Recycling, the Zeigernik Effect, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg
By: Michelle Loucadoux
Tags: Writing, Writers On Writing, Community, Featured Stories

Recycling, the Zeigernik Effect, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Photo by Third Serving on Unsplash

We are proud to have so many thoughtful and creative writers that contribute to The Innovation. Every week, we choose seven stories that stood out to us, either because of their exceptional insight, because of their innovative subject matter, or because of their fresh perspective.

These stories will be listed along with excerpts below, but you can also find them featured on the home page of the publication, updated every Monday right after this newsletter gets to your inboxes. Hopefully, the snippets below will encourage you to click on the links, enjoy some great writing, and show our writers some love.

Without further ado, here are this week’s featured stories:

Some of us are playing the short game on autopilot. And when that happens, we are no longer playing the game, but being played by the short game. The seduction, the contagion, keep us asking for more. This microwave is fast, but the other one is faster. This data package is good, but give me the one that’s better. This smartphone is new — but I really want the one that’s newer. It’s the game of faster, newer, bigger, better. It’s a game where the internal is the servant, and the external is the master.

In disposable societies worldwide, buy, use and toss would seem to be the mantra used by too many. We dispose of things. Our garbage cans of blue and grey line driveways where they are waiting to be picked up by the recycling trucks. The average American produces 1,704 pounds of garbage per year, roughly three times the global average, according to a new report by the research firm Verisk Maplecroft.

For many of us, describing ourselves is an activity that blurs the lines between how we see ourselves today and who we are looking forward to being. I would see myself, for example, as an activator, even if, in the current scheme of things, I am not fully realizing my activator potential. I know who I can be, and that influences the way I see myself today. That’s not what happens when we write a memoir. Looking back, we tend to see what’s missing or is still yet to come. The unrealized potential. That’s because, for most of us, our life decisions have not yet allowed us to feel complete. As it stands, our memoirs are filled with unfulfilled goals, dampened by the reality of unrealized potential. Unfortunately, for many of us, our memoir does not move beyond that.

3. High achievers foster robust personal networks. Many of these stories feature a moment where personal connections yielded unprecedented opportunity. Sometimes these connections arose from hard work and outreach, and sometimes they emerged by chance. Either way, fostering high-quality relationships can yield incredible, unexpected opportunities. Ruth Bader Ginsburg struggled to find clerkships when she started her law career because employers were reluctant to hire a mother. A professor of hers, Gerald Gunther, called up a Judge in the Southern District of New York and personally vouched for her, securing her the position and helping launch her incredible career.

To-do lists can be hard to use. But if they’re too hard to use, why do we make them? Many To-do lists contain tasks that are just distractions, especially when they are phone apps. They give you the illusion of control. The problem is most To-do lists become a rat’s nest of conflicting priorities. Everything becomes jumbled up together. They can be so overwhelming; we can abandon them as soon written. It becomes a random check-list but without rhyme or reason.

We need to understand how short-term memory works to understand the Zeigarnik phenomenon. Short-time memory is limited in capacity, so in order to hold on to pieces of information, we have to keep rehearsing them, and this requires mental effort. People use tricks to constantly pull memories back into awareness — the Zeigarnik effect is one of them. We better remember uncompleted tasks by thinking of them more often.