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Although each of us is born with proactive brain, it's possible to enhance its performance. Here are some tips: Give your brain a rich bank of life experiences. Expose it to diverse environments and situations. Increasing the breadth of your experiences provides richer information for your brain to draw on as it helps you anticipate new situations. Let it borrow from the experiences of others by communicating, reading, or interacting with or about others. Think about what you want from the future. Take time to reflect on individual and team values and goals, both immediate and down the road. These will help guide your brain as it envisions future scenarios that may best help you achieve your objectives. Actively ponder future rewards or accomplishments. Emphasize rich, detailed thinking about long-term outcomes. This reduces the lure (and the danger) of instant gratification. Give yourself periods of relatively uninterrupted thought during which you let your mind wander. Doing this gives the brain's memory system extra time to recombine your prior experiences in ways that can help you envision future possibilities.

The results of Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicate that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.

The number of people using location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla remains small, and does not appear to be growing, according to a report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

On any given day, 1 percent of adult Americans use a service that allows them to share their location, according to the report. Four percent of adult Internet users use location-based services at all, down from 5 percent of Internet users who said they used such services in May. Only 6 percent of people who use social networking sites also used location-based services.

The Pew report notes how quickly technologies like these can go from obscurity to mainstream use. In August 2008, for example, 6 percent of adults used status-updating services like Twitter. By September 2010 that proportion had quadrupled.