Erik's Blog​

Here’s what’s fresh in Erik’s world. ​
Erik Van Alstine

Elon Musk, Pilzer’s Island, and the Question of Universal Basic Income

How are we going to live in the next fifty years? According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the answer could be, largely off government handouts. In February Musk spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he envisioned a heavily automated world, creating massive unemployment, forcing governments to offer money to its citizens in the form of “Universal Basic

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Erik Van Alstine

Need a boost? Watch Nick Vujicic, amputee motivational speaker.

Book Excerpt: Automatic Influence: New Power for Change in Work and Life by Erik Van Alstine The optimist and the pessimist both experience the hard knocks of life. But they see the hard knocks in different ways. It’s hard to get this into our thick skulls, because we’re all heavily invested in the myth that bad circumstances make for bad

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Erik Van Alstine

Want love and happiness? Bo says, lower your expectations.

(This is the fourth post in a series about “anchoring” and its effect on our happiness.) Are you hindered in happiness? Are you lacking in love? Comedian Bo Burnham has some excellent advice at the end of this post. But first, let’s set the table for Bo’s point. Starting with the fact that we’re not alone in our struggle for

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Erik Van Alstine

Traffic Lights, Anchoring, and a New Path to Positivity

(This is the third post in a series about “anchoring” and its effect on our happiness.) Let’s say we drive across town on a road trip that goes through twenty traffic lights. When the lights are green we blaze through. When red, we stop. Let’s also say the typical trip stops us at ten of the twenty intersections. Now, let’s

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Erik Van Alstine

The “Anchoring Conspiracy” in Retail Sales

(This is the second post in a series about “anchoring” and its effect on our happiness.) Go to the mall, find the nearest jewelry store, and look into the display windows. What do you find? The super nice stuff. Wow, there’s a diamond necklace that costs $100,000.  Why do they display this? So we’ll go inside, look at a necklace

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Erik Van Alstine

Release the Anchor, Triple Your Positivity

Feel like something’s dragging you down? Holding you back? Chances are it’s what cognitive scientists describe as an anchor. Not a literal anchor. A mental one. “Anchoring” is a mental bias that, if set wrong, wreaks all sorts of havoc in our attitudes, emotions, and behaviors: Anchoring causes social media depression. Anchoring is the reason we spend too much at the

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Erik Van Alstine

3 Ways to Triple Your Positivity

Researchers who study optimism say the average person needs to triple their positivity. They measure ratios of positive-to-negative conversations in work teams, in marriages, and in the way we talk to ourselves, finding a massive gap between where we are and where we should be: Human flourishing starts at a 6-to-1 ratio and may peak at as much as 11-to-1.

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Erik Van Alstine

To Get Wisdom, Invest in Long-Form

Are we developing wisdom for the challenges of life? Are we getting good at the chess game of success? There are several ways to develop the power of wisdom, and one of them is the amount of time we invest into “long-form” content. There’s a difference between sh0rt-form and long-form information, and they have different effects on the way we

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Erik Van Alstine

Idols of Emotion

Love. Hate. Happiness. Fear. Anger. These words represent powerful emotions that move us to action. They’re deep in human nature, and are constantly at work in one form or another. Unfortunately, many have a mistaken idea about emotion that misleads us into error, regret and pain. Here are some phrases that reveal the mistake: Love is love. There’s no wrong

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Erik Van Alstine

Life is chess, not checkers.

How do I succeed? How can I find fulfillment? If there were a simple answer, I suspect everyone would be successful and fulfilled. But there isn’t. Ahh, an objector would say, but the great Chinese philosopher Confucius says, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Then we find out that Confucius didn’t say this. It’s a misattribution,

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Erik Van Alstine

3 Ways to Whip Useless Fears.

We all know what fear feels like. That feeling in the pit of our stomach. The spike in heart rate. Our hands sweat. Our mind runs fast and furious. Fear is an “emotional response to a perceived threat.” Whenever we believe something bad is about to happen, we feel fear. But if we’re wise, we quickly separate useful from useless

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