The Divorcé's Guide to Marriage - Five Lessons Divorced People Learn About Marriage

Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces

Sometimes it takes going through a bad marriage to figure out what makes a good marriage. Five strategies for a successful, happy marriage from divorced people who learned these lessons the hard way. Elizabeth Bernstein has details on Lunch Break. Photo: AFP/GettyImages.

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.
People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.
Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise and that they resolve to change next time. "Divorced individuals who step back and say, 'This is what I've done wrong and this is what I will change,' have something powerful to teach others," says Terri Orbuch, a psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and author of the new book "Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship." "This is marriage advice learned the hard way," she says

Dr. Orbuch has been conducting a longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, collecting data periodically from 373 same-race couples who were between the ages of 25 and 37 and in their first year of marriage in 1986, the year the study began. Over the continuing study's 25 years so far, 46% of the couples divorced—a rate in line with the Census and other national data. Dr. Orbuch followed many of the divorced individuals into new relationships and asked 210 of them what they had learned from their mistakes. (Of these 210, 71% found new partners, including 44% who remarried.) This is their hard-earned advice.

Don't Innovate, Imitate

By Jonathan Moules

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery. It is one of the shrewdest ways to become a successful entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are often mistaken for inventors. They are not.
There are some very entrepreneurial inventors, but they are an exception. Most entrepreneurs take another person's technological breakthrough and use their skills in mobilizing resources, publicity, salesmanship, and financial management to create a viable business.

Inventors create the technology, but entrepreneurs turn it into something of economic value. It is possible to go a stage further than this, however, because people do not just invent things, such as cars or personal computers, they come up with ideas for new services that people need and ways of providing them.

Many successful entrepreneurs have built great businesses by doing what someone else has done, only better. This demonstrates that originality in entrepreneurship is actually an over-rated virtue. Imitation, on the other hand, is not just the sincerest form of flattery. It is one of the shrewdest ways to become a successful rebel entrepreneur.

An imitator in action

Image via CrunchBase

Take Lovefilm, the highly successful UK-based startup that has made renting DVD films and television box sets across Europe as easy as going to the post box or getting online. In January 2011, barely 12 years after it was founded, the company had over 1,500,000 members, each paying a monthly subscription of about £8, a catalogue of over 67,000 film and television program titles, and over 4 million rentals per month across five countries.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos starts his High Order Bit presentation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise of Lovefilm's business model is simple. Customers pay a monthly fee to receive a number of DVDs or games discs in the post, or the right to download a given quantity over the Internet to a TV or tablet device. They can play the games and watch the films as much as they like, and keep them as long as they like, but they will not get a new one until they return the ones they already have. Lovefilm is able to do this because in most western European countries there are two very reliable delivery mechanisms--one very modern (the Internet) and the other Victorian (the postal service).
Lovefilm's customers pay a subscription to the company, log onto the website and set up lists of favorite films or games, which are ranked as high, medium or low priority. Lovefilm then picks one or two of these, depending on the customer's price plan, and according to availability in the warehouse, and pops them in the mail. Both the old and the new technology work.
Since its creation, Lovefilm has developed its offering to allow customers to bypass the old-economy postal system entirely by streaming video over the Internet to get films 'on demand' on their home computer, games console, TV, tablet computer or smartphone.
Pretty neat, huh? Yes, except Lovefilm is completely unoriginal.

The original

Image via CrunchBase

Reed Hastings pioneered the idea of DVD rental by post in California back in 1997, allegedly after his shock at receiving a bill for $40 in late fees from Blockbuster. Hastings had to fine-tune his original idea to make it work. Initially the business model for his company, Netflix, was for customers to pay for each rental individually. In September 1999, he changed this and Netflix started offering monthly subscriptions. The pay-per-rental model was dropped completely a few months later.
It was not for another three years that Lovefilm began trading in Europe. There were advantages to this. By that time, people had been able to see that the idea worked, helping Lovefilm's founders to put their case when they needed backing from investors or to recruit key personnel.

Founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, class of 1983 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Amazon bought Lovefilm in 2011, making multimillionaires of its investors. This brought the links with Netflix full circle, given that Lovefilm is now part of a U.S. company.
Amazon had seen the potential of the online DVD rental market at first hand with Netflix. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, has a reputation for constantly trying to stretch the Amazon brand into new areas. His approach has often been to try things himself before buying one of the best players in the market--another way of grabbing someone else's good idea. This is exactly what he did with the online DVD rental model. Amazon tried building its own video rental service, based on people downloading titles from its website. This was not as successful as Mr. Bezos would have liked, so he bought Lovefilm instead.
Imitator brands have clearly been a benefit for Amazon. In a way they have acted as the research and development function of Amazon, honing the service until it was ready for Amazon to acquire.

"Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book Urges Us to Unplug

BY DAVID ZAX @ fastcompany.com

 

In her new book, an MIT professor shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, "proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."

Sherry Turkle, has been an ethnographer of our technological world for three decades, hosted all the while at one of its epicenters: MIT. A professor of the social studies of science and technology there, she also heads up its Initiative on Technology and Self. Her new book, Alone Together, completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology. It can be, at times, a grim read. Fast Company spoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company's bottom line. 

 

The title of your book, Alone Together, is chilling.

If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you're alone, you get into this situation where you're continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You're alone but looking for approval as though you were together--the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody's validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it's your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook...we're losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.

You only mention Twitter a few times in the book. What are your thoughts on Twitter?

I think it's an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's, "I share therefore I am." Sharing as you're thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you're thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you're thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don't have an anti-Twitter position. It's just not everything.

You write in your book that we today seem to view authenticity with the same skittishness that the Victorians viewed sex.

For some purpose, simulation is just as good as a real. Kids call it being "alive enough." Making an airline reservation? Simulation is as good as the real. Playing chess? Maybe, maybe not. It can beat you, but do you care? Many people are building robot companions; David Levy argues that robots will be intimate companions. Where we are now, I call it the "robotic moment," not because we have robots, but because we're being philosophically prepared to have them. I'm very haunted by these children who talk about simulation as "alive enough." We're encouraged to live more and more of our lives in simulation.

 

 

Read more here.

 

 

The power of lonely: What we do better without other people around

(Tim Gabor for The Boston Globe)

By Leon Neyfakh

You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us smarter and more creative. Hanging out with friends makes us more emotionally mature and better able to deal with grief and stress.

Spending time alone, by contrast, can look a little suspect. In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.

But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

 

“There’s so much cultural anxiety about isolation in our country that we often fail to appreciate the benefits of solitude,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University whose book “Alone in America,” in which he argues for a reevaluation of solitude, will be published next year. “There is something very liberating for people about being on their own. They’re able to establish some control over the way they spend their time. They’re able to decompress at the end of a busy day in a city...and experience a feeling of freedom.”

 

Solitude has long been linked with creativity, spirituality, and intellectual might. The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. The poet James Russell Lowell identified solitude as “needful to the imagination;” in the 1988 book “Solitude: A Return to the Self,” the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr invoked Beethoven, Kafka, and Newton as examples of solitary genius.

 

But what actually happens to people’s minds when they are alone? As much as it’s been exalted, our understanding of how solitude actually works has remained rather abstract, and modern psychology — where you might expect the answers to lie — has tended to treat aloneness more as a problem than a solution. That was what Christopher Long found back in 1999, when as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst he started working on a project to precisely define solitude and isolate ways in which it could be experienced constructively. The project’s funding came from, of all places, the US Forest Service, an agency with a deep interest in figuring out once and for all what is meant by “solitude” and how the concept could be used to promote America’s wilderness preserves.

 

“Aloneness doesn’t have to be bad,” Long said by phone recently from Ouachita Baptist University, where he is an assistant professor. “There’s all this research on solitary confinement and sensory deprivation and astronauts and people in Antarctica — and we wanted to say, look, it’s not just about loneliness!”

 

Continue reading here.

 

Walter Mosley: The Older You Are, The More You Live In The Past

Big Think Editors @ bigthink.com

Walter Mosley is the author of more than 34 critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring the character Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into 21 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel.

"A lot of people get upset at young people," says Novelist Walter Mosley, "They say, 'Young people aren’t living up to their potential. Young people are interested in things which are shallow, which are meaningless, which are unimportant. But the truth is, is that the older you are, the more you’re thinking is historical, and the more historical things become—especially in our world today, where things change so quickly because of technology, the more they’re invalid."

Aspiring writers shouldn't measure their success in dollars and cents or fame, says Mosley, but rather in their ability to entertain people with their writing. "Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, you know, Victor Hugo. I mean all of these people, they’re popular writers. They’re writing to the broadest range of people," explains Mosley. "Yeah, it’s great literature, but it was popular literature when it was written.  And that’s the case with almost all of the literature that survives starting from Homer. You know? It’s the adventure; it’s the story; it’s the fight; it’s people falling in love; it’s people with deep, you know, personality disorders who succeed anyway; you know, beyond themselves. That’s what great literature is."  

Continue reading here.