Books that can change your life

Sources of Power – How People Make Decisions – 2

Olivier Roland — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:35:32 +0000

Note: as this book is dense and comprehensive, I am publishing its summary into two parts. This is the part two, part one is here.

Book Chronicle and Summary of “Sources of Power”, part two:

Chapter 9: Non-Linear Aspects of Problem Solving

The leverage point concept (see previous chronicle) leads to thinking about problem solving as a constructive process. It is constructive in the sense that solutions can be created from leverage points and that the objective’s profound nature can be clarified whilst the person solving the problem is trying to develop a solution.

The leverage points of problem solving require a non-linear approach rather than a linear approach. Problem solving undergoes four stages:

Problem detection
Problem representation
Options generation
Evaluation

There is no output stage as each one of these stages can generate a different type of output.

Problem detection is in itself an output, for example in military or health and safety radar surveillance stations of a country.

Problem representation is another output, sometimes sufficient for determining how to proceed: there are certain medical diagnosticians whose job consists mainly of providing an excellent problem representation. Producing forecasts is in itself a professional specialism in many jobs.

Generating an action plan is the step many people consider to be the output of problem solving. But whatever way options are generated, they will have to be evaluated, often through mental simulation.

The evaluation process can lead to adopting an option, or to identifying new barriers and opportunities, which require further problem solving.

The pattern shows why the process is interactive and non-linear. The objectives affect the way in which we evaluate the action plan, and evaluation can help us determine better objectives. The objectives determine the way in which we evaluate the situation, and the things we learn about the situation change the nature of the objectives. The objectives determine the barriers and the leverage points we are looking for, and the discovery of these barriers and leverage points alter the objectives themselves. The way we identify the causes leading up to this situation also affect the types of objectives that are adopted. Moreover, the leverage points we become aware of go beyond our own experience and our own abilities – on another interaction level.

Let’s see through a concrete example how a business has changed its objectives because of the way it evaluated its business plan. By evaluating an action plan, managers discover a leverage point opportunity. This information makes them revise their objective and lead them to synthetize a more extensive action plan:

A parent company has a network of franchises. Each of these franchises uses telemarketing to get customers and each must hire, train and manage telesales staff, which the franchise managers find hard going and annoying.

The marketing director of the parent company identifies this as a problem, but with an obvious solution: the parent company can centralize telemarketing onto one site. The head of the business is not too keen on the idea, as it requires a large investment. He then realizes that, with a centralized team of telesales staff, he could develop his idea of taking orders directly over the phone. At this point, he becomes even more enthusiastic about this project than the marketing director himself.

Whilst the marketing director and the chairman were doing a mental simulation of the proposed telesales center, the chairman noticed a new possibility. The idea to use telesales staff for sales increased the aspiration level of the chairman and changed the nature of the objective he wanted to pursue. This opportunity also suggested additional series of actions, which can easily be integrated into the original objective to help the franchises.

Chapter 10: The Power to See the Invisible

This section is about expertise. Experts can be considered as having accumulated a lot of knowledge. Although this is undoubtedly true, it creates an image of people whose brains are full of facts, burdened by a memory of knowledge and wisdom.

However, Gary Klein has a different approach; according to him, the accumulation of experience doesn’t burden the experts: it makes them freer. Experts see the world differently. And often experts do not realize that the rest of us cannot detect what is obvious to them.

There are many things the experts can see and are invisible to everyone else:

Structures that novices cannot see.
Anomalies – events that have not occurred and other violations of expectations.
The Big Picture (awareness of the situation).
The way things work.
Opportunities and improvisations.
Events that have already occurred (the past) or those that are about to happen (future).
Differences too small for novices to detect.
Their own limitations.

These aspects of expertise can be drawn from two main power sources: pattern matching with reality (intuition) and mental simulation. Intuition allows the expert to detect the typical things and spot the anomalies or the events that have not occurred. Mental simulations allow seeing what has not previously occurred and what is probably going to happen in the future.

There are also additional sources of power. The ability to make fine discriminations probably involves some perceptive learning, even though it is hard to distinguish it from the ability to make the pattern match reality.

Experts are indeed able to see the differences that novices cannot be forced to see. For example, to a novice, all wines taste more or less the same, whereas a wine expert can distinguish the taste of each wine, and even each year for each wine.

Expertise is thus more learning how to perceive rather than knowing.

Note: it is important to note that it is possible to believe so strongly in one’s discipline to believe oneself to be an expert when that discipline has no serious grounding. For examples, the ancient forecasters thought themselves to be experts in the art of reading the future in animals’ entrails, or the inquisitors of the Middle-Ages in the art of detecting the demons in witches, whereas instead of perceiving patterns, they were inventing some that had nothing to do with reality because they were missing a very important tool in their intellectual process: the validation of their hypothesis by experience. It is the foundation of the scientific process. And it is lacking, for example, for astrologers, graphologists and many other people, even to geniuses like Steve Pavlina. Be careful when you elaborate patterns to make sure they match reality by testing the hypotheses you rely on. Otherwise, you will be inventing a snake biting its own tail, and the concordances you will perceive will be mere products of your imagination to which you are granting too much credibility.

For example, if you are an astrologer, it is easy for you to determine your ability to predict the future: write down your predictions as you go along, and then check that they have happened, and carry out a statistical analysis: how many times were you right? Be careful in this case not to let your ego protect you by carrying out predictions that are sufficiently vague and nebulous to be more or less always valid whatever the issue, or by justifying your mistakes with numerous complex and convoluted reasons.

Chapter 11: The Power of Stories

We would be overwhelmed if we had to treat everything we see, each visual element, as a separate element, and had to understand the connections each time we opened our eyes or moved them from one viewpoint to another. Thankfully, this is not necessary. We see the world through structures.

According to the Gestalt, or Psychology of the Form, we have powerful organizers that structure the visual world into forms, and we naturally see things have correlations with each other. Indeed, if a group of birds is flying in the distance, we see it as a group sharing a common state. Each time the group changes direction, we do not have to follow the trajectory of each individual bird. If a bird leaves the group and starts to fly on its own, then only will we notice this bird and it will acquire a distinct identity. It has broken the previous structure, which creates a contrast attracting our attention.

According to Gary Klein, we organize the cognitive world in a similar fashion – the world of ideas, concepts, objects and relationships. We link them into stories. By understanding how this happens, we can learn to make better use of the power of stories.

A story is a blend of several ingredients:

Characters – the people in the story
Challenge – the problem the characters are trying to solve
Intentions – what the characters intend doing
Action – what the characters are going to do to realize their intentions
Objects – the tools the characters are going to use
Causality – the effects (both expected and unexpected) of the actions
Context – the many details surrounding the characters and their actions
Surprises – the unexpected things happening in the story

In a simple form, stories link all these ingredients together. Here is an example:

Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, 1990’s. A nurse has been watching a newborn for several hours. Suddenly, the baby turns dark blue, almost black. The medical team immediately calls for a doctor and a radiologist and prepare to intervene, convinced that it is a pulmonary collapse – a wide-spread problem for babies placed under artificial respiration – and where a hole has to be made into the chest, in order to insert a tube and suck out the air in order to allow the lungs to fill up again.

But the nurse is convinced that it’s a heart problem. As soon as she saw the baby’s color, she’s suspected that he was suffering a pneumopericardium: air filling the pocket around the heart and stopping it from beating. She therefore tries to stop her colleagues’ preparations screaming “It’s the heart!”. But her colleagues point at the heart monitor showing that the baby’s heart is beating normally. She insists, pushes their hands away and orders them to be quiet placing a stethoscope on the child’s chest.

Not a sound. The heart is not beating.

A neonatal surgeon enters the room and the nurse immediately hands him a syringe. “Pneumopericardium. Prick the heart.” The radiologist, who has just received the test results, confirms the nurse’s diagnostic. The surgeon inserts the syringe into the heart and slowly releases the air pocket preventing it from beating. The baby is safe.

Later, the team understood why the monitor had misled them: it was measuring the electrical activity commanding the heart beats, and this had not stopped: the heart was simply unable to respond to it because of the air pocket pressure.

Stories such as this one contain numerous lessons; they are extremely efficient learning tools and are rich in teachings, which is why they are so abundant in all circles. They show how context can lead individuals to make the wrong decisions, and highlight the causal relations previously unidentified and the unexpected solutions that the characters have found to solve problems.

To learn more, I invite you to read my summary of Chapter 6 of Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, called “A Story”, which synthesizes most of the ideas in the chapter. Unsurprisingly, the authors rely on this present book to explain the importance of stories .

Chapter 12: The Power of Metaphors and Analogies

People use analogies and metaphors to complete a wide diversity of difficult tasks: making sense of situations, generating predictions, solving problems, anticipating events and making plans. An analogy is an event or an example taken from the same area or a similar area as the task to be undertaken. A metaphor comes from a different area.

Each experience we have – whether we have lived it or heard it – can serve as an analogy or a metaphor. Each time we complete a task, we can use this vast base of knowledge, full of experiences, stories and images.

For example, when Apple designed the Macintosh and the Lisa using ideas provided by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, such as the mouse and the graphic interface, the designers had the idea to use the desk as a metaphor of what happens on screen. The users were going to use files, folders and documents on their virtual desktop, just like on their real desk.

The logic of metaphoric reasoning

Metaphors affect the way we see and interpret facts. Indeed the metaphor “Debates are like war” tells us that we ought to attack the other’s positions, especially its weaknesses, and defend our own. The metaphor “Debates are like music practice” instead suggests using a debate as an opportunity to find how we contribute to the discord.

Metaphors do more than embellishing our thoughts. They structure our thoughts. They condition our sympathies and our emotional responses. They help us gain an awareness of the situation. They determine the things we consider to be obvious and the results we pursue.

Studies have shown that designers use a lot of metaphors to design innovating products, often drawing inspiration from existing products. For example, the designers of the first word processors used the typewriter as a metaphor and the work of the interface designer was to build around this metaphor avoiding dissimilarity. They also had to post warnings to remind users to regularly save the file, which is necessary on a computer and not on a typewriter.

The Logic of Analogical Reasoning

Whenever we try to solve a diffuse objective, one strategy is to try and reach that objective by using failure to define this objective more clearly. For example, if in the morning, before going to work my car will not start, my ultimate objective is to get it started, but it is diffuse because the process required to get it started is not defined, as the cause of the breakdown is unknown. I can therefore carry out various trials and errors until I find the cause of the breakdown and my objective becomes more precise and becomes “fill up” or “change the starter”, or “call a mechanic”.

There is another strategy: find an analogy suggesting the characteristics of the objective. For example, if I remember that I left the lights on in my car by mistake and that it drained the battery, I can tell myself that this is what has happened now. Then, I will only have to see if the lights come on to determine whether the battery is on. If they don’t come on, then my vague problem becomes precise and I have a complete process starting off in my head allowing me to solve the situation.

Analogies may also be used to find solutions. I can remember an example where one time someone who had a flat battery made his car roll down a hill, which made the engine start without the battery. There is no hill around, but perhaps if I asked my passengers to push the car, this might produce the same effect?

Moreover, by taking into account the differences between the analogies and the current situation, we may adjust the analogy to make a prediction.

Chapter 13: The Power to Read Minds

This happens too often. You have sent someone to do something simple and they get it wrong. For example, you are tying to fix a mug, and you’ve asked your wife to buy glue when she goes shopping. Then your wife gets home with glue that doesn’t work on ceramics, and when you tell her why this will not work, she replies “You didn’t say anything about a mug. You asked me to buy glue, which I did. Am I supposed to read your mind?”

The answer is yes. When we make a request – asking for something or ordering – we need the other person to read our mind. To make this possible, both parties need to lean towards the other. The person making the request can help by specifying the intention behind the request. The person trying to fulfill the request must try to imagine what the other person really wants in order to manage the details that have not been explained.

Thus, “can you get some glue when you’re going shopping?” may not seem a difficult request. But when you are in the glue aisle, you can see that there are many different types of glue: for wood, glass, metal, etc. Some Superglues are sold with messages saying that they work every time. Is this true or false? Do I need to dissolve the glue afterwards? Do I need a fast-acting glue? Etc.

In general, we are not able to indicate all the details in advance. If you are doing me a favor, I must rely on your ability to read my mind and imagine how I will make all these choices. I do not believe that I am able to anticipate all the important details for you. There are some people I do not trust and to whom I shall not give a difficult task.

Let’s look at one of the most dramatic incidents and, yet not unknown to incomprehension in history:

The Goeben was a German cruiser stationed in the Mediterranean on the eve of the First World War, and the only German warship in the area. The British Navy knew it and was supposed to find it and sink it as soon as the war had been declared.

The British failed: they had the Goeben surrounded with a dozen warships, but, became confused about the ambiguous orders they were given by the admiralty, they let the Goeben escape and reach the Black Sea and the Ottoman Empire.

This simple fact had countless consequences:

It led the Ottomans to get involved in the war on the side of the Axis, whilst many Ottomans were hesitating between neutrality and taking sides with the Allies.
It is possible that the entry of the Ottoman Empire in the war may have extended the war by one or two years, with millions more deaths and the involvement in the war of the United States, who wished to remain neutral.
The ship closed of the mouth of the Black Sea, cutting off 90% of the Russian naval imports and exports and precipitating, through a situation of want, the Russian Revolution of 1917.

How did this happen? When the British forces surrounded the Goeben, the ship’s commander was not sure of how to interpret the instructions from Admiral Winston Churchill, who indicated: “Do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces.” Although the Goeben was surrounded by twelve British ships, she had 11-in guns at its disposal, whereas the British forces were made up of four cruisers with 9.2-in guns of inferior range, and eight destroyers, including five which were running out of fuel. The commander therefore thought he was in a situation where he was going into action against a superior force and decided to regroup rather than attack the German ship, allowing it to escape to the east towards the Black Sea.

The problem was that Churchill had never meant this. His instructions referred to the possibility of the British ships meeting the Austrian flotilla, and by no means the encounter of twelve ships against one enemy, be it more powerful than each individual ship of the British flotilla. When Churchill learnt the news, he was dumbfounded. He had never thought his orders could have been interpreted in this manner.

Thus the commander failed to read Churchill’s mind, to guess the intention behind the words. Churchill could have avoided this error, had he added extra information about the Austrian ships. But if had to clarify each point in each order he gave in order to avoid ambiguities, his work would have been impossible.

The solution is not to linger on the details. They take too much time and have their own cost. We can pretend that rules and procedures are clear and simple, but they are not. For example, if you give someone the instruction of pressing a button when a green light comes on, and the person asks “what is green?”, there is no way to answer this. We suppose that we live in a common culture with this person, where the meaning of green is known, as are other shared references. If we must work to explain each supposition behind each request, teamwork and cooperation would become impossible.

Intent

In a team, a great number of positive things happen when the intent is understood and shared by all, compared to teams where people are told what to do without explaining why. This notably significantly increases autonomy and reduces the need to supervise. Here are the benefits:

Promote independence
Improve team performance by reducing the need for clarification
Detect deviations from the intent given by the leader
Prevent errors in advance and anticipate problems
Promote improvisation
React to local conditions without the need to wait for permission
Identify opportunities which are not part of the plan
Define priorities in order to make choices of compromise
Continue beyond results without the need to wait for the next order

But how do you communicate the intent? You can, for instance, use the Intention of Commandment of the US Army (see the summary of chapter 1 of Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and others ones die), i.e. communicating the intention in the most concise and efficient manner. It usually consists of this information:

Here’s what we’re faced with
Here’s what I think we should do
Here’s why
Here’s what you should look out for
Now talk to me

Here are the seven types of information that can be presented to someone to help him/her understand what he/she has to do:

The object of the task (the highest objectives)
The objective of the task (an image of the desired result)
The sequence of steps in the plan
The logic of the plan
The key decisions that may have to be made
The anti-objectives (the results that are not desired)
The constraints and other considerations

All these types of information are not always required, but this list can be used as a checklist to determine if there are still details to be added.

It is also important to note that the ability of a person to read minds depends on the familiarity you have with this person and the clarity with which his/her intent was defined.

Chapter 15: The Power of Rational Analysis and the Problem of Hyper-rationality

Hyper-rationality is a mental disorder in which the victim tries to manage all the problems and decisions on a purely rational basis, relying on forms of reasoning that are purely logical and analytical.

It is similar to Retinitis Pigmentosa, an eye disease leading to the loss of peripheral vision, which is a lot more incapacitating than Macular Degeneration, where peripheral vision is maintained but the more accurate central vision is impeded. To understand this, hold your fist as far as you can, then lift your thumb up and look at your nail: the nail represents all you could see if you were suffering from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Let’s just say that it would incapacitate you a great deal and you would have the greatest difficulty to move spatially and position yourself.

Hyper-rationality is similar, in the sense that the individual who suffers from it tries to base all his/her ideas on one source of power: the ability to apply rational procedures whereas many other sources are useful, especially if they are used in combination with each other.

Rational analysis is still a powerful and specialized source of power, which can play a limited role in many tasks, a dominant role in some tasks and sometimes no role at all.

In order to think rationally, we must do the following:

Decompose. We must analyze the task – break down the task, the idea or the arguments into small units and basic elements so that they may be manipulated.
Decontextualize. Because the created contexts add more ambiguity, we must try to find elements that are independent from the context. In order to do so, we try to find a formal way of representing the world, of treating it like a representation, an image, a pattern. We try to construct theories and maps that can be substituted to the fact of having a direct perception of the task or the equipment.
Calculate. We apply a pallet of formal procedures on the elements, as rules of deductive logic and statistical analyses.
Describe. All the analyses and representations should be open to the public examination.

Despite its power, rational thought has limits:

Lack of basic elements

Carrying out an analysis means decomposing a situation or a problem into its essential constituents. However, there are no “primitive” components that exist naturally. The components are arbitrarily defined and depend on individual objectives and calculation methods. There is no “good” way of decomposing a task. Different people find different patterns. The same person may also find different patterns depending on the objectives to be achieved. If we try to pre-define the basic elements, we must either work with approximate or artificial tasks, or take the risk of distorting the situation to match it to the so-called basic elements.

Ambiguous Rules

The rules and procedures take a shape that is more or less of the if-then type (as in programming). They often appear to be simple, but the hardest is to properly apprehend if the antecedent condition, the “if”, has been met. This is why researchers prefer to work in a laboratory on problems which are artificially free of context and do not suffer any ambiguity. Outside of the laboratory, it is difficult to make the context limpid enough to ensure everyone agrees that all the requirements have been met. The episode of the Goeben perfectly illustrates such an example where the context makes the appreciation difficult as to whether the “if” has been met or not: Churchill’s order meant “If you meet a superior force, then do not fight”. Did the flotilla commander break this order by judging that the Goeben was a superior force over his twelve ships? The context of the situation makes this appreciation difficult.

Difficulties to put calculations into place

When calculations require people to estimate probabilities, their own value, or to make other non-natural judgments, we are going ahead of the problems.

The explosion of combinations

The formal methods of rational analysis meet difficulties when they consider a large number of factors. This is what the researchers Schank and Owen say:

The problem with deductions is, that there are too many to take into account. If, for instance, we make five deductions from a fact, and five more deductions from each of these deductions, and so on, then the complexity of the fact of developing each chain of deductions becomes overwhelming in just a few steps. The power of processing is not infinite, be it for human or for machines.

It is therefore important to understand that rational analysis is a source of power that has its strengths and weaknesses, and that it must be used sparingly and in harmony with other sources of power.

Chapter 16: Why the right people make wrong decisions

A wrong decision is not, according to Gary Klein, defined according to whether the result is good or bad; someone would deem a decision to be wrong if the knowledge they have gained would lead them to make a different decision should a similar situation occur.

As we have seen, expertise can provide important sources of power, other than rational analysis. The people with the most expertise are able to see the world differently. Experts spot problems more easily and have richer mental simulations they can use to diagnose problems and evaluate action plans. They have more analogies to rely on.

Expertise can bring us a lot of problems. It can lead us to see problems in a stereotypical manner. The sense of what is typical can be so strong that we can miss subtle signs of contradiction.

The problem is even more evident when we consider learning from experience. We often cannot see a clear link between cause and effect. Too many variables come into place, and the temporal timescales create their own complications. If managers see that they are successful – by making sure that their projects are completed on time and below the allocated budget – does this success come from their own competence, that of their colleagues, a strike of luck, the intervention of more senior managers, a mix of all these factors, or some other cause? It is hard to say.

For example, historians have studied in depth the Great Depression, or the 1929 crisis. Franklin Roosevelt was the US President in 1932, who helped the nation regain its prosperity, and put in place strong actions. Some historians and economists say that these actions had a positive impact, others that they made the situation worse. The 1929 crisis was a major event that has been very closely scrutinized and still, even today, 80 years later, we still do not know if Roosevelt’s actions were successful in redressing the economy. The situation is simply too complex to be analyzed.

Because of these difficulties for interpreting the cause and effect relationships, politicians cannot reach high levels of expertise. They can certainly learn the necessary procedures to become politicians – for instance, attending the most influential committees, building links with the lobbyists, doing favors to the right people. But they cannot learn the long-term impacts of the legislation they have put in place. They cannot learn the causal dynamics between their laws and the likely social changes. Their mental model is neither flexible nor rich.

The researcher Jim Schanteau suggests therefore that no true expertise can be constructed when:

The field is dynamic
We must predict human behavior
We have less chances of receiving feedback
The task is not sufficiently repeated to have a sense of what is typical
We have made too few trials

In these conditions, we should be careful when supposing that experience becomes expertise. In such fields, experience can give us fluid routines, which show that we’ve been doing it for some time. But our expertise cannot go beyond the surface of routines; we would then not have the chance to develop an expertise in which we can trust.

Chapter 17: Conclusions

This book is an exploration into the strengths and abilities of the human being. Despite the fantasies of experience, we can give a reasonable meaning to our world. Even when we do not reach high levels of expertise, even when we are confronted with factors of uncertainty and other stress factors, we generally find the means to fulfill and improve our objectives.

Critic of the book:

This book is dense, and somewhat hard to follow. Summarizing it took me over 10 hours, and I skipped some of the chapters that appeared to be less interesting than others. But what interest and power it has! Very far from the traditional rational approaches to decision making, Gary Klein brings us out of the beaten track to explain that people only rarely use this rational approach, and gives us many other ways of making decisions, which he explains by beautifully blending theories with concrete examples.

He thus reinstates intuition by defining it and sheds light on the strengths and limits of the human mind in an absolutely captivating manner. Having read and summarized it, I wonder about the transformation of this new knowledge into concrete actions, but what is for sure is, that I have upgraded my mind and I am now perceiving more accurately the way the human mind works and the way we make decisions. My mental pattern is no longer the same as the one I had when I opened this book for the first time, and I feel absolutely overwhelmed that this pattern is now a lot more acute and pertinent. What is also strong is that the author highlights the limits of our knowledge and our current approaches, and particularly highlights the biases that can corrupt scientific studies, as well as the infinite complexity of the human brain and the importance of what we yet have to learn about it.

I therefore find it hard today to perceive how this new mental pattern will translate concretely, but it is certain that it can only make me more cautious regarding expertise, more aware of the relativity and the limits of knowledge, and what is the basis for the efficiency of teamwork and the decisions that are made daily.

I therefore recommend it. This book is a true jewel of intellectual stimulation, which should make your brain simmer long after reading it .

Strong points:

Handles perfectly theory and practice by providing numerous examples
Pertinent concepts and out of the beaten track
Intellectually stimulating
A true upgrade for our human pattern of the human mind

Weak points:

Dense
A little heavy to read, with sometimes complex terms

My rating:

Have you read this book? How do you rate it?

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Sources of Power

Olivier Roland — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:55 +0000

How People Make Decisions

Sentence summarizing “Sources of Power” : We all have to make decisions, and sometimes these decisions have important – or even dramatic – consequences, which must be taken into account at difficult times and within strong time constraints; how do firemen, soldiers and doctors take split-second decisions when lives are at stake? This book tells us about it, detailing various theories illustrated with stories and case studies.

By Gary Klein, 1998, 300 pages

Chronicle of “Sources of Power”:

In 1984, Gary Klein carried out his first case study to try and understand how people make decisions, particularly under heavy time constraints. The task was to study how firefighters make choices in the heat of the moment, as part of a contract struck with the US Army. Amongst the predictions suggested at the start of the study, the author and his team thought that the firefighters would only have little time on the field to think of all the options and that they would only consider two options: that which was intuitively their favorite and another, which would be used for comparison to demonstrate why the favored option was the best.

This hypothesis was based on the work of Peer Soelberg in 1967. He was a professor at MIT and taught his students how to make decisions using a rational choice strategy consisting of five stages:

Identify the options
Identify the means for evaluating these options
Ponder on each dimension of the evaluation
Calculate the score
Take the decision with the highest score

For his hypothesis, Soelberh studied how his students made a natural and determining choice: choosing their first job whilst they were still finishing the course. He discovered that his students did not use the rational choice strategy, but instead followed their instinct and made the choice they felt the most attracted to. After interviewing his students, Soelberg was able to identify their favorite job and predict their final choice with a success rate of 87%, 3 weeks before his students would announce their decisions.

When Soelberg asked them if they had reached a decision, they would deny it, claiming that a choice is made by studying several possibilities, just as Soelberg had taught them. However Soelberg noticed that students, in order to feel like they had made a decision, tended to take another offer, compare it with their favorite choice, and then tried to demonstrate how much the latter was preferable. Then they would declare it to be their decision the instinctive choice Soelberg had previously identified. They were therefore not making a decision; they were constructing a justification.

Gary Klein and his team hence suggested that the firefighters would do likewise. But strangely, as they were interviewing Fire Officers, it appeared that they never seemed to simultaneously compare two options. Some Fire Officers even insisted on the fact that they never actually made decision, in the sense of studying two or several options at once in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each. They simply did not have the time. Everything would have burnt before they’d had the time to study all the options, never mind weighing and comparing. Let’s find out the decisional system firefighters actually use.

Chapter 3: The decision making model based on the first observation

Studying deeper, the researchers realized that Fire Officers did not refuse to compare options: they didn’t have to do it. Fire Officers are experienced firefighters. Even faced with a complex situation, they are able to see what is familiar to them and how to react. Their experience allows them to immediately identify the first thing to do to respond to a situation, therefore they do not bother thinking about other ones. They are not stubborn. They are competent. This is what the researchers call recognition-primed decision-making, or RPD model.

So does this mean that firefighters systematically implement the first thing that comes into their heads? No. They evaluate the feasibility and the chances of success of the first option that comes to mind. If these two parameters appear too weak, they then reject this first option and evaluate a second one, and so on, without comparing two possibilities at the same time. This is what the researchers call singular evaluation approach, to differentiate it from the comparative approach.

These are not easy to differentiate: when you are ordering a meal, you are probably going to compare all the dishes on offer to find the one you like the best. If you are in an unknown city and you are almost out of gas, you are going to look for gas stations and stop at the first decent one, without comparing all of the city’s gas stations in order to find the best value for money. Singular evaluation approach is therefore a strategy that makes you opt for a satisfactory decision. It is very different from making an optimized decision: in order to be satisfied, you only need to make the first decision you deem suitable, in order to optimize you need to consider a large number of choices and only select the best one. This satisfying decision strategy obviously makes sense in an emergency situation such as those firefighters encounter.

In his case, however, how can firefighters rule out or select an option, if they’re not comparing it to another? They use mental simulation: they mentally picture the scene from the option they are considering and can see the consequences happening in their heads. If these consequences appeal to them, they select the option. Otherwise, they mentally simulate the outcome of another decision.

As we will see below, mental simulation is not free of failures. But it is often the best available tool usable within the allocated time.

Before he began his study, the author thought that novices were jumping more impulsively on the first option they could think of, whereas the experts would carefully study the merits of each option. It in fact appeared that the opposite is true: experts know what to do and therefore immediately think of a viable solution faced with a problem, whereas novices have to compare various approaches, when they sometimes do not have time to do so.

Finally. Gary Klein and his team sorted the 156 decisions they collected during these studies into 4 categories:

Choosing from options they are given	0
Comparative Evaluation	18 (half come from a case where the firefighters had no experience)
Creative Decision (imagining solutions which had never been used before)	11
RPD, based on singular evaluation approach	127

Therefore, almost 80% of decisions were taken using singular evaluation approach based on the RPD model.

Applications

One of the first lessons to draw from this analysis is to be skeptical as to the formal decision methods. These are methods that are rarely used.

Chapter 4: The Power of Intuition

Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns that indicate the dynamics of the situation. Because patterns can be subtle, people are often unable to describe what they have noticed and how they judged a situation as typical or atypical.

Therefore, intuition has a strange reputation. Skilled decision makers know that they can depend on their intuition, but at the same time, they may not trust a decision source that appears so accidental. The author was able to analyze this when one of the firefighters he was interviewing told him he had saved his own life and that of his men thanks to an Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP). Here is his story:

It was a straightforward house fire in a one-story house in a residential neighborhood. The fire was in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant sent his hose crew into the house, to the back, in order to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roared back at once.

“Odd”, he thought. The water should have more of an impact. They tried spraying it again, with the same result. They retreated a little to regroup.

Then the lieutenant started to feel that something was wrong. He didn’t have any clues; he just didn’t like the idea of staying inside the house and ordered his men out of the building – a very average house, with nothing out of the ordinary.

As soon as the men left the building, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. Had they stayed inside, they would have been plunged into the flames below.

“A sixth sense”, he insisted, and a large part of the skills of each experienced commander. A few questions revealed the following facts:

He absolutely did not suspect that there was a basement underneath the house.
He did not suspect that the seat of the fire was located in the basement, underneath the living room where he and his men were standing before they left.
But he was wondering why the fire was not reacting as it should have done.
The living room was hotter than what he would have expected for a small kitchen fire in a small house.
Everything was very quiet. Fires are noisy, and for a fire to be this hot, he would have expected more noise.

The whole pattern was not working. His expectations were not happening as he was expecting them to. With hindsight, it was obvious that the living room was hot and silent because the flames were located below, and therefore the floor was muffling the noise of the fire. But in the heat of the moment, nothing was hinting at this. Thus the events were not typical, and his reaction was to withdraw, to regroup and to try to better understand what was going on.

The lieutenant’s experience had given a firm set of patterns. He was used to form an opinion of the situation by matching it to one of these patterns. He may not have been able to articulate these patterns to describe their particularities, but he was relying on the match with the pattern to trust in the identification of the situation he was in.

Nevertheless, he was not aware of how he was using his experience because he was not using it consciously and deliberately. He could see what he had in front of his eyes, but not what was going on behind them, so he attributed his expertise to an extra-sensory perception. He was both proud to understand that his intuition was directly derived from his experience and disappointed to understand that he had not had an extra-sensory perception.

Applications

In order to develop our intuition, we therefore need to expand our experience by being exposed to numerous difficult cases.

Chapter 5: The Power of Mental Simulation

Mental simulation is the ability to imagine people and objects consciously and to transform those people and objects through several transitions to finally picture them in a different way than at the start. It is therefore building a sequence of snapshots allowing you to picture what is going to happen.

Indeed, imagine that you have a truck, as it is pictured on the left, and that you would like it to balance on a pile of large bricks as pictured on the right, using only a jack and an unlimited number of bricks, by yourself.

How are you going to proceed?

In order to try and find a solution, you are going to imagine several mental images of the necessary steps to achieve it, evaluating the feasibility of these and picturing other steps if this one appears to be impossible.

The three first steps could thus be to lift the back of the truck with the jack, and then to slide it a pile of bricks:

Then, you could do the same at the front and slide in a pile of bricks in the middle and remove the ones at each end:

You can figure out these steps visually, or logically, but in both cases it is a mental simulation in which you are imagining a series of different steps leading to the desired result.

All human beings use this system when they have to imagine a solution to solve a problem. But mental simulations do not always work. Our brain can only partially apprehend reality, and there is therefore a limit to the variables we can take into account in a mental simulation. We sometimes forget or fail to predict one or more parameters and nothing happens the way we had expected.

In fact, according to the author and his team, we rarely construct mental simulations involving more than three factors. The limits of our working memory – the temporary memory used for our actions in the present – must be taken into account. And generally, mental simulations do not construct any more than six steps: beyond this, our working memory appears saturated and the implementation of simulations is made more difficult. We must therefore assemble our simulations within these constraints.

There are of course several ways of overcoming these constraints. If a particular topic is very familiar, we are able to gather several transitions into one unit and do likewise with the various factors to be taken into account. Moreover, with the right expertise, we are able to pick the right level of abstraction. Another way of overcoming these constraints is to write things down and draw diagrams in order to keep track of the transitions.

The problem becomes more complex when moving elements interact with each other at each step, as we must remember more elements and even the diagrams become useless as arrows start overlapping to represent these interactions.

Considering all these factors, building mental simulations no longer appears to be easy. We must be very familiar with the task we are simulating and think at the right level of abstraction. If the simulation is too detailed, it can overload our working memory, and if it is too abstract, it doesn’t help much. In fact, if we compare our brain to the powerful supercalculators in which scientists and the military invest millions of dollars, we could say that our brain has a very flexible and advanced simulation capability, and is endowed with imagination – unlike the supercalculators – but only has a very limited working memory. A computer has an enormous memory and is able to follow thousands of variables and interactions at the same time, but it is a very specialized tool and can only simulate environments for which it has specifically been programmed.

How mental simulations can fail

The greatest danger of mental simulation is that you may imagine all the evidences that are going to corroborate your estimation of the situation. Unfortunately, if you are sufficiently determined, you may never give up the idea that your mental simulation is Right and matches reality. As contradictions to your mental simulations come along, you may still continue to believe in it by imagining more and more complicated and deeper explanations.

Thus, Sir Francis Galton, at the end of the 19^th century, tried an experiment in order to see if he could understand what the paranoids feel. He tried to maintain the belief according to which all the people he met were plotting against him. Two people were talking and suddenly looked at him? They were part of the plot. A horse swerves when it sees him? Even the animals are against him. Galton carried on as he could but had to give up before the day was up. His paranoid explanations were becoming so convincing that they were starting to become out of control and he was afraid for his own mental balance.

One of the reasons for this problem is that once we have constructed a mental simulation, we tend to fall in love with it. Whether we are using it as an explanation or to make predictions, once it is finished, we may lend it more credibility than it is worth, especially if we are not all that experienced in this field.

Despite these limitations, simulations allow us to make skilled decisions and to solve problems in conditions in which traditional analytical decision strategies cannot be applied.

Applications

Researchers have imagined a method to allow people to be more sensitive to the alternative interpretations of a situation. You must ask someone to give you an explanation about something, an explanation in which he will have the most extreme trust. Then tell him/her that you have a crystal ball telling you that this explanation is wrong. The crystal ball has not shown you why. The person must find out by him/herself another explanation, which will help him/her greatly see that one situation may have different explanations.

Chapter 7: Mental Simulations and Decision Making

Mental simulations are used at least three times in the RPD model:

1 – The awareness of the situation

One of the basic aspects of the RPD model is that experienced people can apprehend a situation and judge whether it is familiar or typical, or not. Often this judgment happens so quickly and so automatically that we are not aware of it.

Sometimes, however, we must try to lend a meaning to the various clues. Mental simulation is a way of giving meaning to events and to create an explanation.

The awareness of a situation can be formed rapidly, through an intuitive cross-checking of the patterns, or deliberately through mental simulation. Sometimes a situation reminds us of a previous event, and we try to use analogy to understand what is going on.

2 – Expectations

By evaluating a situation, people construct a mental simulation of the way in which the events have evolved and the way they are going to keep on evolving. The more experienced the decision makers, the clearer and more precise the expectations.

By checking if the expectations are satisfactory, the decision maker may judge the adequacy of mental simulation. The larger the difference and the more efforts needed to explain the conflicting differences, the less the decision maker will trust in his mental simulation and his diagnostic.

3 – Field of action

Someone who has apprehended a situation will be aware of several typical ways of reacting to it.

We have seen with the RPD model that a person will be able to choose the first idea coming into their head, without bothering to try other ones, especially when they are in a hurry. But few of us are impulsive enough to always act in this way and most major decisions are not made this way.

Mental simulation allows gauging various ways of reacting, by accepting them or rejecting them, one at a time, without the need to compare them. The firefighters make most of their decisions in this manner. Studies show that the great chess players do likewise. But there are certainly times for comparing options rather than evaluating them one by one. For example, researchers have shown that when airline pilots have to deviate from their route and land at a different airport, they simultaneously compare the benefits and faults of each. Although mental simulation plays a role, pilots do not use the RPD model here, because, even with restricted time, there are sometimes moments when you need to compare various options.

This method of decision-making having duly compared the advantages and disadvantages of each option is a good example of the rational choice model. Researchers have analyzed various decisions in various situations and have sorted them according to their belonging to the rational model or the RPD model:

Task Conditions	Decisions based on the RPD model	Rational Choice Strategies
Great time constraint	More likely
Greater experience	More likely
Dynamic conditions	More likely
Non quantifiable objectives	More likely
Need for a justification		More likely
Conflict Resolutions		More likely
Optimization		More likely
Complex		More likely

Let’s look in more details at each line from the table. People are the most likely to use singular evaluation strategies (one at a time) when;

Time constraint is great. In this case, evaluating each option in comparison with the others and determining the comparison and analyzing criteria take too much time.
People are more experienced in this field. With experience, people have more trust in the first actions they consider being the right ones.
Conditions are dynamic. The necessary time and effort to implement a detailed analysis can be wasted if the conditions change.
When the objectives are not quantifiable. The ambiguity makes it hard to implement evaluation criteria that can be applied to all the options.

On the contrary, people are more likely to use comparative evaluation when;

They must justify their choice. Hierarchic authorities generally look for evidence that alternatives have been envisaged.
Conflict resolution is a factor. When all the conflicting parties have different priorities, it is important to find a common comparison, which can put all the expectations in a similar format.
The decision maker is trying to optimize in order to find the best course of action. This is fundamentally what comparison is all about. Singular evaluation is attempting to find the first acceptable, but not necessarily the best one.
The situation is complex. If it is something that no one can easily recognize or conceive, like analyzing an investment portfolio, to find the best strategy.

The researchers also identified and analyzed a large number of decisions in various trades, and determined the percentage of those who used the RPD model:

Surveyed trade	Number of decisions	Decisions using RPD
Urban Fire Officers	156	80%
Specialized and expert Fire Officers	48	58%
Novice Fire Officers	33	46%
Tank Commanders	110	42%
Fire Officers managing a forest fire Functional decisions Organizational decisions	110 76 31	51% 56% 39%
Design Engineers	51	60%
Combat squad	27	96%
Ship captain AEGIS	78	95%

Chapter 8: The Power to Detect the Leverage Points

This section explores the means used by people to use leverage points – a small difference that makes a big difference, a small change that can turn a situation around – in order to create a new chain reaction, and the way they are able identify what could cause problems before there are any signs of trouble.

A leverage point is a focus for building a solution. It is the starting point for an insightful problem solving. If you need to move a rock, you can lean your shoulder against it and push with all your might to counteract its enormous inertia, or you can study the rock and its environment to find the flaw which will enable you make it move or tumble. The leverage points play an important role in many fields, and there are examples galore in the business sector.

For example, the realization by Boeing engineers that commercial jet liners would have an enormous advantage over propelled airplanes was the creation of a major point of leverage. The engineers had not yet designed such a plane and they didn’t have a market for it. But they had a concept and the curiosity to find out what was going to happen if they fitted jet engines on airline planes. The rival companies such as Douglas with its DC-8 came later and were never able to commercially compete against this plane. Similarly, the very well known example of Henry Ford realizing that he could make motorcars using mass production to reduce costs so that most workers could afford his T-model, is an excellent demonstration of the discovery and use of a leverage point. Before that, Ford was only one of the thirty American car manufacturing companies fighting for a luxury and artisanal market.

Similarly, scientists, the military, sportsmen, chess players and many others need to identify and use leverage points.

Leverage points are just possibilities – pressure points that can lead to something useful, or nowhere at all. Expertise may be useful in identifying them. Experts know how recordings are compiled, be it cards, manuals, diagnostic tests or taking-off checklists. They know when you need to follow the steps and when you can make an exception.

We must also detect the leverage points that can work against us, in order to learn the weaknesses of our plans. They are sometimes called bottlenecks. By detecting them, we give ourselves time to take preventive action before an emergency situation occurs.

Note: although Gary Klein doesn’t talk about it explicitly, the leverage points are simply the 20% of action leading to 80% of results.

To be continued in the next episode .

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Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – 2

Olivier Roland — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:23:34 +0000

Note: this book being also very comprehensive, I am publishing its summary in two parts. This is Part Two. Part One is here.

Book review and summary, Part II:

Chapter 5: Emotion

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Mother Theresa

Scientific research shows that Mother Theresa’s precept is true for most of us. Charity organizations have known this for a long time: we do not give to “poverty in Africa”, but we sponsor this or that child. It is very difficult for us to feel compassion for statistics. Although we are aware that the economical situation in Africa is dreadful, we often do not feel concerned enough to act. Seeing an individual suffer, and knowing that we can do something to soothe their ordeal, is quite different.

Charity organizations are not the only ones needing to make people feel concerned. Managers, teachers, politicians and many others need to motivate their colleagues, their pupils, their troops.

What should you be looking for in order to motivate human beings? Appeal to what matters to them. And what matters to them? What are they concerned about?

The answer is simple: themselves. You therefore need to appeal to… their personal interest, and explain: “what can you gain from it” in the messages and ideas you want to convey. How many teachers have heard their pupils ask “But what’s the point of it?”. Do you think pupils are motivated to learn if their teacher cannot answer this question? And what if we could tell them that algebra improves your video game performances, would a teacher hesitate to say it? Would any teacher doubt that it would make the pupils more attentive?

If you have their personal interest on your side, don’t hesitate. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t say: “People will feel safe with GoodYear Tires”, say: “You will feel safe with GoodYear Tires”.

There is however a more subtle way to appeal to the people’s personal interests. In 1982, psychologists carried out a survey on persuasion: students visited homeowners and asked them to answer questionnaires for a presentation. At the time, cable TV was only just beginning and most people had only vaguely heard of it. The survey was meant to compare the efficiency of two different approaches to make people subscribe to cable television, which was to be rolled out a month later.

In the first approach, the following text was presented:

“Cable television will provide its subscribers with more extensive news and entertainment services. Used appropriately, it gives the viewer freedom to plan in order to enjoy the programs on offer. The subscribers may spend more time at home with their family, on their own or with friends, thus saving the hassle of a night out, as well as babysitting and petrol expenses.

In the second approach, the homeowners were asked to imagine a precise scenario:

“Take a few moments and imagine how cable television is going to allow you to enjoy more extensive news and entertainment services. When you know how to use it, you will be able to plan ahead the events you want to watch. Think about it: no more hassle for a night out, not to mention the savings on babysitting and fuel. You will be able to spend time at home, with your family, on your own, or with your friends.”

The differences between the two texts may seem minor. But count the number of times the word you is used in both samples.

One month after the survey, cable television was rolled out in the city and the researchers analyzed the homeowners’ subscriptions. Result: 20% of the first group had subscribed, in keeping with the subscription rate in the area; on the other hand, in the second group, 47% of the homeowners had subscribed.

The subtitle of the article the researchers published was “Is imagining making things happen”. The answer was: it is.

The benefit to the buyer here was not indeed all this valuable. The main argument was: “by subscribing to cable TV, you save yourself the hassle of getting out of your house” (!). These results suggest that – more so than their importance – it is in fact the tangible and concrete aspect of the benefit that clearly comes out when people imagine them, which make them feel concerned.

There is indeed no need to promise the earth: it is often enough to promise reasonable benefits people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

Personal interest, however, does not explain everything, as Abraham Maslow attempted to demonstrate in his famous pyramid. A recent study presented the following scenario to a selection of people:

Imagine a company offering its employees a $1,000 bonus should they achieve a number of objectives. Here are three ways of presenting the bonus to the staff:

Imagine what $1,000 means: a deposit on a new car, or the new kitchen you’ve been dreaming about for a long time.
Think of how reassuring it would be to know that you had $1,000 aside in case of hard times.
Think of what this $1,000 represent: the company acknowledges the role you play in its global performances. It is not wasting its money.

When people were asked which presentation would personally appeal to them, most people answered the third. It is good for self-esteem, and it is obvious that $1,000 can either be spent or saved. But the value of the study was in the answer these people gave when asked which proposal would be the best for others. The majority answered the first proposal, followed by the second one. In other words, people thought that they were motivated by self-esteem, but that the others were motivated by a deposit on a new car. It therefore appears that many of us believe that everyone except us is living in Maslow’s cave, i.e. the bottom of the pyramid, where primary needs are fulfilled.

Note: And what if people answered in this manner because, deep inside, they favored proposals 1 and 2 but did not wish to appear materialistic to the researchers’ eyes? In this case, the results would be the same, but the interpretation would be radically different.

Let us now look at the power of emotions with this practical case: all Algebra teachers have heard their pupils ask: “Why am I learning this? When am I ever going to use it?” Let’s look at three attempts at answering this question:

- Message 1: During a conference entitled “Algebra for All”, the following answers were proposed to the question “Why study algebra?”:

Algebra provides methods for moving from the specific to the general. It involves discovering the patterns among items in a set and developing the language needed to think about and communicate it to others.
Algebra provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding of the world around us.
Algebra provides a vehicle for understanding our world through mathematical models.
[...]Algebra is the basic set of ideas and techniques for describing and reasoning about relations between variable quantities.

Comment: This message is the perfect illustration of the “curse of knowledge”. It has obviously been written by specialists, who remain on an abstract level. Would a sulky pupil suddenly become motivated and excited by algebra once he is told that algebra “provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding the world around us”? These phrases are, above all, definitions of algebra, not reasons to study algebra.

- Message 2: Here is an answer written with reasons commonly given to pupils to explain why they must study algebra and taken from the Internet:

You have to pass your exams.
All Math and Science courses require knowledge of algebra.
In order to get a place at a good university, you need to have good grades at Math.
And even if you never go into higher education, the reasoning skills you learn with algebra will help you buy a house, make up a budget, etc.

My brother is a salesman in a high-tech business. He’s always had a problem with Math, but now he realizes that the hard work he did has improved his analytical skills and help him today to better present his products to his customers.

Comment: This message is safe from the curse of knowledge and remains concrete. It nonetheless remains in Maslow’s cave because it addresses primary needs. The two reasons given are 1) because you have no choice and 2) in order to carry on doing it. The most efficient part is the last, with a concrete “real-life” story showing that algebra can have concrete benefits.

- Message 3: Here is the answer of a high school teacher:

When his 9^th Grade pupils ask him: “When are we going to use this?”, he answers: “Never. You will never use it.”

Then, he tells them that if people lift weights, it is not to prepare in case they are attacked in the street one day. You lift weights so that you can knock over a forward at football, or to carry your shopping bags, or to keep fit, or to lift up your grandchild without feeling stiff the following day. You do Math to improve your ability to reason logically, in order to become a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison guard or even a parent.

MATH IS FITNESS TRAINING FOR THE BRAIN. It is a means (for most people), not an end.

Comment: Here is a much more efficient message using already explained methods: surprise – in order to capture attention: “Never. You will never use it”; the help of an analogy – fitness training; and it rises up Maslow’s pyramid because it deals with levels such as Learning or Self-Fulfillment. The message is that, by studying algebra, we better realize our potential.

Let’s compare the three messages in a table with the 6 principles presented in the book (you can use it at home ) :

Principles	Message 1	Message 2	Message 3
Simplicity	-	-	+
Unexpected	-	-	+
Concrete	-	+	+
Credibility	-	-	-
Emotion	-	+	++
Story	-	+	-

Chapter 6: A Story

Not a sound. The heart is not beating.

In his book Sources of Power (which will be reviewed next week ), Gary Klein tells us this story pointing out that it is an example of the usefulness of stories: they are extremely efficient learning tools, and they are rich in teachings, which is why they are so abundant in all circles. They show how context can lead individuals to take the wrong decisions, and highlight the causal relations previously unidentified and the unexpected solutions that the characters have found to solve problems.

The specific teachings from this story are very interesting for medical staff. Even for those of us who do not work in this industry, this story can affect us and make us think: it’s the story of a woman who was not afraid to come out of her role, who did not give up despite the group’s pressure, who saved a life by rejecting the hospital’s hierarchy; a nurse who gave the correct diagnostic to a neonatal surgeon.

The power of this story is that it has a dual aspect: it is a simulation – showing how to act – and an inspiration – motivating to act. These two benefits have in common that they incite action, and this is what is needed.

In your opinion, for a medical team, which is the most revealing and inspiring to act: this story or a banal: “When a baby under artificial respiration turns blue, you should systematically check her heart with a stethoscope so as to exclude a pneumopericardium?”

In every profession, we “talk shop”, often using obscure technical words the majority cannot understand. We tell one other small professional mishaps, as anecdotes, not failing to mention the technical details. These stories are more than a mere social function fulfilling the desire to share with other humans. They are used to share valuable information, to allow others to identify with the storyteller, to put themselves in his/her shoes, and to be able to solve problems more easily when they happen. These stories are often at once entertaining and instructive. They act as flight simulators, allowing to imagine a situation and to prepare for it without having lived through it.

This simulation works because we cannot imagine events without stimulating the same modules in our brain as those activated in actual activity. These simulations help us better manage emotions, and many phobias – air travel, spiders, talking in public, etc. – are treated using a method based on this technique. Simulations also facilitate problem solving. A man who is trying to stop smoking and mentally projects a party during which friends offer him a cigarette – which he refuses – stands a better chance not to give in to temptation. More amazingly, mental simulation can also develop skills. The summary of 35 studies gathering 3,214 participants has shown that sole mental training – sitting quietly, not moving and imagining oneself correctly completing a task from start to finish – significantly improves performances. This has been corroborated for many activities, from welding to ice-skating, as well as darts. However, sole mental training is more efficient for tasks involving more mental activity than physical activity. But overall, mental training alone can produce on average two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

Therefore, if mental simulation is not as beneficial as real practice, it is not far from it. And good stories are mental simulations.

But how can you make up stories that stick? Well, most of the time, you don’t even need to create them: you only have to spot them. How? Chip Heath and Dean Heath have analyzed hundreds of inspiring stories and have concluded that there are three types of elementary plots is these stories: The Challenge, The Bond and Creativity.

The Challenge

A classic of this genre – and even perhaps its archetype – is David against Goliath. A character triumphs over a formidable challenge and wins. There are many other variants, such as the Ugly Little Duckling, the poor man who becomes rich, the triumph of will over adversity.

The key element of these stories is that the hurdles appear insurmountable to the hero, but he ends up triumphant.

These stories inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work hard, to take on new challenges and to overcome obstacles.

The Bond

The archetype of the bonding stories is the Good Samaritan:

“But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"

Jesus answered, "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"

He said, "He who showed mercy on him."

Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." (Luke 10:30 – 37)

At the time, the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other and there was a social chasm, which seemed to be impassable. This story tells us of people who create a bond by crossing a divide – be it racial, ethnic, social, religious, etc. This plot is ideal for love stories – think of Romeo and Juliet or Titanic.

Creativity

It is present in the story of the apple falling over Isaac Newton’s head, inspiring him the theory of gravity. This plot involves an individual making a revolutionary discovery, solving a very ancient enigma or tackling a problem in an innovating manner. It is the plot of MacGyver or The A-Team.

Chapter 7: Epilogue

In order for a story to stick, it must inspire the following to its audience:

Attention
Understanding and memorization
Adhesion
Implication
Will to act

These stages are linked to the principles in the following way:

1 – Attention	UNEXPECTED
2 – Understanding and memorization	CONCRETE
3 – Adhesion	CREDIBILITY
4 – Implication	EMOTION
5 – Will to act	STORY

The authors give a list of symptoms to detect the audience’s lack of attention and solutions to solve it.

Critic of the “Made to Stick” :

This book is simple, easy to understand and provides a detailed guide to making ideas stick, in all areas one can imagine, from education to marketing, as well as sales or storytelling. The authors have carried out a survey, which they relate at the start of the book and which indicates that even complete beginners following the book’s precepts manage to create efficient commercials that stick. It is ultra easy to check if our messages can stick and to choose the best one by using this table:

Principles	Message 1	Message 2	Message 3
Simplicity
Unexpected
Concrete
Credibility
Emotion
Story

Use it for yourself!

One of the authors is a scientist – Chip Heath, Professor of psychology at Stanford – and it is obvious: the book is packed with references and notes about scientific surveys, a welcome element and rather rare in business books, which adds credibility to the overall work and allows to go deeper if need be.

As for faults, I found it at times repetitive, and I believe it could have been shorter to stick better. Overall it is an excellent book, which explains its message in a clear and concrete manner, illustrating it with many stories, which are as many examples and images to help us understand better the concepts. To be tried out in our future communications.

Strong points:

Simple and easy to understand
Many stories and examples to help us understand the concepts
Many references to scientific studies
Provides concrete tools – including the useful table – to improve the impact and the adhesion of our messages

Weak points:

A little repetitive at times
Could have been more concise

My rating:

Have you read the book? How do you rate it?

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Made to Stick Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. One sentence-summary: Some...

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Made to Stick

Olivier Roland — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:15:07 +0000

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

One sentence-summary: Some ideas influence their audience, making a mark on their memory for a long time and even making them act; whilst others are forgotten having hardly been heard. The authors study the ideas which do stick and explain their adhesion mechanisms.

By Chip Heath and Dan Heath, 2007, 285 pages.

Note: this book being also very comprehensive, I am publishing its summary in two parts. This is the first. I’m afraid this will be the case for many books in the Psychology & Communication section .

Summary of “Made to Stick”:

You will never guess what happened to one of my friends’ friend – Frank, not to name him. He was in Seattle for an important meeting with a client. Once the meeting over, as he still had time before catching his flight home, he went to a bar for a drink.

He had just finished his first glass when an attractive young woman came by and offered him a drink. Surprised, but nonetheless flattered, he accepted. She returned with two drinks. Thank you, he said, and took his first sip. After this, it was a total blackout.

When he woke up, comatose, he was lying in a hotel bathtub, his body covered in ice. He looked around him, panicked, trying to remember what he was doing there. His attention was then drawn to a small piece of paper:

DO NOT MOVE. PHONE 911.

There was a cellphone on a small table beside the bathtub. He struggled to reach, his fingers numbed with the cold, and dialed the emergency number.

At the other end of the line, the switchboard operator did not sound surprised. “Sir, could you please reach your arm behind your back? Can you feel something? A catheter in your lower back?”

Worried, he did as she asked. There was indeed a catheter.

“Do not panic, Sir, said the young lady. You have just had a kidney removed. You are the victim of an organ trafficking network wreaking havoc in the city. The ambulance is on its way.

Congratulations.

You have just read one of the most popular urban legends of the past fifteen years, which has gone round the Internet in every language and in many forms. A story easily remembered, a striking story, a story that sticks; albeit a completely fake story.

Let’s now look at an article published in the newsletter of a charity organization:

The communities’ make-up in the broader sense lends itself by nature to an equation of return on investment, which can be reproduced by referring to existing practices. [...] The fact that, in order to maintain transparency, the donor organizations often have to target or classify into categories the donated sums, is a factor limiting the flow of resources towards our organization.

Now, do something for ten minutes, anything, and then call a friend and tell him the two stories. Which one do you think you will remember the best? And which one will you be able to explain to your friend in simple terms?

An urban legend on the one hand, a few lines from an article out of context on the other: the comparison between the two is indeed biased. However, it perfectly demonstrates the two extremes of what the authors call “the scale of memorability”. And it also perfectly illustrates that some stories stick and others don’t.

We could be led to believe that some ideas are inherently interesting – a gang of organ thieves – and others inherently boring – the financial strategy of a charity organization. This is certainly partly true. But in this nature/nurture debate as applied to ideas, Chip Heath and Dan Heath gamble on nurture: ideas are made to be interesting rather than interesting by nature.

In 1992, Art Silverman, an employee of the Center for Science in the Public Interest – a non-profit making organization aimed at educating consumers in the field of nutrition – was contemplating a packet of popcorn.

He had just received the test results of popcorn packets collected at a dozen cinemas in three major American cities. Everyone had been surprised at the results: a bag contained on average 37 grams of saturated fat. The recommended maximum amount was 20 grams per day.

The coconut oil, which was used at the time, was to blame, as it was full of saturated fat.

Something had to be done. This bag, which could easily be eaten between meals, contained in itself almost two day’s worth of saturated fat. But how was the public going to be informed? For the majority, “37 grams of saturated fat” does not mean much. Is it good or bad? And even if it were bad, would it be “bad bad”, like tobacco, or “normal bad”, like a biscuit or a treat?

And of course, the phrase “37 grams of saturated fat” is boring enough to make the consumers run a mile. No one is turned on by saturated fat.

There were many means of transmitting the message to the public. But it had to be something extravagant to match the extravagance of this nutritional aberration. So the CSPI organized a press conference delivering this message:

An average portion of popcorn sold at a local cinema contains more dangerous fat for the arteries than a breakfast with bacon and eggs, lunch with a Big Mac and fries, and dinner with steak and all the trimmings – all in one!

And this message was reinforced with visuals. A table crammed with all these fatty foods. An entire day of unbalanced diet on a table; beside it, a bag of popcorn.

The story was a hit and got the honors of television channels. Very soon, the consumers stopped buying popcorn and cinemas, hand on heart, declared that they would no longer use coconut oil to make their popcorn. The idea had stuck.

Note: I did some research on this precise point and it appears that the opinions are far from being unanimous on the actual harm caused by coconut oil and the scientific value of the CSPI. As is often the case, it is hard to find a unanimous opinion concerning nutritional recommendations, as the experts and organizations do not agree with one other and individual interests are hidden and nebulous. For examples of articles against the CSPI or the noxiousness of coconut oil, see here or there.

Looking at the stories that stick and the ones that don’t, the Heath brothers set out to search for the common characteristics which could explain why some stories stick and others don’t, studying in particular hundreds of urban legends and widely spread proverbs.

They drew six determining principles from their research. In order for a story to stick, it requires:

Simplicity. A great barrister claimed: “If you put forward ten arguments, even if they are relevant, the jury will have forgotten them all when they return to the deliberation room.” In order to be simple, an idea must be stripped down to its core, relentlessly excluding superfluous elements.
The unexpected. In order to draw attention, intuitions must be challenged.
Something practical. The ideas that naturally stick are full of concrete images. This is where business communication often stumbles.
Credibility. If a Health Minister talks about a health problem, we are prepared to believe him. But we are not always given such a position of authority. Our ideas must therefore themselves bear their own letters of credit.
Emotion. In order to inspire passion for our ideas, the audience or the readers have to feel something. We are made to feel things for individuals, not for abstractions.
A story. Listening to a story or an anecdote is like a flight simulator, preparing us to react more quickly and more efficiently when a similar situation occurs.

Having read this list, you may think that these principles make sense. We all more or less know that we ought to “be simple” and “tell a story”. Do you know many soporific gibberish enthusiasts?

But if it were that simple, why are we not flooded with brilliantly designed sticking ideas?

Well, there’s a real baddie. Not Dark Vador, but a natural psychological tendency, which makes the application of these principles very difficult: the curse of knowledge.

In order to fully understand this principle, let’s look at a scientific study carried out in 1990 at Stanford University. It featured two groups of participants: “drummers” and “listeners”. The drummers were given 25 famous songs – such as The Star-Spangled Banner or Happy Birthday. They had to choose one and beat the tempo with their finger on a table to a listener. The listener had to guess which song it was.

The results were edifying: over the 120 songs played, the listeners identified on average 2.5%, i.e. 3 songs. But this is not what was edifying: before the drummers would play, they were asked to predict the success rate of the listeners: they estimated it to be 50%.

The drummers therefore managed to convey their message once in every 40 times, but thought they would manage it once every two times. Why?

They had knowledge the listeners did not have: the tune playing in their heads. For the listeners, the beats may as well have been Morse code, but for the drummers they accompanied the tempo of the music. And this knowledge made them almost impervious to the listeners’ incomprehension.

This is a perfect illustration of the curse of knowledge. You can try the experiment for yourself at home .

We will see this curse again in all the above principles detailed below. Follow the guide.

Chapter 1: Simplicity

Every last move of the soldiers in the American army meets a very careful preparation, which originated with an order from the President of the United States and then cascades down all the grades of the hierarchy right down to the bottom.

The plans are detailed, pointing out the “pattern of maneuvers” and the details of what each unit will be doing, its equipment, its munitions, etc.

The problem is that no plan can survive contact with the enemy. It is as if you were implementing a detailed plan for a friend playing a game of chess. You cannot predict the opponent’s moves, and therefore the plan becomes obsolete in just a few moves.

Plans are useful in the army. They show that a planning process is in place and allows asking the right questions. But since they do not work on the battlefield, the American army introduced a new concept in the 1980’s: the Intention of Commandment. It is a simple and concise sentence describing the operation’s objective. It can be general and abstract at higher level, but the lower down the grades, the more it becomes precise and practical, like “My intention is to position the 3^rd battalion on hill 4305 to liberate it and protect the flank of the 3^rd brigade when it pushes through the line.”

Thanks to IC, the soldiers know their mission’s objective, they are free to improvise according to the circumstances in order to reach it.

No plan can survive with the enemy. This precept should speak even to those who have no military experience. Very often, no business plan can survive in contact with the customer. No lesson plan can survive in contact with the pupils, etc.

To make one’s ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable and chaotic context is not easy. The way to success is simplicity. Not simple as in “simplistic” or “reductive”, but simplicity as in, the idea’s substantive spinal cord

The idea therefore has to be undressed, totally stripped down to its very essence, its core, and devoid of all superficiality. The trickiest thing is to set aside any idea that appears to be important but is not ultimately the most important idea. The Intention of Commandment makes the American army’s officers extract the most important objective in an operation. There can only be one priority, and only one IC.

Finding the essence of an idea is to set aside a large number of ideas to enable the most important one to shine. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote:

“Perfection is acheived, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Thus is the essence of Made to Stick. In order to make your ideas stick, there are two steps:

Find their essence.
Bring them alive with the help of the six principles.

No more, no less.

Chapter 2: The unexpected

The first issue of communication is to get the attention of those you are addressing. Sometimes we have the appropriate authority to demand attention – like parents with their children, for instance – but most of the time, we do not have this luxury.

One of the most basic elements to capture the attention is to break a pattern or a well-anchored model in our audience’s mind. We human beings get used to recurring patterns incredibly quickly. We soon no longer pay attention to the noisy computer, the purring fan, the picture on the wall… In order to become conscious of things, there has to be a change: the computer or the fan stops, the picture falls off the wall or we find its space empty, etc.

Our brain is therefore extremely sensitive to change. But once we have drawn the others’ attention with surprise, we must keep it by making their interest grow.

Surprise is linked to a facial expression common to many cultures, which the psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in their book Unmasking the Face name “the eyebrow of surprise”.

The eyebrows are rounded and high… The skin underneath the eyebrows is stretched by the upward movement and more visible than usual.

When we raise our eyebrows, our eyes widen and our field of vision expands, making us see more. On the contrary, when we are angry, the eyes shrink so that we may concentrate on the issue. Often the surprise is such that we are left with our mouth open, our body paralyzed for a few seconds, our muscles at rest, as if the brain wanted to make sure we could not do anything that may prevent us from integrating this new piece of information.

Surprise therefore acts as an emergency neutralizer when our guessing machines are cut short. All our ongoing activities are interrupted and our attention unwillingly focuses on the surprising event.

The unexpected ideas are therefore more likely to stick because surprise makes us attentive and makes us think, and this extra attention imprints the unexpected events into our memory.

Sometimes this attention is short-lived, but in other cases surprise can lead to lasting attention. Some researchers looking into conspiracy theories have noticed that these are often born of unexpected events individuals do not comprehend, such as the death of beautiful young people. There are conspiracy theories for John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Kurt Cobain. The deaths of 90 year-old people do not provoke so much questioning.

Surprise is therefore a powerful instrument to use, but one should be careful not to overuse it. To understand this, read the following words:

COMBINEMENT BRAVITUDE DOWG HAUSPITALE

Then ask someone else to read them and carefully watch their facial expressions. Normally, COMBINEMENT and BRAVITUDE make people frown more, whereas DAWG and HAUSPITALE make people raise their eyebrows.

DOWG and HAUSPITALE inspire surprise because their spelling is not familiar whereas the pronunciation is. We go “oh!” when we realize that DOWG is a bizarre way of spelling DOG and HAUSPITALE the incorrectly spelt equivalent of HAUSPITALE.

On the contrary, COMBINEMENT and BRAVITUDE appear to be bizarrely familiar, as they use a combination of existing words. But they do not actually exist and when we realize this, it annoys us because we have been struggling to find a solution that does not exist.

These two words are examples of gratuitous and hollow surprise, which does not stick and is frustrating. In order to be surprising, an event cannot be predictable, but for it to be sufficient, the surprise must be visible afterwards. The trick makes sense when we think about it but we didn’t perceive it at first.

Therefore, in order to make our ideas stick better, we ought to:

Identify the central message, which must be communicated – the substantive spinal cord
Discover what the message may have that is contrary to intuition
Communicate our message in a way that fails the guessing machines of our audience in the essential, unpredictable dimension.

Once we have drawn the attention, we still need to maintain it. To this end we may use known techniques such as the open loop: starting with an enigma, stimulating intellectual curiosity and making us want to know the answer, in short, opening a loop which will only be closed at the end of the message.

Enigmas are indeed powerful, because they create the need for an ending. As the psychology professor Robert Cialdini says: “Have you heard about the Aha! experiment? Well, the Aha ! experiment is a lot more satisfying when it is preceded by the Eh? experiment” .

Chapter 3: Something practical

Aesop’s fables and their morals have travelled worldwide, generating many proverbs, such as those linked to his fable The Fox and the Grapes:

“A fox, having glimpsed a few ripening grapes at the top of a tree wanted to eat them. He tried hard to reach them, but realizing that all his efforts were in vain, he hid his sorrow and said, turning away, that he did not want to eat these grapes as they were too raw and sour.”

Such are some men, whose weakness prevents them from achieving and who blame the circumstances. It is easy to scorn what one cannot have.

If Aesop’s fables have travelled worldwide and survived for 2,500 years, it is of course because they communicate profound truths, but it is especially because the way they are presented make them ideas that stick. The fables conjure up concrete images, here the grapes, the fox, the scornful claim about the green grapes.

The world needs more fables. We are overwhelmed with hollow slogans, which do not mean and/or signify anything, in all walks of life:

Business:
- Client-orientated visionary paradigm
- Reciprocal reeingineering based on costs
Teaching:
- Metacognitive competences
- Pertinent portfolio evaluation in terms of development
Medicine:
- Idiopathic cardiomyopathy (Cardiomyopathy means “there’s something wrong with your heart’ and idiopathic, “we have no idea what it is”)

And I won’t even talk about the academic with their theses full of edifying jargon, I.T. technicians, mechanics, psychologists, scientists, politicians, in short, just about everyone.

Languages are often abstract, but life is not. Even the most abstract business strategy must translate into tangible human actions. And it is easier to adhere and understand tangible actions than the presentation of an abstract strategy.

Concrete means directly perceptible by the senses. A V8 engine is concrete. “Great performances” is not. Let’s not forget that abstraction also has a role, but it is the expert’s luxury and privilege. In order to teach an idea to beginners or neophytes, or even a group of people whose level of knowledge you ignore, concreteness is the only risk-free language.

The ideas that naturally stick are full of images and concrete words. The urban legend of the stolen kidney would probably have stuck less had the protagonist realized he’d been robbed of his self-esteem.

Chapter 4: Credibility

One out of ten people will have an ulcer in their lifetime. For a very long time, doctors believed that ulcers were caused by an excess of gastric acid eating away at the stomach’s wall, and that this excess was caused by stress, spicy food or too much alcohol.

In 1982, Barry Marshal and Robin Warren, two researchers from Perth, Australia, discovered that ulcers were caused by a bacteria, which would some years later be named Helicobacter Pylori. This discovery was considerable: if ulcers were caused by bacteria, then they could easily be cured: all we needed was antibiotics. Would the medical community cry out for joy, would they organize huge parties in honor of the researchers, were they thanked for this new hope they were giving for the health of hundreds of millions of human beings?

Absolutely not. No one believed them. And there were three reasons for this:

The medical community firmly believed that nothing could withstand gastric acid, an extremely powerful substance, which can eat away at a piece of meat or even dissolve a nail.
At the time of the discovery, Robin Warren was a mere pathologist in a Perth hospital and Barry Marshal was completing his residency. The case was understood: residents do not cure illnesses affecting 10% of the world population.
The place. A researcher from Perth is like a doctor from Oregon. Science is science, but scientists are humans and they have the same tendency to snobbery as the rest of us.

Marshall and Warren did not even manage to have their research paper published. After two years of procrastination, Marshall, who could no longer wait, skipped breakfast, called his colleagues and swallowed in front of them a glass containing almost one billion H. Pylori bacteria. In a few days, he developed the symptoms of an ulcer and cured himself using antibiotics.

The game was not yet won, some researchers reproached him his method, but his demonstration had given a new breath of life to his theory, which then started to be widely studied. In 1994, the role of H. Pylori in ulcers was officially recognized and in 2005, Marshall and Warren jointly received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery.

Here was the story of two men who make a discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize and one of whom had to poison himself in order to be believed!

Trying to convince a skeptical audience is very difficult, because we are waging a demoniac challenge against an entire life of teachings and social interactions. However, some absolutely unbelievable urban tales spread like gunpowder. What can make a message credible? Let’s look at various tools for this:

The authorities

Any message issued by an established authority within the message’s subject area is considered with more respect than a message coming from an average individual. By authority, we mean two categories of people:

Specialists, who have authority in their given field, such as Stephen Hawkins for Physics, Alan Greenspan for Economy, Tony Robbins for personal development, etc.
Stars or celebrities. Michael Jordan likes McDonald’s. Very well. He is neither a dietician nor a gourmet, but he is likely to make many people go to McDonald’s because many people would like to emulate him.

However, we rarely have the opportunity to have international specialists or celebrities defending our products or ideas (if so, you may skip this section ). Thankfully, it is also possible to call upon perfect strangers.

The illustrious unknown individuals who know what they’re talking about

Pam Laffin was the heroin of an anti-smoking campaign broadcasted on American television in the 1990’s (watch this video as an example). She was neither a health specialist nor a celebrity. Pam was a smoker. She was 29 years old at the time and a mother of two, and had started smoking at the age 14, “to look older”, as she said in the commercials. These showed her struggle against cancer, her operations, her scars, her terrible suffering. She died aged 31. These commercial had a considerable impact.

It was not evident at first that Pam Laffin, a perfect stranger, would influence the opinion. Yet she became a credible and respected source, because amidst the countless other sources talking about smoking, she exuded honesty and impartiality. The ordeal shown on television was hers, it was real. She really suffered. She really died.

The power of details

Often we cannot use an outside source of credibility to credit our message; most of time they have to have built-in credibility.

Scientific studies show that living and concrete details increase an idea or a story’s credibility, provided that not just anything is used and that these details symbolize and support the core of the message.

Illustrated statistics

Another way of making a message more credible is by using statistics. Statistics can often be boring and do not make an idea stick. It is better to illustrate them with images or clear comparisons, rather than using raw figures.

The principle of the human scale

Another way of giving life to numbers is by presenting them in a more human context. Let’s compare the two scientific developments below:

1. Scientists recently calculated an important physical constraint with an extraordinary accuracy. In order to picture this accuracy, imagine throwing a rock from the Sun to the Earth and hitting your target within a 500-metre radius of its center.

2. Scientists recently calculated an important physical constraint with extraordinary accuracy. In order to picture this accuracy, imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting your target within a 1.5-centimeter radius of its center.

Which one of the two claims appears to be the most precise?

In both cases, the degree of accuracy is rigorously identical, but in a study, 58% of the participants claimed that the first claim was “very impressive” against 83% for the second one.

It is easier for us to imagine the distance New York – Los-Angeles than Sun – Earth; this comparison therefore sticks a lot better and helps us perceive more clearly the scientists’ prowess. It is therefore important to change any figure or result that is too large to a human scale so that it may be concretely understood.

To be continued…

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Rebirth of this blog

Olivier Roland — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:09:08 +0000

April 12th, 2009, I announced the end of this blog. The reason was this blog was a translation of my French blog Des Livres Pour Changer de Vie, and at this time the English blog had 1 third of the traffic of the French blog, six months after the creation. The translation was costly, so I decided to drop the English blog and to focus on the French one.

Fast forward 2 years and half after, I achieved tremendous success with the French blog (which have now more than 20 000 RSS + emails subscribers), and with a second one, Blogueur Pro, which too have more than 20 000 RSS + emails subscribers. I succeeded in my dream of living the 4 hour workweek (which have nothing to do with just working 4 hours per week, no more, no less, as you know if you really read the book) and now I’m travelling all around the world (I just came back from an awesome 3 months trip in California).

And, I’m making a lot of money too. And when I was in Los Angeles, in San Diego and in San Francisco (especially in this city), I met a lot of awesome entrepreneurs (like Patri Friedman of Sea Steading, an incredible project to build a startup country in the ocean) and I want to connect more with them.

So, I thought, now that I have some money to invest, and some awesome (I hope) articles on my French blog, why not hire someone to translate them, so I can give birth again to this blog, and it help me to connect more easily with English speaking entrepreneurs ?

So here it is. I hired a professional translator on Elance, and I will publish her translations as soon as she send them to me. Let’s begin with Made to Stick ! It’s good to see you again !

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End of this blog

Olivier Roland — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:35:31 +0000

Dear Readers,

When I launched my project in October 2008, I launched my blog in French and English at the same time, for several reasons, but particularly because I wanted to make an impact in the English blogging world and to make my project known to most of the participants in the Personal MBA.

Since I do have not perfect mastery of the English language, I get my summaries and articles translated by Mary of www.DeansResource.com who does remarkable work. Unfortunately, this translation service is a significant cost for an amateur blogger (a review translation can cost between $50 and $100).

After six months of existence, I have therefore assessed the situation and weighed the pros and cons of continuing the English blog in spite of the costs it incurs. Unfortunately, visits are less than half what they are on the French blog, the number of RSS subscribers is less than one third and revenues from Amazon commissions are very small, unlike the French blog.

For these reasons, I have decided to give up the English blog and dedicate myself to the French blog. This blog will remain in place and the reviews that are already done will remain on line, and I am continuing my challenge; those of you who can read French will be able to continue to follow me at Des Livres Pour Changer de Vie.

Anyway, I thank all my faithful English readers for their support and their encouragement, and I hope that this news won’t make you too sad . Don’t hesitate to visit my French blog and contact me on the Personal MBA community forum.

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Deep Survival – 2

Olivier Roland — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:44:00 +0000

Note: Because this book is so thick and full of stories, anecdotes and repetition, making it difficut to summarize, I am publishing the summary in two parts. Here is the second. The first part is here. Moreover, certain chapters are somewhat redundant, I skipped the ones that I thought brought little value to the overall work. I have put a concise description in parentheses of each passage to do with the title of these chapters that I don’t necessarily address here.

Part 2 : Survival

When you see someone crying, whether because they are in mourning, or because their son is far away, or because they have lost a possession, be careful not to be carried away with the idea that bad things have befallen them. Remember that in the moment what is affecting them is not the accident, which doesn’t affect anyone but them, but the judgment that they bring to the accident.

Epictitus

Chapter 9 : Bending the Map (The importance of an appropriate mental model for your surroundings, the 5 stages of loss)

One day in 1998, Ken Killip, a strong and experienced firefighter, took a three day hike with his friend, York, in Rocky Mountain National Park, a huge wild expanse of some 1,000 square kilometers covered with mountains and forests

Photo by The Brit 2

Photo by tgrt

They had a specific itinerary to complete of around 10 kilometers with their heavily stuffed packs and one part of their hike took them up to height of 4,000 meters. They were sharing their load and York was carrying the tent. The latter had to regularly wait for Killip who walked less quickly than he did. After five or six hours, he got tired and left Killip behind – people regularly fail to understand that they should travel at the pace of the slowest, not more quickly.

Killip was following York who had been before and knew the way. And while Killip had the map, York had the compass. So when Killip saw York gradually disappear, he did not understand the insidious process that was about to play out.

One type of mental model that people form is a mental map: a schema of the geographic area and what route to take. Killip had formed such a mental map ever since he had left his car. Because he was following York, he did not check his topographic map and it is not a good idea to create a mental map. Now his mind was unconsciously in the middle of creating a mental map of a route from an unknown position to a destination he had never seen before.

He found himself climbing up a slope that he thought was Mount Ida. When he got to the top, he was supposed to find landmarks that York had told him about and would be able to guide himself by, in particular a lake and some rivers of crystal clear water where he could quench his thirst – he had drank the last drop from his water pouch three hours ago. When he got to the top, the lake and the rivers weren’t there, the sun went down and the temperature was slowly falling.

In fact, he was not on top of Mount Ida. He had following a path almost parallel in the beginning, which ended up being further away by more than 5 kilometers to the north. It was the result of a minor geographic error. He should have retraced his steps and tried to find the path. Instead of that he continued on.

The apparently irrational behavior makes sense when you consider the brain’s point of view. The fact of not having a mental map, of trying to create one in an environment where sensory facts have no sense is interpreted as an emergency and triggers a physical – or rather an emotional – reaction. The brain pushes the body to hurry up and get somewhere more quickly, somewhere that corresponds to your mental map, a place that has everything you need to survive.

This is how Killip found himself wandering in a thick forest in total darkness with the horrifying feeling that he didn’t know where he was. By chance, a ray of light lit up a little pond, at which Killip could quench his thirst and fill up his water pouch. He got ready to spend the night there, he had no choice at present. He had food in his pack, but York had the tent. He also had materials to light a fire, but he didn’t. The rules prohibited lighting fires in the park, and Killip, a good fireman, respected the rule. If he had lit a fire he would have been able to find himself more quickly.

When he woke up, he had not yet completely admitted that he was lost. He wandered about all day long, becoming even more lost, because he had expanded his circle of confusion so much that he could no longer retrace his steps. He decided to climb up a hill to see where he was, slipped half way up and slid down the slope, severely wounding his shoulders and his legs. He stopped again beside a small pond, refrained from building a fire even though it was freezing cold, and fell asleep.

When he awoke, he was filled with frustration. He decided to turn back. But he didn’t know where he was and he didn’t know which way he had come. Everything he tried took him deeper into the forest. He tried again to climb up a mountain. But a storm stopped him and sent him back into the forest. He knew his clothes were dirty. He fell asleep again on the slope, with one arm around a tree to avoid slipping. Two days ago he was a perfectly healthy hiker, competent and well equipped, his pack contained what he needed to live for a week in the wild. Now, he was huddled on an icy mountain slope, exhausted, famished, seriously dehydrated, hurt and hypothermic. What started out as a small navigation mistake had progressed, one innocent step at a time, into a fierce fight for survival.

Getting lost is not a matter of the place you are in. It’s a state of mind. It can happen in a forest or it can happen in your life. People know it instinctively.

Research suggests that there are five general stages that a lost person goes through:

First, you deny that you are disoriented and you move with a sense of urgency, trying to reconcile your mental map with what you see.
Then, when you realize you are lost, the sense of urgency vanishes and becomes a complete urgency to survive. Thinking clearly becomes impossible and actions become frenetic, unproductive and even dangerous.
At the third stage, often after getting hurt or exhausted, you develop a strategy to find a place that corresponds to your mental map. It’s a bad strategy, because you don’t have a map; you are lost.
You deteriorate both rationally and emotionally as soon as you perceive that your strategy is failing to resolve the conflict.
In the final stage, when you are low on options and energy, you become resigned to your difficult situation and accept it for what it is.

Whether you like it or not, you must then make a new mental map of the place where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then the place you happen to be will not be so important.

These stages for getting lost don’t only apply to hikers in the woods. For example, the Xerox corporation, a multinational American company which made its fortune by selling one of the premier photocopiers, got lost on the road that leads to innovation even though that was the spearhead of the company. Throughout the 70s, when personal information technology was in its infancy, and had barely started spreading through homes, and when computers such as the Apple 2 were driven by command line interfaces in green text on small yet cumbersome screens, Palo Alto Research Center, a laboratory that belonged to Xerox, invented the mouse, the graphic interface, the flat screen and Ethernet, the standard for information technology networks. Veritable treasures, a generation ahead of its time, which could have allowed Xerox to completely dominate the emerging market for computer technology.

But others were to become rich with these inventions. The executive leaders of Xerox, busy with their old mental models, were still worrying about managing paper and photocopiers and did not relate any more to the reality of a world which had changed rapidly, did not see the enormous potential of their discoveries. They left others to profit, notably Apple, and its founder Steve Jobs, who used their ideas to create Lisa, then the famous Macintosh.

Unlike Killip, Xerox is still lost in today’s woods.

Because Killip, after spending his third night in the woods, could no longer honestly deny that he was lost. He could have resigned himself to it, but that is not the path he chose. He built a shelter and lit a fire, something he should have done the first day. He remained in the same place for two days, resting his body, adapting to his environment. He had begun to make a map of his real surroundings rather than imagining the map he wished for. He had discovered the first Rule of Life: Be in the here and now.

At last, a helicopter passed so close that he could have thrown a stone at it. Then it went away. This almost broke his spirit in two. But one of the most difficult stages that survivors must learn is to give up the hope of being rescued, just as you must give up the old world that you have left and accept the new. There is no other way of calming the mind. This might seem paradoxical, but it is essential.

The pilot had seen Killip’s blue parka hanging on a branch, and he sent help to him. He had lost more than 10 kilos in five days (about 22 lbs). The condition of his knees required two surgeries. But he got out of it.

Chapter 11 : We’re all going to fuckin’ die! (The importance of staying calm and adopting a good attitude for survival)

In January 1982, Steven Callahan was preparing to cross the Atlantic alone on a small boat that he had built himself, setting out from the Canaries on his way to the Caribbean islands. Six days later, in the middle of a storm and in the middle of the night, his boat struck something – perhaps it was a shark, and began to sink. Callahan was woken up by the noise and had just enough time to jump out, without recovering his survival pack, before water got inside the boat. He managed to put on his life jacket in spite of the tall waves and the howling wind, remaining remarkably calm in a very dangerous situation which allowed him to maximize his chances of survival by acting efficiently from the onset of the catastrophe.

On the other side of the Atlantic, three months earlier, a ketch, the Trashman, was busy sinking with 5 people on board after encountering a storm. The ship’s second in command yelled “We’re all going to fuckin’ die! We’re all going to fuckin’ die!” and in his panic he inflated his life jacket without attaching it to the boat. It was carried off on the wind and disappeared forever from sight.

Callahan’s boat took a long time to sink. It was the result of Callahan’s ingenious design which included several reservoirs sealed in the hull. He left his life jacket attached to the boat for a moment wondering what to do next. When he looked at the moon he suddenly noticed how sharp his senses had become. His perceptions had not become narrow with fear, they had been awakened. Obviously, he was afraid and had begun a bitter struggle to get control over his thoughts, but he turned his fear in a focused way towards thinking about survival, the first act of a survivor. He was thinking then in a clear and effective way. He knew that his chances of being spotted and rescued were small. He also knew that the tide was moving towards the west, not the east, which gave him a journey of about 3,000 kilometers. His life jacket contained a survival kit, but the pack that was in the flooded boat contained many more supplies for survival. Then he took a risk; he dived, got to the inside of the boat, cut the strings of the pack and brought it up to the surface with him. He had just risked his life, but he was better equipped for survival now. He made a rational choice and assumed the risks and the rewards.

The account of his survival, which he shares with us in his best seller: Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea, is an example of everything you need to do to survive; stay calm, make decisions and act, accept the situation and understand whether the chances are slim, everything is possible, and do your best, your absolute and total best, to survive.

Many people finding themselves in much less desperate situations than Callahan don’t stay calm and make calamitous mistakes from the beginning, drastically reducing their chances for survival.

So, on the Trashman, all that was left after the life jacket had been carried off on the wind was an inflatable Zodiac (dinghy) which did not have a survival kit. Five people, one of whom was seriously wounded after having been tossed on the rigging by a wave, were in this little semi-rigid dinghy. Other than the wounded one, who was in pain, the team divided quickly into two groups of two people with completely opposing attitudes; one, hysterical, panicked and refusing to face up to the situation, the other calm, accepting the situation and preparing psychologically to do everything in their power to survive, and not only for themselves, but also for all those that loved them and would suffer if they died.

The first group, and the wounded one died. The two others survived.

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Chapter 14 : A certain nobility (The need to consider everything right up until the end)

When Solon, a great man in the state of Athens, visited the court of Croesus, the rich king of Lydia, the king showed Solon his enormous wealth and his palace and asked him:

“My dear Athenian guest, we often hear you spoken of here; you are famous for your culture and your voyages, which have taken you far and wide to many different places. What I would like to know is whether you have ever crossed paths with someone who is happier than all others?”

Croesus waited to be named, but Solon gave him the name of an ordinary man, Tellus of Athens.

“You see, in the battle of Eleusis he rushed into a breach and made our enemies turn tail. He died, but his death was splendid, and the Athenians gave him a magnificent public funeral and greatly honored him.”

Croesus was somewhat put out at not being mentioned. Solon then replied to him:

“I am not in a position to tell you what you are asking me to tell you until you are also dead. It is necessary to consider the end of everything, and see how it ends up, because the gods often offer prosperity to men and then destroy them completely and blindly.”

This, then, is the paradox of survival: it is not possible for a man or for a woman to say they have survived and be a perfect survivor until they are dead, because every test is a preparation for the next. Survival is a path that must be followed from birth until death.

Appendix : The rules of adventure

At this point you could look over everything that has been written and wonder: this is all very well, but what am I doing right now?

The book was not designed to tell people what to do in critical situations but rather to allow research for a better understanding that will allow them to know what to do when the moment arrives – and it always comes one way or another.

None-the-less, Laurence Gonzales offers some suggestions that can help in any difficult situation, not just catastrophes and accidents.

To avoid getting into difficult situations:

Notice, believe, and then act

Avoiding accidents is intrinsically tied to the fact of being intelligent. Neurobiologist Horace Barlow says that intelligence is the fact of “guessing well.” Training is an attempt to make more accurate predictions about your surroundings. But if your surroundings change, you will need to be open and polyvalent, and have the ability to notice what is really happening and adapt to it. Therefore training and prediction might not be your best friends.

In Kendo – a martial art involving sword fighting, the practitioner must not anticipate his opponent’s movements or give free rein to the tendency to predict, because if his opponent does not act in accordance with his predictions, it could lead to surprise, and then momentary confusion, and thus a sudden death. Instead, he must keep his eyes open, remain clear and calm, and act at a decisive moment. Kendo teaches concentration, precise control of the body, courtesy, humility and confidence in yourself. These are similar to the qualities you need when you meet with the forces of nature.

Those who avoid accidents and those who see the world clearly see it change, and change their behavior as a result.

Avoid impulsive behavior; don’t rush

Catecholamines are a double-edged sword. They give you power when you need an energy boost, but they can also excite you to the point where you make mistakes. Don’t be the skier or the snow-mobiler who takes a slope that is prone to avalanches just because it is a wonderful day and the beauty excites you.

Know your business

As the philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius put it: “For every particular thing, ask yourself: What is on the inside, how is it constructed?” A deep knowledge of the world that surrounds you could save your life.

Get information

The same accidents happen again and again, year after year. Do internet research. Ask people who know. Game wardens, rescue workers and local authorities will be happy to inform you.

Be humble

A Navy commander told Al Siebert, a psychologist who studies survivors, that “the Rambo type are the first to go.” Don’t only think that just because you are good at one thing you are good at something else. The other principle is that experience endangers success, “this lamp that lights up our backs.” The beginner has a more open mind on what could happen than an expert. Those who manage to gain experience while keeping the mind of a beginner become long term survivors.

If in doubt, don’t

This is a difficult piece of advice. You have bought your ticket. You have waited all year for this trip. You have bought all the equipment you need. It is difficult to admit that things don’t happen as expected. During these times, it is good to ask yourself if this is worth dying for.

To better manage difficult situations when they arise:

Notice, believe. Be attentive to your new surroundings, accept them as well as the consequences that occur.
Stay calm. Use humor to focus your fear. Survivors keep their sense of humor and therefore their cool. They use fear rather than being guided by it.
Think/analyze/plan. Stay organized. Identify small manageable tasks. Survivors get organized quickly, define routines and instill discipline.
Take decisive and appropriate actions. Be both brave and wise when you identify tasks. Survivors are ready to take risks to save themselves and others.
Celebrate your success. Take joy in accomplishing tasks. It is a very important step in order to create a sense of motivation and not fall into hopeless depression.
Consider yourself happy. Recognize it – you are alive. That’s how survivors become survivors and not victims. They always have someone else to help, even if they are not present.
Play. Sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count whatever you like, do math problems in your mind.
See the beauty. Survivors are sensitive to the wonders of the world. Beauty appreciation, the feeling of seeing something great, awakens your senses, reduces stress and greatly increases your motivation.
Believe that you will succeed. Develop a deep conviction that you are going to live.
Surrender. Let go of the fear of dying and accept it. Resign yourself without giving up.
Do everything necessary. Be determined. Have the will and the skills. Survivors have a meta-knowledge: they know their abilities and don’t overestimate or underestimate them.
Never give up. Don’t let anything break your spirit.

Book Summary:

This book is unique in the sense that it contains an excellent book hidden inside. You need to find it, and assemble it piece by piece yourself, perhaps in an amusing attempt to create a seemingly interactive Web 2.0 version of an old paper book. Actually, this book is thick, crammed, poorly structured, and hides the heart of its messages among numerous true stories, messages that are more or less repeated throughout the book from different angles. The storytelling side is interesting because it allows concepts to be presented well, but it becomes somewhat indigestible by virtue of telling us these stories over and over. Moreover, the author, a journalist by profession, ventures into very difficult scientific territory – like chaos theory or auto-organization – which he doesn’t seem to have totally mastered, even if his attempt is praiseworthy.

The book is written simply and reads easily, but it could benefit by being cut in half and condensing the format around the heart of the author’s ideas. And his ideas are, undeniably, worth the detour. Because what Laurence Gonzales gives us here is a survival philosophy and an extremely interesting analysis of the way the brain and mind work in emergency situations, which goes well beyond catastrophes to other physical accidents which can affect us. He describes the state of mind that separates those who survive from those who die. He describes the importance of mental models, of a positive mental attitude, the effects of stress and the absolute necessity of understanding the paradox: to survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation rather than wallow in denial. And that helps you to dedicate yourself to the present moment, as the author describes it in the passages are reminiscent of certain passages of The Art of Meditation.

This book, despite its form that might lose some people, is therefore immensely interesting and allows people to learn many things about the way the mind works, and the attitude to adopt to get out of all sorts of prickly situations. And who knows, perhaps it will be useful to you one day to get out of a situation where your life is in danger?

Strong points:

Philosophy and psychology of survival
Universal subject that applies to every delicate situation in spite of its focus on catastrophes
Much interesting information on the the way the brain works, the role of certain hormones, and the way they function in crisis situations
Numerous stories illustrating the author’s points

Weak points:

Thick and crammed, needlessly long
Numerous repetition
A bit too full of stories for my liking
The author ventures into territory that is not an expert in, like chaos theory

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

My rating:

Add one star if you are in a risky profession or practice a risky sport.

Have you read this book ? How do you rate it ?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

PMBA Challenge:

Cost of book :	€ 12.57
Total cost of project :	€ 236.34
Number of pages :	295
Total number of pages :	3606
Time to read it :	4H
Time to write this article :	10H
Total Time of Project :	137H30

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Deep Survival

Olivier Roland — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:07:43 +0000

One sentence summary: In extraordinary circumstances, like accidents or catastrophes, some people survive and others die, such that sometimes things lead you to believe that the first ones die and the second ones survive; this book explains, using numerous stories of accidents and catastrophes, and by exploring the latest scientific theories – from neuroscience to the theory of chaos – what makes one person die and another survive.

By Laurence Gonzales, 2003, 295 pages.

Summary and book review:

The author begins by telling us the story of his father, a B17 bomber pilot – the flying fortress – during the Second World War. While conducting a raid on Dusseldorf, his plane was hit in midair by a shot from a German flak, which cut the left wing in two and killed nine crew members on the spot – out of ten. With his plane spinning around, pinned by centrifugal force, seriously wounded, he failed to grab his parachute and jump. He remained imprisoned in the cockpit for a six kilometer descent while the plane was cut in two. Then he fainted. When he came to, he was on the ground, and looked out at the world through the shattered window of the cockpit. He whole body was in agony, and a piece of the cockpit had penetrated his leg. A German farmer was standing in front of him, his gun pointed at him – at that time, they did not hesitate to kill American pilots from time to time. The German fired.

He survived. He was taken to a prisoner camp, then freed at the end of the war.

Laurence Gonzales’ interest in survival began when his father told him his story. The fact that he lived while so many others died fascinated him, and he wanted to understand, with the help of his interest in science. When five people were shipwrecked and only two came home, what was it that made the difference? Who survived the Nazi camps? Why did Robert Falcon Scott die during his expedition to the North Pole and Roald Amundsen survive? Why was a 17 year old adolescent girl the sole survivor to escape in the Peruvian jungle, while the adult victims with her in an air crash died? Why can some people survive the worst psychological catastrophes, like divorce, death, layoff, serious illness, while others suffer terribly? In his quest, he discovered principles that he tells us about in his book. Follow the guide.

Part 1 : How accidents happen

Chapter 1: Look out, here comes Ray Charles (The impact of emotion on our actions and how they are the cause of certain mistakes, the impact of fear and the effectiveness of humor)

Shortly before the author reached the American aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, an important step in his quest that was leading him to explore the frontier between life and death – frontier because some people succeed and others fail – a pilot was in the middle of landing, a normal sort of thing on such a boat. But his approach was too low. And many signals were indicating that to him, both in his cockpit and on the runway – the landing officer had turned on large red lights which meant your approach is not good, you should not land! And of course he yelled into his microphone, his voice echoing in the pilot’s helmet. But the latter continued, even though he only had to push down a fraction of an inch on the throttle to take off again and try a new approach.

The impact of the tail against the aircraft carrier cut the plane in two, and sent the pilot ricocheting off the runway in a shower of sparks, still clinging to his seat.

He survived. That was not the end of the story, that is not where the frontier is. The frontier can be found in this question: What was he thinking? He was intelligent, well prepared and had undergone extremely rigorous training. Something powerful blocked him. Something strong enough to continue trying to hit the runway even though all signals indicated that he wouldn’t make it. This reminded Laurence Gonzales of numerous accidents in dangerous sports like canyoneering which happened because people were ignoring the obvious signs for some inexplicable reason. It is this mystery that the author was trying to solve.

What the pilots of the Carl Vinson know, is that some time issues come up. There are things that you cannot control and you would be better off knowing how you are going to react to them.

The first rule is: face up to reality. Good survivors are not immune to fear. They know what is happening and fear permeates them completely. The whole question is what they do right afterwards.

When a pilot takes the controls of a plane and soars off the runway, he is often in a state of advanced excitement. Flying is his passion and sometimes he only lives for that. Every flight is a pure moment of joy and happiness, even though he is piloting several tons of a highly unstable machine that is full of explosive fuel where the slightest mistake could be fatal. They take a calculated risk just as snowboarders do before taking off from the top of a mountain, alpine climbers, parachutists and numerous other sports.

At times like that, people are not really totally present. They are each in a state of perception, of awareness, of memory and of deeply altered emotion.

Today, scientific studies tell us that emotions are an instinctive response designed for survival. These are faster than intellect, and occur due to many physical changes which are preparations for action. The nervous system becomes more energetic, blood changes its chemistry so that it coagulates more quickly, digestion stops, and numerous chemicals are sent in the blood to help the body become ready for everything that must be done. Reason is hesitant, slow and fallible, while emotions are sure, rapid and unhesitating.

There are primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are those you are born with, like the need to search for food or the sudden desire to catch something when you feel it falling. And the emotional system can get hung up on anything and everything. If you are a soldier at war, evolution has not formed your brain to throw you to the ground at the slightest gunshot. But once you have made a connection between gunshots and the risk of death, this connection becomes so deep that you don’t even need to think when it happens; your reaction is automatic. These are secondary emotions: connections between things and primary emotions that make reactions automatic.

Fear is a very powerful emotion. During a fear reaction, amygdale in the brain – as opposed to throat amygdale – helps to put in motion a series of incredible, complex events designed to produce a reaction that aids survival, bypassing the intellect. For example, if you are walking up a mountain path and notice something on the ground that looks like a snake, you will stop dead before you have even really registered what is on the ground because the strategy that evolution has fashioned with amygdale is “better be safe than sorry.” Then the neocortex takes over and tells you whether you are looking at a simple stick or an actual snake.

Many pilots, therefore, experience fear when they are in the landing stage – taking off is optional, but landing is a must – and fear in the cockpit is like knights dueling in a telephone booth. Pilots out of necessity develop a very strong secondary emotion associating safety, and even ecstasy with the ground – or the flight deck – and the overwhelming feeling that if only they can get this thing on the ground they will be safe and sound. A pilot develops a physical memory of this feeling, which is a powerful driving force for action coupled with direct experience with a primary emotion. He also has intellectual know-how telling him that if he tries to land, if it is too low or too slow, he could die. Unfortunately, he has no secondary emotions linked to that event since he has never experienced it. It is an abstract concept which cannot fight on equal terms to become a driving force to act upon.

So fear is often a stress trigger. In the case of stress, the brain secretes cortisol, which has many effects, one of the most important being the fact that it erodes our ability to perceive things and constrains our field of vision by targeting only what we think are the most important. And sometimes these are not good things. Therefore sometimes a pilot focuses too much on what he feels is the most important thing: the landing strip. His home. And thus the pilot of the Carl Vinson very well may not have heard the voice of the landing officer and not seen the red lights on the bridge. His body was doing what it knew was best for him: escaping the danger and getting to safety as quickly as possible. The rest of the environment became uninteresting noise efficiently filtered out by his brain.

So he hit the carrier.

Chapter 4 : A gorilla in our midst (How the brain filters reality, mental models, and the limits of working memory)

As complex as the brain is, the world is even more so. The brain cannot deal with and organize all the facts it receives. It could not define a reasonable plan of action if everything was treated equally and perceived with the same intensity. Thus, the brain must simplify reality and only perceive a part of it in order to be able to deal with it, otherwise it would cave under the weight of the complexity. This is what is difficult about logic: it happens step by step in a linear manner. Reality is not linear.

The brain’s role with respect to reality is similar to that of a search engine with respect to millions of pages that it finds on the internet. Without a powerful search engine you are paralyzed.

One of the brain’s search engines involves emotional book-marks, in which emotions help to direct logic and direct reason towards a place where they can do useful work. A second strategy that the brain uses to manage complicated problems is to create mental models, simplified schema of reality. A mental model can tell you what the rules are for a particular environment or the color and shape of a familiar object.

Magicians use this creation of a temporary mental model in their most subtle tricks, a short term memory of the world. Every world model has its own underlying assumptions based on experience, memory, secondary emotions and emotional book marks, which influence our expectations and what we see and what we plan to do about it. The magician creates a world model then passes from one model to another so quickly that you remain stuck in the first model, and you are surprised by the new reality he shows you. It is the disconnect between the first model and the second model that is surprising. You believe that it’s the magician doing the trick, but in fact you are doing it yourself.

One of the reasons why magic tricks work can be explained by the working memory. The working memory is a temporary memory which manages what we are doing at the moment. It can only manage a few things at one time, maybe half a dozen or so, when new things require our attention, these elements are forgotten. The working memory can also use information from long term memory. The fact that you are able to read this long sentence is the result of your short term memory which is capable of remembering the beginning, the middle and the end of the sentence, while using definitions and associations coming from your long term memory to understand the meaning of the words. It is also the result of the fact that you have created mental models of the words, you have associated to the symbol – the word – a meaning, an image of reality. When you read camel you immediately think of a camel, if you have ever seen a picture of that animal. If you have never seen a picture of that animal, then the meaning that you attribute to this word will depend on knowledge that you have acquired about this subject – perhaps you will classify it in the general category of “animal,” you might associate it with the desert or put it simply in the case of “I don’t know what it is” – and you do this in an instant.

The fact that new information – and in particular emotionally laden information – forces things to leave our working memory means that we cannot pay attention to many things at once. Unless something is transferred successfully to our long term memory, it is lost.

Working memory is therefore our attention. Its limited nature, together with the inevitable failings of the mental models, can cause surprising deficiencies in the way in which we comprehend reality and make conscious or unconscious decisions.

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Chapter 5 : Anatomy of an Act of God (the need for humility, the cause for mistakes)

If you distill all the cognitive sciences, psychology and neurosciences over the last hundred years, you will find that we are always Homo but only sometimes Sapiens. We are emotional creatures, which is to say physical creatures. Neurologist Joseph Ledoux concluded that “people do all sorts of things for reasons they are not conscious of…and that is one of the principal jobs of the conscience to make our lives have a coherent manner, in a self concept.” Therefore, each of us is the hero in our own movie.

It is therefore not surprising to note that in many cases the mechanisms underlying survival, which are directly wired in us and sculpted by experience, are revealed not only to be powerful motivation elements pushing us to action, but also work to their maximum which they short circuit conscious mechanisms. Once an emotional reaction has taken hold, this can lead to an imperious desire to act.

But there are many ways to revise the script and adapt to dangerous situations. Training is one. All performers at the top of their profession train hard, and if you follow in their footsteps you are interested in being well trained as well. If we are beginners, we are confronted in mother nature with the same level of difficulty as the experts: she does not adapt herself to our level.

The practice of Zen teaches us that it is impossible to add anything to a teacup filled with water. The same thing is true of our mind. A closed attitude that says “I already know that” can lead us to miss important information. Zen teaches openness. Survival teachers refer to it when they talk about “humility.” Generally, highly skilled performers such as professional rescue personnel have an exceptional personal balance between bravery and humility.

Just being aware of nature’s pitfalls can help; it helps us remember that we are primates with a recent new functionality that is only somewhat tested; the neocortex. What we see as failings in the mind are probably nothing more than nature’s process which is quietly tinkering with simple rules over a long period of evolutionary time. Nature always uses plenty of individuals of all species in her experiments, and we are her ultimate experiment. It’s nothing personal then, when our brains play tricks on us. It’s nothing personal either when we die, as Marc-Aurèle, the philosopher emperor put it.

Chapter 6 : The sand pile effect (Accidents as a natural effect of systems)

What we call “accidents” do not happen by themselves. People must assemble the framework that makes them happen. Furthermore, nothing can stay happening for a long time. That is how mountains can have the reputation for being easy and well suited for beginning climbers. However accidents do happen, often involving experienced people who have climbed much more difficult mountains.

It was like this in 2002 that a drama unfolded on Mount Hood, a supposedly easy mountain in Oregon. 4 mountain climbers, one of whom was very experienced, arrived at the summit. After enjoying the view, they began their descent, all attached to the same cord, the novice at the bottom and the most experienced at the top. They did not use pitons to attach the cord, it was attached to them. The cord helped hold someone if they fell, but only on condition that the person at the top did not fall. Effectively, the distance between the climbers could be 10 meters (about 32 feet), so that if the person at the top fell, the second would absorb the impact when the first falls 20 meters (twice as long as the cord between the two of them), leading to an impact of such force that the second person would have to fall, and so on. That is why the most experienced person is at the top. They are not supposed to fall.

So on that day, Ward, the experienced mountain climber, slipped and fell. He led the other three in his fall, and this fine group led another two climbers who were down below them, then three more who were making their ascent. The nine of them fell into a crevice. Three died, including Ward.

This kind of accident must happen, as is always the case, to someone somewhere. All the available theories tell us that it is an inevitable part of the system at large that puts climbers on snow-covered slopes in large numbers. In his book Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow defends the idea that in certain types of systems big accidents, while rare, are both normal and inevitable. Accidents are a characteristic of the system itself.

Mountain climbers roped themselves in a team without belaying to anchor themselves all the time. They use axes for support poles while they descend

Photo par massimobottelli

The accident on Mount Hood involved two big categories of effects: the mechanical system that the climbers were using and the psychology and physiology that contributed to the accident.

In system accidents, unexpected interactions between forces and components are generated naturally by the complexity of the system. This type of accident is made up of conditions, judgments, acts and events that would be inconsequential by themselves; at least if they were not associated with “right time” and “right place,” they would pass unnoticed. So Ward had slipped in the past, but he had always managed to catch himself before a fatal fall. He had also already belayed, but without ever falling to the point of it being useful to him. Thus Charles Perrow observed that most of the time, nothing serious happens, which leads operators – in this case climbers – to believe that the behavior of the system that they see is the only possible state of the system.

When a system is tightly coupled, its effects can expand in an exponential manner. In a system that is loosely coupled or uncoupled, the effects don’t affect other parts of the system. Therefore in a closely arranged row of dominoes there is a strong relationship between the state of an individual domino and the state of all the dominoes: if one falls, all the others will be affected. But if the dominoes are sufficiently well spaced, if one falls there won’t be any consequences for the others.

If the climbers were not attached to each other, the consequences of Ward’s fall would have been much less dramatic. But the accident was, however, no-one’s fault. It was a logical consequence of the self-directed system. So the Mount Hood accident was predictable, but no-one could know which mountain climbers were going to fall, nor where, nor when, nor with what injuries. The climbers were familiar with the system and had a good idea of how it worked, but only of its most common states. This type of huge accident, when it happens, happens very fast and can’t be stopped.

Chapter 7 : The rules of life (psychological causes of accidents)

There are two environments, two worlds, on Mount Hood. One is designed for the survival and comfort of humans. The other is not. There are mechanical chair lifts, pavilions, and a five star restaurant with its pinot noir and its rosemary crostini. In that place you can look out over thousands of square meters of natural wilderness while sipping your white wine, with an indifference more impudent than any animal would dare to entertain. The mountain is safely contained behind double-paned glass.

But we can only reign over our little model of the world. It is easy to cross this invisible line between that which has been adapted for us and that which requires that we adapt to it. But it is also easy to forget and bring with us this false sense of security that can be fatal for us when we cross the line. So the nine mountain climbers could have taken a little bit of this attitude with them from the pavilion to the mountain. Their success in life, their objectives, their plans and their imaginations took them there. They earned money to do this sort of thing. They earned the reward that their life mastery had bought them. People are part of a mechanical system but they are also a system in themselves.

Risk homeostasis theory states that people accept a certain level of risk and the more you perceive the environment as less risky, the more risks you take and vice versa. Therefore when the ABS breaking system was introduced in cars, the number of accidents overall remained the same because drivers who had them felt safer and took more risks. In the same way, the mountain climbers who have tackled reputedly dangerous mountains with maximum precaution, have a tendency to relax when they are climbing on reputedly safer mountains.

So, as Heraclite put is over 2500 years ago now, “every time we enter a river, it’s a different river.” And every time you hike on Mount Hood, it’s a different mountain. Studies of mountain accidents show that there are three factors that contributed to Mount Hood: 1) the descent, 2) everyone was roped together and 3) no belay. These three factors mean that on a global scale, accidents similar to the one on Mount Hood are very common.

There are three difficulties with the descent:

Attitude
An emotion tied to reaching a goal
Stress

In the first place, the climbers, like many, had celebrated their arrival at the summit. “It was a glorious morning,” one of them recounted, “we had fun up there for half an hour, cracking jokes.” Humor. The tool that gives vent to emotional response. The pitfall they were up against was that they were only half way there. They partied even though the hardest part still awaited them. Mountain climbers are the only athletes to do that. So, it’s a natural part of the cycle of human emotions to let down your guard once you have reached a goal.

So the climbers were at the summit and faced the descent with the 5 star restaurant below them. Suddenly, the positive state of celebration upon arriving at the summit was transformed into the perspective of slowly descending the length of the long slope. Images of previous experiences popped into the minds of all the climbers: they saw themselves sitting quietly in the warm, resting. They saw rest and safety within their grasp: they only had to get down quickly and reach the pavilion as quickly as possible (a warm shower, pinot noir, rosemary crostini). So securing themselves by belaying would be long, annoying and tiring. They were already tired, and had already spent a lot of time climbing. A succession of emotional book marks had already been etched in their minds and one of the book marks reminded them that is was enough to go down one foot in front of the other for safety. Another told them that belaying would mean prolonged pain, thirst, hunger and fatigue. And they had no emotional book mark tied to falling 300 meters, or for the energy that would build up with a rope system if the highest climber fell.

So they had a false sense of security, due to the fact that Mount Hood is reputedly easy, of Ward’s experience, and by the training in self-arrest that they had successfully carried out the day before, and by their discussions on what behaviors to adopt to secure their descent.

Thus, piece by piece, unconscious of the fact that their model of the world was no longer valid, they assembled their accident. And they began the process long before their arrival at Mount Hood.

This kind of accident has to happen. But it does not have to happen for you and me.

More in the next episode .

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

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How to Win Friends and Influence People

Olivier Roland — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:33:36 +0000

One Sentence Summary: To make friends, influence others and get them in our corner, it is important to know how to look after their ego; this happens after an important change in our everyday behavior, which consists of never criticizing, being genuinely interested in others, smiling, remembering the first name of the person we are speaking with, making them feel important, never telling them they are wrong, talking about our own mistakes before talking about theirs, motivating, sincerely complimenting, and generally always looking after their self esteem.

By Dale Canergie, 1936 (first edition), 1981 (most recently revised edition), 250 pages.

Summary and Book Review:

After GTD, this book is the second best seller of my crazy personal MBA challenge and it is certainly one of the best known. It has sold over 45 million copies around the world since it was first published – a modest printing run of five thousand copies – in 1936. The book has undergone several revisions since the death of the author in 1955, primarily by his wife and his daughter in order to update examples given by the author about famous personalities who were known in 1936 but forgotten since – without changing the heart of the book itself.

The author starts out by entrusting us with 8 rules for getting the best out of the book, which seem to me to be highly relevant and applicable to any number of non-fiction books:

Have a great desire for learning and applying the principles that drive communications and relationships between human beings.
Read every chapter twice before going on to the next one.
Interrupt our readings frequently to ask ourselves about our personal possibilities for applying every principle.
Underline the important ideas.
Re-read the book every month.
Practice the principles whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Transform the book into a fun game: ask our friends to pay a penalty whenever they surprise us by breaking the rules.
Monitor the progress that we make each week. Ask ourselves what mistakes we have made, what progress we have made, what lessons we have learned.

Part One: Three fundamental techniques for handling people

Chapter 1: If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive

In 1931, Francis “Two Guns” Crowley, a gangster and assassin who was known for having killed a police officer in cold blood after he asked him for his driving license, was arrested in his girlfriend’s apartment after a siege in which one hundred police officers were mobilized! He was taken alive, but, believing he was as good as dead, he had taken the time to write a letter. Was it a letter of repentance, a letter of remorse for the crimes he had committed? No, it said “Under my jacket beats a weary heart, but a good one that would not hurt anyone.”

He was condemned to the electric chair. When he arrived at the execution chamber, was he full of excuses, did he declare that he was experiencing remorse? No. He said “This is my punishment for wanting to defend myself.”

Al Capone, the most notorious gangster of all time, himself said: “I have spent the best years of my life giving pleasure to people and amusing them, and what has been my reward? Insults and the life of a hunted man.” Often, gangsters, criminals and wrongdoers justify their behavior with a whole lot of logical or fallacious reasoning.

If criminals as notorious as Francis Crowley or Al Capone consider themselves innocent, what do the people we meet every day who are just like you and me think of themselves?

This is a universal law that is sometimes difficult to accept: 99 times out of 100, man considers himself innocent, no matter how serious his crime. Criticism is therefore useless because it puts the individual on the defensive and forces him to justify himself, and it is dangerous because it damages their self esteem and causes bitterness. Criticism is like a carrier pigeon: the person we want to blame and correct will do anything to justify himself and will condemn us in return. Or, often, they exclaim: “I don’t see how I could have acted any differently!”

When you study the lives of those considered great leaders of men, like Abraham Lincoln – who Dale Carnegie studied in a very thorough manner, even wrote a biography, Lincoln the Unknown – you generally notice that they handle criticism with extreme caution and do everything to preserve the self esteem of those they reproach.

Rather than condemn people, it is better to try and understand them, to discover the motive for their actions. This is much nicer and more productive than criticizing, and it makes us more tolerant, understanding, and good.

Principal # 1: Don’t criticize, don’t condemn and don’t complain

Chapter 2 : The big secret of dealing with people

There is only one way in the world to get someone to do something: you must excite in them the desire to do it. Obviously, it is always possible to use force, authority or blackmail, but these methods have way more disadvantages than advantages. It is only by giving you what you want that I will manage to get you to do something.

So, what are our needs? In a list that somewhat resembles Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Dale Carnegie lists the different needs that we claim with ceaseless insistence:

Health and preservation of life
Food
Sleep
Money and the means to procure it
Future survival
Sexual satisfaction
Our children’s happiness
A sense of being important

Very often, most of these needs are met, but there is one that is rarely satisfied, because it is just as deep, and just a imperative as hunger. It is what Freud referred to as “the desire to be recognized,” what William James talks about as “the deepest principal of human nature,” and that is the thirst for appreciation, recognition, to be considered important. This desire distinguishes man from the animals, in which it does not exist.

It is this desire for importance that has driven many men who were poor at birth, to realize a glorious destiny, like Lincoln, Dickens or Rockefeller, it is this desire that drives men to buy cars that are too big for their needs or a house that is much to huge for them.

Tell me how you fulfill this need, and I will tell you who you are. The way in which we fill this need is one of the traits that best characterizes our personality. Some people fulfill it by turning to crime, like the notorious French Bonnot Gang, others write great works of literature, or build commercial empires or help others with all their might, until their dying breath. History is full of amusing details about famous people who try to show their importance, from George Washington, who demanded to be called the “Greatest President of the United States,” to Victor Hugo who wanted to donate his name to the city of Paris.

Note: And you just have to stroll through the Père Lachaise cemetery and read the epitaphs to understand that this need for importance accompanied many men even in death.

So, what is the best way to give a person the importance they seek so much? It is by complimenting them. It is not a matter here of flattery, false or otherwise, which is dangerous and often ends up coming back to bite the sycophant. It is a matter of a new mental attitude, of a new way of life: finding the good qualities in others and sincerely complimenting them, making them aware of the admiration we have for them. Sincere praise is the honey of human relations – everyone seeks it and deeply appreciates it.

Principal # 2: Compliment sincerely and honestly

Chapter 3: He who can do this this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way

Why are we always talking about what we want? It’s vain, childish and absurd. Obviously, each of us is interested in what we want. We will be interested in it for eternity. But we will be the only ones thinking about it. Everyone else is just like us in this regard and worry only about what they think.

That’s why the only way to influence your neighbor is to talk to him about what he wants and show him that he can get it.

This is the secret of success: putting yourself in someone else’s place and thinking about things from both his point of view and ours. Because action is born out of our fundamental desires, and to influence others you must first excite in them an ardent desire to act.

Principal # 3: Motivate often to do what you propose.

Part Two: Six ways to make people like you

Chapter 4: Do this and you’ll be welcome anywhere

Do you like dogs? If you do, why? Does it by any chance have something to do with the fact dogs are completely loyal, love you spontaneously and sincerely, and make a big fuss over you when you come home? Do you like it when they jump up on you wagging their tail, with their tongue hanging out, before the door is fully open, losing themselves completely in welcoming you?

We all know people who try their whole lives to get people interested in them. Wasted effort! People are only interested in themselves. They think about themselves morning, noon and night. When you look at a photo of a group that you are part of, who do you look at first?

If you want people to be interested in you, you must first be interested in them. Whether we are a beggar or a king, we like those who admire us.

Do you want people to like you? Then write down anniversaries on your calendar and send a card, welcome people with warmth and enthusiasm on the telephone, show your admiration and your sincere interest when opportunity presents itself. Publius Syrus said it over two thousand years ago:

We are interested in others when they are interested in us.

As with all the advice in this book, this must be applied with total sincerity. This way you might even touch the the heart of the most powerful and unreachable person.

Principal # 4: Be genuinely interested in others

Chapter 5 : A simple way to make a good first impression

Actions speak louder than words. A smile says: “I like you,” “I am happy to see you,” “Your presence makes me happy,” etc. Obviously, it needs to be a sincere, wide and spontaneous smile that seduces and comforts, not a mechanical and false smile that irritates instead of pleasing.

The most striking example of the effect of a sincere smile is the smile of a child :

Photo by Julien Lagarde

Often it communicates to us and can change our grimmest mood in an instant, whenever we smile back.

A smile is so important that it is can also be heard in our voice. Your telephone voice will change if you smile; try it and see

Try this: For one week, once an hour, smile your widest, sincerest smile possible, be nice to others, appreciate their company, because we must be happy in the company of our peers if we want them to be happy in ours. If this is difficult for you, tell yourself that it is just one week and you can stop after that if you don’t like it

Principal # 5 : Have a smile

Chapter 6 : If you don’t do this you are headed for trouble

James Farley, a famous American politician, has succeeded in becoming a cornerstone of American politics, depended on for decades, even though he was born to a poor family of farmers, even though he lost his father at age 10 and had to start working at that age on a construction site, pushing wheelbarrows full sand and letting bricks dry in the sun. When Dale Carnegie asked him his secret, he replied that he could remember the first name of over five thousand people, as well as the details of each of their lives.

He was Roosevelt’s electoral agent. He had a simple and remarkable system: whenever he met a new person he researched their first and last name – with its exact spelling – and carefully engraved the details in his mind, then he was able to greet this person by his first name by cross-referencing them later – sometimes years later.

Jim Farley knew that everyone likes his own name better than any other name on earth. If you can remember someone’s name, you pay its owner a subtle and appreciated compliment. But if you forget it, mispronounce it or misspell it, you might upset someone or greatly displease them. Men are proud of their name and try to perpetuate it at all costs.

In general, if we forget names, it’s because we simply don’t take the time to write them down, repeat them, and engrave them permanently in our minds. This takes work and requires a certain amount of time, but the reward is definitely worth the effort.

Principal # 6: Remember a person’s name so that they are important

Chapter 7 : An easy way to become a good conversationalist

How do you succeed with the person you are talking with? How do you convince him and reach a good understanding with him? It’s no mystery: to win someone over, put him in a good mood, and get him in your corner, you must give him your full attention when he expresses himself. Nothing is more flattering.

To do this, you must know how to listen sincerely, and show it.

This also works with unhappy people, including customers. Often, unhappy customers who complain are deeply hurt themselves because someone has made them feel one way or another that they are not important. If you succeed in showing them that they are important in your eyes, then often their complaint will go away by itself.

On the other hand, if you want to know what to do to get people to run from you, mock you behind you back, or despise you, it’s easy: don’t listen to what other people say; only talk about yourself. If an idea comes to you when someone else is talking, don’t wait until they are finished. What good will it do anyway? In any case, what they are saying can’t be as interesting and brilliant as what you are going to say. Go on, really, cut them off mid-sentence.

But if you want your conversation to be appreciated, learn how to listen: to be interesting, be interested. Ask stimulating, agreeable questions, ask them about their life, what they have done. Remember that the person you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in his toothache than in the famine that was responsible for thousands of deaths in China.

Principal # 7: Learn to listen. Encourage others to talk about themselves

Chapter 8 : How to get people to like you instantly

To find the way to man’s heart you must bring him what he prizes the most

To discover what interests someone, what he is passionate about, all you have to do is stop and listen with interest while he explains to you everything you want to know.

Principal # 8 : Talk to people about what they are interested in

Chapter 9 : How to make people like you instantly

There is a primordial law that we must respect in our relationships with others. If we observe it, we will win friendship and happiness. If we violate it, we will give rise to numerous difficulties in our wake. Here it is: Make others feel important.

You respect those around you, you wish them to do justice to your merits, and you like very much feeling important in your own circle. You hate excessive flattery, but adore sincere praise, you want to be respected, encouraged, complimented. We all aspire to that.

Principal 9 : Make others feel important and do it sincerely

Part Three: Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking

Chapter 10 : You can’t win an argument

In his youth, Dale Carnegie adored controversy.

He studied logic and argument in college, never missed the opportunity to participate in contradictory debates, and even directed a dialectic course as a result, and made the project about writing on a subject… Then, after having attended and participated in thousands of discussions, he analyzed them and drew one conclusion: the best way to carry on a controversy is to avoid it. Nine times out of ten, everyone leaves the debate being even more certain that they are right.

Effectively, nobody wins these battles! Because if you lose, you lose and if you win, you also lose because you have proven to your adversary that he is wrong, you have made him feel inferior, you have hurt his self esteem and his pride. So,

A man convinced against his will
Always keeps his own opinion.

You must therefore choose: a spectacular and theoretic triumphant, or sincere agreement. The two rarely go together. You may well be right, a hundred times right, if you have to fight prove it and change your adversaries mind, your efforts will as useless as if you were wrong.

But what should you do then if there is disagreement? The idea is to welcome the dispute. The dispute is an opportunity to enrich yourself, to discover a new point of view that had not occurred to you before. Here is advice in such a situation:

Don’t give in to your first impulse.
Overcome your anger.
Begin by listening.
Find common ground.
Be honest.
Promise to think about the ideas of your adversaries, and study them carefully.
Sincerely thank your adversaries for their interest.
Adjourn your actions to allow both parties present the time to examine the problem in detail.

Principal # 10: Avoid controversy, unless you can come out on top.

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Chapter 11: A sure way of making enemies and how to avoid it.

When Theodore Roosevelt was the President of the United States, he admitted that he couldn’t be sure he was right more than 75% of the time. That was the outer limit of his potential. If that is the degree that such a successful man could attain, then what is it for you and me?

Actually, if we could be sure of being right even 50% of the time, all that would be left to do would be to install ourselves on Wall Street and earn a million dollars a day. But if we can’t achieve this percentage, why do we allow ourselves to state that others are wrong?

So don’t ever begin a sentence with “I will prove that to you” or “I can show that…” because that comes out as “I am smarter than you, and I am going to change your mind,” that can only hurt someone’s self esteem without changing their mind. It is actually difficult, even under favorable conditions, to change other people’s opinion, so why present obstacles and add even more difficulty?

If someone states something that you think is wrong, wouldn’t it be better to start with: Listen, I don’t see it the same way as you but I might be wrong. That happens to me a lot. If I am wrong, I will change my mind… Let’s take a look together, would you mind?

This type of phrasing is magic because no-one can object to “I might be wrong, let’s take a look together.” Who can find anything to say about that? Therefore no-one will ever be annoyed with you if you promptly admit that you are subject to error.

Here is an excerpt from the book “The Mind in the Making” by James Harvey Robinson to learn more:

[Translator’s note: The book excerpt is translated from the French version, so the text may not match the English version of the book exactly]

We can spontaneously modify our opinions effortlessly and without emotion. But if someone tells us that we are wrong, we revolt against the accusation and instantly adopt a defensive attitude. We form our convictions lightly, but the instant anyone threatens to snatch them from us, we develop a fierce passion for them. Obviously, it is not so much our ideas as it is our self esteem that we fear is in danger…

Principal #11: Respect others’ opinions. Never tell people they are wrong.

Chapter 12: If you’re wrong, admit it.

One day, the author was walking his dog off the leash in a park, which was not allowed. He came face to face with a mounted policeman who, after a sharp reprimand, told him never to come back. A week later, Dale Carnegie came across the same policeman, in the exact same circumstances. What did he do? He rushed up to the policeman and overwhelmed him with apologies, and reminded him that he had promised to fine him if he did it again. The policeman’s reply was mellow, Dale Carnegie insisted that he was at fault, and finally the policeman let him off the hook.

Because the policeman, like all of us, was only a man; what he wanted was confirmation of his own importance. When Dale Carnegie confessed, the only thing left for the policeman to do to maintain his own self esteem was to adopt a magnanimous attitude.

When we know that we deserve a dressing down, isn’t it better to take the initiative bravely and make our mea culpa? If we inflict blame on ourselves, isn’t it more acceptable that way than from someone else’s mouth?

Principal #12: If you are wrong, admit it promptly and energetically.

Chapter 13: A drop of honey

Aesop, a greek slave from the seventh century BC, has explained the point of this chapter once before:

One day, the wind and the sun were arguing over who was the strongest. The wind said:
- I am going to prove that I am. You see that old man down there? I bet that I can make him take his coat off faster than you can.
Upon which the sun disappeared behind a cloud and the wind started to blow like a hurricane. But the harder it blew, the more the man cinched his coat around him. Finally, the wind became tired and stopped blowing. Then, the sun came out from behind a cloud and smiled gently to the traveler. Soon he started to feel warm; he wiped his forehead and took off his coat.
The sun then remarked to the wind that sweetness and kindness are always stronger than violence and fury.

Principal #13: Begin on a friendly note.

Chapter 14: The Secret of Socrates

When you want to win someone over, avoid raising issues that you don’t agree with, from the very start. Focus instead on things you identify with and emphasize those. The point is to show that you have goals in common, and disagree only on the means to reach them, and to do that, say “yes” as early as possible, and above all try to avoid having them say “no.”

Because as Dr Overstreet says in his book “The Art of influencing the human condition:”

A negative response is a difficult obstacle to overcome. When someone says “no,” his pride causes him to remain steadfast in his opinion[...]. Later, he may figure out that it was an unjustified no. Too bad! He cannot retract it; he must above all look out for his self esteem. That’s why it is extremely important to start out, from the beginning, with the person you are talking to in the right direction: that of agreement.
[...]
When someone says “no” sincerely and with conviction, they can do no more than articulate those two letters. [...] Their whole being is on the defensive, the whole neuro-muscular system is alerted against agreeing.
On the other hand, when someone says “yes,” their body takes on a consenting, receptive attitude. Consequently, the more we can get people to say yes, the more we succeed in putting someone in a favorable mood towards our proposition.

Principal #14: Ask questions that will lead to saying yes immediately.

Chapter 15: The safety valve in handling complaints

Most people say too much when they are trying to persuade someone. Let the other person vent. He knows his problems and his business better than you. Ask him questions and let him express himself. This produces good results in professional relationships as well as between friends and family.

Principal # 15 : Make the person you are talking to feel completely comfortable speaking.

Chapter 16: How to get cooperation

Don’t we trust the ideas that we think of by ourselves more than those are handed to us ready to go on a silver platter? If that’s true, isn’t it clumsy to try and impose our opinions at all costs? Isn’t it wiser to make some clever suggestions and leave the other person to draw his own conclusions?

Twenty five centuries ago, Lao-Tsu, a wise man from China said that the reason why rivers and seas are graced with certain mountain streams is because they keep a low profile. They can thus reign over all the mountain streams. The wise man, who wants to be above others, puts himself below them; if he wants to be in front, sets himself behind. Thus, if his place is above others, they don’t feel his weight; if his place is in front, they are not hurt.

Principal #16: Allow the person you are talking to the pleasure of thinking it was his idea.

Chapter 17: A formula that will work wonders for you.

Even if your neighbor is wrong, he doesn’t think he’s wrong. Don’t condemn him. The first fool that comes along can condemn him. Rather, try to understand him. Those who would be wise are tolerant and even exceptional.

Actually, your neighbor has a reason for thinking and acting as he does. Find out the hidden reason and you will understand the secret to his behavior, and probably to his personality.

Think about the difference that exists between the passionate interest that you have for your own business and the luke warm attention that you pay to the rest of the word. Ponder, and ponder deeply on the fact that everyone in the world experiences the same thing as you. If you can understand that, then you can considerably perfect the art of leading men.

Principal #17: Make a real effort to see things from the other person’s point of view.

Chapter 18: What everybody wants

Wouldn’t you like to know a magic phrase that lets you avoid arguments, dissipates bitterness, stimulates good will and motivates others to listen to you carefully?

Yes? Well then, it does exist. Here is it:

“I understand completely where you are coming from, if I was you I would probably feel the same.”

Try it and you will see

Principal #18: Welcome kindly the ideas and desires of others.

Chapter 19: Appeal that everybody likes

Everyone we meet has a high opinion of himself and wants to appear noble and generous in their own eyes. Therefore, individuals generally have two reasons for their behavior: one which makes him look good, and the real one. An individual understands the second one very well, but he prefers to put his most worthy reasons out in front.

So, to influence others it is better to appeal to their most noble intentions. For fear of shattering the idealist image they have of themselves, they will be more motivated to respond to your pleas.

Note : The desire to show only the most noble motivation is not only strong to protect their self image, but also the image they wish to project to others.

Principal #19: Appeal to higher feelings.

Chapter 20: The movies do it. TV does it. Why don’t you do it?

At the beginning of the last century, a newspaper was the object of vicious rumors that effectively said that the paper had too many advertisements and not enough text; that it was no longer interesting to its readers, etc. They needed to act fast to halt the devastating rumors. But how? The staff of the newspaper had a good idea: they would cut all the text that wasn’t advertising from one edition, and publish it in the form of a book, they would call it “One Day.” The book, which was 307 pages long, would go for average price, because the paper was sold at only a fraction of the usual price of a book.

The publication highlighted the lies and rumors, and appealed to people in a more convincing and more attractive way than a whole pile of figures and arguments.

Principal #20: Show off your ideas spectacularly. Appeal to both sight and imagination.

Chapter 21: When nothing else works try this

The need to excel and compete are two extremely powerful drivers for the human spirit. To get results, create competition, not for the sake of winning, but to lubricate in a noble way the desire to do one’s best, to outdo others and to excel.

Principal #21: Present a challenge.

Part Four – Be a leader: how to change people without living offensively or arousing resentment

Chapter 22: If you must find fault, this is the way to begin

It involves an obvious process, but it gets results; it less painful for us to receive unpleasant comments after a compliment about our ability.

Principal #22: Start out with sincere praise.

Chapter 23: How to criticize and not be hated for it

One day, a senior person in a steel factory was walking the floors. He ran across a group of workers smoking. Just above their heads was a sign on which was written “no smoking.” What do you think the person did? Did he mouth off at these people yelling “Don’t you know how to read?” No. He approached them, offered each of them a cigar and said “I would like it if you went to smoke these cigars outside.”

How do you think the workers felt? They were in violation and they knew he knew it. Instead of punishing them, he offered them a gift and didn’t say a thing to reproach them. He had made them feel important. Who couldn’t like a man like that?

With reasonable people who would suffer under direct criticism, draw attention to their mistakes indirectly, and you will work wonders.

Principal #23: Comment on mistakes or errors indirectly.

Chapter 24: Talk about your own mistakes first

By acknowledging our own mistakes, even if we have not corrected them, we can help others to change their behavior. A few humble words can greatly help to deliver the bitter pill of criticism .

Principal #24: Mention your own mistakes befote correcting those of other people.

Chapter 25: Nobody likes to take orders

An order which is too brusque can cause someone longlasting offense, even if the order is justified. Instead, ask questions such as “Could you take a look at this?” or “Do you think this would be okay?” or “Would you do this?” Asking questions doesn’t just make orders more palatable, it also stimulates the other person’s creativity. People accept orders more readily if they have been part of the initial decision.

Principal #25: Ask questions rather than giving direct orders.

Chapter 26: Let the other person save face

Here is how Saint Exupéry put it:

I don’t have the right to say or do something that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What counts is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man’s dignity is a crime.

Principal #26: Let the person you are speaking with save face.

Chapter 27: How to spur people on to success

Psychologist Jess Lair wrote the following:

Praise is like sunshine for the human spirit. We cannot flourish without it. However, most of use are ready to blow the cold wind of criticism on others, rather than warm their heart with a compliment.

So, let’s acknowledge the progress, however slight it is, of those we wish to encourage. That’s how we will motivate them, how we will get them to pursue their efforts.

Principal #27: Praise the smallest progress and praise any progress. Do it warmly and generously.

Chapter 28: Give a dog a good name

For this, there is nothing better than complimenting someone on their potential or their past coups, and asking them if they think they will get back to that initial level or reach their full potential.

Principal #28: Give a good reputation to the deserving.

Chapter 29: Making the fault seem easy to correct

Tell your colleague, your child or your coworker that they are stupid, that they are not cut out for such work, or such a game, that they are doing badly, that they don’t understand anything, etc, and you will destroy any desire they have to excel. But try it the opposite way: Give generous encouragement; make it so the task to be accomplished appears easy, let them know you are behind them, that you have confidence in their abilities, tell them they have untapped talent… and they will use it all day long if necessary.

Principal #29: Encourage. Make errors seem easy to fix.

Chapter 30: Making people glad to do what you want

To change someone’s attitude or behavior, it is useful to keep the following points in mind:

Be sincere. Don’t make false promises. Forget your own interests and focus on the interest of the other person.
Make sure you know exactly what you want the person to do.
Put yourself in the other person’s place.
Think about the benefits that the other person will get out of doing what you want them to do.
Make sure these benefits line up with what the other person wants.
When you make an offer, structure it in such a way that the other person understands that he will benefit personally.

Principal #30: Make others happy to do what you suggest.

Book Review:

I am pleased that I read this book. It has been on my list of books to read for years (which has become significantly larger since my Readers have been sending me suggestions! and I finally found the opportunity to pick it up. As to the format, this book is written in a simple, accessible way. Dale Carnegie seems to write as he Speaks, staying very concrete, concise and relevant, and using many examples from real life – what am I saying? – a plethora of examples – of which you have only a small sample in this summary. These examples might seem dated – they date from the Civil War to the Second World War for the most part – but they are extremely varied, from a president, a king and an emperor, all the way to factory directors, finance magnates or workers. They allow us to get into the concepts very easily and understand how to apply them on a daily basis.

Regarding content, I found this book extremely interesting, because of the primordial importance it accords to the ego and self esteem. Dale Carnegie puts the deeply emotional nature of human beings first, and the whole book is centered on these two primordial concepts:

1. No matter what they say, men and women are above all emotional beings with a vital need to look kindly on themselves.

2. No matter how rational an argument might be, they will reject it most of the time if their self esteem is hurt.

Once you understand these two concepts, most of the principles of the book are simple to understand. All you have to do is apply them. The eight pieces of advice that Carnegie gives at the beginning of this book – and that could easily be applied to almost all the Personal MBA books – are, I think, a good beginning for implementing. As with everything, this advice must be applied in moderation, otherwise I think we could become machines generating consensus, which would be a bit bland and hypocritical. I also think that a good Kick in the rear can produce better results than all the diplomacy in the world. But Carnegie’s approach doesn’t consist of adopting mechanical tricks to artificially increase his influence, it consists of understanding the two concepts presented above, and internalizing them to transform our point of view with regard to human relationships and remaining watchful so that the other person comes out on top, or at least free, in our arguments, confrontations and other issues.

It’s a huge program. I am sure that human relationships would be a bit smoother if everyone applied the principles in this book. What’s more, it’s an excellent introduction to the ideas of ego and self esteem, and a point of departure for me with certain questions: why is it so important to us to maintain the vision of ourselves intact, and the way that we think of ourselves even though very often we “form our opinions lightly?” Why do we favor a comfortable vision even though it is false, to the truth? What is ego? Self esteem? Are they deeply human and therefore universal, greatly influenced by society or not? In short, great, interesting questions but which require sometime to be understood J

I therefore recommend this book. It’s excellent, may change the way in which we look at human relationships and is easy to read. A must have.

Strong points:

Clear and concise
Written simply and is easy to read
Numerous examples covering a wide variety of situations
Strong, relevant, fundamental concepts
Many principles that can be applied or internalized

Weak Points:

The examples are a little dated (from the Civil War to the Second World War primarily)
A little redundant at times

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

My rating:

Have you read this book? How do you rate it?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

PMBA Challenge:

Cost of book: € 5

Total cost of project: € 222.77

Number of pages: 250

Total number of pages: 3311

Time to read book: 3H

Time to write this article: 6H

Total time for the project: 123H30

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9 Concepts to learn more about and to develop your Productivity and your Creativity

Olivier Roland — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:53:12 +0000

Note : This article is the third in a series of articles concluding my reading of ten books in the category Productivity & Effectiveness in my Crazy Personal MDA Challenge, after 10 Things You Can Do Tomorrow To Increase Your Productivity and 10 Exceptionals Books about Productivity and Creativity in a Glance .

Contrary to the first article in the series which focused on simple things that can be implemented, here I deal with concepts that seem to me to be profound and interesting, and that require, for the most part, reflection and time to learn more and then use them. Often, these are the foundational concepts in the books from which I drew them – even though there are some that don’t come directly from the ten books in the category – and I think that they all have the potential to change our view of the world with regard to their subject matter. Here they are without further ado:

1 – We are all more efficient when our mind is free of parasitic thoughts that endlessly invade it. When we reach a state of absolute concentration, where we are completely focused on the task at hand, we are capable of miracles, that is to say, of doing things more quickly and efficiently that we could have imagined. It is a state in which we can choose to dedicate ourselves completely to our tasks, without the slightest interruption, parasitic thought, daydream or other source of distraction, while remaining absorbed and in full possession of our faculties. A dream, is it not? It is what practitioners of martial arts call “mind like water” (Mizu-no-kokoro), and athletes call “being in the zone,” or psychologists the flow. Moments like this have no doubt occurred in your life. Were you performing, more satisfied with yourself and your accomplishments? No doubt you were.

It is possible to cultivate habits that allow you to reach this state frequently, to develop a system. GTD recommends a system completely based on writing in order to free our mind from all the thoughts that endlessly interrupt our concentration. Matthieu Ricard, in The Art of Meditation, tells us this is the best way to develop a more attentive mind, conscious of the present moment, free of all emotions and negative thoughts. There are no doubt many other ways to reach this state of mind, and the fact that it is described in multiple disciplines shows clearly that it is an important universal concept and that we will benefit by learning more about it.

To learn more:

Review of The Art of Meditation
Review of GTD
And thousands of other internet resources …

2 – It takes years and years to completely master an art, a discipline, or a subject. To become a true master in a field, if that’s your goal, is a bottomless well that you never truly reach.

It was only 58 years ago that Twyla Tharp, famous American choreographer, and author of The Creative Habit, finally felt like a “master of choreography.” For the first time in her career, on the occasion of her 128^th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, she felt like a perfect master of all the components that make up the dance – the music, the steps, the symbolism, the use of people on the set, and clarity of the objective. She finally had the skills to fill the void between what she saw in her mind and what actually happened on the set. The achievement of mastery takes time. Be patient. Never give up. But how will you know when you have achieved mastery in something? Is it the total realization of your objectives, a feeling of inner completeness, the unequivocal respect of others? Why do you seek total mastery?

To learn more:

Review of The Creative Habit

3 – On the other hand, understand that very often it is useless to seek perfection and that you can be happy with good results by carrying out 20% of the actions that lead to 80% of the result.

Effectively, perfectionism leads us on an endless quest and makes us concentrate on details that aren’t important, and that can be a means of procrastination – putting the most important things off until tomorrow. Now, Pareto’s Law tells us that in general, 20% of the objectives produce 80% of the results. The 80/20 percentage is of course not exact to last the decimal point in most situations, but it describes effectively the enormous imbalance which takes place in an incalculable number of fields; 20% of clients in a company make up 80% of its revenue (that’s the case in mine), 20% of countries in the world share 80% of the wealth, in these same countries, 20% of the population share 80% of the wealth, 80% of our work is finished in 20% of the time we allocate for it, 20% of blog posts are visited by 80% of the visitors, 80% of our annoyances come from 20% of our relationships (customers, friends, acquaintances, etc), 20% of our relationships bring us 80% of the love we need, etc. This concept may seem completely alien the first time that we are confronted with it, but its universality has been proven in many fields.

Imagine what would happen if you got rid of a maximum of 80% of the things you do and that only bring you 20% of your results, so that you could concentrate on what is really important? And why is it that this law is so universal? Does that mean something? Are there ways to concretely apply it in our lives? The wealth of questions and possibilities that this concept opens up is absolutely fascinating. It is worth learning more about it, from a practical and theoretical point of view, and I think that it is completely susceptible to changing our lives if we can find a way to apply it intelligently.

To learn more:

Pareto’s Law
The long tail, or how to get the remaining 20%, but with only 1% effort using new technologies
Read Living the 80/20 Principal, less work and stress for more success and pleasure, which will explain the practice and theory in simple terms.
Read The 4-Hour Work Week, an absolutely concrete and enthusiastic application of Pareto’s Law!
And thousands of other internet resources…

4 – Our freedom in life is, like our freedom of movement in a building, in part defined by its structure. Effectively, everything has an underlying structure, whether it is physically like a bridge or a skyscraper or as immaterial as the plot of a novel or the form of a symphony. Our life is a structure, it is composed of multiple elements interacting with each other and with itself.

The structure determines the movements and behavior of the objects that comprise it, and:

We advance in life by taking the path of least resistance, the one which is easier to travel within our structure – just as it is easier to enter a room by the door rather than a window.
The underlying structure of our lives determines the path of least resistance.
The actual structure of our lives is in large part determined by the paths of least resistance in our past, at present almost completely forgotten.

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Thus:

5 – In order to live our dreams, it is preferable to change the structure of our lives rather than resolve our problems. Effectively, we can learn to recognize the structures that play a role in our life and change them so that we can create what we really want to create. But how do you change a structure? By creating. Often we think in terms of solving problems, but this approach only allows us to change some of the elements here or there without changing the structure, and this initial structure can only lead then to elements in their initial state.

When we try to solve a problem we are acting to remove something: the problem. When we create, we are acting to make something happen: creation. Therefore by thinking structurally, rather than saying “How shall I make this unwanted situation go away?” we say to ourselves “What structure should I adopt to create the results that I want to create?”

It is a radically different approach. And much more efficient. And which is best, once we have mastered it, for giving us the key to create the life we want rather than put up with a state of affairs that we don’t appreciate, to be proactive rather than reactive, in short to create out of our desires and our imagination rather than responding to the constraints and stimuli. Personally I find the concept of structure and the path of least resistance absolutely fascinating, because it is a sort of theory of individual freedom, the freedom of every human being to live the life he wishes for. It is a concept so rich and loaded that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read The Path of Least Resistance, the book that explains all this, and it is really beneficial to learn more about it. Is the actual structure of your life what you wish for? How was it created? Did you choose it or did it arise from elements beyond your control? Are you more focused right now on solving problems without seeking to change the underlying structure?

To learn more:

6 – To renew your energy and that of your co-workers, concentrate on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Efficient people renew their energy. They know they you can’t build on weakness. Their first task consists of gathering strength. They assign roles and promotions according to what men can do, by taking their good qualities more into considerations than their defects. Trying to staff an organization with men who have no weaknesses or “good subjects” leads to mediocrity, even incompetence. Strong men always have weaknesses: wherever there are mountains there have to be valleys.

Efficient people don’t ask themselves “How will he get along with me?” instead they ask “What can he bring to the table?” They don’t ask themselves “What is he capable of doing” but “What does he do especially well?” When they interview, they look for exceptional qualities in an important area rather than general skills. Finally, by concentrating on strengths rather than problems, you must inflate the possibilities and deflate the problems. This is a strong concept because it is actually applied very little. And for your own part, do you concentrate more on your strengths or your weaknesses? And what do you do with other people? Why do you think it is more important to focus on strengths? What is the ego’s role in self esteem deep down? Do you prefer doing things in an area in which you are gifted or where nature has given you no particular talent? Is the pleasure of doing something tied in some degree to the perfection with which we do it?

To learn more:

Review of The Effective Executive
Review of Strengths Finder 2.0: Now, discover your strengths

7 – Knowing how to manage computers – the skills of the 80s consisting of clicking buttons, making menu selections, opening or closing files – are no longer enough in the Information Age. The Information Age is characterized by the omnipresent, skyrocketing volume of bits that we deal with. Bits are everywhere today, traveling at the speed of light from one end our planet to the other and transport a quantity of information that is increasingly more significant, increasingly more different, and on a significantly increasing quantity of peripherals – computers, telephones, PDAs, MP3 players, vehicles and even refrigerators. The number of emails is exploding, new acronyms and new technologies appear every day and millions of people from students to doctors, from teachers to CEOs, from graphic designers to computer technicians, are overwhelmed by the amount of information that they receive every day and have to deal with.

For this worldwide problem there is a solution: learn to manage this mass of information by using good practices and good tools, in a process similar to learning how to read and write allows us manipulate symbols which form the written language. This talent is so important in this era of streaming information and communication that whoever has this skill can overcome the hurdle of overload, climb to the top of their profession, and enjoy a life with less stress, better health and more time for their family and friends.

Bits are heavy, you either consume them or ignore them. The fact that they are predominant today is due to their unique properties making them so desirable: they are very small, very fast, easy to acquire and created, copied and shared in almost infinite amounts, protected by the ravages of times and free from limitations of distance and space. Bits are however paradoxical: they don’t weigh anything yet they seem to weigh us down, they don’t take up any space, but they seem to always accumulate, they are created in an instant but they can remain indefinitely, they move at the speed of light, but they make us waste a lot of time.

Avoiding or ignoring these paradoxes only lead to being engulfed by the avalanche, fortunately, information management training teaches us how to avoid that.

Finally, learning to manage information is summarized by applying GTD and and the 20/80 rule to sort the information, while using good tools. This concept is fundamental for learning more and achiveing mastery in our era, and will become more so given the omnipresence of digital information tools leading to information all around us. Knowing how to manage information is for me as important today as it must have been to learn how to read and write in the 19^th century: it gives you a considerable advantage over those who have not mastered it.

To learn more:

Review of Bit Literacy

8 – It is better to fail while trying to fulfill our dreams than not trying to fulfill them. A dream is transformed into an objective when it is assigned a time limit – and actions to get there. You should not be afraid of failure; it’s even very important. Failure is cool. It is an enormous source of learning, and can cause us to make progress in an area more quickly than years of apprenticeship with no setbacks.

What is also great about failing? In many ways, the creative act is a question of refinement. You suppress or modify bad ideas that didn’t work. That exercises our judgment. There are many ways to fail:

Failure of skill. You have an idea in your head but you don’t have the required skill to implement it.
Failure of concept. You have an idea that is poorly formed and doesn’t fit properly in your life.
Failure of judgment. You leave something in your idea or your project which should have been taken out – and that results in imbalance in the total creation.
Failure of nerves. The worst. You have everything you need except the necessary guts to follow through with your idea and explore it to its fullest potential.
Failure of repetition. Despite having overcome one or more similar failures, you repeat the same mistakes.
Failure of denial. The deepest. Creating something new and fresh is an act of daring, of presumption. You think that the world cares because you have something to say. And they don’t really care, you shut yourself up in denial feeling misunderstood and cursing a world that doesn’t understand your genius. Do you consider the fulfillment of your dreams as nothing but possible? Do you think that the mere act of trying to reach your dreams, the path, is more important than the fact of reaching them? – the destination? Do you experience or would you experience more pleasure by trudging along the path that leads to your dreams even if you are not sure of reaching your destination, than meandering along a sure path but one that you are not sure is taking you anywhere?

To learn more:

9 – In the end we are all powerful human beings who have a mountain of jewels inside us ready to be harvested, and we can learn to surpass ourselves to create the life we want. Learning, understanding, acting, creating, making mistakes and learning from these mistakes, trying and succeeding to constantly overcome our limitations, these I think are the ingredients for a life that is worth being lived, an exciting life full of challenges which we can turn to at the end and say “yes, I have lived well and that’s just as well”

translated by www.DeansResource.com

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Cost of book:	€ 5
Total cost of project:	€ 222.77
Number of pages:	250
Total number of pages:	3311
Time to read book:	3H
Time to write this article:	6H
Total time for the project:	123H30

Books that can change your life

Sources of Power – How People Make Decisions – 2

Book Chronicle and Summary of “Sources of Power”, part two:

Chapter 9: Non-Linear Aspects of Problem Solving

Chapter 10: The Power to See the Invisible

Chapter 11: The Power of Stories

Chapter 12: The Power of Metaphors and Analogies

Chapter 13: The Power to Read Minds

Chapter 15: The Power of Rational Analysis and the Problem of Hyper-rationality

Chapter 16: Why the right people make wrong decisions

Chapter 17: Conclusions

Critic of the book:

Sources of Power

Chronicle of “Sources of Power”:

Chapter 3: The decision making model based on the first observation

Chapter 4: The Power of Intuition

Chapter 5: The Power of Mental Simulation

Chapter 7: Mental Simulations and Decision Making

Chapter 8: The Power to Detect the Leverage Points

Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – 2

Book review and summary, Part II:

Chapter 5: Emotion

Chapter 6: A Story

The Challenge

The Bond

Creativity

Chapter 7: Epilogue

Critic of the “Made to Stick” :

Made to Stick

Summary of “Made to Stick”:

Chapter 1: Simplicity

Chapter 2: The unexpected

Chapter 3: Something practical

Chapter 4: Credibility

The authorities

The illustrious unknown individuals who know what they’re talking about

The power of details

Illustrated statistics

The principle of the human scale

Rebirth of this blog

End of this blog

Deep Survival – 2

Deep Survival

How to Win Friends and Influence People

9 Concepts to learn more about and to develop your Productivity and your Creativity