Blogs on Shine

4 reasons to share your ideas

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We are living in an age where the power of crowds is accomplishing big things. Writers, who used to guard their ideas now hone their thinking through blogs, build and audience, and then publish their books for a group of expectant readers. Every day experts spend their free time contributing to Wikipedia. And lately I've noticed a lot of folks encouraging would-be entrepreneurs to share their ideas.

Of course, there are times to be guarded. If you've got a concept or invention which might be patentable, then the only person you probably want to talk to is a lawyer. There are also times you want to be first to market a product or service (you don't see Coke running to Pepsi about its latest product before it hits the shelves). But in many situations, sharing ideas with people you trust and respect is a good idea and here's why:

The secret to good introductions

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As a congenital connector, I make introductions all the time. Usually I have good results. I've had an uncountable number of successful career matches and even ignited a few romances (one of which resulted in a strong marriage.)

Does thinking about happiness make you happier?

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Happiness is having its moment in the sun. And the darkened economy doesn't seem to have cast much of a shadow over it.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I joined a packed auditorium at the Hilton New York for a lecture on positive psychology by Shawn Achor, a popular professor at Harvard. (This was part of One-Day University, a cool program that assembles a group of lecturers from top universities for a day of public lectures in major cities.) Achor took the audience through the greatest hits of the science of happiness, covering a wide swath of material in his alotted 70 minutes. He explained how positive psychology developed as a field of study. Instead of focusing exclusively on mental troubles like depression, psychologists like Martin Selgiman started focusing on people who are happy to figure out what we could learn from them.

Achor took us through a host of nifty experiments, like this one: