Novels are great! They stir the soul. They share emotional journeys we can all relate to. It's great to read novels – which is probably why Stanford provides a list of three books -- usually novels -- for its incoming freshmen to read each summer.

My freshman year, the Three Books were M Butterfly, Annie John, and Old School, which was actually pretty spectacular -- especially since I'd just graduated from a New England boarding school.

But let's be honest. Did any of these books change my life? Prepare me for college? Change the way I think? Improve my cognitive skills?

No. But this one will:

Bloggers, life coaches and motivational speakers love telling people to stop caring what others think. And, to some degree, they're right. People don't watch, think or talk about you nearly as much as you think they do.

But. 

The idea that you can simply "quit caring" what others think goes against our very biology, and everything we were designed to do.

By now, I'm sure we've all heard of gamification -- a strategy that employs game-like elements in non-game contexts to improve employee, student or even just life engagement.

As someone who has studied and blogged about playfulness for years, I want to be on-board with the gamification movement. The problem is... a lot of managers are doing it totally wrong. 

So I heard a super interesting story about one of my favorite feminist scholars today.

I recently wrote that one great goal for creative types (and aren’t we all creative types?) is to follow the 80-20 rule: consume 80% of the time, and create the other 20%.
 
This is important for two reasons:

Are you really expressing yourself -- or are you just dressing a certain way? Are you really showing the world your true self -- or are you just putting on a performance for an audience?

Julia Baird, a politics, history and social policy columnist for the New York Times, made waves with her most recent piece, How to Explain Mansplaining. She cited some good research about how men are rewarded for speaking a lot ("he's confident! he's a leader!"), and women are punished ("she's too aggressive."). She discussed how men use direct language and women use "hedging language," or words that are meant to soften your ideas ("kind of," "might, maybe," "don't you think?"). She even mentioned research about how movies, even movies starring women, usually give women very few lines relative to men.

Anyone who's been to Disneyland -- or even just a local playground or grocery store -- has probably seen a young girl in a Disney Princess costume. I remember girls playing dress-up when I was young... but I don't remember owning an official princess dress. I started wondering when this trend started... and whether it's really a good idea for parents to dress their daughters up like princesses as daywear. 

My research got interesting pretty quickly. Here are some of the facts that surprised me most:

As I recently wrote in YourTango, people LOVE policing women's language and monitoring their tone.  

Personally, I think it's more important to listen to what women are saying than how they're saying it. Though there are some specific behaviors I think the average women could improve upon. For example:

The Netflix Grammasters are back! Netflix and Instagram are teaming up to hire what they call "Grammasters," or proven Instagram wizards who will travel to Europe and the Middle East to photograph the sets of Netflix original shows and movies.

​Here's how to apply: