Friday Links: Men, Cats, and Awesomeness

In the print edition of Harvard Business Review, in response to this: “Men are not trying to score for our gender.” < — It sometimes seems otherwise, but I’m sure this is, most of the time, correct.

Pursuant to both this and EntitledCat: How to Work Out With Your Cats

Sometimes, you just have to know when it’s time to walk away. The Atlantic has a great article on the psychology of lost causes:

Once you’ve realized that you probably won’t succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn’t matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into something. If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn’t make sense to let them use up the years you’ve got left. An ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

Jen spoke about this same topic in Bullish: When To Make Massive And Ballsy Life Changes For Your Career:

If everything in your life is not working, all at the same time, it is actually fairly unlikely that incremental improvement will give you the results you want. If you have a terrible job in a terrible city where you live with a terrible boyfriend in too-close proximity to your terrible relatives, and you try to fix everything as it stands, it’s pretty likely that you will wear yourself out early on, and you will stop tinkering as soon as things become bearable again – that is, the goal will become relief, not awesomeness.

Does trying to be happy make us unhappy? Adam Grant details all the common mistakes people make when they search for happiness in all the wrong places. Jen talked about the usefulness of gratitude as an emotion in Bullish: Gratitude Is Nice, But Don’t Let It Keep You From Action.

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