Beast Mode

Activate Beast Mode

How to talk like a business-school graduate

Who uses it: business-school students getting in the zone/gym rats/Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch.

When you’re a young capitalist you don’t merely prepare for high-pressure meetings. You go into “beast mode.”

That’s the word that Harvard Business School–types have designated for the aggressive headspace they enter before important meetings and job interviews.

A young project manager turning down after-hours drinks, for instance, may explain that he has to pull an all-nighter, emailing, "Activate EXCEL BEAST MODE."

The term originates with Sega’s Altered Beast, a video game starring a Roman centurion who could morph into mythical creatures.  Its doltish brand of masculinity (the centurion must rescue Athena — you know, the Greek goddess of war?) made the leap to the American football world in 2007 when Marshawn Lynch, then a Berkeley undergraduate, told an interviewer he was in “beast mode” when he was on the field.

The phrase became Lynch’s nickname and is now employed by jocks everywhere. Today, Twitter is deluged with people getting into #beastmode ahead of their gym routines.

Wall Street likes its slang to be masculine. There was, says the anthropologist Grant McCracken, “a particularly annoying period when people kept asking (or saying) that something ‘hunted.’ As in, ‘I think that new idea really hunts.’ ”

McCracken observes that Wall Street lingo has typically sounded “muscular, capable, decisive, and in-the-know,” and not nearly as frenzied as “beast mode.” But today’s MBAs were reared on video games and are entering a Wall Street that recently tanked the global economy and has become the frenetic domain of quants (the math geniuses that run the financial markets) that buy and drop stocks in a fraction of a second. Who could survive the melee that is modern finance, save for someone with the improbable strength of a video-game action hero?

Business Tips: Trade-Offs

Trade-Offs

We live in a world where time, energy, and resources are finite. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, you only have so much available energy, and at any given time there’s an upper limit on the amount of money you’re able to spend. What do you do when you can’t do everything you want?

A Trade-off is a decision that places a higher value on one of several competing options. 

You can’t have everything you want all of the time. Even if your bank account is large enough to purchase a private island, you’re still faced with the decision of which private island to buy. You may want it all, but you can’t have it all, so you do the best you can by choosing the option with the characteristics that matter most to you at the moment you make the decision.

Every minute of every day, you and the people around you are making Trade-offs. Some of these Trade-offs are economic: which watch should you purchase? Some of them are temporal: should you visit your friend or go to a movie? Some of them are about effort: should you go to the team meeting or complete the overdue report?

Predicting how people will make certain Trade-offs is tricky — values change quickly, given the environment and context. Values are preferences — how much we want, desire, or place importance on one particular object, quality, or state of being versus another. What you value this morning may be different from what you value this afternoon or this evening. What you want today may be different from what you want tomorrow.

When making decisions about what to include in your offering, it pays to look for Patterns — how specific groups of people tend to value some characteristic in a certain context. The decisions you make about what to include and what to leave out will never make everyone happy, so perfection shouldn’t be your goal. By paying attention to the Patterns behind what your best customers value, you’ll be able to focus on improving your offering for most of your potential customers most of the time.

Just one more thing before you go … I’d like to ask you to do one important thing for me – spread the word about this article. 

That is all -

David

Redefine Age: Why A 20 Minute Nap Could Change Your Life

SLEEP ESSENTIALS: NAP FOR BETTER HEALTH

Why a 20-Minute Nap Could Change Your Life

Three benefits some short shuteye provides other than helping you be well rested.

While your boss may not appreciate the snoring in the office, the truth is that well-timed sleep actually boosts your effectiveness as a worker. “A brief mid-day nap can reduce levels of fatigue, improve reaction time, promote learning, and improve coordination,” says Michael A. Grandner, Ph.D., instructor and a member of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

There is, however, a right and wrong way to grab some quick shuteye. Try to sleep as close to the middle of the day as possible, preferably 8 hours after you wake up, says Grandner, or else it will be more difficult to go to bed at night. Ideally your snooze should be 20 to 30 minutes — it’s best for regulating brain functions and keeping you from feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck when waking up from deeper sleep. Keep reading for three sound reasons to rest your eyes right now. 

Improve Your Memory

A 2012 Northwestern University study showed participants could play a recently learned song on a keyboard more accurately after it played in the background of their afternoon nap. The reinforced tune helped consolidate the memory, making it more easily reactivated when awake, according to the study authors. Wondering why we’re pushing a catnap in place of simply a steaming cup of coffee to motivate your noggin’s memory? According to a University of California San Diego study, people did significantly worse in memory exercises when hyped up on caffeine compared to people who slept in the middle of the session.

Additionally, UC Berkeley research shows that memorised facts are briefly held in the brain’s hippocampus before being sent to the prefrontal cortex for more permanent storage, which occurs during your Stage 2 sleep, or the point you reach in a 20-minute nap. Without this transfer of memories, your hippocampus “fills up” like your voicemail inbox and wouldn’t be able to hold new information, meaning a siesta preps you for learning more stuff, concludes the study authors.

Relieve Stress

Looks like it’s possible to sleep your worries away: Night shift nurses who took two 15-minute naps during 9-hour work shifts reported feeling less stress and tension in a recent Japanese study. 

The researchers noted that if the medics followed a stricter snoozing schedule during their breaks, they would feel the napping benefits more strongly, such as feeling more alert. Need more convincing? In a study from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, students who dozed after taking a mentally taxing math test had significantly lower blood pressure and thus higher cardiovascular recovery than those who stayed awake.

Lose Weight

Immobility as a sort of calorie-burner? This sounds too good to be true. “What we know about sleep and weight loss, the more sleep-deprived you are, the less likely you are to lose weight,” says Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., author of The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep. If you’re consistently shorting yourself on pillow time, taking a longer, 90-minute nap that encompasses a full sleep cycle will help lower your sleep deficit and positively alter your levels of hormones ghrelin and leptin, making weight loss more likely, Breus says.

Leptin tells your brain when you’re full, while ghrelin gives you an appetite. Studies at the University of Chicago and Stanford University found that when participants slept less, leptin levels decreased while ghrelin increased, meaning the men felt more hungry and craved high-carb foods 45 percent more than those who got more shuteye.

That is all -

David

Motivational Monday: Are You Awake?

Are You Awake?

Far too many people drift through life waiting for “the good stuff.” They choose a career or a path in life with the expectation that that path will bring them something they seek — perhaps happiness. And if it doesn’t come — or they find themselves conflicted because they feel as if they chose poorly — they think, “Well, this is the path I chose, there’s no changing it now.”

But this becomes a self-limiting belief. There is no rule that says you cannot correct the course you’re on.

If you want to makes changes to improve yourself as a person, you can. And if you want to take action to change the trajectory of your life, you can do that, too.

You don’t have to sit back and watch your life pass you by thinking, “If only…” and regretting all the things you could have done, but chose not to.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

Remember: Living life to the fullest means continually reaching out for newer, richer, deeper, life-changing experiences. It means using those experiences as a means for personal growth and pushing the boundaries of yourself mentally, spirituality, and intellectually for the betterment of yourself and the world at large.

Living life to the fullest means taking an active role in your own development. It means steering the rudder of your own life and taking advantage of your unique and powerful potential as a person.

If you don’t like where you are in life or some aspect about yourself, you can take steps to change that. And if it sounds a little scary, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re on the right path. Dealing with discomfort, fear, and situations we don’t want be in — or situations that we are completely unfamiliar with — is an absolutely essential part of growth.

This is your life.

Here.

Today.

Right now.

Your life is in progress. Every day that passes is another day closer to your expiration date.

What you aim for and where you go in life as a result of striving to meet your goals is up to you.

“Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others. If you don’t aim for it all, you’ll never get it all. To aim for it requires that you know what you want.” — Richard Koch

If you want to make changes to yourself or your life, you can choose to make changes. But to do so means you have to be proactive and awake, not passive or asleep at the wheel.

So… are you awake?

That is all -

David