Sounds too good to be true? Just give me a second to explain. This quarter, at Stanford, I’m taking a class called The Pursuit of Happiness. As you can imagine, it’s been a pretty interesting class. We’re looking at psychological studies of happiness to try and figure out how people can become happier. Good stuff.

I want to share a definition of stress that I learned the other day…

Stress is our appraisal of whether or not we can handle what we think we have to with what we have available to us.

Okay so you’re stressed, right? Stop for a second, think about why you’re stressed. It’s probably because you think you have too much to do and not enough time, right? Just the thought of it is raising your blood pressure (note: this is very bad for you, stress also lowers your immune system, makes you fat, and does lots other fun stuff. Expect me to post more on this at a later date). Take a deep breath, and realize, that, you actually can handle it. Come on, you’ve made it this far, and not for nothing I’m sure. So relax, there’s nothing in your day that you can’t handle. I’m pretty sure of this because you have to handle it every day and have survived as of yet. So stop stressing and get working!

I found this definition helped me mentally talk myself down from stress really easily. I’d love to hear your opinon though. What do you do to combat stress? Does this help you?

Tomorrow I, and many of my friends in my dorm, are going to get up to watch the inauguration (the festivities start at 8:30AM PST). Getting college students to get up for anything that early in the morning, even class, is hard. Getting them up for a speech and ceremony that will be recorded and therefore could be watched at any time can easily be classified as miraculous. My roommate, who has been known to sleep through lunch, professed downright disdain for anyone unwilling to wake up for this monumental moment.

If Obama can accomplish that then surely he can fix a trifling thing like the economy. Apparently, I am not alone in my thoughts. A recent New York Times poll shows that 83% of Americans think we are worse off now than five years ago, admitting that we are in some pretty tough times. Yet, despite that, 61% think that we will be better off in five years (and only 19% think that we will be worse off).

So, I’m going to wake up early tomorrow, hear the speech of our new president and dearly hope that he can turn this economy around. Will you be doing the same?

Often times being a perfectionist is considered a good trait. You get things done right. Nothing goes unnoticed. Your essays don’t have any spelling mistakes. Your emails are polite and well-worded. Your projects are always meticulously planned and implemented. What could be wrong about that?

But, to be slightly melodramatic, there’s also the dark side of perfectionism. Firstly, you’re probably wasting time. Is it really necessary to triple and quadruple check that email? Will the world really end if there’s one spelling mistake?

Secondly, and perhaps worse, is the things you don’t do because your worried you won’t do them right. This post was actually inspired by me trying to figure out why I have been unable to blog for a month, despite the best of intentions. I realized that I was holding out for perfection. I couldn’t post just anything, it had to be the “perfect” post. Witty, intelligent, interesting. Finally, I realized that that I was allowing my perfectionism to run away with me.

Maybe you have the same problem. Here are 5 reasons you should get over your perfectionism:

1. You’re wasting time. As a perfectionist that should bother you. What about the idea of perfect productivity? Can that really be achieved when you’re obsessing over the details?
2. Perfection is unattainable. This is obvious. But somehow easy to forget. Repeat it to yourself.
3. Perfectionism leads to stress. Stress is bad for you. WebMD reports that stress hormones rose higher in perfectionists that others in a high pressure situation such as an interview. Perfectionism has also been associated with depression.
4. It’s making you scared of mistakes. This is holding you back from what you really want to achieve. Start to fear regret of missed opportunities more than mistakes.
5. It’s holding you back from being happy. As a perfectionist myself, I can understand the desire to say I will be happy if … But this probably isn’t true. There’s a psych study that shows that lottery winners revert to their previous state of happiness within a year. Your life will never be perfect, learn to be happy anyway.

So now, belatedly, I have my New Year’s resolution: to make sure my perfectionism stays part-time.

This is a phrase becoming all too common in the lives of college seniors. Thanks for your interest but…

our company has recently entered a hiring freeze, we had far too many qualified candidates to interview them all, etc. etc.

Around September or so my friends and I started to get worried about getting jobs in a tough economy. The responses we got from our counselors and relatives though were mostly positive. “You’re a senior at Stanford, I’m sure you’ll do fine.” “Even if the job market is down, you’ll still find a job.” We fervently wish this to still be true, but it certainly has been worse than expected.

The stock market crash happened in the middle of fall recruiting schedules. One of my friends got an email from an investment bank saying that they were no longer hiring, but she could still go to the interview if she wanted (how generous of them, right?). Another of my friends was told by a consulting firm that he was great and would be the perfect candidate except that they barely had enough space for the returning interns they had already offered positions too. Many are turning to graduate school instead, hoping that the job market will have improved by the time they finish. Graduate school applications are up, making it more competitive now than ever.

I keep getting surprised by how often my smart, qualified friends are getting turned down for jobs they would be perfect for. Then, though I came across this article by Penelope Trunk: Reason to give thanks: there is no job shortage for young people. And I just couldn’t help wondering if she was living in a different universe.

• Her main proof seems to come from a Beyond.com study that job postings for candidates with 0-3 years experience increased from September to October in 2008.
• I checked out the actual study and noted that job postings actually decreased for candidates with less than one year of experience (which may be the situation for many college grads).
• Postings increased for candidates with 1-3 years of experience, which is certainly hopeful. But, while job postings for these candidates went up by 3.68%, the resume postings for the same group went up by 6.33%, implying that demand for jobs is increasing more than the supply.
• I also suspect that the job postings will decrease from October to November, but I don’t think Beyond.com has published those results yet. It’s pretty clear to us all that things have been getting steadily worse since October, not better.

Now, I don’t want to be a downer. By all means, I’d love to believe that college graduates will not be affected by our current depression, but the reality around me is all too clear.

Think back to an event that happened in your life or a movie you just watched. Try to remember what happened. Does that retelling seem remarkably like a comic strip?

I’m reading an article called “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” for my media psychology class. The authors, Hochberg and Brooks, argue that we remember movies in comic strip form. They add “Comic strips may be popular because they approximate the ways in which we think about the visual world.” It’s a technique to help us remember the salient moments without storing the unimportant data. 

I’d never really thought about this before, but now that I have I can’t help seeing it as a fairly accurate way to describe memories. Does knowing this affect how we should write? Design advertisements or commercials? Then again maybe we’re already using these techniques — think about storyboarding for movies and advertisements.

There’s been this idea for some time now that the internet is democratizing communication. Anyone can have a blog and their ideas with the world. Anyone can be a journalist. It’s easy; it takes 30 seconds to post something. But should it?

I wonder if the ease of communication is making what we’re saying shallow. If I can post on my blog whenever, do I spend as much time on each post? There’s very little opportunity cost to communicating online — clearly that leads to more quanitity — but is it decreasing quality? Mark Slouka, author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-tech Assault on Reality, says in a Harper’s Magazine forum “there’s an incredible shallowness to most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.” Do you think before you type?

Do you read articles written by professional journalists or hobbyists? I find this new form of citizen jouralism most helpful when it comes to tech news/blogging. Before, you would have had to subscribe to a magazine that would have become obsolete by the time it comes out. Now, I subscribe to RSS feeds of the top tech blogs and I know when a new product comes out instantly. Even if the posts aren’t always top-quality writing, what I care about is the news, the annoucement, the main idea — not who wrote it.  But who’s doing the long-term journalism projects? Who’s writing long thoughtful pieces about, well, almost anything? And does anyone read them, if they do exist? I find myself only reading the first page of articles and then skimming the rest. Is this change in journalism a demand or supply problem (or both)? We don’t have the attention span to read the long articles and so the newspapers aren’t writing them anymore.  Is this a change we’re okay with? Do we have a choice?

Now is a difficult time to be a senior in college. By which I mean it is a terrible time to look for a job. The dreaded what are you doing after college question has now changed into “You’re going to try to get a job? NOW? Good luck.” While I envy my peers who are heading for graduate school, I, and many others, must brave the job market in a time when the President recently declared “Our entire economy is in danger.” Those words sent chills to our previously optimistic hearts.

I shouldn’t complain though, because at least I wasn’t planning on doing investment banking. I know too many friends who majored in econ because it would help them get well-paid i-banking jobs… not so much anymore. One of my friends was working on her cover letters for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch when they ceased to exist. Now she’s not sure if there are any investment banking jobs left.

I recently met with my college advisor to discuss career options. I shared with him my desire to go into online marketing or business development in the Bay Area. He basically said I shouldn’t be choosy and should try to get any job available. His pessimism (hopefully not just realism) made me worry, and certainly I am not alone in this. Are these really the worst of times?

In July, Facebook revealed the “new Facebook.” Surprisingly, they made it optional. I tried it out, decided I didn’t like, and then went back to the old Facebook. According to Mashable, Facebook says only 40% of its users have even tried the new design, and some of those, like me, chose to go back to the old design after trying it. Facebook reported that “nearly 30 million” users had stuck with the new Facebook — but thats out of about 100 million total.

Now Facebook has decided that they are going to make the new design permanent. My Facebook was just forcibly switched today. It’s hard for me to pinpoint why I don’t like it. I miss the wall now that its integrated with everything else in the feed. It might just be general dislike of change. But my personal view of the new Facebook is not my point here.

I’m curious about their idea of a gradual changeover and whether its been a positive or negative influence over all. I suspect that by giving users the ability to stick to the old Facebook they increased their attachment to it. I wouldn’t have been that upset or surprised if Facebook has just suddenly shifted over in July. Now that I’ve decided to stick to the old design for so long, I’ve become even more against the new one. By giving users the choice and then taking it away they made a story of it — there are various groups against the new facebook and many users are petitioning them to change it. Of course, the same sort of hubbub was made about newsfeed, and now everyone seems okay with that, so I think this too will blow over. However, I think it would have been a better decision to just change all at once instead of pretending users had a choice in the matter. What do you think? Was the gradual change a good idea?

My grandmother had a problem. She liked where she lived, but there was a roundabout near her house where everyone would pile their garbage. It smelled; it looked bad. It needed to go. Since this was the 1970s in Mexico City she couldn’t rely on the government to clean up. A master of spin far ahead of her time, my grandmother had an idea. She went out and bought a four-foot-high statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe – the patron saint of Mexico) and she put it the roundabout in the midst of all the garbage along with a vase of flowers.

The next time she passed the roundabout she noticed that that no one was piling their garbage there anymore. The next week people started taking away the garbage that was still there. A few weeks after that she noticed that there were new vases with flowers joining hers. Someone was sweeping in front of the statute. By the time five years had passed the center of the roundabout had gone from a garbage dump to an open air chapel where informal services were held once a week. True story.

Now, this could be a story about the power of religion, but I think its more truly a story of spin. With one simple statue, my grandmother changed the connotations of the space. Instead of being “the garbage dump” it became a shrine — she made it taboo to put garbage there. There’s a lesson in that: cultural and social norms influence our actions more than we realize. She didn’t have to yell, call the police, or pay a lot of money to remove the garbage. Instead she figured out how she could get people to want to clean up the space. My grandmother was brilliant.

How should we judge a speech from our political candidates? We talk about their charisma, their talking points, their promises, and their gestures. What about simply looking at their words? In a recent article Wired posted word clouds of speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions. Words that are said more frequently are bigger (color doesn’t matter). I’m not seriously suggesting we evaluate our candidates this way, but it is worth a look. Can we learn anything from these word clouds? In case you’re curious, these word clouds were generated from wordle.net.

First, Barack Obama’s speech:

Second, John McCain’s speech: