The newspaper said it very clearly. “At 2 AM, you should set your clocks back one hour.” And so, she set her alarm for 2 AM, waking up in the middle of the night to set back every clock in her house at the scheduled time.

Yes, she followed the rules to the letter. But was that the best way to do it? Would the time cops have found out if she had changed her clocks the night before, or the morning after?

Not everyone is a natural rule breaker, but if you can’t take the plunge with your own clocks, perhaps that’s something to work on.

I just read Hugh McLeod’s book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. This is the book version of his 13,000 word post how to be creative, which has been read by over a million people, and is a must-read if you’re not one of those million. And you can read more about Ignore Everybody here.

I don’t remember how different that post is from the book, but they’re probably very similar. The main difference may be that a way-too-long post works better as a bit-too-short book. Anyway, the book retains his wisdom, his cynicism, and most importantly, his cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards.

And by turning it into a book, Hugh gives us yet one more key to creativity: if you can’t think of what to write a book about, first write a blog post that a million people want to read. You now have a best seller just waiting to be published.

This arrangement creates two kinds of people: those who use everything the intended way, and those who have to figure everything out. Of course this affects the way we look at appliances, but in a bigger sense, can it affect the way we look at the world?

In David Wolman’s book A Left Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw, he shares the thoughts of his father, a Harvard psychologist:

“Lefties can never accept the world as it is presented to them, always reconfiguring spatial arrangements, implements, and the like from right-oriented to left-oriented. My guess? The same thing happens conceptually, and lefties are often re-imaging ideas and concepts because of their proclivity not to take things at face value.”

Ask a right-hander how they write, and they’ll just show you. Ask a left-hander how they write, and there’s a good chance they’ll say “Well, I can do it this way, or maybe this way, or sometimes this way…”

Because they can’t just accept what’s presented to them, they’re forced to figure out their own way, and this mentality may extend beyond figuring out how to use a right-handed guitar or field hockey stick.

Which way is better? Well, there are obvious benefits to doing things the direct and efficient way. But if you get in the habit of doing everything on autopilot, you might get lazy and miss out on what can be gained from a novel approach.

On the other hand, there are obvious benefits to working out alternative solutions to problems. But if you insist on bypassing the standard route every time, you can get really burned out from overcomplicating things.

There’s room for both approaches: following a tried and proven path, as well as forging your own. And that’s true regardless of which hand you use.

For more stuff for lefties and righties alike, check out my ebooks Ambidextrous (for right-handers) and Ambisinistrous (for left-handers).

The Personality Puzzle: Interview with Hunter Nuttall, Part 1 – this is about whether our personality changes with age, or in response to significant life events.

The Personality Puzzle: Interview with Hunter Nuttall, Part 2 – this is about why it’s helpful to understand different personality types, and what advice I have for introverts.

Klaus @ TechPatio asked a question in the comments, but when I realized that my reply was way too long for a comment, I told him I’d answer his question here. Here’s what he asked:

“A week ago I took a 40-question test that gave me these four letters: INTJ
I: 75%
N: 55%
T: 55%
J: 55%
As you can see, NTJ is pretty close to the middle, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, if I’m just “average”?

But then I took another 40-question test a few days ago, that placed me as ISTP and a bit ISTJ. So I think it’s quite confusing with all those personality types when they can change so much in tests depending on your mood when you take them, and how you understand the questions.

I guess my question is, Hunter, what is the *best* way to find out your four-letters?”

Great question! It’s not always easy to determine your type.

When I attended a full day MBTI workshop, I came away thinking I was an ISTJ. I actually tested as an INTP, but the facilitator explained that the test is not always accurate, and after going through all the exercises, I decided I was an ISTJ in spite of what the test said.

Looking back on that now, it sounds ridiculous to me, but it made sense at the time.

3 years later, I met with a career coach to talk about career options, and the MBTI just happened to come up. I said I was an ISTJ, and she seemed surprised. She asked me if fitting in was very important to me, and I said no, if anything, I’d want to be different.

She said, “Oh, then you’re definitely not an ISTJ,” and after a couple of minutes decided that I was probably an INTP. I told her that’s what the test said, and she smiled.

Now I can see why I misunderstood some things and concluded that I was an ISTJ. And when I take the online tests, I get INTJ/ISTJ/ISTP quite often, and I can see that it depends on how I’m interpreting the questions, and even my mood.

First you need to realize that even the official test isn’t perfectly accurate. Yet it’s been tested and refined over 40 million administrations, and it meets and exceeds the standards for psychological instruments for both reliability (consistent results from one test to the next) and validity (measuring what it attempts to measure).

On the other hand, the online knockoffs have barely been tested at all. And even tiny variations in the questions can make a difference in how you answer them.

When I see you’re testing as INTJ, ISTP, or ISTJ, I know something is way off. These aren’t just three different types – they’re three different temperaments.

The 16 types are organized into four temperaments, which are the most basic personality types dating back to ancient times. They represent the starkest differences you can have between different personalities.

So if the online tests are taking you across temperament boundaries so easily (even if you’re borderline on those letters), something is wrong.

The best ways to find out your type, in descending order:

#3 – Take the official test and attend an MBTI workshop. The test results will probably be accurate, and the workshop will provide additional info as well as being a lot of fun.

#2 – Read books and websites about the MBTI until your type becomes obvious. The official MBTI guidelines say that you are the best judge of your own type, regardless of what the test says. And I think that when you understand the different types well enough, you can’t fail to correctly type yourself.

And the #1 best way to find out your four letters…read my book!

While I’m at it, I’ll comment on this part too:

“As you can see, NTJ is pretty close to the middle, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, if I’m just ‘average’? ”

You’re using a smiley, so you know that “average” isn’t a bad thing here. It just is what it is.

If you have split preferences, you can say you have a balanced personality. This might sound good, and of course it is in some ways. At the same time, it can lead to confusion. Imagine not being sure whether you want to be a hedge fund analyst or a panda ballet choreographer.

If you have very clear preferences, you won’t have this confusion. You’ll be pulled in only one direction, and you’ll be full speed ahead when you get to do what you want. The downside is that you’ll be a fish out of water when you have to act against your preferences.

There are always pros and cons. There are no bad types, nor bad preference splits. So just be who you are!

One thing that surprised me was how astonishingly hard it is to get reliable information on whether certain famous people are left-handed, right-handed, or mixed-handed.

What often happens is someone hears that so-and-so is left-handed, so he puts that in a book without checking for any evidence, and before too long it ends up on a million web pages. It’s kind of annoying when you’re just trying to find the truth.

Here we see 6 famous people who regularly appear on lists of southpaws, despite the notable distinction of not being left-handed. (Thanks to Chris McManus for bringing these people to my attention in his book Right Hand, Left Hand.)

Billy the Kid

First on the list is Henry McCarty, AKA Henry Antrim, AKA William H. Bonney, AKA Billy the Kid. He’s been the most famous southpaw outlaw since Paul Newman played him in the 1958 western “The Left Handed Gun.”

It’s actually understandable that we always thought he was left-handed. After all, we only had one photograph of him, and it showed him with a pistol on his left hip, steadying a rifle with his right hand.

The problem is that we only had blurry copies of the original photo. After discovering the original more than 100 years after his death, we found that it was made using a technique that reversed the image.

Furthermore, the original was clear enough that we could see that the buttons were on the wrong side of his vest, and his belt buckle was backwards. The corrected version appears above, showing Billy’s pistol on his right hip.

Pablo Picasso

We only had one picture of Billy the Kid, but we don’t have that problem with Picasso. Actually, we have thousands of pictures of Picasso, and plenty of videos as well. The only problem is, he isn’t using his left hand in any of them.

Albert Einstein

You’ve probably seen this picture before, with Einstein writing on the chalkboard right-handed. He may very well have been mixed-handed, but he sure wasn’t left-handed.

James Michener

Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener was once nominated by Southpaws International as one of their southpaws of the year. He wrote to them to say that the only thing he used his left hand for was occasionally scratching his right elbow.

Bob Dylan

If Bob Dylan were completely left-handed, you’d think it would be easy to find a picture of him playing a guitar that way.

However, he may have been mixed-handed. In David Hepworth’s 1986 interview with Bob Dylan, Hepworth noted that Dylan autographed his album with his left hand.

Benjamin Franklin

The confusion here comes from Benjamin Franklin’s essay a petition of the left hand. It’s written from the point of view of a left hand, complaining about how he’s treated differently from the right hand. But is that enough to mean that Ben was left-handed?

The portrait above was painted by Mason Chamberlin, from life (i.e., in person) in 1762. Ben Franklin is shown holding a quill pen in his right hand. I have to think that the artist wouldn’t go to the trouble of reversing the image since the model was right in front of him, and Ben would surely have noticed had he done so.

At any rate, there are many possibilities between completely left-handed and completely right-handed. Take this handedness test to see where you fall on that continuum.

Do you know any other right-handed “southpaws?”

For more handedness myth-busting, check out my ebooks Ambidextrous (for right-handers) and Ambisinistrous (for left-handers).

Barack Obama was nominated for it less than two weeks after his inauguration. The committee voted for him while he presided over two wars that have lasted longer than World War II. And he actually won the award on the day we bombed the moon. I don’t know where to start with what’s wrong with this.

The problem with handing out Nobel Peace Prizes like tic tacs is that it cheapens the award for the people who really earn it. You know, the people who actually do something for peace, like Martin Luther King, or Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela, or the 14th Dalai Lama.

It’s entirely possible that Obama will earn it in time (ending these two wars would be a nice start). But even so, wouldn’t it have been better for everyone, Obama himself included, to at least wait until the end of his presidency, instead of hoping he’ll earn it someday?

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In other news, the price of How To Be Rich And Happy has been dropped from $97 to $47. For people who have already bought it, don’t worry – Tim will be in contact with an offer to make it right.

It was originally titled “Planning For The End Of Your Ittybiz,” but it’s really not specific to business at all. It’s about what you’ll do once you no longer have to do anything.

Stop by and get some life advice from the Dalai Lama, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferriss, Neo, and Ferris Bueller.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a classic book by Betty Edwards about learning how to draw. It was first published in 1979, then revised in 1989 and 1999 (the latest edition being called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). It has a reputation for being phenomenally effective at teaching people how to draw better than they ever thought they could.

I first heard about it in Paul Scheele’s PhotoReading course. One day he was mulling over the problem of how to look at the words on a page without using his conscious mind, but at the same time without de-focusing his eyes.

He found his answer through this book, saying “I read an article about an art teacher named Betty Edwards. In her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, she said, ‘If you want to draw my thumb, don’t draw my thumb,’ because you will use the left brain–the analytical, non-artistic side of the brain. She said, ‘To draw my thumb, draw the space around my thumb.’ That strategy uses the right brain–the creative side of the brain.”

As a teacher, Betty couldn’t understand why so many of her students had a hard time drawing something that was right in front of them. She could see that they were trying, but her suggestion of “Just look at it” was always met with a frustrated “I am looking at it!”

She developed her techniques after realizing what the real problem was. Most people don’t draw what they see – they draw what they think they see.

As kids we learned a particular way to draw a sun. Maybe it’s in the corner of the page or maybe not, but surely it has lines coming out of it. And yet, whenever I’ve looked up at the sky, not once have I ever seen lines coming out of the sun.

We learned a certain way to draw a house, a dog, a car, and a person, and these methods stuck with us. Now when we think we’re drawing what we see, we’re actually just loading our mental clip art, and drawing what we think we see.

One of the main techniques in this book is drawing things upside down. The idea is that if you can’t recognize what you’re drawing, your left brain can’t load its mental clip art and tell you what the object should look like. Instead, the right brain kicks in, and you draw what you actually see.

Here we see that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a fantastic title, having double meanings for both drawing (sketching, as well as utilizing) and right (the opposite of left, as well as the correct side of the brain to use for drawing).

People often forge signatures upside down so they can focus on the details they see, instead of making a T the way they learned to make a T. It makes sense in a way. In 10th grade English when we could look for our vocabulary words in the newspaper for extra credit, I read the paper backwards so I could focus on each individual word and not get caught up in the story (though that may not have been the teacher’s intent).

But could this really work? Wouldn’t a signature drawn upside down be all messed up after you turned it right side up? Anyway, I gave it a try, drawing these signatures upside down:

You can’t really tell if they’ll look right when you turn the paper around, but I was pleased with the results:

For comparison, here’s what I got when I drew them right side up:

Other than MLK’s signature (which is really hard to do upside down!), the two versions don’t look all that different. (BTW, is anyone else surprised that Leonardo da Vinci’s signature looks like that?)

OK, so drawing upside down works well enough for signatures (although my right side up signatures were still better). But what about when you’re drawing a real picture? Surely a sufficiently complicated subject would have so many intricacies that you couldn’t possibly get it right upside down. But let’s find out.

Before the book explains anything, one of the first exercises it gives you is drawing your self-portrait. Fortunately, you’re not asked to draw someone while hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Instead, you’re just sitting in front of a mirror and drawing your reflection. Here’s what I drew:

Yeah, it’s really awful. But what specifically is wrong with it? The main problem is that I wasn’t really drawing what I saw. Nobody’s eyes are that big, outside of a Disney cartoon. The proportions are all wrong, none of the features look right, and I couldn’t pick myself out of a lineup.

And I made what’s called “the chopped-off skull error.” If you look in a mirror, you’ll notice that your eyes are halfway between the top and bottom of your head. It’s obvious, but nobody wants to acknowledge it. We subconsciously think foreheads aren’t as important as the main features, so we put the eyes closer to the top, chopping off the skull. It’s an extremely common mistake. Even van Gogh did it in his early years.

If you draw upside down, will all these mistakes go away? In theory they should. If you don’t know what you’re drawing, you can’t bring any preconceived notions to the table. But I couldn’t help thinking that I’d make other mistakes that would have been obvious if I could see what I was doing.

Anyway, the day after drawing my self-portrait, I attempted a rather intimidating feat. The subject was a knight on a horse, with no shortage of fine detail. I was going to draw it upside down. And for an added challenge, I was going to use my non-dominant hand (though Betty doesn’t say to do this). I drew this:

I couldn’t believe what I saw when I turned the paper right side up! The biggest mistake was in the lance, where my inability to draw straight lines with my right hand forced me to draw the lines thicker as a cover-up. But overall, I was thrilled with it.

Of course, you don’t have to keep drawing upside down forever. Once you get in the habit of really looking at things, you’ll be able to draw right side up without being biased by your assumptions about what things look like.

The main thing is to just get started. How many beautiful drawings never see the light of day because people assume they don’t have enough talent? If I can draw this knight on a horse, upside down, in ink, with my weak hand, after one day of instruction, I’m sure you’d be surprised by what you can do.

But as for Betty’s theory about why her methods work, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong. We’ve all heard a lot about the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, but almost everything we’ve heard is wrong (though the details are far beyond the scope of this post). She came under heavy attack for drawing half-brained conclusions (pun very much intended) based on this pop psychology.

However, she did the right thing in response. Instead of backing away entirely from the left-brain and right-brain distinctions, she just started using the terms L-mode (analytical) and R-mode (creative). There are very important differences between these ways of thinking, even if they aren’t neatly packaged into separate hemispheres of the brain.

But the bigger problem is that things still seem backwards. Why would looking at something upside down make you switch from L-mode to R-mode? Wouldn’t recognizing the subject and loading the associated mental clip art fall into the R-mode category? And when your recognition of the whole is disrupted and you’re forced to look at the details out of context, wouldn’t that be an L-mode activity?

Anyway, this is not to take away from the simple truth that her methods work wonders by changing your way of seeing, which determines so much. Learning about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator forever changed the way I look at personalities. Now I can’t meet someone without trying to figure out their type. In the same way, learning the basics of drawing is changing the way I look at all objects. I can’t look at something without thinking about how to draw it, or whether it really looks the way I think it does.

Even if you don’t think you like drawing, you might be surprised by what you get out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (although you might want to skip the exercises that require equipment you won’t have). Once you learn to see, the world will never look the same again.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.

In Dune, the 1984 movie adaptation of the classic sci-fi book, Paul Atreides knows the power that words have. In the movie (but not the book), his people use devices called Weirding Modules to literally turn words into weapons.

By speaking certain words into the device, people can generate a devastating sonic blast. Most words are innocuous. Maybe they just don’t carry enough emotional intensity. Actually, very few words are known to trigger the device, but they discover others when training the Fremen people to use it.

One soldier makes the innocent mistake of calling Paul by his self-chosen Fremen name, Muad’Dib, while holding a Weirding Module. Paul is as surprised as anyone else when his own name triggers the device, collapsing part of the ceiling. “My name,” Paul thinks to himself, “is a killing word.”

Can words have the same kind of power in reality? After all, we’re told that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But can’t words do a little more than sticks and stones?

The harmful effect of words might start off small. Someone is told that they’re stupid, or ugly, or they can’t do anything right, and maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But when they hear it enough, they start to believe it.

And when people believe that something is wrong with them, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they’re having a bad day and something goes wrong, they think it’s because there’s some truth in what the other person said. They think they deserve it, so they feel worse about themselves. And they pass this feeling on to other people.

It’s not even necessarily the words themselves that do the damage, so much as the way they’re said. When someone takes a word with no inherent negative connotations (such as the name of a religious or ethnic group) and uses it in a negative way, people hear the hate.

Other words are specifically meant to do harm. Several groups, including the Special Olympics, have started campaigns to ban the R-word, as it’s now being called.

Can words kill? Absolutely. 11 year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself after classmates repeatedly called him “gay” in a derogatory way. It’s unclear whether he actually was gay, or whether he was even old enough to know.

13 year old Megan Meier hanged herself after several people created a fake MySpace account, pretending to be a 16 year-old boy who told Megan “The world would be a better place without you.”

In middle school and high school, Seung-Hui Cho was teased for his social anxiety and speaking disorder. People told him to “Go back to China” (he was Korean). As one classmate said, “There were just some people who were really cruel to him, and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn’t speak English really well, and they would really make fun of him.” Cho went on to kill 32 people plus himself in the Virginia Tech massacre.

Words have more power than you think. Is it really so hard to use them to help rather than harm? For some ideas, watch this: