All healthy human babies and young children display curiosity, suggesting this is an innate human trait. Exploring our environment and babbling questions appear almost universal in early childhood across cultures. As an adaptive trait, curiosity draws us to seek information and new experiences. It’s how we learn about ourselves, others, and the world. However, research … Read More
We all have those recurring fascinations we just can’t seem to shake. You know the ones — those diffuse obsessions and latent creative projects that linger in the back of your mind, calling to you even when you try your best to ignore them. Though you may not realize it, these ‘curiosity attractors’ often reveal … Read More
Whether it’s quitting a job, breaking up with someone, or leaving behind a place, we all have at one point or another to learn the difficult art of letting go. Unfortunately, learning to let go is much harder than holding on. Human beings have a tendency to define themselves through what they own, and so … Read More
The year had barely started, and I already felt nervously excited, but also slightly off balance. Writing a book in English while completing a PhD and running Ness Labs… Wasn’t I trying to bite more than I could chew? This is my 2023 annual review.
For generations, hard skills have been prioritized over soft skills. Today, engineering and computer science education still places a strong emphasis on building technical expertise through math, science, and programming courses, with little attention paid to fostering interpersonal abilities. Many parents and educators still operate under the assumption that academic achievement and hard skills should … Read More
When was the last time you stopped to truly observe your own life? Turning an anthropological lens on yourself might feel strange, but it can lead to invaluable insights, allowing you to uncover patterns, gain self-knowledge, and imagine new possibilities. Anthropologists ask fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to live in our world … Read More
“I’ve decided to take it easy at work this year and focus on myself.” I’ve recently been hearing variations of this sentence over and over again. Magazines are publishing stories about “the end of ambition” and how more people are taking extended sabbaticals. It seems like we need to make a constant choice between our … Read More
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Adults often as this question when chatting with a kid. Maybe it’s because the answer is often endearing (an astronaut!) or surprising (a YouTuber!), or because it’s a way to connect through a topic that speaks to us—work. We keep doing this to each other … Read More
Would you want to watch the same play with the same actors repeating the same lines over and over again, with just some small variations in their tone each time? You’d probably get bored pretty quickly. And yet, that’s what we often unconsciously do when making career and life decisions. If you ever applied for … Read More
It’s common to see progress as linear. When thinking about success, many people imagine a ladder or stairs going up. To progress, you need to climb each step one by one and get closer to the top. But that’s not the only model you can apply to visualize personal growth. In a linear model of … Read More