Let's assume that you're a parent, and that you want your child to behave. (Or eat their vegetables. Or clean their room. Etc.) How do you do it? One standard answer is to create a system of reward and punishment. Lay out some rules, then give rewards and punishments so that your kids will follow …
Author: Cary
Cary is a professional mathematician and amateur parent.
Celeste and the denial of perfectionism
What's the difference between greatness and perfection? In theory, being perfect sounds great. But in practice, it means avoiding all mistakes, and that can be limiting. The easiest way to be perfect is to avoid everything outside your comfort zone, which means you'll never grow and improve. In this way, perfectionism can be a malicious …
How not to be creative
In the last post I talked about how creativity is a two-step process: brainstorming, then pruning. The most creative people seem to have a dual nature. They have a boundless ability to believe in their own stupid ideas, and also a boundless capacity for self-criticism and reflection. If is is the way that creativity works, …
How to be creative
I want to share an idea that I've built my research career on. It's essentially a recipe: how to be creative. The idea is that creativity is a two-step process. Brainstorm, then prune. The first stage is brainstorming. Open your mind, let your imagination run wild, try everything, chase the slightest thought and just see …
Positive and negative criticism
I'm preparing to teach a class about mathematical proofs. I want to teach my students to write proofs, but I also want to teach them to think critically about their own work. This is really important. If you can understand and check mathematics on your own, you've earned a kind of intellectual self-reliance. You have …
When to work on it and when to leave
One of my friends recently commented that all the relationship advice online seems to be "dump him and go to therapy." Of course, the people who go online for this advice aren't representative of all relationships, so maybe this isn't such a bad thing. It seems that all of us struggle at some point with …
We should disagree more
The biggest problem in American politics is that liberals and conservatives don't disagree enough. They should disagree more. Let me explain what I mean by that. There's a difference between understanding and agreement. Understanding means seeing things from the other person's point of view, and knowing what they really mean. The opposite is misunderstanding -- …
Emotional maturity, Part 7: Avoiding the obstacles and just talking about feelings
This is the final post in this series -- I'll explore some possible explanations for why we don't just talk about our feelings. To reiterate, talking about your feelings is really important. They originate in your subconscious, making them hard to interpret, but they have important information. Talking to other people is the best way …
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Emotional maturity, Part 6: Building emotional intelligence
The last part of emotional maturity is fairly simple: talk about your feelings, and listen to the feelings of others. That's really the entire thing. But there are two big issues that come up when we put this into practice, the first of which I'll discuss in this post. This first issue is simply one …
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Emotional maturity, Part 5: How to interpret your feelings
The last two posts tell nearly opposite stories. On the one hand, your feelings are amazing things that give you quick, broad-reaching impressions of what will be good for you. On the other hand, they don't always point you in the right direction, and it's hard to double-check the math on them because the process …
Continue reading Emotional maturity, Part 5: How to interpret your feelings
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