Have you ever wondered about your daily Niagara of words? ‘Language in Thought and Action’ by S.I. Hayakawa.

From the moment you wake up in the morning till the moment you go to bed, you are exposed to constant sources of information. Whether it’s your morning newspaper, your boss, a group of friends that you hang out with, or the multitude of feed applications on your smartphone; your brain is being flooded by a Niagara of words. “[…] by 2015, the sum of media asked for and delivered to consumers on mobile devices and to their homes would take more than 15 hours a day to see or hear. That volume is equal to 6.9 million-million gigabytes of information, or a daily consumption of nine DVDs worth of data per person per day.” How Much Media? 2015, Report on American Consumers" Each of these sources has the power to shape your thoughts and inevitably your actions by carefully manipulating controlling the nature, time and placement of the content. Like it or not, every day you draw new inferences from things you hear about people you may or may not know and create subtle judgments in your mind.

There are many more ways to get a presentation wrong than there are to get it right. Good presentors (and presentations) are hard to come by. But I believe it is a skill that can be learned and acquired.

Robert Waldinger¹, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School talks about a famous long term study of adult development done by Harvard and shares his findings about what made the lives of the participants happy or sad as they aged. While the talk itself isn’t very detailed and offers a too long, didn’t read summary, the publications page² on the website offers a comprehensive and has an interesting list of findings. ⊕ Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness

Reading is one of the fundamental habits that we learn as a child. Even before our temporal abilities are decently developed (usually by the end of third month after birth), people sing songs, lullabies, read stories or make interesting noises to stimulate our brain. Not much later, reading becomes out favorite activity where we have already irritated our parents to read Winnie-the-Pooh over and again for umpteenth time. This habit, however, grows only up to the teenage years and then starts to diminish, only to increase again later in life.1