EDITION 746
31 December 2019

As another week slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. This newsletter is sent to 50,000+ subscribers each Monday. Please share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can subscribe, learn and engage. I'd be very grateful if you did.

1. How to kick your bad habits. Every one of us has a career-limiting bad habit. Whether it’s weak interpersonal skills, a tendency to procrastinate, or good-but-not-great technical prowess, one of the biggest impediments to our upward mobility is a habit we can’t get rid of. But a few small changes can help: [MORE]
    
2. As the year draws to a close, are we more contented? The young certainly appear not to be. 61% of 16- 25-year-olds say they regularly feel stressed. The average happiness of this group is at its lowest since 2009. 67% of 18- 24-year-olds, but only 34% of the over 55s, think richer people are happier. Daily Telegraph
    
3. How resilient are you? Our new think resilience module from 10/10, our acclaimed leadership development and mentoring programme, defines what resilience is, and why it is now so important in everyday life. Learn how to be more resilient with useful tools, techniques and exercises intended for both individuals looking to become more resilient themselves, and leaders aiming to improve their teams’ resilience at work. [MORE]
    
4. It was a good year for some. The water vole, one of Britain’s most beloved and endangered riverine creatures, was reintroduced to Exmoor National Park, where it has been extinct for more than 30 years. Immortalised by Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, the water vole is the nation’s fastest declining mammal.
    
5. Britons may not be quite the workaholics that we thought. Instead of working more than 1,700 hours a year, on average, a more accurate figure may be…1,500 when time off is properly taken into account (according to the OECD). If we are working fewer hours, our output per hour is higher. We are still less productive than France, Germany and America, but by less than was thought. The difference in respect of France may be 10% rather than 20%, and the gap with America comes down from 24% to 16%. The Sunday Times
    
6. Welcome to the age of analytics. Over the course of a year, Google stores enough data from its search engine, maps, GPS and other services to fill more than half a million A4 pages for each of its users. Mail on Sunday
    
7. UK rail prices now twice as expensive as Europe. Rail passengers in Britain pay at least twice as much to travel as those in major European countries. Analysis of commuter fares in 40 European countries found that UK passengers paid the equivalent of 55p a mile in the past year compared with 29p in France, 21p in Spain and only 19p in Italy. Campaigners said: “January’s fare rise is particularly difficult to justify.” The Times
    
8. Shrinking nest eggs. The amount that households are saving has reached “record lows”. In the 1990s the percentage of our income that we put away stood at 14%. By 2016, that had halved to 7%. In Q2 this year, that figure almost halved again to 3.9%. The Sunday Times
    
9. Alexa users complain of Christmas outage. Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa seemed to take at least part of Christmas Day off: users trying to get the AI interface to help them time cooking, turn on Christmas lights or play carols yesterday only got the response: “Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding right now.” It is thought a surge in new devices given as gifts caused the trouble. Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, seemed to work just fine. Daily Express
    
10. The bottom line. 8% of Britons think that when someone says “don’t get me any presents”, they do want a gift and will be upset if they don’t get one. A further 13% think they won’t be upset, but really do still want a present. YouGov