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If You Want to Motivate Someone, Shut Up

Leadership Freak

Raise your hand if you say, “I know you can do it,” to motivate. Recent research suggests that feeling like you can’t motivates more than feeling like you can.

Verbal encouragement may not be
as encouraging as you believe.

Brandon Irwin’s research indicates that working out in the gym with someone who is better than you motivates more than having someone egg you on with verbal encouragement.

Motivate by pairing with someone more proficient.

Why it works:

“A big reason why superior partners are motivating is that people want to compare favorably with others.” (Brandon Irwin interview in HBR July-August 2013)

Surprise:

Surprisingly, exercise partners were virtual, on a screen. Even more surprising, silent virtual exercise partners were more motivational than vocal. It seems that comparing ourselves with someone more proficient motivates, especially if they aren’t encouraging us verbally.

Teams:

Irwin studied motivation as it relates to virtual…

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Study Finds 3D Printing Could Save The Average Home Up To $2,000 A Year

Starbucks will get speedier, Google-powered free Wi-Fi

Gigaom

Sometimes, the only way to get connected is via coffee shop Wi-Fi. And for many people across the U.S., the nearest Wi-Fi-enabled cafe is a Starbucks.

But Starbucks is notorious for its spotty internet connections. It’s always free, but the challenge of getting a connection while waiting for a Frappuccino means many people don’t even try, much less camp out the way that many customers do at indie establishments.

But that may be about to change, as Google announced that it would be boosting the Wi-Fi in all 7,000 company-operated Starbucks stores over the next 18 months. The search giant promises connection speeds up to 10 times faster than what they are now, and 100 times faster in Google Fiber cities across America. Starting in August, each free Wi-Fi connection will be available under the same name “Google Starbucks.”

This isn’t the first time Google has rolled out fast free Wi-Fi…

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How to Smoke Your Cheese: The Art of Cold Smoking

Patrons of the Pit

Delving into the smokey arts with any degree of abandon, sooner or later you’re likely going to find yourself with a sincere desire to smoke something peculiar.  Oh its starts innocently enough with the usual gamut of savory meats. But before you know it, and if you’re not careful, you may catch yourself trying to smoke such oddities as vegetables, fruits, and even nuts. And in the back of your mind, where brain thrusts often copulate, you no doubt will have the curious yet lingering urge to set smoke to your favorite block of cheese. No worries. Such thoughts are common place among the brotherhood of the pit, and not soon to be ashamed of. Indeed, fret not, for this is the pleasurable bane of many a pit keeper, of whom’s patron plumes of mesquite and smoldering apple are not just for meat alone, but a bevy of nourishment…

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When it comes to free speech, Twitter is caught between a rock and a very hard place

Gigaom

Twitter has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to become what CEO Dick Costolo has called “a global town square,” and with 200 million users in dozens of different countries it has come pretty close to achieving that goal. But what happens when the town square is filled with sexual abuse or death threats or other bad behavior? That’s the conflict the company finds itself in right now, as it tries to battle a firestorm of criticism over its lack of action in cases like those of British journalist Caroline Criado-Perez.

As we explained in a recent post, Criado-Perez was subjected to what she says were hundreds of abusive and violent messages — many threatening rape and some even worse — in a matter of hours earlier this week, in what appeared to be a co-ordinated attack that lasted for several days. The abuse was apparently directed at…

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The puzzle masters: How 3D printing is enabling the most complex puzzles ever created

Gigaom

Oskar van Deventer and George Miller make puzzles.

Not the flat, jigsaw kind, but the complex, 3D variety that most of us associate with the Rubik’s Cube. Both have mathematical minds that allow them to dream up wild interlocking pieces that can take weeks to put together. For Oskar, some of his earlier designs were so complex that they were ahead of the manufacturing capabilities of the time, caging the most exotic shapes in his mind.

In 2003, they visited the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and discovered something amazing: a 3D printer. They watched, mesmerized, as it printed tiny UFO toys. George bought one immediately when he got home.

“This was a super stupid thing to do because I didn’t know how to make things, how to run the machine, what language it used or anything like that,” George said. “I just said, ‘This is something that I…

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