A first-year college student needs a four-year plan.

The student wants to graduate on time, and the university wants them to, too. It’s win-win, and helping students with course planning is a big part of my job as an academic advisor.

What’s the best way to help, though? When helping a student with long-term course planning, I have a couple of choices.

1. Make the student do most of the work. I can ask the student to bring in a rough draft (and it will be rough). We can then revise it together, with the student consulting the complex course catalog and slowly making changes while I offer pointers. For someone who knows the catalog inside and out, it’s slightly maddening, like playing Candy Land with a 5 year-old. The process will be messy, the end result often imperfect, and the whole experience mildly frustrating (yet satisfying) for the student.

I’m experimenting with a new post format: a simple list of things I’ve found useful lately. I hope you find it, well, useful!

Here’s a book, a productivity tip, and a quote.

1. Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

I wrote about Adam Grant’s Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives our Success in a recent post, and I’ll likely do a full write-up in the future.

In the meantime, let me just say this: I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s an exhaustively-researched, data-driven explanation of why it’s good to give (and how to be generous without becoming a doormat).

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him. — Walt Whitman

I’m in the middle of a great book right now: Adam Grant’s Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.

Grant’s central argument is that in the workplace, our interactions with others tend to fall into one of three reciprocity styles: taker, matcher, or giver. While there are advantages to each, being a giver brings a special set of rewards (and risks).

Humans take mental shortcuts all the time.

We kind of have to, you know? Time is short, there’s a lot to do, and it’s a big world out there. We can’t evaluate every situation from the ground up, so our brains use simple rules called heuristics to save time.

Heuristics are super handy and efficient. They can also lead us astray, though, particularly when it comes to our work.

Availability Heuristics: What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Availability heuristics allow us to quickly evaluate a situation by sifting through recent information that relates to that situation.

photo by Juraj Varga

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. — Chuck Close

Do you need to be inspired in order to create?

The answer seems obvious: yes. If a painting inspires its viewers, it must been created by an inspired artist, right?

I say no. Inspiration makes for a good origin story, but if you look at how most great thinkers actually work, inspiration seems to play a pretty minor role.