Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s western world is actually making us miserable.

Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.

Schwartz’s previous research has addressed morality, decision-making and the varied inter-relationships between science and society. Before Paradox he published The Costs of Living, which traces the impact of free-market thinking on the explosion of consumerism — and the effect of the new capitalism on social and cultural institutions that once operated above the market, such as medicine, sports, and the law.

Both books level serious criticism of modern western society, illuminating the under-reported psychological plagues of our time. But they also offer concrete ideas on addressing the problems, from a personal and societal level.

We have all changed someone’s life — usually without even realizing it. In this funny talk from TEDxToronto, Drew Dudley calls on all of us to celebrate leadership as the everyday act of improving each others lives.

Drew Dudley’s interest in developing people’s leadership began when he was the Leadership Development coordinator at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. In 2010 he founded Nuance Leadership Development Services, a company that creates leadership curricula for communities, organizations and individuals — a subject on which he also speaks widely.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness.

Widely regarded as the world’s most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics — exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk.

Daniel Kahneman is an eminence grise for the Freakonomics crowd. In the mid-1970s, with his collaborator Amos Tversky, he was among the first academics to pick apart exactly why we make “wrong” decisions. In their 1979 paper on prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky examined a simple problem of economic risk. And rather than stating the optimal, rational answer, as an economist of the time might have, they quantified how most real people, consistently, make a less-rational choice. Their work treated economics not as a perfect or self-correcting machine, but as a system prey to quirks of human perception. The field of behavioral economics was born.

Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2002 for his work with Tversky, who died before the award was bestowed. In a lovely passage in his Nobel biography, Kahneman looks back on his deep collaboration with Tversky and calls for a new form of academic cooperation, marked not by turf battles but by “adversarial collaboration,” a good-faith effort by unlike minds to conduct joint research, critiquing each other in the service of an ideal of truth to which both can contribute.

Daniel Kahneman is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Kahneman has held the position of professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970-1978), the University of British Columbia (1978-1986), and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-1994). Dr. Kahneman is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002), and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007). Dr. Kahneman holds honorary degrees from numerous Universities.

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, spent over a decade at Harvard University where he won numerous distinguished teaching awards for his work.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.  In 2006, he was Head Teaching Fellow for “Positive Psychology,” the most popular course at Harvard at the time.  In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think Inc. to share his research with a wider population.  When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Shawn was immediately called in as an expert by the world’s largest banks to help restart forward progress.  Subsequently, Shawn has spoken in 45 countries to a wide variety of audiences: bankers on Wall Street, students in Dubai, CEOs in Zimbabwe. Shawn’s research on happiness and human potential have received attention from the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR.

He is the CEO of Good Think Inc., a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers — people who are well above average — to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures. He is also the author of The Happiness Advantage.

About Good Think Inc.

The goal of Good Think Inc. is to bridge the gap between academic research and the real world, so that our message is not only instructive and inspirational, but evidence-based.  We’ve gathered a team of world renowned researchers, speakers, and trainers to deliver this information to organizations around the globe.  But talent, degrees, and reputation alone do not ensure integrity.  Our team believes that research should be lived, so as a company we strive to embody what we teach.

You can find Shawn’s website at  www.shawnachor.com

We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk from TEDxBloomington, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity.

Sanjit “Bunker” Roy is the founder of Barefoot College, which helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient.

Development projects the world over run into one crucial point: For a project to live on, it needs to be organic, owned and sustained by those it serves. In 1972,  Sanjit “Bunker” Roy founded the Barefoot College, in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, with just this mission: to provide basic services and solutions in rural communities with the objective of making them self-sufficient. These “barefoot solutions” can be broadly categorized into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development. The Barefoot College education program, for instance, teaches literacy and also skills, encouraging learning-by-doing. (Literacy is only part of it.)  Bunker’s organization has also successfully trained grandmothers from Africa and the Himalayan region to be solar engineers so they can bring electricity to their remote villages.

As he says, Barefoot College is “a place of learning and unlearning: where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.”

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men — many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It’s called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

About Us

Established in 1972, the Barefoot College is a non-government organisation that has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable. These ‘Barefoot solutions’ can be broadly categorised into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development.

The College believes that for any rural development activity to be successful and sustainable, it must be based in the village as well as managed and owned by those whom it serves. Therefore, all Barefoot initiatives whether social, political or economic, are planned and implemented by a network of rural men and women who are known as ‘Barefoot Professionals’.

Rural men and women irrespective of age, who are barely literate or not at all, and have no hope of getting even the lowest government job, are being trained to work as day and night school teachers, doctors, midwives, dentists, health workers, balsevikas, solar engineers, solar cooker engineers, water drillers, hand pump mechanics, architects, artisans, designers, masons, communicators, water testers, phone operators, blacksmiths, carpenters, computer instructors, accountants and kabaad-se-jugaad professionals.

With little guidance, encouragement and space to grow and exhibit their talent and abilities, people who have been considered ‘very ordinary’ and written off by society, are doing extraordinary things that defy description.

History
In the late 60’s, a very small group of determined individuals in India, coming out of a sound educational system, felt it necessary to look for alternative ways of living, thinking and looking for rural solutions. With very little resources and no long term ideas, they chose to start a process of re-learning in different rural parts of the country by living in remote villages with the people. There was no fixed agenda.

By the early 70’s, India witnessed coming together of minds and different ideologies. Urban educated persons and professionals started their own search for working models. The processes set by them were in terms of approaches and methodologies. While some of individuals chose to live in villages, others thought it better to base themselves in big towns and cities of India.

The very idea of them volunteering to live and work in the villages was considered ‘crazy and daring’, as it was not quite the done thing in the 1970s. Parents expected their children to get a ‘steady and secure’ job, such as in a bank or the Government. Even with considerable opposition from their parents, they chose an alternative way of thinking as their way of life.

The Barefoot College was the coming together of urban educated persons and professionals in 1972 including Bunker Roy; as its founder, a cartographer and a typist. The coming together was validated by this collective registering itself as the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) that is more popularly known as the ‘Barefoot College’ today. The term originally comes from the Chinese health workers who were villagers trained to assist their own rural communities in the 1960s. The name emphasises the organisation’s commitment to poor, neglected and marginalized sections of society.

In 1972, forty-five acres of Government land and an abandoned Tuberculosis Sanatorium (consisting of 21 buildings) was leased from the Government at Re.1 a month, to serve as a campus. Barefoot College started working in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, with a population of about 2,000 people.

At the time of its inception, the organization was envisioned as one which would attract young, urban persons and professionals to come and work with local rural communities in an integrated development process. Most of the people working at the College were geologists, economists, doctors, medical and social workers, chartered accountants, graduates and post graduates from universities who were out to serve in the villages. The participation from members of the rural community was only limited to men as the College was misunderstood as a missionary organization with intentions of converting their religion. Rural women were thought to get corrupted by being exposed to the organization.

Members of the College focused their efforts on trying to find out the needs and priorities of village communities to improve their standard of living and quality of life. The idea was to upgrade their existing traditional skills and knowledge through training, and to help them take control over basic services at the grassroot level. The College struggled and campaigned for justice and what was laid down by law, as well as to bring about transparency and public accountability towards the rural communities in whose name the funds were received.

The early 80s saw a substantial change in the nature of the College work force, with locals forming 80% of the organization. Such a change was partly due to the departure of urban trained professionals who could not stay in rural areas for a long period of time as most of them eventually moved on for ‘good jobs’ and parental pressures. However, this also meant that the locals, for whose development the organisation was set up, were taking charge of activities and initiatives right from planning to completion, thereby reducing dependency on external aid and learn to self sufficient.

The Barefoot College aimed to adopt a new approach and understanding of social work and community development by using the local skills to achieve people-centric and participatory development that was sustainable rather intimidating them by using knowledge from outside. Respect the wisdom of traditional knowledge and mould it with the involvement of rural communities to meet their needs. It identified and worked for only poor and marginalised farmers, landless peasants, rural artisans, women, children, and scheduled castes and tribes as its target group.

Barefoot College has witnessed a process of evolution and change in its aims and ways of functioning to provide simple solutions for rural problems but its five non-negotiable values have been equality, collective decision-making, self-reliance, decentralization and austerity. These are respected right from matters such as the salary structure of the organization to the fact that all the workers and visitors, irrespective of caste and class barriers, eat in the same mess and wash their own plates. Barefoot College has also been very flexible, adaptive and innovative in its approaches and has learnt from its own mistakes and changing times.

You can find the Barefoot College website at  www.barefootcollege.org

The Original 365 Project

Hailey Bartholomew

It all began back In 2008. I was feeling really down. It seems strange now to say that because I can’t think of a good reason why I should have been, but I know I felt incredibly out of sorts with life. It was like I knew in my head I had it good but I really wasn’t enjoying myself!

I started seeing a Nun who did life coaching and counselling. She was brilliant and told me the secret to happiness. According to her it was all about reflection and gratitude. She asked me to try it out each night and write something down about my day that I was grateful for. So I did.

It really surprised me how quickly I began to notice things that I otherwise would have missed. I remember sitting on my bed one night and realising that the little moments I was thinking through were really special and if I had not taken the time to notice them they would be lost forever.

It shocked me how much I had missed so I started to take the project seriously. I got a beautiful album and ordered enough polaroid film to see me through a year! (and lucky I did!) Taking one photo every day for a year of something I was grateful for really re-programmed my brain. I couldn’t believe how much gratitude affected my life. Seeing and celebrating the good in my life affected not only the way I felt spiritually and physically but it improved my relationships with others too. It was not long before it was hard to only take a single photo each day. The more I noticed and took photos the more I began to notice the good and great moments in my life and want to capture them.

I shared my first polaroid project on Flickr. From there a group was formed and others began their own version of this project.

The idea was spread by articles in FRANKIE and NOTEBOOK magazines. It has been amazing seeing other people interpret the idea in their own way and find similar results to me.

I have had so many emails and chats with people who also find the practice of celebrating the now, the good, the special moments so, so enriching. I am now very excited to begin the big journey of filming (with my amazing pocket rocket of a mother!!) and sharing the stories of some of these incredible people while discovering more about the power of gratitude.

Is it possible to harness the power of gratitude through a photo? That’€™s just what Hailey Bartholomew did with her 365 Grateful Project, not only changing her life, but the lives of countless others by inspiring them to create their own gratitude projects.

The 365 Grateful website can be found at  www.365grateful.com

Former fighter pilot Jack Tueller plays the same trumpet that he carried in the cockpit in World War II

Jack Leroy Tueller’s decision to play his trumpet for the last remaining German sniper threatening his unit so moved the sniper that he couldn’t shoot, and surrendered the next morning. By choosing to play “his love song” Jack recognized the fear and loneliness common to all of us. Now 90, he shares his precious story with us.

The Power of Music from Life File Videos on Vimeo.

The values we live by are worth more when we

The Foundation for a Better Life began as a simple idea to promote positive values. We believe that people are basically good and just need a reminder. And that the values we live by are worth more when we pass them on.

What is The Foundation for a Better Life?

The Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, started in 2000. Our sole objective is to promote positive values, using print and broadcast media.

Why are you doing this?

We want the stories we share about the positive actions and values of others to serve as inspiration for someone to do one thing a little better, and then pass on that inspiration. A few individuals living values-based lives will collectively make the world a better place.

How do you determine these values?

The Foundation does not have a political or religious agenda. Our values are selected with the hope that most individuals would find these values universal, encouraging, and inspiring. The Foundation acknowledges that each person has a unique lens through which he or she views the world. Naturally there are religious, nonreligious, political, and cultural views that give meaning to our lives. Our objective is to provide a wide spectrum of values without any intended agenda or slant and provide an uplifting message around each one.

About the Pass It On TV Spots

This idea, though small at first, began to grow. We started by developing public service television messages. Each one incorporates popular music to help life the messages and make them relevant to the audience. These TV spots are now seen in over 200 countries around the world. They are also played in Spanish and Portuguese in 23 countries throughout Latin America. The award-winning artists and writers who have donated their music include, David Foster, Celine Dion, Josh Groban, Diane Warren, Aretha Franklin, Randy Travis, Amy Grant, Kenny Chesney, Garth Brooks, Steppenwolf, Back Street Boys, Frank Sinatra and many others.

About the Pass It On Billboard Campaign

Billboards have become an important component to the “values“ campaign. These messages depicting heroes of our time are seen across America’s highways and in Times Square. Thousands of schools around the world also use these motivational posters to communicate positive messages to youth. Some of these heroes include Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Winston Churchill, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Kermit the Frog, Shrek, Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Goodall, Michelle Kwan and a list of other remarkable individuals. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America has recognized the Pass It On campaign as “…the most successful public service campaign in the history of outdoor advertising.“

You can visit the Values.com website at  www.values.com

Lynne McTaggart is the award-winning author of five books, including the international bestselling sensations The Field and The Intention Experiment. She is an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of spirituality.

She is an investigative journalist and author, and a sought-after public speaker whose talks and workshops have transformed the lives of the thousands around the world who have heard her.

You can find Lynne McTaggart’s website at ww.lynnemctaggart.com