China migration: At the turning point - Financial Times

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May 4, 2015 4:54 pm

China migration: At the turning point

Gabriel Wildau

A shrinking labour force from rural areas is driving huge economic change

©Reuters

When Deng Xiaoping left his rural village of Guang’an in 1919 to study in Paris, he was leaving behind a desperately poor agricultural community in Sichuan province where standards of living had barely risen in over 200 years. 

Sixty years later, when Deng’s historic economic reforms unleashed a wave of migrants that powered the country’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse, his fellow villagers from Guang’an led the chargehina’s farm output soared in the 1980s as agricultural communes were dismantled. By allowing farmers to keep a portion of what they produced, Deng gave them incentive to boost their yields. But Guang’an’s hilly landscape was unsuitable for mechanised agriculture, blunting the gains from reform. 

“The land was bad. You could scrape at it the whole day but it was no use. People used to fight over a bit of fertiliser,” says Shen Xiaozhen, 77, recalling life in Guang’an after Deng’s reforms were introduced in 1978. “Outside you could earn more in a day than in a week back here. The money people sent back was important to our lives here.”

As a share of its population, Guang’an was the biggest contributor to China’s “migrant miracle”, three decades of breakneck economic growth underpinned by an unprecedented flow of labour from countryside to city, according to a Financial Times analysis of data from China’s 2010 census. Nearly a third of Guang’an’s 4.7m registered inhabitants no longer live here. 

Now, however, economists say the most dynamic phase of China’s transformation to an urban society is complete. The once-limitless pool of impoverished rural labour from areas like Guang’an is rapidly drying up. 

End of the migrant miracle

‘Migrant miracle’ nears an end 
The flow of rural labour that fuelled China’s economic boom is petering out

Policy bottlenecks add to labour shortage 
Reform of the unloved hukou system proves difficult

The end of surplus labour has profound implications for the Chinese economy

China’s great migration 
When China’s 170m rural migrant workers head home it is the biggest movement of people on earth

The end of surplus rural labour — a significant milestone that economists call the Lewis Turning Point — carries profound implications for China’s economy. As the flow of low-paid migrants into Chinese factories slows, workers demand higher pay, a phenomenon that has been evident for several years. This either drives low-end manufacturers out of business or forces them to raise prices, actions that could slow the export growth that has helped drive the country’s economy for decades. 

“Labour and capital will become more limited and more expensive,” says Ha Jiming, investment strategist for private wealth management at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. “The economy will rebalance as exports slow due to rising factory prices. Investment will have to slow. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in real estate and manufacturing.”

Growth drivers

Many of the characteristics that have defined China’s economy over the past decade — fast growth, rising inequality, high savings and investment, big trade surpluses — can be traced in large part to the waves of migrants that flowed into China’s factories and construction sites from small towns and villages. 

The National Bureau of Statistics estimates the number of people working outside their hometowns for at least six months was 278m last year. If they were a country, China’s migrant population would be the world’s fourth largest.

China’s growth in gross domestic product is forecast to slow to 6.1 per cent from 2016-2020, from 9.8 per cent in 1995-2009, according to estimates by Cai Fang, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which advises the government. A shrinking labour force is the main factor.

Development economist Arthur Lewis laid out the turning point theory in 1954 to explain how wages stay low in agricultural economies that undergo rapid industrialisation. Since then, the idea has been commonly applied to the “Asian tigers” such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

When industrialisation begins, Lewis explained, the reallocation of labour from farms, where productivity is low, to the urban industrial sector fuels rapid growth. But the fruits of this development flow disproportionately to business owners because the deep pool of excess rural labour ensures wages stay low. 

This dynamic explains the extraordinarily high rates of savings and investment that are hallmarks of China’s economy. Knowing they can easily find fresh workers, factory owners and property developers boldly expand their operations. Rising profits fuel further investment, creating a positive feedback loop. Cheap labour and high savings produce trade surpluses, big foreign exchange reserves and a rising currency. Asset bubbles can also develop, as China has seen in its real estate market.

Eventually, however, the rural wages begin to converge with the industrial sector. At that point, labour shortages appear and urban employers must offer higher wages to lure workers from the countryside. Corporate profits, export competitiveness and asset prices fall.

“When I wrote an op-ed in 2004 called ‘A labour shortage in China,’ my friends laughed at me. Now it’s obvious to everyone,” says Huang Yiping, economics professor at Peking University’s National School of Development. 

Today, few working-age people are visible on the streets of Guang’an’s rural towns and villages. Children and the elderly comprise the bulk of the remaining population.

Urbanisation

Cheng Dequan, 64, a retired primary school teacher, says that his village school, a two-hour walk up muddy hillsides from the town centre of Linshui county, is mostly deserted. 

“The village school is still there, but there are only two grades and maybe 10 students. They can’t keep it going. The parents have all gone to work in cities,” he says. His village had 500 people before. Now there are only 30.

While many villagers from Guang’an went to far-off cities, Mr Cheng moved to a comfortable flat in a nearby “county town”. Home to just a few government buildings a decade ago, the town is now bustling. Though classified as a rural area, it is in reality already urbanised. 

At an open-air restaurant in Linshui’s county town, the children of farmers dine on Chongqing-style hot pot, drinking beer and talking loudly. Thick steam pours out from tables of unfinished wood where pig brains, cow stomachs and duck kidneys boil in a spicy broth. The change to his home town is almost unimaginable for Mr Cheng, who recalls dinners of a single sweet potato shared among his wife and young children in the late 1970s. 

County towns are key to understanding China’s changing demographics. Officially, 48 per cent of the country's 1.4bn people still live in the countryside, a figure suggesting plenty of room for further labour migration. 

However, separate data that classifies employment by sector show only about 30 per cent of the population is engaged in agriculture. Mr Cai says that when various statistical distortions are corrected, the true share of agriculture in the labour force is a mere 20 per cent. 

“If you go to the villages, I’m sure you won’t find any agricultural labourer under 30 years old. They’re just not there,” says Mr Cai.

Now, labour scarcity that began in export hubs like Guangdong province has arrived in Guang’an, where the supply of workers was once the most plentiful. That has caused difficulties for officials like Gan Zhiyong, mayor of Heliu town in Linshui county. 

Three things we learnt from making a China migration choropleth

“People have the impression that salaries are higher outside, but that’s changing. Now our labour costs are very high,” Mr Gan says from a simple office with no computer and a bedroom in the back. Official data show migrant wages have risen from Rmb861 ($139) per month in 2005 to Rmb2,864 today.

Even if wages in rural towns remain lower than in the city, the gap is now close enough that some would-be migrants choose to stay closer to home for a better quality of life. “Fewer people are going out than before. People want to stay here and take care of their children,” Mr Gan says. 

The dwindling flow of migrants is one aspect of China’s shrinking labour force. But the slowdown in urbanisation is coinciding with a rapid ageing of the population, another key shift underlying the Lewis Turning Point. 

China’s one-child policy created a “demographic dividend” for the economy between roughly 1980 and 2014. Now that dividend is turning into a deficit. The population of Chinese aged between 15 and 64 peaked in 2013, Mr Cai notes. The ratio of children and elderly to working-age Chinese — the dependency ratio — began rising in 2011. The one-child policy was introduced in 1979, but the birth rate kept rising into the 1980s. Annual births in China hit 25m in 1987 and have steadily dropped ever since, hitting about 20m a year by 1997 and falling to 16m last year. 

“Starting in two or three years, you’re going to see another substantial, precipitous drop in young labour entering the labour market,” says Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographics at the University of California Irvine and Fudan University in Shanghai.

Rebalancing act

Yet reaching the Lewis Turning Point has a bright side. For years economists have warned that the outsized share of savings and investment in China has led to distortions within the country and lopsided trade relations with the world. 

This high investment has led to wasteful construction, capital misallocation and excess capacity. Unused highways and “ghost cities” of empty apartment buildings are a common feature of China's landscape. A bloated industrial sector where steel mills, shipyards and solar panel factories produce more than the country can use have led to tensions with trading partners, which complain of China “dumping” excess output.

Lewis’ theory explains how changes in labour dynamics can help correct these problems, promoting the kind of economic rebalancing that government policy has so far failed to achieve.

Rising wages gradually eat into profits and investment, so “rebalancing happens naturally”, says Ross Garnaut, economist at Australian National University and co-editor, with Mr Huang, of a collection of papers on China at the Lewis Turning Point. “The turning point forces rebalancing to happen.” 

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Any rebalancing will fundamentally reshape China’s economy and its trade relations with the rest of the world. In the pre-turning point era, real estate, infrastructure and smokestack industries dominated the economy. In the new era, service industries like healthcare, media, financial services and tourism will thrive. And instead of imports tilted towards commodities like crude oil and iron ore, China will buy more food and other consumer goods. 

The changes Deng’s reforms set in motion in Guang’an and across China were possible because of a set of circumstances that are rapidly disappearing. For China to keep moving towards a place among the ranks of rich countries, it needs to grow by improving urban productivity, rather than simply by moving people off the farm to work in low-end industrial jobs.

“There is no need to fear the slowdown of the potential growth rate,” Mr Cai says. “The new stage of development, however, requires China to accomplish a fundamental transformation of its economic growth pattern, from sole reliance on inputs of capital and labour to greater improvements in total factor productivity.”

May 3, 2015 at 9:26pm

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May 1, 2015 4:31 pm

Lucy Kellaway sets sail on giant cruise ship Anthem of the Seas

Lucy Kellaway

A mega-ship offers simulated skydiving, surfing and endless entertainment — can Lucy stand the pace?

©Christopher Ison

My first sight of Anthem of the Seas was through the taxi window that was ferrying me to Southampton dock from the train station. At 348m long, you might have thought Royal Caribbean’s billion-dollar new “smart” cruise ship would be hard to miss, yet at first I failed to spot it. The 15 stories of glass and steel rising from the dock looked like an office block; even when I got out of the cab and saw the funnels and yellow lifeboats, I still couldn’t believe that this monster, which sleeps 4,900 guests and 1,500 crew, could sail anywhere at all.Having never been on a cruise before, and not knowing anyone who had been on one either, I was a bit hazy about what to expect. I had pictured myself getting on board via a steep gangway, with well-wishers on the quay throwing streamers as the ship set off. The reality, a modern corridor that links directly to the ship, was a bit of a let-down.
Inside, Anthem looks even less like a ship than it does from the outside. The “Royal Esplanade” running down the middle is more of a cross between a Westfield shopping centre and a Marriott hotel. At one end there is a vast silver sculpture of a French horn. At the other is Michael’s Genuine Pub, on the roof of which a not terribly genuine Caribbean band played noisily.
As I gazed, slack-jawed, a member of staff explained that the giant chandelier above our heads lights up to the rhythm of your pulse. She guided my hand on to an electronic pad and, sure enough, some spasmodic flashing ensued.
Your pulse is weird, commented my 20-year-old son, who had joined me for the 48-hour voyage. This might have been because, despite the size of the ship, I was suddenly feeling claustrophobic. Or it might have been a response to the sensory overload. Everywhere there was something to distract: different sorts of music bled into each other, clashing art works lined the walls, and functional objects were subverted in the interests of fun — chairs were variously shaped like sombreros, piles of wood and locks. Even in the lift there was no respite. A photograph of a moose in a necklace and high heels bears down on you, and a man pretending to be a stowaway pops up out of nowhere playing an upright piano. I stared in bafflement at an inlaid plaque on the lift floor that said “Monday”. Could it really still be Monday morning? And could I last till Wednesday?

On the 11th floor, down an interminable corridor with a jazzy brown carpet, door number 11268 opened on to our “stateroom”. The modest space inside might not have been stately but here at last was peace. No music, and a balcony that opened on to the sea. Most of the staterooms have sea views, we are assured, but those that don’t have a “virtual balcony” with a screen showing real-time views of the sea.
On our beds were our “wowbands”, which you wear on your wrist and which let you into your room, pay for your drinks (and, if you’ve had too many, deny you more), and tell you what you are meant to be doing. We put them on and went back out to find that the 2,000 travel agents who were our companions on this complimentary, inaugural trip had changed into flip-flops and were enjoying the free booze in the sun, which, surprisingly for April, was obligingly beating down.

We signed up for the biggest draw on board, the simulated skydiving, and in no time at all were wearing royal blue flying suits and stepping into a tunnel containing what looked like the world’s biggest hair dryer. Relax!, the instructor gestured at me as he grabbed my flailing limbs. Smile!
Afterwards, as I watched the others taking a turn, each one given a minute to fly, I started to understand. Anthem of the Seas isn’t so much a ship, it’s a holiday factory that does pleasure in mass quantity but somehow makes it feel like an individual experience.
Later that day I met Dominic Paul, senior vice-president in charge of international operations, and asked him who the ship was for. Everyone, he replied. Cruises, he explained, were one of the fastest-growing holiday markets in the world, and were no longer the preserve of the old. The average Royal Caribbean customer is only 41, most of them have families, and many are couples. The company is building more floating holiday camps, one of which will live permanently in China.

Simulated skydiving - 'the world's biggest hairdryer'

What customers must love above all is the price. Subsequent googling reveals you can go to Paris and Bruges — or even to the US — on this boat for about £500 for up to eight nights, everything thrown in, if you go off-season.
Which makes me forgive the food being not up to much. At lunchtime I avoided burgers sweating under hot lamps in the mammoth buffet and chose an uninspiring sandwich instead. But even then I didn’t mind that much. Knowing there are 17 other restaurants on board, most of which are included in the basic price, simply made me resolve to try something different next time. This abundance of choice was also in evidence at the ship’s naming ceremony that afternoon. Rather sweetly, the “godmother” of Anthem of the Seas, turned out to be not the usual minor dignitary but a Thomas Cook travel agent from Sunderland who had won a singing competition. She duly belted out a decent cover of a Katy Perry song backed by the Welsh band Only Boys Aloud; for anyone who didn’t like that, there were either bagpipes or the cast of We Will Rock You singing “We Are the Champions”, or someone from Coronation Street singing the national anthem — after which a rabbi and a priest added an assorted sprinkling of spirituality.
When the time came to break the bottle, the godmother stood on the stage in the theatre (more technically advanced than any in the West End, we were told), pressed a button on an iPad, releasing the bottle outside, which duly smashed against the side of the ship, watched inside by passengers on screens.

At some point later in the evening Anthem of the Seas slipped from its Southampton moorings and made its way towards the Isle of Wight. Earlier that day I had been taken to see the captain on the bridge and now imagined him sitting in front of his huge bank of computer screens, steering the boat with its impossibly tiny joystick — barely the size of a matchstick. There was no swaying to accompany our departure; no hum of engines. Had we not been having a beer on deck at the time, we wouldn’t have known we were on our way. Down below, in the restaurants, the casino and in the music hall, no one would have had any idea they were going anywhere at all.
The following morning, after a good sleep in a comfortable and quiet cabin, we went out on deck to plan our day, walking around the running track, sharing the space only with a multicoloured 30ft giraffe and half an oversized camper van.
My son had in mind a nonstop programme of rock climbing, dodgems, basketball, circus skills, a team game that involved escaping from a room and a surf machine that allows you to surf on large artificial waves when the sea outside is flat as a pancake.

I had in mind other amusements. In the spa I opted for a facial that involved blowing oxygen over my skin to discourage bacteria, which seemed a slight waste of time given how much sea air was to be had for nothing on deck.
Later. I went in search of facts about the ship, none of which left me much the wiser. It took six million hours to build. The robotic bartenders with screens on the end of their arms are the only ones like them in the world. The ship has its own satellite that allows guests more bandwidth than is available on all other cruise ships put together.
Of all the technological feats, the one that I could relate to best concerned the robot bartenders. Guests tap their wowband on an iPad, design their own drink, watch the graceful robotic arms mixing their cocktail and then another touch of the wowband, the finished drink glides down the counter to meet them.

At least, that’s the idea. But when I tried it, the iPad wasn’t working properly and the robots turned out to be both slower than humans and messier, leaving splashes all over the frosted counter. On the upside, my robot was exceedingly generous with the measures. A single vodka turned out to be a quadruple, which meant I set off in excellent sprits to the next activity: a ride in the North Star, a glass globe on a crane that rises to 300ft above sea level. Alas, here the flaw had nothing to do with technology but with the fact that, if you are lifted up so far from land, the view from the top is a shocking anticlimax — the horizon looks pretty much the same from every altitude.
Suppressing a wish to sit quietly on my balcony and recoup, I went, instead, to a production of We Will Rock You in the theatre. The singing was loud, the dancing tight, the acting passable, the theatre large and comfortable but, after half an hour, we tired of having Queen songs yelled at us and crept out to have dinner at Wonderland, one of the most expensive restaurants on board.

Here, the eggs arrived in a puff of smoke and the olives turned out to be reconstituted and made of gelatin shell and filled with olive-tasting juice. Both were served by a waitress who wore a crushed velvet tailcoat and was so animated in her explanation of every dish that I overheard another journalist say, “Can’t I have whatever she’s on?”
As I ate this strange fare, some of which was rather nice, I realised that I was getting used to the cruise. Indeed, later that night as I watched the cabaret — in which six screens on robotic arms danced, as did a troupe of assorted Indian hippies, rap dancers, barber shop singers, and transvestites — I found I was actually enjoying myself.

“Let’s do stand-up comedy and then the casino,” suggested my son, when the dancing stopped. He was intent on sucking every last drop of novelty out of the cruise and had earlier declared it to be greater fun than any of the family holidays he’d ever been taken on. “No offence,” he had added, after seeing my expression.
But I could take no more. I had flown in the air, had my face zapped, seen three shows, lost at table tennis and table football, swung on swings and lounged on loungers, drunk cocktails and beer and wine and had the weirdest meal of my life — I simply had to go to bed.
First thing the next morning, we had to leave our stateroom so that it could be prepared for its first lot of paying passengers, bound for the Med. At 7.30am we were under the flashing chandelier in the Royal Esplanade and, half an hour later, we did the most disorienting thing of all, got on a perfectly ordinary train into London, bound for the office, where a 100 per cent fun-free day was about to start.
Lucy Kellaway is an FT columnist

Details

Lucy Kellaway was a guest of Royal Caribbean International on the inaugural two-day sailing of Anthem of the Seas. (royalcaribbean.co.uk). Its seven-night France and Spain cruise costs from £979pp, based on two sharing an Ocean View stateroom, departing June 13. It sails from Southampton to Gijón and Bilbao in Spain, St Peter Port in the Channel Islands and Paris, docking at Le Havre, in France before returning to Southampton. The price excludes gratuities, speciality dining and drinks packages.
Photographs: Christopher Ison; Victoria Birkinshaw

The 9 Books Every Leader Should Read - TIME

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• Geoffrey James / Inc.
 

May 1, 2015

    

There are more than a million business booksin print, and thousands more published every year. But what if, for some reason, you were only allowed to read nine books about managing people? (Why nine and not 10? I’ll explain at the end of the post.)

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After giving it a lot of thought, here are the nine that I would recommend:

The Effective Executive

Subtitle: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

Author: Peter F. Drucker

Why it’s a must read: This book is literally definitive in the sense that it definesmanagement at the executive level so clearly that most other serious management books takes this book’s concepts for granted. The Effective Executivealso rejects the concept that an executive should encourage a personality cult among employees and the press. For Drucker, management means getting things done without grandstanding or being concerned about your public visibility.

Best quote: “Men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination, or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders. While others rush around in the frenzy and busyness which very bright people so often confuse with ‘creativity,’ the plodder puts one foot in front of the other and gets there first, like the tortoise in the old fable.”

The One Minute Manager

Authors: Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

Why it’s a must read: The One Minute Manager, along with The Greatest Salesman in the World, is the best of the “teach through parables” style of business book. The advice it offers is mostly common sense, but it’s laid out in such easily understood terms and actionable advice that it makes common sense into something that’s uncommonly valuable.

Best quote: “The managers who were interested in results often seemed to be labeled ‘autocratic,’ while the managers interested in people were often labeled ‘democratic.’ The young man thought each of these managers–the ‘tough’ autocrat and the ‘nice’ democrat–were only partially effective. ‘It’s like being half a manager,’ he thought. He returned home tired and discouraged. He might have given up his search long ago, but he had one great advantage. He knew exactly what he was looking for. ‘Effective managers,’ he thought, ‘manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the organization and the people profit from their presence.'”

Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

Subtitle: A Guide to Outwitting Your Boss, Your Coworkers, and the Other Pants-Wearing Ferrets in Your Life

Author: Scott Adams

Why it’s a must read: Adams’s earlier book, The Dilbert Principle, outlined the absurdity and inconsistency of the business world. This book goes deeper into management and decision making, explaining why everyone’s experience at work differs so greatly from the idealized picture that’s provided in books like The Effective Managerand The One Minute Manager. If you’ve got a sense of humor, this book will definitely make you laugh, but it will probably be the uncomfortable laugh resulting from seeing a bit too much of your own inner weasel.

Best quote: “There’s a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone* and it’s where most of life happens. (Note: *Sometimes known as Weaselville, Weaseltown, the Way of the Weasel, Weaselopolis, Weaselburg, and Redmond.)”

The Age of Unreason

Author: Charles Handy

Why it’s a must read: Every book you’ve read about the digital age, disruptive innovation, massive change, etc., is based on this book. This was the first book to really nail the fact that what we now call the Mad Men era was disappearing and that we were about to slip into a crazy period where none of the old rules work and nothing makes much sense. It’s a quick read and some of his observations are dated, but it’s really amazing how much he got right and how much later business writers have stolen his ideas.

Best quote: “We are now entering an Age of Unreason, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped by us and for us–a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.”

The Art of War

Author: Sun Tzu

Why it’s a must read: This book is usually read as if it were a collection of fortune cookie proverbs. That misses the point, though, because this book is actually a philosophy of life that extends to every type of leadership. It’s one of those books that you can read 50 times and get something different with each successive reading. The edition that I’ve linked into the heading above is not just a beautiful work in the art of publishing but also contains the best commentary and notes, all of which can deepen your understanding.

Best quote: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.”

Don’t Bring It to Work

Subtitle: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success

Author: Sylvia Lafair

Why it’s a must read: If you’ve ever wondered why the people you work with behave in such strange ways, wonder no more. As this book clearly explains, whatever happened or is happening in their family is reflecting and repeating itself at work. What’s truly valuable about this book is that it identifies the personality types that cause problems and then explains exactly how to use and redirect the problematic behavior so that it serves the goals of the team.

Best quote: “Once you learn how people’s past family life and their work behaviors connect at a core level, you’ll know where performance problems originate and conflict starts. Then you’ll gain skills to do something about it. The reason most organizational programs abort is that they fail to deal with our life patterns, which are at the foundation of workplace anxiety, tension, and conflict.”

The Prince

Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Why it’s a must read: This is a book of bad advice. It was supposed to be “how-to” guide for leaders in Italy at a time when every city was fighting every other city and the entire region was full of mercenaries, inquisitors, and other unsavory types. Why do I include it? Simple. This book accurately predicts the decisions of a sociopath in a management role. As such, it’s perfect defense against predatory competitors and allows you to keep one step ahead.

Best quote: “And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Subtitle: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

Author: John C. Maxwell

Why it’s a must read: Sometimes it seems like everyone in the management consulting business has a list of principles, habits, laws, rules, and so forth that explain everything you really need to know. What’s funny about all those books, though, is that they’re all valid! Leadership is such a complicated phenomenon that it’s possible to describe it in hundreds of different ways. That being said, this book (of all the other books of this type) is the easiest to read, with techniques that are easy to apply. (Note: In this category, I went back and forth between this book and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But 7 Habits gets a little preachy, so I finally settled on this book.)

Best quote: “Instinctively, successful people understand that focus is important to achievement. But leadership is very complex. During a break at a conference where I was teaching the 21 Laws, a young college student came up to me and said: ‘I know you are teaching 21 Laws of Leadership, but I want to get to the bottom line.’ With intensity, he raised his index finger and asked, ‘What is the one thing I need to know about leadership?’ Trying to match his intensity, I raised my index finger and answered, ‘The one thing you need to know about leadership is that there is more than one thing you need to know about leadership!'”

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Author: Dale Carnegie

Why it’s a must read: The writing style is a bit corny and the anecdotes incredibly out-of-date, and yet it’s a well of wisdom that has yet to run dry. Everyone I’ve known who has read this book cover to cover (and made the effort to implement its lessons) has been successful, if not in business then in their personal life. This book has been a bestseller for decades and is likely to be a bestseller for decades to come. There’s so much in this book that for the quote, I just plucked out one that’s helped me in my interactions with colleagues and family members.

Best quote: “Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

Why Only Nine?

I was going to make this a top 10 list but then it occurred to me that every reader probably has a favorite that’s helped them to be successful but that is not on this list. If that’s the case with you, leave me a comment or send me an email. I’d love to know what’s working for you.

Woodstock of Capitalism’s odd couple - Financial Times

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May 1, 2015 at 11:17pm

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May 1, 2015 11:50 am

Woodstock of Capitalism’s odd couple

Stephen Foley

Bill Gates is not expecting to triumph in his table tennis match this weekend. The Microsoft founder will once again be pitted against the US Olympic team member Ariel Hsing, in what has become one of the rituals at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, where Mr Gates and Warren Buffett mingle with Berkshire shareholders, play a few rounds of bridge under the gaze of television cameras, and “soften up” Ms Hsing for any other visitors who want to put her skills to the test. They do not commonly score a point against her.

Among all the oddities of the annual “Woodstock of Capitalism”, when 40,000 Berkshire shareholders congregate in Omaha, Nebraska, the oddest is surely the sight of the two richest men in the US larking about together.

In the 24 years since Mr Gates was introduced to Mr Buffett — reluctantly, expecting he would have little in common with a man 25 years his senior who “just buys and sells stuff” — the pair have become fast friends and confidantes.

“The number of things I’ve sought Warren’s advice on is pretty incredible,” Mr Gates says.

Over that time, the two men have bounced the number one slot on the rich list between them like a ping pong ball, and drawn each other more deeply into each other’s embrace, thanks to an arrangement unique in billionaire philanthropy.

Mr Buffett is handing over much of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, rather than attempting to make his own donations — an arrangement he describes as akin to his picking expert managers for Berkshire subsidiaries.

The Gates Foundation has received parcels of Berkshire shares worth about $2bn each year since 2006 and though it sells them over time, it still holds 6 per cent of the company’s “B” shares, which have fewer voting rights. Mr Buffett has a seat on the foundation board of trustees; Mr Gates has been a Berkshire board member since 2005.

Their first meeting on July 4 weekend 1991, at the Gates family’s getaway outside Seattle was engineered through a chain of connections from Mr Buffett’s friend Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, to Mary Gates, and while Mr Gates had told his mother he would entertain only a short conversation, the two billionaires were still talking well into the evening.

“I met him and he asked me, ‘why hadn’t IBM done what we’d been able to do, and what were the competitive dynamics, was it the people, the technology?’” Mr Gates recalls. “He asked all the questions that I’d been thinking about so intensely to create the strength of Microsoft.

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“Warren created a career starting with this lens of, ‘is this thing undervalued, therefore should I buy it and make money for myself and my partners?’ Using that lens over a period of many, many decades he ended up learning about people, about types of businesses, about honest long-term accounting. He learnt an immense amount even though he started with this, you might say, purely capitalistic, narrow view of things.”

Along the way, Mr Buffett has created one of the five largest companies in the US by market capitalisation, and this weekend’s meeting marks the golden anniversary of his control of Berkshire. It has completed a transformation from investment vehicle to fully fledged conglomerate. Its operations include railways, insurance, utilities, retailing, big food brands, manufacturing, real estate agencies, home finance and car dealerships, so it is reaching into more and more Americans’ daily lives.

That may bring controversy, but the company is diverse enough to withstand inevitable challenges, Mr Gates says. 

“Berkshire is not an oil or a coal company, but you can imagine eventually the climate change crowd saying cars and utilities have something to do with CO2 emission. You’ve got animal slaughter equipment. You’ve got rail cars and the question of, should they be double-walled when they’re transporting oil? Insurance — can you rate people according to various characteristics and not other characteristics? There’s no end of potential controversy.

“Does the self-driving car 30 years from now affect the auto insurance business? Almost everybody is exposed to the winds of technological change. I can’t think of any other company of the size that is as diverse,” Mr Gates said.
As Berkshire has evolved, Mr Buffett’s investment philosophy has remained remarkably consistent, and consistently profitable, and he has increasingly taken on a public teaching role. Since Mr Buffett’s golden anniversary letter to Berkshire shareholders was published in February, Mr Gates has been repeatedly recommending it to anyone “if you are ever going to read 20 pages about business”.
For his own part, Mr Gates recalled how Mr Buffett helped him navigate Microsoft’s antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice and the overvaluation of its stock during the dotcom bubble.

Warren Buffett’s directors, executives and possible successors

“He and I talked a lot about using stock options as a form of compensation when you get highly volatile technology stocks, and the idea that you are overpaying people wildly in some period of time and underpaying them during other periods of time and it is arbitrary,” Mr Gates said. “I was the first significant technology company actually to move towards pure share grants as opposed to option grants.”
And what of Mr Gates’s influence on his friend? The IBM that the pair discussed at that very first meeting is now 7.8 per cent owned by Berkshire. IBM executives will even be at the shareholder meeting exhibiting Watson, its artificial intelligence computer, competing for shareholder attention with dozens of other Berkshire brands, and shopping opportunities, and activities — and table tennis.
Can Mr Gates be credited with getting Mr Buffett over his famous reluctance to invest in technology shares with the IBM investment?
“No, IBM became less of a technology company,” Mr Gates says. “It’s really sad. It turns out, at least so far, Warren was wrong. Even with the enterprise customers, the cloud has not been saleable for them. I’m biased. IBM is a wonderful company but because I competed with them for many, many decades I have to say, I don’t see their future as brightly as people who are long on the stock.”

Sage advice
If you had invested $1,000 in the S&P 500 when Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, it would have swelled to more than $110,000 now. That may sound impressive, but $1,000 in Berkshire shares would be worth about $18m.
The Financial Times asked high-profile investors to reflect on what they had learned from following Mr Buffett’s career and their first meetings with the Sage of Omaha.
Jack Bogle, whose asset management group Vanguard turns 40 this year, remembers approaching Mr Buffett in a California hotel lobby one morning in 1991. “After half an hour the papers came in and I said, you know, Mr Buffett, I’d like to buy a paper for a billionaire. So, I went over and bought him a New York Times and Wall Street Journal and I felt very proud of that.”
Jeff Ubben, founder of activist hedge fund ValueAct, met Mr Buffett for the first time this year, at a ceremony to celebrate a gift from his sister Doris Buffett to Northwestern University. Mr Buffett posed with Mr Ubben’s daughter and let her hold his wallet. “I credited him face to face with his influence,” Mr Ubben said.
Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia tells the story of his first exchange of letters with Mr Buffett, after he came from Omaha to stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which was part-owned by the prince. When the prince wrote that he had been called “the Buffett of Arabia”, Mr Buffett wrote back that, “in Omaha, I am known as the Al-Waleed of America”.

David Rubenstein, a founder of private equity group Carlyle, was surprised that when he was invited out to dinner in Omaha, Mr Buffett drove his guests to the restaurant himself. “I have recognised from him that no matter how much you achieve you should put it in perspective,” Mr Rubenstein said. “If you are successful, that is great, but don’t try to make it sound as if you have reinvented the earth.”

This Common Activity Is Reducing Your IQ, According to Research - TIME

April 30, 2015 at 10:29pm

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http://time.com/3841225/can-missing-an-hour-of-sleep-take-points-off/

• Eric Barker
 

April 29, 2015

    

Lack of sleep affects intelligence

Missing an hour of sleep turns a sixth grader’s brain into that of a fourth grader.

Via NurtureShock:

The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly-sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explained.

There is a correlation between grades and average amount of sleep.
Via NurtureShock:

Teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged fifteen more minutes than the C’s, and so on. Wahlstrom’s data was an almost perfect replication of results from an earlier study of over 3,000 Rhode Island high schoolers by Brown’s Carskadon. Certainly, these are averages, but the consistency of the two studies stands out. Every fifteen minutes counts.

Not only does it affect intelligence, lack of sleep also reduces impulse control.
Via NurtureShock:

A different mechanism causes children to be inattentive in class. Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest—the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “Executive Function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous.

And when we’re tired it’s actually harder to be happy. We can recall negative memories more than positive ones when we’re exhausted.
Via NurtureShock:

Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine. In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like “cancer.” But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like “sunshine” or “basket.”

To learn how to get the best night’s sleep of your life, click here.

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/09/sleep-astronauts/

4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A Good Night’s Sleep

Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.
They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time it is.
But actually, it’s even worse than that.
In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythm go completely haywire.
When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due to lousy sleep can have very bad results.
When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.
So NASA started doing some serious research.

3 Big Insights On Sleep

They quickly realized a few things:
1) You’re a slave to external cues
Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longer each night.
2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle
Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually your sleep cycle can totally spin out of control.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-running periods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours per week in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completely around the clock.
3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality
You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarily notice your reduced performance the next day, either.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noises perceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition or complete awakening.
This info is more valuable than you think. Why?

We’re All Astronauts Now

As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re all living more like astronauts now.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?
Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.
You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.
Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, you’re legally drunk:
…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “It’s not affecting me.”
Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.
So what answers did NASA come up with?

What You Need To Do

In the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s add some astronaut knowledge.
Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of the hull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:

• Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.

• Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.

• If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights at night. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.

• Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t bother you” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.

Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; set an alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:

A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set an alarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off the TV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.
This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.
(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)
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Related posts:
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What six things make for a great night’s sleep?
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18 Behaviors of Emotionally Intelligent People - TIME

April 29, 2015 at 11:24pm

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http://time.com/3838524/emotional-intelligence-signs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Travis Bradberry / Inc.
 

April 28, 2015

    

Emotional intelligence is a huge driver of success

When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.
Despite the significance of EQ, its intangible nature makes it difficult to measure and to know what to do to improve it if you’re lacking. You can always take a scientifically validated test, such as the one that comes with the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book, but unfortunately, most such tests aren’t free. So, I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the behaviors that are the hallmarks of a high EQ. What follows are sure signs that you have a high EQ.

You have a robust emotional vocabulary.

All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36 percent of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions.
People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling “bad,” emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel “irritable,” “frustrated,” “downtrodden,” or “anxious.” The more specific your word choice, the better insight you have into exactly how you are feeling, what caused it, and what you should do about it.

You’re curious about people.

It doesn’t matter if they’re introverted or extroverted, emotionally intelligent people are curious about everyone around them. This curiosity is the product of empathy, one of the most significant gateways to a high EQ. The more you care about other people and what they’re going through, the more curiosity you’re going to have about them.

You embrace change.

Emotionally intelligent people are flexible and are constantly adapting. They know that fear of change is paralyzing and a major threat to their success and happiness. They look for change that is lurking just around the corner, and they form a plan of action should these changes occur.

You know your strengths and weaknesses.

Emotionally intelligent people don’t just understand emotions; they know what they’re good at and what they’re terrible at. They also know who pushes their buttons and the environments (both situations and people) that enable them to succeed. Having a high EQ means you know your strengths and how to lean into and use them to your full advantage while keeping your weaknesses from holding you back.

You’re a good judge of character.

Much of emotional intelligence comes down to social awareness; the ability to read other people, know what they’re about, and understand what they’re going through. Over time, this skill makes you an exceptional judge of character. People are no mystery to you. You know what they’re all about and understand their motivations, even those that lie hidden beneath the surface.

You are difficult to offend.

If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident and open-minded, which creates a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.

You know how to say no (to yourself and others).

Emotional intelligence means knowing how to exert self-control. You delay gratification and avoid impulsive action. Research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Saying no is a major self-control challenge for many people, but “No” is a powerful word that you should unafraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases such as “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

You let go of mistakes.

Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.

You give and expect nothing in return.

When someone gives you something spontaneously, without expecting anything in return, this leaves a powerful impression. For example, you might have an interesting conversation with someone about a book, and when you see them again a month later, you show up with the book in hand. Emotionally intelligent people build strong relationships because they are constantly thinking about others.

You don’t hold grudges.

The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When the threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when the threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.

You neutralize toxic people.

Dealing with difficult people is frustrating and exhausting for most. But high-EQ individuals control their interactions with toxic people by keeping their feelings in check. When they need to confront a toxic person, they approach the situation rationally. They identify their own emotions and don’t allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. They also consider the difficult person’s standpoint and are able to find solutions and common ground. Even when things completely derail, emotionally intelligent people are able to take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring them down.

You don’t seek perfection.

Emotionally intelligent people won’t set perfection as their target because they know that it doesn’t exist. Human beings, by our very nature, are fallible. When perfection is your goal, you’re always left with a nagging sense of failure that makes you want to give up or reduce your effort. You end up spending time lamenting what you failed to accomplish and should have done differently instead of moving forward, excited about what you’ve achieved and what you will accomplish in the future.

You appreciate what you have.

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the right thing to do; it also improves your mood by reducing the stress hormone cortisol (in some cases by 23 percent). Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who work daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experience improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol play a major role in this.

You disconnect.

Taking regular time off the grid is a sign of a high EQ because it helps you to keep your stress under control and to live in the moment. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even–gulp!–turning off your phone gives your body and mind a break. Studies have shown that something as simple as an email break can lower stress levels. Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email with the power to bring your thinking (read: stressing) back to work can drop onto your phone at any moment.

You limit your caffeine intake.

Drinking excessive amounts of caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline, which is the primary source of a fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response to ensure survival. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. Caffeine’s long half-life ensures you stay this way as it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body. High-EQ individuals know that caffeine is trouble, and they don’t let it get the better of them.

You get enough sleep.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams) so that you wake up alert and clearheaded. High-EQ individuals know that their self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when they don’t get enough–or the right kind–of sleep. So, they make sleep a top priority.

You stop negative self-talk in its tracks.

The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that–thoughts, not facts. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain’s natural tendency to perceive threats (inflating the frequency or severity of an event). Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts in order to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook.

You won’t let anyone limit your joy.

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from the opinions of other people, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something they’ve done, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or snide remarks take that away from them. While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within.
This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article above was originally published at Inc.com.