Cup of Compassion and Grandma's Beautiful Hat
"Suddenly, we heard the sirens of a fire truck and an ambulance parking in front of our house. We are new in this neighborhood, moving in only 3 months ago; opening the door I noticed that some paramedics were running up the stairs of our front neighbor's house. On the side walk, a woman in her thirties was in deep commotion crying on the phone. A scared, desperate 13 year old was half way up the ... posted on Jun 8, 8499 reads

Fostering Virtue
"How can we foster more virtue in our societies?" A question sparked for researcher Kentaro Toyama by a one-time interaction with a rickshaw driver in India. This reflective piece goes on to propose ideas for fostering virtue in three areas: Education, Measurement, and Mentoring. And of course, the question "How can I foster more virtue in myself?" comes up as well. There we're left with the intr... posted on Jul 18, 12970 reads

The Science of Self-Control
In the classic Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, researchers gave children a choice between one marshmallow right away, or two later. Most struggled to resist the treat and held out for less than three minutes. "A few kids ate the marshmallow right away," Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor in charge of the experiment, remembers. "They didn't even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare ... posted on Jul 10, 11995 reads

A Love Affair With Questions
In this beautiful black-and-white vignette, filmmaker Nic Askew interviews a man named Julio Olalla. Julio candidly speaks about an encounter with his father that changed his life, and what he learned: "Gratitude in so many ways is so dramatically missing in the world today. Without gratitude nothing is enough." Over this 10-minute video, he reflects on his own experiences, ranging from exploring ... posted on Jul 3, 5357 reads

Going Beyond Profit
The simple for-profit model that has guided business practice in the past appears to be shifting towards a new paradigm. Profitability is important, but only when it serves the more fundamental goal of creating value for others through our gifts. And when a company's strategy loses touch with this key principle, the potential for true value-creation is also lost. In this article, Decision Analyst ... posted on Aug 8, 14771 reads

Sister Cyril's Compassionate Vision
As principal of Loreto School in Calcutta, Irish Catholic nun Sister Cyril has worked some real-world miracles. Her school serves 1500 female students, of which 721 are so poor that they need food, medicines, and even money to meet the rent. By bringing children together like this, she is showing a way for middle class schools to integrate the poor living around them into their educational mainst... posted on Aug 7, 7978 reads

What Makes Extreme Do-Gooders Tick?
"From protecting our natural environment to improving our children's education to combating global poverty and disease, we've come to rely on extreme do-gooders to tackle the world's toughest problems. Few of them will make as much as they could in the private sector. They may lose a relationship with a loved one to their work, or miss their kids' big moments. All of which raises the obvious: Why?... posted on Aug 18, 4865 reads

A 21-Year-Old's Solution to Homelessness
As a design student in Detroit, Veronika Scott was keenly aware of the increasing numbers of homeless people suffering deeply during the relentless winters. At the tender age of 21, she created The Detroit Empowerment Plan to provide much-needed warmth to the city's 20,000 street dwellers. Scott is the creator of Element S, a coat that is self-heated, waterproof, and transforms into a sleeping bag... posted on Aug 23, 14944 reads

School Superintendent Gives Up $800k
Some people give back to their community. Then there's School Superintendent Larry Powell, who's literally giving back. As in $800,000 -- his expected compensation for the next three years. Until 2015, Powell will run 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students, all for $31,000/yr. "How much do we need to keep accumulating?" asks Powell, 63. "There's no reason for me to keep stockpil... posted on Aug 30, 6016 reads

The Doctor Who Would Not Give Up
Dr. Richard Olney is racing to finish what is almost certain to be his last research paper. The 63-year-old neurologist is considered one of the country's top clinical specialists for ALS, popularly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS is also the reason Olney is in a hurry to finish his paper: He was diagnosed with it in 2004 and now has almost no muscle function left. But Olney's most enduring con... posted on Aug 31, 4524 reads

The Best Goal is No Goal
"These days, however, I live without goals, for the most part. It's absolutely liberating, and contrary to what you might have been taught, it absolutely doesn't mean you stop achieving things. It means you stop letting yourself be limited by goals. Consider this common belief: 'You'll never get anywhere unless you know where you're going.' This seems so common sensical, and yet it's obviously not... posted on Sep 1, 29092 reads

An Accidental Activist
"So many of us have good ideas for helping the world. But we tuck our ideas away. I did. I'd tell myself that if the idea were any good someone else would have already done it. That I'm not capable of making a difference. I'd sit on my ideas, get on with my 'life,' and then feel angry at the world because the problems I cared about didn't get solved. I had that fear of going first. Then I took my ... posted on Sep 2, 9325 reads

Disrupt Yourself
When Whitney Johnson decided to walk away from a stellar career on Wall Street, even close friends thought she might be making a mistake. But in Johnson's own words, "Notwithstanding the considerable career and financial risks involved, it was time to leave my comfortable perch and become an entrepreneur. Time to disrupt myself. We typically define disruption as a low-end product or service that ... posted on Sep 4, 15277 reads

Gifting Art
A controversial statue led conversations.org founder Richard Whittaker to an unusual artist, Fredric Fierstein. The art piece itself was inspired from a place far off the beaten track. In Fredric's words: "When I've gotten out of the cities I've met people of the earth, I call them. They're not the kind of people you meet in the cities who are trying to hustle you. My guide, who spoke Thai and a f... posted on Sep 6, 2375 reads

The Ripple Effect of Kindness
"Over the last few years, I've become a big proponent of Smile Cards. The premise behind these small cards is simple: do an anonymous act of kindness and leave a card behind, inviting the recipient to pay-it-forward. If he/she does, the chain keeps going, resulting in "ripples" of kindness radiating out. Smile Cards are wonderful in ways I cannot count. Small, simple, humble -- yet powerful, becau... posted on Sep 11, 23478 reads

Planning & Other Paths To Less Stress
A recent survey by psychologist and self-help author Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we're able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress? The stress management technique that worked best, according to the survey: planning. In other words, "fighting stress before it even starts, planning things rather than letting... posted on Sep 12, 8892 reads

Feeding the World From A Garden Shed
The corrugated tin hut crouching in the undergrowth, dwarfed by dripping firs, looks like a wartime relic nobody could be bothered to clear away ... a sign reading "Mary's Meals" has been stuck above the doorway. To Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, his father's shed in Dalmally, Argyll, has acquired a talismanic significance. It's where he stockpiled food and clothes for Bosnian refugees in the 1990s -- ... posted on Sep 13, 3720 reads

In Praise of Selflessness
"Who are you doing it for? Asked that question, many entrepreneurs would answer, 'me.' There's nothing wrong with that. Plenty of great companies were built by people for whom CEO is an imperfect acronym for "He who must be obeyed." Servant leaders, by contrast, put their people and their organizations before themselves. They don't view employees as a means to an end; rather employees' happiness a... posted on Oct 12, 6536 reads

The Dumpster
"'We can't use these. They look like heirlooms!' Gina, a guest at my holiday gathering, holds up one of the elaborately embroidered napkins from the buffet table. 'Where'd you get them?' 'Out of a dumpster. The tablecloth and those candleholders were in there, too.' 'You can't be serious! Why would they be in a dumpster?' The shock in her voice carried across the room, and others looked up. It's c... posted on Sep 17, 5926 reads

Why Does Beauty Exist?
"Why does beauty exist? What's the point of marveling at a Rembrandt self portrait or a Bach fugue? To paraphrase Auden, beauty makes nothing happen. Unlike our more primal indulgences, the pleasure of perceiving beauty doesn't ensure that we consume calories or procreate. Rather, the only thing beauty guarantees is that we'll stare for too long at some lovely looking thing. Museums are not exactl... posted on Sep 20, 4084 reads

Be Vocal in Times of Beauty
"To stand up and speak out against cold injustice, against the blind wrong-doing that we see in the world -- that is one kind of activism. But there is another kind. A rarer form of fire-in-the-belly commitment to a much less talked about cause. Tell me, do you stand up and speak out when you encounter a moment of unexpected joy, warmth, beauty or compassion in your life? Do you stop to say so whe... posted on Oct 16, 4560 reads

Wind Powered Art
Beautiful art can inspire a person to see life in a totally new way. Theo Jansen is the Dutch creator of what he calls "Kinetic Sculptures," where nature and technology meet. Essentially these sculptures are robots powered only by the wind. Amazingly, these machines are made completely of recycled items. The 'stomach' of the sculpture is made with retired plastic bottles that capture the air pumpe... posted on Sep 24, 6757 reads

Why Collaboration is Risky -- And Worthwhile
"Why is teamwork so difficult? Because collaboration is actually a pretty risky business. Perhaps, like me, you are generally of the mindset that two heads are better than one. But because your ideas frequently get co-opted, there's a risk-reward imbalance that makes you reluctant to engage. Or maybe you've reached out to a potential collaborator only to have your lack of expertise exploited. So, ... posted on Sep 27, 13991 reads

A Tokyo Teacher's Lessons in Empathy
"What's the most important thing this year?" asks Toshiro Kanamori to his students? "To be happy!" comes the joyous response. The class goal truly is to understand how to be happy and care for other people. It sounds like the sort of class a stressed or overworked adult would find, long after they graduated school. Instead, it is a different teaching approach taken by a grammar teacher in Tokyo, T... posted on Oct 22, 5563 reads

Of Forests and Men
To commemorate 2011 as the International Year of Forests, the United Nations appointed Yann Arthus-Bertrand to create a short video to raise consciousness about forests. Using stunning aerial photography and video footage, the producer (whose previous online movie was seen by 400 million people) has done it again.... posted on Nov 6, 5053 reads

Discovering My Own Values
"For most of my life, I believe I inherited my values from my context. Working at Facebook, efficiency and leverage became important to me, along with openness, connectedness, impact. These were the things that kept me up at night. What should've kept me up was my dad's cancer. He'd been diagnosed sometime while I was in college, but I'd mostly pretended he hadn't because that was easier. I assume... posted on Nov 8, 39150 reads

5 Great Books on the Science of Being Wrong
"The intricate mechanisms of the human mind are endlessly fascinating. We've previously explored various facets of how the mind works -- from how we decide, to what makes us happy, to why music affects us so deeply -- and today we're turning to when it doesn't: Here are five fantastic reads on why we err, what it means to be wrong, and how to make cognitive lemonade out of wrongness's lemons." Cul... posted on Nov 11, 9267 reads

Toss Productivity Out
"For at least a couple of years, Zen Habits was one of the top productivity blogs, dispensing productivity tips for a nominal fee (your reading time). I'd like to think I helped people move closer to their dreams, but today I have different advice: Toss productivity advice out the window. Most of it is well-meaning, but the advice is wrong for a simple reason: it's meant to squeeze the most produc... posted on Nov 15, 17096 reads

Students Stepping Up the Kindness
How amazing would it be to start the first day of school receiving random acts of kindness from your fellow students? Last year, a hundred students at Kansas State huddled early in the morning to see just how they could pool their time, money and creativity to surprise (and even shock!) their fellow students with unexpected generosity. From a welcome applause to paying for meals to wowing a driver... posted on Nov 16, 3414 reads

Inspiring a Life of Immersion
In this wide-ranging TED talk, Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, shares stories of people who have immersed themselves in a cause, a community, a passion for change. Stories that remind us that our human inheritance is the capacity to live lives infused with courage, sacrifice, humility, and hard work - and the tremendous impact it can bring to others.... posted on Dec 2, 4564 reads

The 9 Dwarves: A Legend of Conservation
With multinational companies accelerating exploitation of oil, timber and minerals, activist Ladislas Desire Ndembet decided that he had to supply a stronger local voice in the West African nation of Gabon. Financed out of his own modest salary from running a cleaning business on the side, Ndembet's NGO is an inspired movement to conserve some of the world's largest intact tropical rainforests for... posted on Dec 12, 9086 reads

Coelho's 1 Min Manual For Climbing Mountains
"A. Choose the mountain you want to climb: don't pay attention to what other people say, such as 'that one's more beautiful' or 'this one's easier.' You'll be spending lots of energy and enthusiasm to reach your objective, so you're the only one responsible and you should be sure of what you're doing." Through 11 simple but profound guidelines, Paulo Coelho, bestselling author of "The Alchemist," ... posted on Dec 20, 49445 reads

Locked Up, Yet Calm Within
"Prison time, you're in a box. Every second, every day, every year, every decade -- there's no hope. No matter what you accomplish in there, no matter what you do in there, you're still in that box." These are the words of boxer Dewey Bozella, locked up for 26 years for a crime that he did not commit. His is a story about the triumph of the human spirit, and living proof of the maxim: "never give ... posted on Dec 16, 4263 reads

The Neuropsychology of "Don't Worry, Be Happy"
"In 1988, Bobby McFerrin wrote one of the most beloved anthems to happiness of all time. On September 24 that year, 'Don't Worry Be Happy' became the first a cappella song to reach #1 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart. But more than a mere feel-good tune, the iconic song is brimming with neuroscience and psychology insights on happiness that McFerrin -- whose fascinating musings on music and the brai... posted on Dec 22, 41833 reads

How Good Found Me In A Bad Neighborhood
"It occurred to me a little too late that I was in a sketchy part of town. In anticipation of making it to my massage appointment, I had actually gotten off my bus five blocks before my stop. I was young and clearly a college student...I stuck out like a sore thumb in the southern town. Yet, even with my fingers trembling I was convinced that I would be perfectly safe, that I didn't have to rely o... posted on Dec 30, 12469 reads

Be Healthy, Be Compassionate
The Dalai Lama has been telling us for years that it would make us happy, but he never said it would make us healthy, too. Maybe the Dalai Lama knew all along or maybe he's just finding out like the rest of us, but science is starting to catch up with a couple millennia of spiritual thought. In recent years, the investigation of compassion has moved beyond theology and philosophy to embrace a wide... posted on Jan 5, 7787 reads

What We Aren't Taught About Creative Thinking
"Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace fa... posted on Jan 18, 60985 reads

Life Is Easy ...When You Simplify
"Life is easy" says Jon Jandai. "Why do we have to make it so difficult?" After pursuing "success" in Bangkok for several years, Jo dropped out of university to return to village life. There, he went back to the life he knew as a child, working 2 months of the year to grow rice (with an additional 15 minutes a day to grow vegetables), dug a couple of fish ponds, built his own homes using earthen b... posted on Jan 23, 6604 reads

The Inventor Who Disrupted the Period Industry
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn't dream of. He wore one himself -- for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat's blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women's underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test ou... posted on Jan 26, 19244 reads

High Schooler Devises Potential Cancer Cure
17-year-old Angela Zhang's after school project may change the world. Zhang has been making headlines recently after taking home a check of $100,000 from the national Siemens science contest, and now it has been suggested that her research could lead to a potential cure for cancer. "I created a nanoparticle that's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of cancer treatment in that it can detect cancer c... posted on Feb 18, 20085 reads

Knock Knock
As an actor, singer, writer, and composer, Daniel Beaty has worked throughout the world in a variety of styles ranging from solo concerts to theatre to one-man plays to a gig at the White House. But here he is at a Def Jam Poetry contest, sharing about a topic near and dear to his heart -- the essence of a father-son bond. In this 3-minute video, he delivers nothing short of a riveting, electrifyi... posted on Feb 26, 5647 reads

Five Tips For Making Travel Meaningful
Few know more about the art of travel than acclaimed writers Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer, who have a combined six decades of experience chronicling their adventures around the world. These two world wanderers shared a list of the things they do to make travel meaningful and how they go about being a traveler rather than a tourist. Their first piece of advice? "Pick a destination that raises more qu... posted on Mar 5, 11428 reads

A Heart Touched By Music
"The way she was singing comforted me a bit. I stood there watching her play for about fifteen minutes, thinking that it must take courage to perform on your own in the middle of a crowded New York ferry terminal. So I stood there listening. She must have felt my presence because she would occasionally look in my direction. By now I was telling myself that if she could perform in front of hundreds... posted on Mar 7, 5718 reads

The Suitcase That's Saving Lives
What if your carry-on suitcase could save a woman's life? In the fight against maternal mortality in the developing world, a rugged, portable "Solar Suitcase" is providing reliable electricity to clinics in 17 countries where healthcare workers previously struggled to provide emergency obstetric care by the light of candles, flashlights and mobile phones. The Solar Suitcase powers medical LED ligh... posted on Mar 9, 5470 reads

How to Be Alone
This charming and chirpy video pays tribute to the happy wholesomeness of being alone. Tanya Davis recites her poem about the ways of solitude, gently cataloging all the places where aloneness can bring freedom and healing. Whether at a lunch counter, park bench, mountain trail, or on the edge of a dance floor -- all we have to do is love ourselves enough, to love being alone.... posted on Mar 16, 10333 reads

The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky
For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imita... posted on Jun 10, 7001 reads

From Selling to Serving
"The topic for this week's meeting was: 'What are you doing to keep your business going in these crazy-making economic times?' Several people said they have upped the number of cold calls they're making; others talked about creative ways they're using social networking to market themselves. Some are revamping their web sites and blogs; a few are exploring new business ideas, as they worry that the... posted on Mar 19, 41537 reads

The Importance of Imagination
"While growing up, I'd never really considered how important it is to be imaginative. It's a childhood profession, you could say. It comes naturally. Then we hit an age when we're presented with a scantron of bubble-in options, a template for a CV that we need to create, and Excel. At that point, our learning has to fit into certain parameters: within that little bubble, within the one page limit... posted on Mar 29, 85770 reads

10 Points on the Science of Spreading Good
"Good deeds are contagious. We naturally imitate the people around us, we adopt their ideas about appropriate behavior, and we feel what they feel. Acts of charity are no exception. In our 2010 generosity experiment, we showed that every extra dollar of giving in a game designed to measure altruism caused people who saw that giving to donate an extra twenty cents. Furthermore, the network acts lik... posted on Mar 21, 46766 reads

Recovering the Heart of Medicine
"Our modern view of disease is that disease is centered in the body. The older view of disease is that it is soul loss, a loss of connection, of meaning, of purpose, of essence. If this is so, the real task of the medical system is to heal soul loss, to aid in the retrieval of the soul. What is needed is not to develop more of a spiritual practice or to go to church more. Our task is to recognize ... posted on Mar 23, 52166 reads