What if a commencement speech told you to assume the worst?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief and humorous book from 2018 by Carl Hiassen titled Assume the Worst: The graduation speech you’ll never hear. Amazon has sample of first eight pages. It’s just 64 double-spaced pages, with hilarious cartoon illustrations by Roz Chast. Here’s a paraphrase from it:

 

 “This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration.

 

That’s not what you need. You need a warning.

 

After an uncommonly long career observing and writing about misbehavior, I have one piece of advice as you launch yourself from college: assume the worst.

 

Based on the last six thousand years of human history, it’s the only sensible way to proceed. Lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointments. It will also set you up for heart-lifting surprises on those occasions when someone you meet turns out to be unexpectedly honorable, generous and selfless.

 

…. 1. Live each day as if it’s your last.

      As wise and appealing as this might sound, it’s actually terrible advice. If you live every day as if it’s your last, you won’t accomplish a damn thing. You’ll soon run out of money, your car will get repossessed, you’ll be evicted from your apartment, and the person you’re living with will dump you for somebody with a mid-level management job at BrandsMart.

 

…. 2. If you set your mind to it, you can be anything you want to be.

     Total bullshit. Nobody can be absolutely anything they want to be – no matter how hard they wish, pray or try. I wanted to play major-league baseball like Willie Mays but unfortunately, I couldn’t run, catch or hit like Willie Mays. And I tried. Really hard. By eighth grade I’d bagged the whole fantasy and moved on.

 

…. 3. Try to find goodness in everyone you meet.

     Another waste of time. Relationships aren’t supposed to be reclamation projects. The humane qualities of any new acquaintance should be evident in the first five minutes of conversation – ten minutes, tops.

 

…. 4. Don’t be quick to judge others.

     Are you kidding? If you don’t learn how to judge others – and judge fast – you’ll get metaphorically trampled from now until the day you die.

 

…. To sum up.

     Figure out what you’re good at, and get better at it. Along the way, don’t waste your time on people whose decency isn’t apparent when you first meet for a cup of coffee. Be an astute judge of character, and learn to judge quickly.

 

Read the news. Pay attention. Always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else’s cruel or stupid behavior.

 

Never stop worrying. Live each day as if your rent is due tomorrow.

 

And always, always be the one who sleeps near the campfire – the one who would make Darwin proud.”

 

My version of the book cover cartoon was assembled by adapting an anvil from Wikimedia Commons and a silhouette from OpenClipArt. 

 

Celebrating a joyful milestone of 3000 blog posts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just passed a joyful milestone - 3000 blog posts. My first pair of posts were over eighteen years ago on May 26, 2008. There have been 3,144,713 page views or an overall average of 1,048 per post. The five posts with the highest number of page views are:

 

25,900: October 27, 2009 - The 14 Worst Human Fears in the1977 Book of Lists: where did this data come from?

 

22,300: July 5, 2009 – Two types of speech outlines:speaking and preparation

 

17,200: February 6, 2019 – Is flip-chart a racist term?

 

8,980: December 29, 2011 – How can you easily draw dotted chalk lines on a blackboard?

 

7,490: December 6, 2021 - Most Americans are not terrified of public speaking

 

On July 22, 2024 I had blogged about Celebrating 2,700 blog posts. The first four then were the same as the current ones.

 

The image of a crate came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Small acts of joy bring big gains in happiness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting brief article by Darwin A. Guevarra, Xuhai ‘Orson” Xu, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas in the December 2025 issue of Scientific American titled Small, Easy Acts of Joy Mean Big Gains in Happiness. It describes how there is a free, globally available online resource called the Big Joy Project.

 

“People who sign up for this project receive a daily e-mail or text that includes a link to instructions for a five- to 10-minute micro act, defined as a short, simple activity for building joy. The opening micro act, for example, invites participants to listen to a 42-second audio clip of different people laughing, including the Dalai Lama and Tutu. It’s an uplifting moment designed to elicit a smile or chuckle. The rest of the activities are delivered each day for seven days and include making a gratitude list, doing something kind, reflecting on a core value, feeling loving-kindness (or a state of tenderness and consideration to others), reframing a difficult experience, celebrating another person’s joy and watching an awe-inspiring video….

 

By analyzing responses from 17,598 people from 169 countries and territories, we found that people reported higher emotional well-being, more positive emotions, lower stress, and even modest improvements in sleep quality and physical health.

 

It took surprisingly little time and effort for participants to feel better. Many well-being programs span eight weeks or more, but the Big Joy Project yielded meaningful changes after just one week. And the more micro acts people completed, the more their happiness improved.”

 

The image was modified from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

Two good recent articles about opening a speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two good, brief articles about opening a speech from earlier this year at the web site for the National Speakers Association. One is by Patricia Fripp on April 9, 2025 and titled Your First Thirty Seconds: Arouse Interest in Your Subject. She says:

 

“Transport the audience to a different time and place

 Stories are always a crowd pleaser

 Interesting statistics or little-known facts

 A powerful quotation

 A question”

 

Another is by Mark Sanborn on July 2, 2025 and titled Start Strong: How to Open a Speech the Right Way. He says to:

 

“ 1]  Promise a benefit

   2]  Pique interest

   3]  Relate a personal experience

   4]  Be a contrarian

   5]  Make a challenging statement

   6]  Use humor”

 

The cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Finding joy at work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some long, excellent publications about finding joy at work. For example, there is a 42-page pdf white paper by Jessica Perlo et al. in 2017 from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) titled IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work. It describes:

 

“The importance of joy in work (the ‘why’).

 

Four steps leaders can take to improve joy in work (the ‘how’).

 

The IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work: nine critical components of a system for ensuring a joyful, engaged workforce (the ‘what’).

 

Key change ideas for improving joy in work, along with examples from organizations that helped test them.

 

Measurement and assessment tools for gauging efforts to improve joy in work.”

 

And there is an article by Alex Liu at the Harvard Business Review in July 2019 titled Making Joy a Priority at Work. Another article by Megan Dalla-Camina at Psychology Today on December 12, 2023 is titled 6 Ways to Find More Joy at Work. 

 

And there is a 60-page pdf article by Amanda Cornett and Jeannine Herrick from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) in July 2024 titled Joy in Work Implementation Guide. On page 8 they mention nine key areas:

 

Physical and psychological safety

Meaning and purpose

Choice and autonomy

Recognition and rewards

Participative management

Camaraderie and teamwork

Daily improvement

Wellness and resilience

 

A section on page 47 about Spreading Joy begins:

 

“Joy deserves to be spread to others. You can create a ripple effect that starts with your team and then spreads to others. Be intentional and plan for how you will spread and scale your efforts. A workplace culture that prioritizes JOY IN WORK will typically use a layered approach continuously thinking through how the implementation steps look differently for SELF (the manager), INDIVIDUAL STAFF, TEAM, and the overall ORGANIZATION. If you’ve been successful with your SELF, STAFF, and TEAM what do you do next to spread it to others and throughout the ORGANIZATION.”

 

The cartoon was cropped from one at OpenClipArt. 

 

 

Aphantasia means not having a mind’s eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got and have been reading a 2025 book by Adam Zeman titled The Shape of Things Unseen: A new science of imagination. There is a Google Books preview to page 43 of it. On pages 13 and 14 he says:

 

“But Keat’s acute sensibility is deeply puzzling to the 2 – 3 percent of us who turn out to lack imagery entirely. The existence of people whose ‘powers’ of visualisation ‘are zero’ was noted by the remarkable Victorian psychologist Sir Edward Galton in the 1880s. But neither Galton himself nor his followers pursued this intriguing lead. In 2015, with colleagues in Edinburgh, I described 21 people who had always lacked a mind’s eye [Adam Zeman, Michela Dewar, and Sergio Della Salla, Cortex, 2105, Volume 73, pages 378 to 380: Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia], coining the term ‘aphantasia’ to denote this variation in human experience: we had borrowed Aristotle’s term for the capacity to visualize, phantasia, adding an ‘a’ to indicate absence. The public interest that followed came as a huge surprise: after five minutes on breakfast TV discussing the work, I watched emails dropping into my inbox many times every second. One of the most memorable came from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Blake Ross, the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, who wrote a feisty Facebook post about his realisation that he was aphatasiac: ‘If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. And mom’s face? Of course. You experience this differently, sure. Some of you see a photorealistic beach, others only a shadowy cartoon, Some of you can make it up, others only ‘see’ a beach they’ve visited. Some of you have to work harder to paint the canvas. Some of you can’t hang onto the canvas for long. But nearly all of you have a canvas. I don’t. I have never visualiszed anything in my entire life. I can’t ‘see’ my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought ‘counting sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.’

 

Many others wrote along similar lines – one contact wrote of ‘the amazing click of realization we all get when we first heard about it.’ There turned out to be a substantial community of aphantasic folk who had long been trying to articulate this quirk in their psychological nature and were glad of a term with which to describe it.

 

We shall return to the recent discovery of aphantasia. For now, the existence of folk who get by perfectly well without a mind’s eye – indeed in some cases, like Blake Ross’s, without any conscious sensory imagery at all – underlines the huge variability of our imaginative experience and inner lives. This helps to explain my teenage puzzlement at a lively but hazy recollection of the gallery: I have average imagery vividness, but it extends across the sensory spectrum – I can see in my mind’s eye, hear in my mind’s ear, walk with my mind’s legs with reasonable ease. When I recalled the gallery, I precisely imagined being there – the feel of the boards beneath my feet, the still gallery air, the scent of canvas, a certain mood, as well as the look of the paintings. The ability to re-experience events in this richly integrated way – much as we experienced them in the first place – is a key source of our sense that our recollected or imagined memories are ‘true’, even when the fine details prove to be elusive.”

 

There also is a magazine article by Larrissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker for October 27, 2025 titled Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound. And there is another 20-page pdf article with 165 references by Feiyang Jin, Shen-Mou Hsu, and Yu Li in Vision on September 22, 2024 titled A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural Basis, and Theory Development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Yet another article by David J. Wright et al. at Frontiers in Psychology on October 15, 2024 is titled An international estimate of the prevalence of differing visual imagery abilities. They surveyed 3049 people with the results shown above on a bar chart. Just 1.2% had aphantasia. Another 3% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.9% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.9% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second bar chart shows similar results just for 887 Canadians in that larger sample. Just 1.7% had aphantasia. 3.6% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.1% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.6% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

Still another article by Rish P. Hinwar and Anthony J. Lambert at Frontiers in Psychology on October 14, 2021 is titled Anauralia: The Silent Mind and Its Association With Aphantasia.

 

The cartoon was assembled using images for an eye and mind from OpenClipArt.

 

 

A Change This manifesto and a book by Laura Huang on trusting your gut feel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a ChangeThis manifesto by Laura Huang on July 30, 2025 titled Trusting Your Gut Feel: Listening to What Whispers, Not What Screams. It also is presented as a 9-page pdf. In large orange lettering she says that:

 

“Intuition is the process that leads to a final moment of recognition that we call our gut feel.

 

Gut feel is fully and absolutely effective in the right contexts – inadequate, even damaging, in the wrong ones.

 

Gut feel is the result of data plus experience, colliding and combining to create a remarkable reaction, not unlike the nuclear reaction that occurs when atoms collide.”

 

Laura refers to her 2025 book, You Already Know: The science of mastering your intuition. There is a brief Google Books preview ending on page 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 3 starting on page 23 is titled Gut Feel Is Sensed in Three Ways and is subtitled Water presents as a liquid, solid or gas. Our gut feel manifests in three forms too. On page 28 there is a 2x2 table, my color version of which is shown above.  It shows her three types of intuition based on priors and prompts: Jolt, Eureka, and Spidey Sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 4 starting on page 33 is titled Gut Feel Doesn’t Lie and subtitled For complex and chaotic problems, gut feel can always be trusted.  On page 51 there is a table, my version of which is shown above, describing how to solve four types of problems: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 8 starting on page 101 is titled Emotional: How Do I Feel That?  and subtitled Our embodied gut feel is honed when we perceive where in our bodies we physically feel signals. On page 112 she has a 2x2 chart from another article describing The Emotional Circumplex, my color version of which is shown above.  

 

The cartoon came from OpenClipArt.