Skip to main content

Work on Grining from Year to Year

 That work life is no laughing matter appears to be corroborated by a recent study done by two Standford University academics, who found that cachinnations start becoming less frequent from a median age of 23, or about the time when people get jobs. Whether or not the researchers' prime conclusion– that laughter is " under-leveraged" in offices and can be a gamechanger, professionally , if properly utilized — is solid enough to take Humour Seriously (also the little of their book), it is true that laughter is not exactly a common workplace sound. It is heartening at their survey of the daily laughing habits of 1.4 million people from 166 countries showed that four -year-olds did so up to 300 times a day. But their additional finding that 40 years olds clocked up that same number over 10 weeks is a sobering statistic. Of course, if that cohort also laughed as frequently as four year olds, it would be quite alarming, not to mention distracting, in workplaces. 

That laughter is often the best medicine is well known; that understanding the power of humour is as important for a successful career as say, mastering financial trading strategies, may also be borne out by fact one day if this pair's findings are taken seriously. Meanwhile, we are all ears about their contention that levity can be used positively in workplaces.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Women are, Indeed, The Fairer Sex

  Fairness has been coloured by its association with creams, lotions and discrimination against darker skin tones. However, the word does have several other non-racial connotations, and in that context it is heartening to note that the findings of recent research in the US corroborates that women - Regardless of ethnicity- are indeed the fairer sex. And the difference is more than cosmetic, as among the 3.3 lakh people surveyed in 67 countries, women outnumbered men on prioritising fairness, purity(of intention, that is ) and compassion when it came to taking ethical decisions. While the finding makes a case for putting more women in places where fairnessvl counts, the fact that the divide between the sexes on this matter is more pronounced in the supposedly more gender-equal western nations comes as a surprise. After all, the conventional wisdom is that shades of opinion on fairness are more fraught in developing economies. Another recent study conducted in the US concluded that w...

Europe's plague Joke Renaissance

 Laughing at the face of coronavirus is getting contagious in that continent With much of Europe abd Britain getting back under lockdown covers with Covid relurking,  the cradle of dodgy pandemic jokes is having a renaissance. The chaps who brought the world the Teutonic Bubonic Plague Jokebook— the Black Death supposedly the prime reason for Germans losing their sense of humour — are already guffawing with fear. The strategy this time seems to be any dearth of mirth will be the birth of death. So, as cracks like the corona virus also keeping their versions of pub and restaurant timings —it's rule-abiding Europe for the critters too, you see— go viral, who knows, one may even have a new healthy obsession with Eros and Thanatos, rather than a prolonged taste for organic food and EU Rules of Origin Laws.  Remember, this is the continent of the original Coveni, Covidi, Covici( I came down with Covid , I saw Covid, I conqured Covid), not to mention the very name ' Coronavirus...

Simple Solutions For No-Fly Zones

 The unfortunate incident last week of the main in France who had a narrow escape when his house burned down because his attempt to swat a fly with an electric racket ignited a leaking gas cylinder underlines a the dangers if complicating simple tasks. If not an old-fashioned swatter, a rolled-up newspaper could have accomplished the deep more efficiently with considering the fate of that fly remains unknown. The efficacy of old-fashioned methods to deal with annoying flies has been immortalised in the Brothers Grimm 1812 tale, The Valiant Little Tailor, who dispatched no less than 'seven at one blow' and leveraged that feat to eventually become a king. An American cartoonist named Rube Goldberg became a by-word for the propensity to invent convoluted contraptions to perform simple tasks because of his sketches bon the subject. His cartoon Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin, published in 1931 has become a meme for complex contrivances; but nearly a century bof techno...