body tissues means a lower metabolic rate since the immune system can relax.
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Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people
 Until the end of the 20th century, most young people could take one thing for granted: their embarrassing behavior would eventually be forgotten. It might be a bad haircut, or it might be getting drunk and throwing up at a party, but in an analog era, even if the faux pas were documented in a photograph, the likelihood of its being reproduced and widely circulated for years was minimal. The same held true for stupid or offensive remarks. Once you went off to college, there was no reason to assume that embarrassing moments from your high school years would ever resurface.
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Practicing The Subtle Art Of Detachment
 Is there anything that remains when I strip your life of your work and your deepest relationships for a while? Is there a core within you that is separate, detached and at peace irrespective of how things go in your life?
Or are you constantly on a roller coaster ride based on what happens? Exhilarated because great things are happening at work, miserable because the last batch of orders didn't get delivered on time and customers left bad reviews. Exhilarated because things are going well in your relationship, miserable because he/she suddenly stopped giving you enough time.
Letting the things that you feel passionate about dictate your mood, your energy levels and your overall enthusiasm towards life is not a very healthy approach as you are relying over something external, something that is not entirely under your control to dictate your life.
The only difference between people who collapse after failure/loss and those who dust themselves off and start again quickly is that the latter know and practice the art of detachment.
What exactly is the art of detachment?
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The Case for Businesses That Don't Scale
 The real unicorns are those that stand the test of time
With a volatile economy, uncertain trade agreements and an anxious public we need businesses that that don't necessarily scale nationally or internationally but offer local communities something of their own, that offer employment to the local communities and that have the potential to stand the test of time. It could be the trusted local co-working space in an old factory, that has been revived and doubles as a maker space with a cafe supporting local bakeries and a concept store supporting creations of the city and its broader metropolitan area.
In 1965, the average tenure of companies on the S&P top 500 was 33 years, by 1990 it was 20 years and now it is 14 years. It is expected that 50% of the top 500 companies will be replaced in the next 10 years.
In rapidly changing times with exponential technology, the real 'unicorns' are going to be companies whose value proposition remains relevant in 2100.
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How to Spot Three Major Red Flags Before Joining an Early-Stage Startup
 The prospect of joining a new team - especially when it's an early-stage startup - can feel exhilarating: you're positive that together you will shape (if not outright change!) the world (and get crazy rich in the process). But letting yourself be carried away by the visionary ideas of a super charming founder without taking a step back and examining what you're actually getting yourself into might be a risk not worth taking. You don't want to find out after you signed the contract that all the fancy talk was based on fantasies rather than any tangible results or at least achievable goals.
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Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full
 As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first Century, humanity faces so many issues and questions, that it is really hard to know what to focus on. So I would like to use the next twenty minutes to help us focus of all the different issues we face. Three problems pose existential challenges to our species.
These three existential challenges are nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. We should focus on them.
Now nuclear war and ecological collapse are already familiar threats, so let me spend some time explaining the less familiar threat posed by technological disruption.
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These are the most detailed photos yet of the far side of the moon
 China has just released a new batch of photos snapped by its Chang'e 4 lunar probe and its Yutu-2 rover. The new images give us the sharpest look ever at the landscape of the far side of the moon, just as the robots wake up from a two-week slumber.
While these are far from the first photos of the far side snapped by the probe and the rover, they are among the highest-resolution images of the moon taken by the mission. Some are panoramic shots taken by Yutu-2.
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Understanding the leader's 'identity mindtrap': Personal growth for the C-suite
 If you're shackled to who you are now, you can't recognize - or reach for - who you might become next
Millions of years of evolution have shaped our brains, with nature selecting for many adaptive and energy-saving, if imperfect, shortcuts. Some are easy to spot - for example, how we systematically fall for optical illusions and how our loss-aversion reflex biases our choices. Other ancient shortcuts trip us up in subtler, more personal ways.
A CEO named Hans experienced this firsthand as he debriefed his executive team on what he'd learned at his leadership retreat. Hans gestured to a printout - a feedback report drawn from a combination of psychometric tests and 360-degree feedback. He told the team that the report found him intelligent, passionate, and purpose led. However, he added, he was also seen as too controlling, prone to quick judgments, and mostly certain of the rightness of his own opinions.
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What 15 Years of Y Combinator Investments Can Teach Us About Startups
 There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place, we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed.
- Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator
I recently wrote a recommendation letter for a former co-worker who wanted to change careers by going back to school. Not just any school but a very specific world-class, prestigious institution with an acceptance rate in the low single digits. Harvard or Stanford MBA you might guess? Nope, something even harder to get into: Y Combinator. Entering its 15th year of operation, Y Combinator (or YC for short), has put over 2,000 companies through its program and produced 100 companies valued at over $150 million and 19 companies valued at over $1 billion.
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AngelList Launches 'Rolling Venture Fund' In Bid To Make Fundraising Easier For New VCs
 AngelList's new product, the Rolling Venture Fund, is intended to relieve the fundraising headache for fund managers. Under its structure, fund managers raise a certain amount of permanent capital, then set up quarterly commitments that roll in automatically. New backers can join each quarter, with funds that haven't been invested rolling over to the next. The fund manager accepts the same management fees and carry as with a typical fund, with the ability to invest throughout the cycle as soon as the first commitment has closed. AngelList charges new fund managers a 1% fee capped at $25,000 per year, as well as 5% carry on dollars brought in for investment through the AngelList platform.
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The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age
 Executives around the world are out of touch with what it will take to win, and to lead, in the digital economy. Digitalization, upstart competitors, the need for breakneck speed and agility, and an increasingly diverse and demanding workforce require more from leaders than what most can offer.
Although a significant segment of the current generation of leaders might be out of touch, they still have control - over strategic decisions, who gets hired and promoted, and the culture of their organizations - but not for long. The need for change is urgent, and time is running out for leaders who are holding on to old ways of working and leading.
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