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Young entrepreneurs' advantage: ignorance

Young people make better entrepreneurs because they're too inexperienced to know that their ideas are silly:

The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they regard it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.

» corante.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Book: Take a Nap! Change Your Life.

Tired after lunch or by mid-afternoon? You might think that you should go buy yourself some coffee. But according to UCSD researcher Sara Mednick, you’re better off taking a nap.

Nappers make fewer mistakes, are in a better mood and in better health, she said. “It also feels good,” she added. “And what’s wrong with that?” Napping also is important because many of us today say they have trouble sleeping, Mednick said. According to the National Sleep Foundation, about 40 percent of Americans report that they sleep less than seven hours a night – as opposed to the recommended eight hours. Everyone is affected, from infants to older adults, the researcher said.

Some of her most striking research looks at napping compared to drinking caffeine. In one study, Mednick had one group of subjects nap for 90 minutes, while another drank 200 mg of caffeine. She also set up a control group, who took a placebo. Then she tested her subjects on several tasks, including typing and spatial skills, such as remembering the layout of a room or a map. On both tasks, coffee drinkers performed much worse than the placebo group, Mednick said. “Of course, this is a bummer for Starbucks,” she added.

» UCSD's Biomedical Library