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A View that Leads to Bigg Success

Written on July 16, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Personal Growth

watch Bigg success is life on your own terms. Our focus today is growth, one of the five elements of bigg success.

We tend to avoid information that’s not consistent with our beliefs. There’s been a long-running debate between psychologists:

Do people actively avoid contradictory information or is it a more natural process? For example, it may be that we don’t hear opposing views because we hang out with people like us.

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Some new research [PDF] (led by a psychology professor at the best school in the world, the University of Illinois) has answered that question.

If you seek opposing views, you’re in the minority

The research confirms that people do avoid ideas that disagree with their own. They did this study to “see … to what extent people are willing to seek out the truth versus just stay comfortable with what they know.”

The researchers found that two-thirds of us choose information that supports what we already think. However, the more interesting part of their research to us was this:

They found that two types of people are more likely to listen to alternative points-of-view:

People who are confident in their own beliefs

We were out with a friend right after we read this research. The timing was perfect. She’s very politically active – politics is one area the researchers cited that we’re particularly reluctant to consider the other side.

Our friend told us that she no longer subscribed to a certain magazine. She said that she found she always disagreed with their point-of-view. After further discussion, it was clear that she’s not confident in her opinions.

If she had confidence in her opinions, it wouldn’t bother her to read the other side. In fact, by reading the other side, she might gain confidence in her positions. Or she might change her mind, but be more confident in her new opinion.

The best way to confirm your opinion is to continually test it against all the information available. Talk with people who hold counter opinions. Read everything you can. Try to balance opinions on all sides of an issue before arriving at a conclusion.

Even then, continue testing that opinion with any new evidence you find, both pro and con. Then you’ll have confidence in your opinions.

People who have to defend their ideas in public

It’s interesting that the researchers cite the much-maligned politicians here. Politicians constantly have to defend their point-of-view.

They serve as an example to us. Don’t keep your opinions to yourself; defend them.

We should point out two things here:

You have to be careful discussing certain subjects with certain people.

We’ve talked about things here in very black-and-white terms. Obviously, many if not most issues are full of grey. That’s what makes for interesting discussion!

When you do discuss your ideas, you will hear other points-of-view that you can synthesize with your own. Your ideas will sharpen and grow. So will your confidence in what you believe.

That’s bigg success … as long as you agree with us!

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Thanks for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss what we can learn from cats about communication. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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(Image in today's post by adzica)

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Who is More Accident Prone – Men or Women?

Written on November 14, 2008 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Health

accident Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistics agency, released a report on work injuries [PDF] a while back. There were a few things we found interesting. While four percent of all workers experienced some sort of work place injury over the past year, only two percent of the women had. So guys got hurt disproportionately to gals.

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss the injury report stats on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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You might hypothesize that perhaps men perform riskier tasks, on average, than women. However, the research showed that men have a higher rate of injury across all job categories.

Can women work harder?

Another point of interest was that, compared to men working less than 35 hours a week, men who work eighty hours a week or more were twice as likely to get injured. Men were forty percent more likely to get hurt if they worked between 45 and 79 hours.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more someone works, the more tired they are and the more likely they are to harm themselves somehow. Sounds good, except that it didn’t hold true for women. There was no noticeable difference among women based on the number of hours worked.

Women who worked more than one job experienced more injuries than women who only had one job. There was no difference for men. Finally, we found one in the men’s favor!

Why do we work so much?

Seriously, though, we see that whether we look at hours worked or number of jobs, there is evidence to show that chance of harm increases.

So we wonder: Why do we work so many hours? Why do we need more than one job? In many cases, it’s because of money issues. Might we be better off looking at our budget? Would we better served by adjusting our lifestyles? Then we might not have to work so much and we might not get hurt as much.

More hours. More jobs. Still a lack of money. No extra time. More stress. All of these come into play together.

Speaking of play

Here’s another thing we found very interesting in this report. Only 28% of all “activity-limiting injuries” occurred at work. Now think about that. We spend about half of our waking hours at work, if not more. Yet nearly three-fourths of the accidents that keep us from working happen in our personal lives. What in the world are we doing at home?

The study says that most accidents that occur at work are hand injuries and lower back strain. We don’t know what the accidents are away from work. Are we straining ourselves too much at home?

Maybe instead of a “honey do” list, we should start a “honey don’t” list!

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