Peter Shallard has been the Shrink For Entrepreneurs (one client is Michael Ellsberg).

He did a recent interview with Andrew Warner (Mixergy).

He has a site/service called Commit Action (started mid-2012) which is a service to help people fight Procrastinat Ion. It's a CoachIng service, for $130/mo.

He's defined "4 pillars" to achieve this:

• Specificity of goals - needs to be big enough to connect to a larger MissIon, but "What can I move forward, entirely on my own, in this day and this day alone?"

• Measurement - Tracking your actions (Gamificat Ion, Quantified Self) gets you over the hump of Delayed Gratification before the actual results will become visible. (That assumes the actions are the right path to the results. But certainly no action will probably lead to no results.)

• Accountabil Ity - public Commit Ment)

• Deadline - set yourself for every action/goal

TimBray notes Steven Pinker's mention (in Blank Slate) of Donald E Brown's list of Human Universals. Here's the complete alphabetical list, and Jorn Barger sorts it in Evolut Ion-ary order.

Roy Baumeister wonders "Is there anything good about men?" (Men And Women). Among other things, digs into the Larry Summers WomEn-and-science thing.

I’m suggesting the important differences between men and women are to be found in motivation rather than ability. What, then, are these differences? I want to emphasize two.

Perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group.

Carol Dweck contends that we don't serve our kids (Raising Kids, Educating Kids) by telling them how smart they are. For a few decades, it's been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent... "When we praise children for their intelligence," Dweck wrote in her study summary, "we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don't risk making mistakes." (Risk Management, FailUre). The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores. (Self Improvement) After reviewing those 200 studies, Roy Baumeister concluded that having high Self Esteem didn't improve grades or career achievement. It didn't even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort... Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their Meta Analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students' "shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions." Dweck's research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary (Extrins Ic) concern - they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down... But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to FailUre by exerting more effort - instead of simply giving up - is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, Persist Ence (or should tha be Resil Ience?), rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification.

The key, she found, isn't ability; it's whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed... "The MastEry-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something," Dweck says, and "learning goals" inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than "performance goals." Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process... The classroom workshop isn't feasible on a large scale; for one thing, it's too costly. So Dweck and Blackwell have designed a computer-based training module to simulate the live intervention. Their hip multimedia software, called Brainology, is still in development, but thanks to early buzz from a Time magazine article and Dweck's recent book, teachers have begun clamoring for it, one even asking to become a distributor.

Maria Popova examines the history of the ToDoList as recounted in John Tierney and Roy Baumeister's Will Power book.

(Ben Franklin references.)

In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik Effect and explains phenomena like EarWorm-s — when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. Originally, the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain’s way of ensuring goals are eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists. [It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. (Next Action)