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The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz | Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 2 weeks ago

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The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time.

We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We’re wired up, but we’re melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to:

* Mobilize four key sources of energy
* Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
* Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do
* Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes

Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

The authors worked with the best athletes and executives for years, and found that the best ones knew how to push themselves, then recuperate, push, recuperate. Take this same approach to your emotional, mental, physical, and even spiritual life, and it’s a powerful metaphor. Think of sprints, not marathons. Be fully in whatever you’re in, then give time to recuperate. But push futher each time, past your comfort zone, like a good exercise plan.

Every one of our thoughts, emotions and behaviors has an energy consequence.

Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned.

Immerse yourself in the mission you are on.

Eager to get to work in the morning, equally happy to return home in the evening – and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two.

Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to be able to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time. At a practical level, they build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives – eating and sleeping; working out and resting; summoning the appropriate emotions; mentally preparing and staying focused; and connecting regularly to the mission they have set for themselves.

The primary markers of physical capacity are strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. These are precisely the same markers of capacity emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Stretching increases flexibility.

Emotional flexibility reflects the capacity to move freely and appropriately along a wide spectrum of emotions rather than responding rigidly or defensively.

Emotional resilience is the ability to bounce back from experiences of disappointment, frustration and even loss.

Mental endurance is a measure of the ability to sustain focus and concentration over time.

Mental flexibility is marked by the capacity to move between the rational and the intuitive and to embrace multiple points of view.

Spiritual strength is reflected in the commitment to one’s deepest values, regardless of circumstance and even when adhering to them involves personal sacrifice.
Spiritual flexibility reflects the tolerance for values and beliefs that are different than one’s own, so long as those values and beliefs don’t bring harm to others.

We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints – fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray.

To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
Building “muscles” in every dimension of our lives – from empathy and patience to focus and creativity to integrity and commitment.

We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our ordinary limits and then recovering. Expose a muscle to ordinary demand and it won’t grow. With age it will actually lose strength. The limiting factor in building any “muscle” is that many of us back off at the slightest hint of discomfort. To meet increased demand in our lives, we must learn to systematically build and strengthen muscles wherever our capacity is insufficient. Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand our capacity – physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually – so long as it is followed by adequate recovery.

Will and discipline require pushing yourself to a particular behavior.
A ritual PULLS at you.

The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible.

Imagine that every time you failed to focus your attention fully on the task at hand, you put someone’s life at risk. Very quickly, you would become less negative, reckless and sloppy in the way you manage your energy. We hold ourselves accountable for the ways that we manage our time, and for that matter our money. We must learn to hold ourselves at least equally accountable for how we manage our energy.

Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.

“How should I spend my energy in a way that is consistent with my deepest values?”

It is impossible to chart a course of change until you are able to look honestly at who you are today.

Face the Truth. Denying to ourselves that the choices we are making are having a consequential impact on the quantity, quality, force and focus of our energy.

Some of our existing habits help us get through the day, but take a long-term toll on our performance, health and happiness. Examples include relying on junk food for bursts of energy.

Building rituals requires defining very precise behaviors and performing them at very specific times – motivated by deeply held values.

Great leaders are stewards of organizational energy. They begin by effectively managing their own energy. As leaders, they must mobilize, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.

The powerful source of energy that can be derived from connecting to a clear sense of purpose.

Unmoored from deeply held values, he didn’t have much motivation to take better care of himself physically, or to control his impatience, or even to prioritize his time and focus his attention.

An imbalance between the expenditure and the recovery of energy: they were either overtraining or undertraining.

Both overtraining and undertraining have performance consequences that include persistent injuries and sickness, anxiety, negativity and anger, difficulty concentrating, and loss of passion.

When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover energy, we fill it back up. Too much energy expenditure without sufficient recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown. (Overuse it and lose it.) Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness. (Use it or lose it.)

The benefits of a sustained fitness program decrease significantly after just one week of inactivity – and disappear altogether in as few as four weeks.

Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings. Mental acuity diminishes in the absence of ongoing intellectual challenge. Spiritual energy capacity depends on regularly revisiting our deepest values and holding ourselves accountable in our behavior.

We assume that we can spend energy indefinitely in some dimensions – often the mental and emotional – and that we can perform effectively without investing much energy at all in others – most commonly the physical and the spiritual.

In the sixteen to twenty seconds between points in a match, the heart rates of top competitors dropped as much as twenty beats per minute. By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time.

Many of us treat life as a marathon that doesn’t end until it finally ends for good.

We must learn to establish stopping points in our days, inviolable times when we step off the track, cease processing information and shift our attention from achievement to restoration.

To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves to more stress – followed by adequate recovery.

We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our normal limits, and then recovering.

The catch is that we instinctively resist pushing beyond our current comfort zones.

The best moments in our lives usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

The deepest satisfaction comes from our willingness to expose ourselves to new challenges and engage in novel experiences.

The willingness to challenge our comfort zones depends partly on our degree of underlying security. To whatever degree we are consumed by anxious concerns, we are less willing to expose ourselves to any discomfort.

Gradual and incremental exposure to increasing doses of stress.

The size of our energy reservoir depends on the patterns of our breathing, the foods that we eat and when we eat them, the quantity and quality of our sleep, the degree to which we get intermittent recovery during the day, and the level of our fitness.

Breathing in to a count of three and out to a count of six, lowers arousal and quiets not just the body but also the mind and the emotions.

Even if you don’t feel consciously hungry, eating breakfast is critically important. It not only increases blood glucose levels, but also jump-starts metabolism.

The frequency with which we eat also influences our capacity to stay fully engaged and to sustain high performance. Eating five to six low calorie, highly nutritious “meals” a day insures a steady resupply of energy. Even the most energy rich foods won’t fuel high performance for the four to eight hours that many of us frequently permit to pass between meals.

Snacks between meals should typically be between 100 and 150 calories and once again should focus on low-glycemic foods such as nuts and sunflower seeds, fruits.

The shifts of energy that we experience are tied to the ultradian rhythms that regulate physiological markers of alertness at 90-to 120-minute intervals.

It took him four weeks to lock in these new rituals so that they began to exert a noticeable pull on him.

Recommended exercise protocol is twenty to thirty minutes of continuous exercise, three to five days a week, at 60 to 85 percent of maximum heart rate.

Sprinting, walking up stairs and down, bicycling and even weight lifting, so long as the effect is to rhythmically raise and lower heart rate.

Stress inoculation occurs only when the stress intensity is at the optimal level – high enough to activate a person’s psychological and biological systems, but low enough so as not to overwhelm them. If the stress level is not high enough, inoculation will not occur; if the stress level is too high, stress sensitization will occur, and the individual will probably perform less effectively when he is stressed again. In short, minimizing or avoiding stress is just as destructive to capacity as excessive stress without recovery.

Researchers looked at the effects of bed rest on some 16,000 patients with fifteen different medical problems. It turned out that patients got no significant beneficial effect from prolonged bed rest, regardless of their medical condition. To the contrary, bed rest tended to delay recovery and in some cases cause further damage to the patient. These conclusions even applied to conditions for which bed rest has long been recommended, including low back pain, recovery after a heart attack.

He had never stuck with an exercise program long enough to derive any benefits.

Committed to an exercise program for sixty days – the outer limit of what it typically takes to put a new ritual into place.

The key to any new fitness regimen is to start slowly and build incrementally.

Heart-rate monitor. Target heart rate. he could reach that rate simply by walking fast. He maintained it for sixty seconds and then slowed down until his heart rate dropped to 90.

Repeated the same up-and-down sequence for the next twenty minutes. Rather than pushing himself continuously for twenty or twenty-five minutes, he was teaching his body both to tolerate stress and to recover efficiently.

Emotional intelligence is simply the capacity to manage emotions skillfully in the service of high positive energy and full engagement. In practical terms, the key “muscles” or competencies that fuel positive emotion are self-confidence, self-control (self-regulation), social skills (interpersonal effectiveness) and empathy. Smaller, supportive “muscles” include patience, openness, trust and enjoyment.

When our emotional muscles are weak or insufficient to meet demand – if we have a lack of confidence or too little patience, for example – we must systematically build capacity by devising rituals to push past our current capacity and then recover.

Epidemiologist David Snowdon, study of 678 aging nuns who had been required to write a personal essay when they came into the order in their early twenties. Those nuns whose writing expressed a preponderance of positive emotions (happiness, love, hope, gratitude and contentment) tended to live longer and more productive lives. Nuns with the highest number of positive-emotion sentences had half the risk of death at any age as those with the lowest number of such sentences.

Undertake activities simply because they are enjoyable and emotionally nourishing.

Keeping this physical routine helped anchor him to a sense of normalcy and provided a source of emotional recovery each day.

Talking freely with her new friends. She became as invested in their lives as they did in hers.

True empathy requires letting go of our own agendas, at least temporarily.

All virtues are entailed. Honesty without compassion, for example, becomes cruelty.

To perform at our best we must be able to sustain concentration, and to move flexibly between broad and narrow, as well as internal and external focus.

The key supportive muscles that fuel optimal mental energy include mental preparation, visualization, positive self-talk, effective time management, and creativity.

Agents who scored in the top 10 percent for optimism sold 88 percent more than those ranked in the most pessimistic 10 percent.

Da Vinci wrote, “It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation…. When you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.”

Sequential steps of the creative process. Five stages are now widely recognized: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination and verification.

The highest form of creativity depends on a rhythmic movement between engagement and disengagement, thinking and letting go, activity and rest.

Exposing one’s self to short-term stress, for example, can stimulate a burst of adrenaline that actually improves memory.

A Japanese neuroscientist put a group of young people on a jogging program of thirty minutes, two to three times a week. When he tested them at the end of twelve weeks on a series of memory skills, their scores significantly increased, and so did the speed with which they completed the tests. Of equal note, their gains disappeared almost immediately when they stopped jogging.

The key muscle that fuels spiritual energy is character – the courage and conviction to live by our values, even when doing so requires personal sacrifice and hardship. Supportive spiritual muscles include passion, commitment, integrity and honesty. Spiritual energy is sustained by balancing a commitment to others with adequate self-care.

The disconnection from a compelling sense of purpose had robbed him of passion and of any clear sense of direction.

Expanding spiritual capacity requires subordinating our own needs to something beyond our self-interest. Because we often perceive our own needs as urgent, shifting attention away from them can prompt very primitive survival fears. If I truly focus my attention on others, we worry, who is going to look out for me? It is a mark of courage to set aside self-interest in order to be of service to others or to a cause.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.

“We are much better than we know. We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis. So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us.” – Lance Armstrong

We become fully engaged only when we feel that what we are doing really matters.

Purpose creates a destination.

Look at someone that you deeply respect. Describe three qualities in this person that you most admire.

Create a vision for how we intend to invest our energy.

To provide inspiration it needs to be lofty, ambitious and even a bit overreaching. It needs to be realistic, specific and personal.

“Every form of addiction is bad,” wrote Carl Jung, “no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”

We deceive ourselves in order to protect our self-esteem – our image of who we are or wish to be.

Intellectualizing is a means of acknowledging a truth cognitively without experiencing its impact emotionally.

But why were the most successful leaders also so consistently self-effacing, modest and eager to share credit? In part, it was that their humility gave others room to flourish.

The success of any large venture depends on giving people a sense of ownership and a feeling of being valued and valuable. Genuine humility also meant that these leaders were open to opinions contrary to their own and to the possibility that their views weren’t always necessarily right. They were confident enough to be wrong without feeling diminished.

“Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with,” writes Edward Whitmont, “and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics….These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others.”

Like all of our “muscles,” self-awareness withers from disuse and deepens when we push past our resistance to see more of the truth. We fall asleep to aspects of ourselves each and every day. Much as we must keep returning to the gym and pushing weight against resistance in order to sustain or increase our physical strength, so we must persistently shed light on those aspects of ourselves that we prefer not to see in order to build our mental, emotional and spiritual capacity.

When it comes to absorbing the truth, too big a dose can be overwhelming, and even self-defeating. Some truths are too unbearable to be absorbed all at once.

Ivan Lendl was far from the most physically gifted tennis player of his era, but for five years he was the number-one-ranked player in the world. His edge was in the routines that he built. He followed similar routines in every dimension of his life. He developed a rigorous fitness regimen off the court, which included sprints, middle-distance runs, long bicycle rides and strength training. He did regular ballet bar exercises to increase his balance and grace. He adhered to a low-fat, high complex-carbohydrate diet and ate at very specific times. Lendl also practiced a series of daily mental-focus exercises to improve his concentration – and regularly introduced new ones to assure that they remained challenging. At tournaments, he gave clear instructions to friends and family not to burden him with issues that might distract him from his mission. Whatever he did, he was either fully engaged or strategically disengaged. He even meticulously scheduled his time for relaxation and recovery, which included recreational golf, daily afternoon naps and regularly scheduled massages. On the court, during matches, he relied on another set of rituals to keep himself centered and focused, including visualizing entire points before playing them and following the same multiple-step ritual each time he stepped up to the line to serve.

It is perfectly logical to assume that Lendl excelled in part because he had extraordinary will and discipline. That probably isn’t so. A growing body of research suggests that as little as 5 percent of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. We are creatures of habit and as much as 95 percent of what we do occurs automatically or in reaction to a demand or an anxiety. What Lendl understood brilliantly and instinctively was the power of positive rituals – precise, consciously acquired behaviors that become automatic in our lives, fueled by a deep sense of purpose.

Positive energy rituals are powerful on three levels. They help us to insure that we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on. They reduce the need to rely on our limited conscious will and discipline to take action. Finally, rituals are a powerful means by which to translate our values and priorities into action – to embody what matters most to us in our everyday behaviors.

Rituals serve as anchors, insuring that even in the most difficult circumstances we will continue to use our energy in service of the values that we hold most dear.

Every time we participate in a ritual, we are expressing our beliefs, either verbally or more implicitly.

The sustaining power of rituals comes from the fact that they conserve energy. “We should not cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,”

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Discipline, which imply PUSHING ourselves to action, a well-defined ritual PULLS us. We feel somehow worse if we don’t do it.

It is possible to strategically build the muscle of self-control. The same training regimen applies. Exercise self-control or empathy or patience past normal limits, and then allow time for rest and these muscles become progressively stronger.

Shift from the mentality of a marathoner to that of a sprinter.

Because Peter told us that he felt freshest early in the morning, we had him begin his workdays at 6:30 A.M. and write for ninety minutes before he did anything else. At 8:00 A.M., Peter stopped to have breakfast with his wife Peter returned to work at 8:30 A.M. and wrote without interruption until 10:00. At that point, he took a twenty-minute recovery break – ten minutes of training with light weights followed by ten minutes of meditation. He also ate a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts before heading back to his desk. Peter’s third writing session went from 10:30 until 12:00 NOON, at which point he went jogging and then ate lunch. During those 41/2 hours of focused morning work, Peter was able to write nearly twice as much as had sitting at his desk for up to ten hours a day in previous years.

If our rituals become too rigid, unvarying and linear, the eventual consequence is boredom, disengagement and even diminished passion and productivity.

Hold fast to our rituals when the pressures in our lives threaten to throw us off track, and to periodically revisit and change them so that they remain fresh.

There are several key elements in building effective energy-management rituals but none so important as specificity of timing and the precision of behavior during the thirty-to sixty-day acquisition period.

Specificity of timing and precision of behavior dramatically increase the likelihood of success.

By determining when, where and how a behavior will occur, we no longer have to think much about getting it done.

The less thinking people have to do under adverse circumstances, the better.

Build rituals in increments – focusing on one significant change at a time, and setting reachable goals at each step of the process.

Create a daily accountability log. This exercise can be as simple as a yes or no check on a sheet kept by the side of your bed.

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Think Learn Succeed by Dr. Caroline Leaf | Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 2 weeks ago

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Think, Learn, Succeed – Understanding and Using Your Mind to Thrive at School, the Workplace, and Life by Dr. Caroline Leaf

Think Learn Succeed contains valuable insights on mindsets and stresses how adopting an effective mindset can be the differentiating factor as to the levels of success and well-being that one attains in life. Furthermore, the book distills a great deal of neuroscientific research on the processes of learning as well as memory formation -helping readers to gain a better understanding of their own unique style of thinking.

The author, Dr. Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist, her research, for the last 30 years being mainly on the mind and body connection.

‘A thought is not just a thing, but rather, a thought is something that influences other things.’

“We can choose to adopt a mindset that improves our creativity and functionality in general, or we can choose to adopt an attitude that constrains us.”
Gratitude Mindset Activation: “Gratitude begins with an awareness of whether you have an attitude of gratitude, so intentionally and critically observe your thinking to determine if an attitude of gratitude is part of it.”
Happiness Mindset Activation: “Be proactive in where you put your energy: you can choose to bemoan and marinate in your misery or move your energy to do something constructive.”
“Emotions don’t happen to you; emotions are made by you, it is you who creates the tectonic nature of your emotional experience”
Controlled Emotions Mindset Activation: The first step in controlling emotions is to recognize that you have control over your emotions. The second step is to realize that you are not responsible for the cause of the emotion but rather for the management of the emotion.
“Re-conceptualize (redesign) thoughts that are holding you back by deciding what thought you would rather have and then work toward eliminating the toxic thought and building something better.”
“You cannot control the events and circumstances of life. You can, however, control your reactions to the events and circumstances of life through the choices you make and the thoughts you think.”
“Where your mind goes, your life follows.”

“A mindset is an attitude or a cluster of thoughts with attached information and emotions that generate a particular perception. They shape how you see and interact with the world. They can catapult you forward, allowing you to achieve your dreams, or put you in reverse drive if you are not careful.”
“And because you control your mindsets—they are not some pre-programmed function, but rather, it is you that is actually making your brain and body work for you.”
“The ability to think, feel, and choose and build thoughts into mindsets is one of the most powerful things in the universe because this power is the source of all human creativity and imagination.”
“Think of your mind as the movement of information as energy through your nervous system. Each thought has quantum energy and electrochemical and electromagnetic signals, which flow throughout your brain and body largely below the level of awareness in your non-conscious mind.”
“Just thinking about a loved one, for example, can cause positive structural changes in the caudate nucleus of the brain, which is closely linked to feelings of reward and happiness. The converse also applies. Stress, which is actually good for you, can become incredibly toxic, depending on your perception of the situation.”
“Essentially, the way you think, through the mindsets you adopt, will influence the neural correlates in your brain, thereby influencing your words and actions. In turn, these words and actions influence the brain, and a feedback loop is established based on this mindset.”
An interesting study indicated that instead of trying to calm down when you experience pre-performance anxiety before a big event such as meeting with a boss, public speaking or writing a math exam, etc. re-conceptualizing the anxiety as excitement while taking deep slow breaths (which dissipates cortisol) helped people cope better.

[Note: this is in a sense, re-framing; instead of trying to calm your nerves before a performance, you tell yourself repeatedly ‘I’m excited!’]

Thus, we can choose to adopt a mindset that harnesses our creativity and functionality in general, or we can choose to adopt an attitude that restricts us.
“Where your mind goes, your life follows.”
“Stem cells persist in the adult brain and generate new neurons throughout life; thousands of new cells are created on a daily basis. These thousands of new neurons that are added into the brain each day do not survive.”
However, one of the most effective ways to keep these cells from dying (which increases toxic levels in your brain and body) is by thinking and learning properly.
… process of reappraising and realigning your mindsets back to your natural wired-for-love design is integral to the life well-lived.

Dr. Leaf writes about genetic expression & mindfulness…

She defines mindfulness as a way of deliberately and intentionally paying attention to what you think, say, and do in a self-reflective and self-regulatory way.
“Your thinking, feeling, and choosing impacts your genetic expression. You switch genes on and off with every thought you have, and every thought you have is a response to the way you see and perceive your life experiences.”
“…only about 5 percent of genetic mutations directly cause health issues.”
“Approximately 95 percent of genes are influenced by life factors and lifestyle choices.”
“By changing your thoughts, you change your mindsets, and in turn, you can influence and shape your own genetic readout. Research even shows that your mindsets can impact how you age.”
“I did some of the first neuroplasticity research back in the eighties, showing how intentional, deliberate thinking changes intellectual, cognitive, emotional, social and academic performance.”
“I emphasize retraining the brain as opposed to training the brain. It is incorrect to assume that the brain has a negative bias and that we have to fight off the brain’s natural tendency to scan for and spot the undesirable. This kind of negative mindset will actually work against the natural optimism bias of brain function and upset thinking patterns.”
“What do you think about the most? Whatever you think about the most will grow; if you are thinking about something daily, within approximately two months your brain has changed to accommodate this pattern of thought.”
“You plant these thoughts deep into your non-conscious mind, allowing them free rein to shape your mindset, which in turn affects your future thoughts, words, and actions.”
“We merge with our environments; whatever we think about the most will have the most energy and will dominate our thinking, the good and the bad.”
“Brain plasticity means the changes that occur in the brain as a result of thinking and lifestyle choices.”
“Indeed, we can harness the brain’s plasticity by using our mind to train our brain to build normal positive patterns. This is called Automatization.”
“Automatization is not incredibly difficult, but it does require time, discipline, and effort. If asked, I am certain you would be able to point out your positive and negative thinking habits, your love and fear mindsets.”
“You have already been practicing building mindsets, albeit without consciously knowing the technique! The conscious control of this process can take you to a whole new level of life.”

THE THINKER MINDSET

“The need to be constantly occupied does not just concern “kids these days.” One recent study found that being alone with one’s thoughts is considered an unpleasant experience by the majority of people of all ages.”
“In a series of eleven studies done by Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia and Harvard, a number of the participants of all age ranges (18 to 77 years) battled spending 6 to 15 minutes alone with nothing to do but think, daydream, and ponder.”
“The majority of the participants didn’t enjoy being alone with their thoughts, while some preferred even shocking themselves to sitting and thinking!”
“The conclusions of this study indicate that most of the participants preferred to be doing something, even something negative, rather than just using their imagination for several minutes.”
“Contrary to popular belief, the mind does not grind to a halt when you are doing nothing. Spontaneous thought processes, including mind-wandering, creative thinking, and daydreaming, arise when thoughts are relatively free from focused thinking and external influences.”
“The mind-wandering ‘thinker’ state can be high-jacked, so to speak, by existing toxic thoughts moving up from our non-conscious mind unless we control them.”
“Controlling the mind-wandering “thinker” is known as an awake resting state. It activates the coexisting default mode network (DMN) and task-positive network (TPN) in the brain in a constructive and healthy way.”
“The default mode network(DMN) is a primary network that we switch into when we switch off from the outside world and move into a state of focused mindfulness. It activates to even higher levels when a person is daydreaming, introspecting, or letting his or her mind wander in an organized exploratory way through the endless myriad of thoughts within the deep spiritual non-conscious part of who we are.”
“The task-positive network(TPN), on the other hand, supports the active thinking required for making decisions. So, as we focus our thinking and activate the DMN, at some point in our thinking process we move into active decision making. This activates the TPN, and we experience this as action.”
It is your perceptions of your thoughts, and what you do with your thoughts, that is important.
“Learning to capture thoughts and evaluate them logically by developing a thinker mindset is one of the most significant parts of any mental self-care regimen, allowing us to become more self-evaluative and self-regulatory.”

Thinker Mindset Activation Tips:

“Thinker moments teach you how to live the self-examined life. As your mind wanders, think about what you are thinking and your own experiences, perhaps writing about your thoughts in a journal or notepad.”
“During your thinker moments, write down, in a self-reflective way, which thoughts are free-flowing as well as which thoughts get stuck. Track the direction of free-flowing thoughts over time. Capture and change the thoughts that get stuck.”
“The average person spends up to eight hours a day using technology. Some of the worst effects of electronic devices seem to be mitigated when devices are used less than two hours a day. Find ways to limit your use of technology throughout the day.”

THE CONTROLLED THINKING MINDSET

“It is possible, however, to learn about your mental processes by thinking about your thinking and choosing what to think about. This process of self-reflection is not only possible but essential.”
“Mind-body research increasingly points to the fact that consciously controlling your thoughts is one of the best ways, if not the best way, of detoxing your brain and body.”
“Consciously controlling your thought life means that you do not allow thoughts to rampage through your mind. Instead, you learn to engage interactively with each thought, taking control over and learning to enjoy the moment you are in. Essentially, your job is to analyze a thought before you decide either to accept or reject it.”

Controlled Thinking Mindset Activation Tips:

“Never let thoughts just wander through your mind unchecked. Focus on the now moment and observe your thoughts and feelings.”
“Re-conceptualize (redesign) thoughts that are holding you back by deciding what thought you would rather have and then work toward eliminating the toxic thought and building something better. Here is an example:

Start with acknowledging and articulating thoughts weighing you down—ones that don’t serve any useful purpose beyond keeping you stuck. Now ask yourself questions rather than issuing commands to yourself—this is a much more effective way to re-conceptualize because it opens up exploration, creates possibility, and distances you from what you are thinking, giving you a safe space for change. You can also label your emotions in a nonjudgmental way to give yourself some distance from them in order to deal with them.”

THE WORDS MINDSET

“When you make negative statements, you release negative chemicals. These chemicals allow negative memories to grow stronger, especially if you continue to allow these thoughts to dominate your thinking. On the other hand, the more you speak positively, the more you think positively!”
“Please note, I am talking about much more than just positive thinking or positive affirmations because framing your world with words is not just about talking positively.”
“The problem with positive affirmations, per se, is that they operate at the surface level of conscious thinking but do not align with the non-conscious mind where limiting beliefs really reside.”
“Your words have to be backed up with honesty and integrity, or what in psychological terms is called cognitive congruence. What you do and say on the outside must reflect what you think and actually believe on the inside.”
“Being more intentionally mindful about what you want to say, what you are saying, and what you are actually thinking about what you are saying bring all sorts of prefrontal resources to help get the amygdala unstuck from toxic emotions.”
“This happens because the more intentionally mindful you are, the more activation you have in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the less activation you have in the amygdala in response—and this is a good thing.”
“Thus, congruent thinking, not positive words, creates the necessary changes in the brain. This type of thinking takes time and effort because you have to be aware of your words and the mindset behind them.”

Words Mindset Activation Tips:

“Start replacing negative statements with positive ones, thinking about the kind of change you want to see in your life. You might re-conceptualize your self-talk to sound more like “I am a work in progress, and that’s totally fine.” ”
“Putting feelings into words has tremendous therapeutic effects on your mind and brain.”

THE CONTROLLED EMOTIONS MINDSET

“Emotions don’t happen to you; emotions are made by you.”
“When you repress and deny your emotions, whatever they may be, you block the network of quantum and chemical pathways, stopping the flow of good chemicals that run your biology and behavior.”
“Unfortunately, many of us have become experts at hiding our emotions—or think we have. Instead, we create neurochemical chaos in our brains. Signs of suppressed feelings arising from this conflict include irritability, short temper, over-reactivity, anxiety, frustration, fear, impulsiveness, a desire for control, perfectionism, and self-doubt.”
“You are not at the mercy of preprogrammed emotion circuits that neurocentric approaches are dangerously trying to convince you of. This does not mean you deserve blame for your emotions; it means you need to take responsibility for how you are going to manage them so they don’t carry into your future with negative effects.”

Controlled Emotions Mindset Activation Tips:

“The first vital step in controlling emotions is recognizing you have control over your emotions! You build them into your brain in a creative choice with your mind. They are not universal or preprogrammed; they are unique to you.”
“The second vital step is to recognize you are not responsible for the cause of the emotion but rather for the management of the emotion.”
“You do not have to wear your heart on your sleeve or let everything hang out. But you do have to be honest with yourself. Working out what you are feeling and how to deal with these emotions is an evolving process.”
“Do not deny your feelings. Acknowledge them, face them, deal with them, and name them in a positive way as soon as possible—but most importantly, when you are ready.”

THE FORGIVENESS MINDSET

“Forgiveness does not deny pain or wrongdoing; it is a choice to let go of the person who hurt you.”
“Forgiveness does not make excuses for someone’s behavior. By its nature, forgiveness acknowledges wrongdoing, and, at the same time, you choose to show grace and mercy.”
“We’re often told to “forgive and forget” the wrongs that we suffer, but it turns out that there is scientific truth behind the common saying.”
“Forgiveness changes the brain. Research shows that forgiving someone increases the size of the brain’s anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS). In fact, the larger the amount of grey matter in this patch of cortex, the more likely we are to forgive those who have made a serious mistake by accident.”
Also, the more you forgive, the more you are likely to forgive—the brain changes to accommodate a forgiveness mindset.

Forgiveness Mindset Activation Tips:

Re-conceptualize the memory. Find a new way to think about the person(s) who hurt you. Think about the context. What was happening in that person’s life when the hurt occurred? Why did they perhaps do what they did? What is their story? What is your story? Where are you in life?
Acknowledge the issue and the attached pain and anger you feel. You have to be honest with yourself if you truly want to forgive someone.
Recognize that healing requires time.

THE HAPPINESS MINDSET

“Scrolling through instagram, it is easy to believe that happiness means having a lot of money, nice things, status, or privilege.”
Happiness has more to do with a sense of inner satisfaction than external consumption. Happiness is knowing where you belong and knowing why you are alive, regardless of your circumstances.
“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the link between happiness and community. Berkeley neuroscientist Emiliana Simon-Thomas has found that people with the strongest social connections are the happiest.”
“We also need to remember that happiness precedes success. Working harder and achieving some entrepreneurial or academic or personal goal will not automatically make you happier.”
Our happiness does not depend on our circumstances. Furthermore, happiness also does not mean a smooth and uncomplicated life, if such a life even exists.
“The brain works significantly better when you choose to feel happy in the midst of a challenge. I have found repeatedly in my research and clinical experience and personal life that excitement arises when we adopt a positive attitude and persist in the face of a daunting task.”

Happiness Mindset Activation Tips:

“Be proactive in where you put your energy: you can choose to bemoan and marinate in your misery or move your energy to do something constructive.”
“Don’t allow yourself to think that I will be so happy when this is over. Enjoy the start, the middle, and the end! Tell yourself it is okay to experience different emotions, moving toward peaceful acceptance.”

THE GRATITUDE MINDSET

“One recent study investigated the effects of gratitude on Behavior and looked at the response in the brain to the mind.1 The researchers found that subjects who participated in a gratitude letter-writing exercise showed both positive changes in their behavior and greater brain activity in the front of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) up to three months later.”
“When we choose to be grateful, we tap into our natural design. Research on the effects gratitude has on our biology shows how being thankful increases our longevity, our ability to use our imagination, and our ability to problem-solve. It also improves our overall health.”

Gratitude Mindset Activation Tips:

“Gratitude begins with an awareness of whether you have an attitude of gratitude, so intentionally and critically observe your thinking to determine if an attitude of gratitude is part of it.”
“Are you thankful? Spend the next week analyzing how grateful you are. Keep a record, somehow, of every time you are grateful and every time you are whiny over a seven-day period. Tally it up at the end of the seven days—you may be shocked at the results!”

THE GIFT PROFILE

The GIFT Profile is a tool that one can use to understand the way that they learn and process information.
In her book ‘Think Learn Succeed,’ Caroline Leaf explains in great detail the research methodology she used to develop the profile as well as how to utilize this model of learning. She provides a questionnaire that readers can complete to get their own customized Gift analysis and gain a better understanding of their own thinking.

She further clarifies:

“Each one of us has seven stages that our thoughts sequence through in order to digest information. This sequence is called the cycle of thinking. Our uniqueness comes in which module of thought we use for which stage of the cycle. The process is different for each of us.”
“For example, one person may use Intrapersonal for stage one, and another person may use Kinesthetic for stage one. However, until we move through all of these seven stages—each in our own way—the thought will not be fully processed. In other words, we won’t be thinking properly unless we move through all seven stages of the thinking cycle.”

THE SWITCH ON YOUR BRAIN 5-STEP LEARNING PROCESS

“It has been collectively demonstrated that just about every aspect of our thinking, learning, and intelligence—our brainpower—can be improved by intense, targeted, deliberate mind training. The Switch on Your Brain 5-Step Learning Process provides a technique for this kind of organized drive.”
“The model is made up of 5 steps that facilitate this disciplined and directed learning process. Each step is designed to take you beyond short-term memory and into building effective and useful long-term memory. Each step is also designed to take advantage of a particular brain process, with all steps collectively moving toward the goal of memory building and learning.”

The five steps are:

Input: read, listen, watch
Reflect: ask, answer, discuss
Write: create the Metacog
Recheck: check for accuracy
Output: re-teach

“The Golden Rule of the Switch on Your Brain 5-Step Learning Process is to think to understand the information you are trying to remember. Thinking to understand involves three steps: asking, answering, and discussing.

Dr. Caroline Leaf elaborates:

Read a chunk of information—between one to three sentences—out loud, with your guide (pencil, pointer, or finger).
Stop and ask yourself what you have read.
Now, answer yourself by looking at what you have just read. Then answer yourself by rereading the chunk of information out loud and circling the concepts. Don’t underline or highlight words. Those are passive actions because they don’t require you to think, analyze, or understand what you have underlined or highlighted. Circling is active.

Next, discuss this chunk of information with yourself, still looking at the sentence(s) you have just read. Discussion means you explain it to yourself over and over in your own words until you understand.”

EPILOGUE

“You cannot control the events and circumstances of life. You can, however, control your reactions to the events and circumstances of life through the choices you make and the thoughts you think.”
“When you understand the power of your mindsets and your customized way of thinking and harness the power in your mind to build healthy memories, you will begin to realize that you can choose to control how you live your life.”

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The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt | Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 1 month ago

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The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation shows how a deeper understanding of the world’s philosophical wisdom can enrich and transform our lives

The Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world’s civilizations–to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives and illuminate the causes of human flourishing. Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how a deeper understanding of the world’s philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims–like “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”–can enrich and transform our lives.

We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.

The foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.

I’m a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.

Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”

The Golden Rule: Reciprocity is the most important tool for getting along with people.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

Confabulation: when we fabricate reasons to explain our own behavior.

The rider is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior.

When the rest of us look out at the world, our emotional brains have instantly and automatically appraised the possibilities. One possibility usually jumps out at us as the obvious best one. We need only use reason to weigh the pros and cons when two or three possibilities seem equally good. Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game of Trivial Pursuit; and words related to soccer hooligans make people dumber.

Automatic processes have been through thousands of product cycles and are nearly perfect. This difference in maturity between automatic and controlled processes helps explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, math, and chess problems better than any human beings can (most of us struggle with these tasks), but none of our robots, no matter how costly, can walk through the woods as well as the average six – year – old child (our perceptual and motor systems are superb).

(Marshmallow Experiment:) The successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities. These thinking skills are an aspect of emotional intelligence – an ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires. An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills. It’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by willpower alone.

Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones.

By choosing to stare at something that revolts the automatic system, the rider can begin to change what the elephant will want in the future.

Whenever I am on a cliff, a rooftop, or a high balcony, the imp of the perverse whispers in my ear, “Jump.” It’s not a command, it’s just a word that pops into my consciousness. When I’m at a dinner party sitting next to someone I respect, the imp works hard to suggest the most inappropriate things I could possibly say. Who or what is the imp? Dan Wegner, one of the most perverse and creative social psychologists, has dragged the imp into the lab and made it confess to being an aspect of automatic processing.

Moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate.

Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind.

To take something “philosophically” means to accept a great misfortune without weeping or even suffering. We use this term in part because of the calmness, self-control, and courage that three ancient philosophers – Socrates, Seneca, and Boethius – showed while they awaited their executions.

Adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for more, but adversity makes them strong.

“No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.”

Nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

Epiphanies can be life-altering, but most fade in days or weeks. The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.

Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you toward thinking the thing is good. People named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Men named Lawrence and women named Laurie are more likely to become lawyers. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, and George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia. The own-name preference even shows up in marriage records: People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial.

Bad is stronger than good. Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures. This principle, called negativity bias, shows up all over psychology.

The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path. Although you can tell yourself that you are not afraid of snakes, if your elephant fears them and rears up, you’ll still be thrown.

Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that bias subsequent information processing. A flash of fear makes you extra vigilant for additional threats; you look at the world through a filter that interprets ambiguous events as possible dangers. A flash of anger toward someone raises a filter through which you see everything the offending person says or does as a further insult or transgression. Feelings of sadness blind you to all pleasures and opportunities.

Genes make at least some contribution to nearly every trait. Whether the trait is intelligence, extroversion, fearfulness, religiosity, political leaning, liking for jazz, or dislike of spicy foods, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, and they are usually almost as similar if they were separated at birth. Genes are not blueprints specifying the structure of a person; they are better thought of as recipes for producing a person over many years.

Cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences. The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers. And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up. Having lost out in the cortical lottery, they will struggle all their lives to weaken the grip of an overactive withdrawal system.

John Milton’s paraphrase of Aurelius: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

You can change your affective style too – but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant.

There are many kinds of meditation, but they all have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a nonanalytical way.

He mapped out the distorted thought processes characteristic of depressed people and trained his patients to catch and challenge these thoughts.

Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts. A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.

“cognitive behavioral therapy”

Proust wrote that the only true voyage is “not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”

Horror fascinates me, particularly when there is no victim. I study moral reactions to harmless taboo violations such as consensual incest and private flag desecration. These things just feel wrong to most people, even when they can’t explain why.

Prozac: It’s easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery.

Tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction, but after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previous round.

Gratitude and vengefulness are big steps on the road that led to human ultrasociality, and it’s important to realize that they are two sides of one coin. It would be hard to evolve one without the other. An individual who had gratitude without vengefulness would be an easy mark for exploitation, and a vengeful and ungrateful individual would quickly alienate all potential cooperative partners.

Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address hooks suggest that 100 to 150 is the “natural” group size within which people can know just about everyone directly, by name and face, and know how each person is related to everybody else.

When you pass on a piece of juicy gossip, what happens? Your friend’s reciprocity reflex kicks in and she feels a slight pressure to return the favor. If she knows something about the person or event in question, she is likely to speak up: “Oh really? Well, I heard that he …”

Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others.

When people pass along high-quality (juicy) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don’t need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip.

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

“So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” – Benjamin Franklin

People who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.

People really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.

“naive realism”:
Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is.
We believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us.

If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.

People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one’s insights; for example, being a doctor gives a person special insight into the problems of the health – care industry.

But the background of other people is used to explain their biases and covert motivations; for example, doctors think that lawyers disagree with them about tort reform not because they work with the victims of malpractice (and therefore have their own special insights) but because their self-interest biases their thinking.

It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are.

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.

Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages’ advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.

People want to believe they are on a mission from God, or that they are fighting for some more secular good (animals, fetuses, women’s rights), and you can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.

If God is all good and all powerful, either he allows evil to flourish (which means he is not all good), or else he struggles against evil (which means he is not all powerful).

A three-thousand-year-old question had been given a complete and compelling psychological explanation the previous year by Roy Baumeister, one of today’s most creative social psychologists. In “Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Agression”.

The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias.

When someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality. In reaction to those threats, people often lash out violently. Baumeister questions the usefulness of programs that try raise children’s self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of. Such direct enhancement can potentially foster unstable narcissism.

To really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism – the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack. Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path.

The world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners.

All this moralism, righteousness, and hypocrisy. It’s beyond silly – it is tragic, for it suggests that human beings will never achieve a state of lasting peace and harmony.
So what can you do about it?
The first step is to see it as a game and stop taking it so seriously.

Write down your thoughts, learn to recognize the distortions in your thoughts, and then think of a more appropriate thought.

You will see the fault in yourself only if you set out on a deliberate and effortful quest to look for it. Try this now: Think of a recent interpersonal conflict with someone you care about and then find one way in which your behavior was not exemplary.

Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damages so many valuable relationships.

“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

When it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool.

People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed. Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they “habituate,” firing less to stimuli that they have become used to.

Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. Because such activities must be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can’t just disappear from your awareness the way conditions can. Voluntary activities, therefore, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects.

Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

Conflicts in relationships – having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict. It damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

People who report the greatest interest in attaining money, fame, or beauty are consistently found to be less happy, and even less healthy, than those who pursue less materialistic goals.

There is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone.”

The keys to flow:
– There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention
– You have the skills to meet the challenge
– You get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step

Pleasures are delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, such as may be derived from food, sex, back-rubs, and cool breezes.
Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness.

Arrange your day and your environment to increase both pleasures and gratifications.
Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency.

Because the elephant has a tendency to overindulge, the rider needs to encourage it to get up and move on to another activity.

The key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.

Buddhist detachment:
What would have happened if the young Siddartha had actually descended from his gilded chariot and talked to the people he assumed were so miserable? What if he had interviewed the poor, the elderly, the crippled, and the sick?

Buddha’s emphasis on detachment may have been the turbulent times he lived in: then, it was foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not. People living in wealthy democracies can set long – term goals and expect to meet them. We are immunized against disease, sheltered from storms, etc. Although all of us will get unwanted surprises along the way, we’ll adapt and cope with nearly all of them, and many of us will believe we are better off for having suffered. So to cut off all attachments, to shun the pleasures of sensuality and triumph in an effort to escape the pains of loss and defeat – this now strikes me as an inappropriate response to the inevitable presence of some suffering in every life.

Calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha is designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys,

Giving monkeys raisins as a reward for each correct step in solving a puzzle (such as opening a mechanical latch with several moving parts) actually interferes with the solving, because it distracts the monkeys.

They enjoy the task for its own sake.

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.

If the model says that mom is always there for you, you’ll be bolder in your play and explorations.

If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together.

People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love.

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry.
If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology.
If you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

People in all cultures have a pervasive fear of death. Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lengths to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality.

Adversity may be necessary for growth because it forces you to stop speeding along the road of life, allowing you to notice the paths that were branching off all along, and to think about where you really want to end up.

At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma, the Hindu notion that people reap what they sow. The psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy.

Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.

When people older than thirty are asked to remember the most important or vivid events of their lives, they are disproportionately likely to recall events that occurred between the ages of 15 and 25. This is the age when a person’s life blooms – first love, college and intellectual growth, living and perhaps traveling independently – and it is the time when young people (at least in Western countries) make many of the choices that will define their lives. If there is a special period for identity formation, a time when life events are going to have the biggest influence on the rest of the life-story, this is it.

Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

First, wise people are able to balance their own needs, the needs of others, and the needs of people or things beyond the immediate interaction (e.g., institutions, the environment, or people who may be adversely affected later on).

Ignorant people see everything in black and white – they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.

The wise are able to see things from others’ points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run.
Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations:

adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment)
shaping (changing the environment)
selection (choosing to move to a new environment).

This second balance corresponds roughly to the famous “serenity prayer”: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself” – (Benjamin Franklin)

Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge – skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.

Many moral education efforts since the 1970s take the rider off of the elephant and train him to solve problems on his own. After being exposed to hours of case studies, classroom discussions about moral dilemmas, and videos about people who faced dilemmas and made the right choices, the child learns how (not what) to think. Then class ends, the rider gets back on the elephant, and nothing changes at recess. Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.

A wonderful book – Practical Ethics – by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer.

I have been morally opposed to all forms of factory farming. Morally opposed, but not behaviorally opposed. I love the taste of meat, and the only thing that changed in the first six months after reading Singer is that I thought about my hypocrisy each time I ordered a hamburger. But then, during my second year of graduate school, I began to study the emotion of disgust. I watched in horror as cows, moving down a dripping disassembly line, were bludgeoned, hooked, and sliced up. The sight of red meat made me queasy. My visceral feelings now matched the beliefs Singer had given me. The elephant now agreed with the rider, and I became a vegetarian.

I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

The modern requirement that ethics ignore particularity is what gave us our weaker morality – applicable everywhere, but encompassing nowhere.

Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. How many of your New Year’s resolutions have been about fixing a flaw? And how many of those resolutions have you made several years in a row?

Cognitive behavioral therapy really does work!

Religion and science each begin with an easy and unsatisfying answer, but then move on to more subtle and interesting explanations.

Psychologist Alice Isen went around Philadelphia leaving dimes in pay phones. The people who used those phones and found the dimes were then more likely to help a person who dropped a stack of papers.

Happy people are kinder and more helpful than those in the control group.

“Anomie” (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomie society, people can do as they please. But without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do.

Asking children to grow virtues, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language – a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

Would you prefer that there be a wide variety of opinions and no dominant one? Or would you prefer that everyone agree with you and the laws of the land reflect that agreement?
If you prefer diversity on an issue, the issue is not a moral issue for you; it is a matter of personal taste.

The metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland, a charming little hook written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot.

The ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity:
When people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals.

When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership.

When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred.

Cultures vary in their relative reliance on these three ethics,

Man is possessed of two natures – a lower, in common with animals, and a higher, peculiar to himself. The whole meaning of sin is the humiliating bondage of the higher to the lower.

The modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable.

The great historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote “The Sacred and the Profane”

Even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others – a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways.
1. The constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity. This is why Eastern religions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self.
2. Spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back – in some sense, killing it – and often the self objects. Give up my possessions and the prestige they bring? No way! Love my enemies, after what they did to me? Forget about it.
3. Following a spiritual path is invariably hard work, requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self-denial. The self does not like to be denied, and it is adept at finding reasons to bend the rules or cheat. Many religions teach that egoistic attachments to pleasure and reputation are constant temptations to leave the path of virtue. In a sense, the self is Satan, or, at least, Satan’s portal.

Only by seeing the self in this way, can one understand and even respect the moral motivations of those who want to make their society conform more closely to the particular religion they follow.

Love and work, for people, are obvious analogues to water and sunshine for plants.
When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, “Love and work.”

We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them.

Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.
– If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your needs more thoroughly than does your work.
– If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.
– If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.

You might think that blue-collar workers have jobs, managers have careers, and the more respected professionals (doctors, scientists, clergy) have callings. But all three orientations represented in almost every occupation examined. Those janitors who worked this way saw their work as a calling and enjoyed it far more than those who saw it as a job.

Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment.

“Work is love made visible.” – Khalil Gibran

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.

When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy. Genetics, for example, is a healthy field because all parties involved respect and reward the very best science. Journalism into just another profit center where the only thing that mattered was will it sell, and will it outsell our competitors? Good journalism was sometimes bad for business. Journalists who worked for these empires confessed to having a sense of being forced to sell out and violate their own moral standards. Their world was unaligned, and they could not become vitally engaged in the larger but ignoble mission of gaining market share at any cost.

A coherent profession, such as genetics, can get on with the business of genetics, while an incoherent profession, like journalism, spends a lot of time on self-analysis and self-criticism.

If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living.

When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts.

You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment.

And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life.

If evolution is all about survival of the fittest, then why do people help each other so much? Why do they give to charity, risk their lives to save strangers, and volunteer to fight in wars? Darwin thought the answer was easy: Altruism evolves for the good of the group: There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.

The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together.

It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

Liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists.

Conservatives are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness.

When one side overwhelms the other, the results are likely to be ugly.

A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals.

A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints.

A good place to look for wisdom is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.

You already know the ideas common on your own side.
If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time.

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The Third Door: The Mindset of Success by Alex Banayan | Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 2 months ago

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THE THIRD DOOR: The Mindset of Success By Alex Banayan

The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.

The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure—from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga—as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.

Life, business, success… it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always… the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way in. Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #1: BILL GATES INSPIRED THE AUTHOR TO GO ON A QUEST FOR THE SECRETS TO SUCCESS.

Alex Banayan was supposed to become a doctor. At least, that was his parents’ plan for him. But at 18 years old, a month into college as a pre-med, he realized this wasn’t the path for him.

One day, while reading a biography of Bill Gates instead of studying, Banayan started wondering. Bill Gates had become the richest man in the world and revolutionized the software industry. But how? How did he go from a regular 18-year-old kid, just like Banayan, to becoming the wealthiest man in the world? Banayan started looking into other successful people: How had Steven Spielberg, a guy who didn’t even get into film school, ended up as one of the most successful directors in history? What did Lady Gaga do to pivot from waiting tables to nailing her first record deal in 2006?

Banayan couldn’t find a book that gave him the answer to these questions, so he decided to write it himself. Why not? He’d arrange interviews with Bill Gates and of other legends, travel across the US to meet with them, write up his discoveries and share them with his entire generation.

Getting the interviews was one thing, getting to them was quite another. The hard part, he quickly realized, would be funding the travel to all those interviews.

But as luck would have it, the game show The Price is Right was being filmed a few miles away. Winning the show was how he’d fund his quest.

Some googling told him that the wackier the behavior at casting, the more chance of getting selected for the show. So when he turned up on set, Banayan hugged janitors, danced with security guards and flirted with old ladies. It worked, and he got selected. He didn’t actually know how to play the game though, so began chatting to his fellow contestants. One kindly old woman, who said she’d been watching for 40 years, took a shine to him. She advised him to always guess low, as guessing too high would get you eliminated.

Hours later, with studio lights shining in his face, Banayan won the final prize – a sailboat, retail price $31,188, which he sold days later for $16,000. His quest could begin.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #2: MEETING TIM FERRISS TAUGHT THE AUTHOR HOW TO BE PERSISTENT IN THE RIGHT WAY. EVENTUALLY.

After reading Tim Ferriss’s phenomenally popular book The 4-Hour Work Week (2007), Banayan became obsessed with meeting the author.

At a conference where Ferriss was speaking, Banayan hid in a bathroom during the speech, realizing that its location gave him the best chance of intercepting Ferriss as he came off stage. When Ferriss finished talking, Banayan sprung out and snatched a quick chat. Ferriss seemed interested in Banayan’s mission and said he’d get in touch.

But time passed with no contact from Ferriss, so Banayan started emailing Ferriss’s assistant. Business books say that persistence is important, Banayan reminded himself. The author was undeterred at receiving no reply, even when Ferriss’s assistant rejected the request. In total, Banayan sent 31 emails, one of which claimed that a one-hour interview with him, a college student, would be one of the best investments that Ferriss, a multi-million selling author, would ever make. Staying upbeat, Banayan always ended his emails with a cheery “Thanks in advance!”

Then one day, out of the blue, Ferriss agreed to talk. Persistence works! Or so the author thought.

When they met, Ferriss talked a little about persistence. Ferriss got his first big break after he tried to build a relationship with a certain startup CEO. Ferriss had emailed the CEO asking for a job, and was turned down 12 times. Eventually, Ferriss emailed to say he’d be in the CEO’s neighborhood the following week – a total lie – and that it would be great to stop by. When the CEO said ok, Ferriss jumped on a plane from New York to San Francisco to “casually” meet him. Ferriss got the job.

But in telling the story to Banayan, Ferriss wanted to be clear about one point: There’s a difference, he said, between being persistent and being a hassle. Ferriss was never rude, and while he was persistent, he got the balance right. He didn’t email ten times a week. He told Banayan not to say things like “Thanks in advance!” because it sounds rude and entitled. Instead, say something like “I totally understand if you don’t have time to respond.”

Months later, when reading through old emails, the author realized that Ferriss had been trying to save Banayan from himself. Only then did he understand how much he had to learn.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #3: QI LU, A SOFTWARE SUPERSTAR, GOT HIS BREAK BY FINDING EXTRA HOURS IN THE DAY.

When a contact at Microsoft said he could get Banayan an interview with Qi Lu, Banayan wasn’t sure what to think. Any interview was good news, but he’d never even heard of this guy.

But Banayan’s interest was piqued when he learned that Lu was one of the tech world’s rising stars.

At 27 years old, Qi Lu was earning just $27 a month. Fast forward to his 47th birthday, and he was a president at Microsoft.

Qi Lu grew up in a poor village in China. As a child, he wanted to be a shipbuilder but wasn’t strong enough, so he focused on his school work and ended up studying computer science at Fudan University.

There, he had the spark of inspiration that would change his life. He realized that one thing in life is constant – whether you’re rich or poor, you only have 24 hours in a day. That led him to think that sleeping less could give him a competitive advantage over his peers.

So he started to re-engineer his sleep pattern, cutting out one hour, then another and another. At one point he slept just one hour a night, forcing himself back to consciousness with an ice-cold shower, but this was too much to keep up. Eventually, he settled on a sustainable four hours a night, and he’s stuck to that ever since.

By reducing sleep and working extra hard, Lu managed to publish five research papers on the topic of model checking in computer science astonishingly early in his academic career. One day, a visiting professor from Carnegie Mellon came to give a talk on the same topic. Lu made some perceptive observations and impressed the professor with his research. The professor suggested that Lu try and study in the US, saying he would waive his $60 application fee – $60 that Lu didn’t have.

That encounter might feel a little lucky, but it was only by carving out an extra few hours in the day that Lu had been able to deliver his research papers. As he said himself, luck is a little like a bus: If you miss one, another will come along. But if you aren’t prepared, you can’t jump on.

These days, Qi Lu is so productive that at Microsoft his colleagues say he works twice as fast as anyone else. They even have a term for it – “Qi Time.”

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #4: A WORLD CHAMPION BOXER SHOWED HOW HIDDEN RESERVOIRS OF DETERMINATION COULD MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE.

After his initial success in talking to Qi Lu and Tim Ferriss, Banayan hit a brick wall. Qi Lu had helpfully passed on an interview request to Bill Gates, but the message came back that Gates wouldn’t meet. Banayan embraced “Qi Time,” getting up at six o’clock every day to write more cold emails requesting interviews. But the only consequence of more emails going out was more rejections coming back in.

Eventually, “Sugar” Ray Leonard, a six-time world champion boxer, agreed to an interview at his California mansion. Banayan had written to the boxer saying that he believed the younger generation could learn from his advice.

When Leonard first started boxing as a child, he was skinnier, shorter and younger than the other kids. He knew that he needed an edge. One morning, as the yellow school bus pulled up to collect him, Leonard didn’t get on. Instead, as it pulled away, he chased it, running all the way to school. He did the same on the way home, and the same the next day. Day in, day out, rain, wind or snow, he chased the school bus.

Leonard said that, as a child, he didn’t have as much boxing experience as the other kids. But he did have the heart and the desire to improve.

Years later, in 1981, twelve rounds into a welterweight world championship fight against the then-undefeated Thomas “The Hitman” Hearns, he was getting badly beaten. His left eye was so swollen that he could barely see. But he was able to summon what he called his hidden reservoir – a buried reserve of strength and determination. It’s the reserve that allows a mother to lift a car off a trapped child, Leonard said. We all have it, and success comes to those who can tap it. When Leonard stood up for the 13th round, he exploded in a whirlwind of adrenalin and concentration. In the 14th round, with his opponent limp on the ropes, Leonard was the champion of the world.

Banayan explained to Leonard how he wasn’t getting far with his mission. Leonard told him not to let anyone tell him that his mission, his dream, isn’t possible. Stay in the fight, the boxer said, find your hidden reservoir, and you can do whatever you want to do.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #5: BITING OFF MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW CAN CATAPULT YOU TO SUCCESS.

It’s always good to have a mentor in life. For Banayan, that mentor was Elliott Bisnow. A 20-something kid who dropped out of school and built a company, Bisnow Media, with his dad, that would go on to sell for 50 million dollars in 2016. In 2008, Bisnow also co-founded Summit Series to provide fun conferences for entrepreneurs and the world’s elite.

Impressed at how much Bisnow had achieved so young, Banayan got in touch. They met days later in LA and quickly became friends. Bisnow helped Banayan access a world of entrepreneurs and taught him invaluable lessons. The key one was to bite off more than you can chew.

Summit Series began when Bisnow wanted to meet more young entrepreneurs. Most of us in that situation might decide to go to networking events, or perhaps move to a bigger city. Not Bisnow.

Bisnow cold-called young entrepreneurs, asking if they wanted to get a group together and hang out for a weekend. He gathered 20 young leaders, including the founders of TOMS Shoes and the websites Thrillist and CollegeHumor, and took them for a weekend’s skiing on his own money. He didn’t actually have the money, instead he put the $30,000 in upfront costs on a credit card. Then he began cold-calling companies to ask if they wanted to sponsor a conference of the top young entrepreneurs in the US. Companies started saying yes, and Summit Series was born.

Bisnow was out of his depth. He had to ask his mother what food he should provide. Granola bars? Apples? He had no idea. But he worked it out, and ever since, he’s tried to live by the philosophy that you should bite off more than you can chew – be ambitious, aim high and work out the details later.

It certainly worked for Bisnow. Summit Series is now a huge enterprise, and very popular among the business and cultural elite. Attend an event, and you might hear Richard Branson telling entrepreneurial tales in the morning, listen to national poetry slam champion IN-Q in the afternoon and hear Erin Brockovich discuss social justice, all in the same day.

Bisnow and his co-founders even bought an entire ski-resort in Utah to act as a base for an exclusive, entrepreneurial community. Bisnow is the living embodiment of what you can achieve if you aim high.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #6: SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO FIND YOUR OWN PATH TO SUCCESS, INSTEAD OF TRYING TO OUT-AMAZON AMAZON.

When Banayan tried to approach Bill Gates for an interview, he got this message from Gates’s office: he would never get an interview while he didn’t have a publishing deal.

So Banayan set out to find a publishing deal. The key to this was finding a literary agent. From that point on, Banayan’s motto was “get a literary agent, get Bill Gates.”

Banayan read books about how to get published and approached literary agents by the handful. He’d met plenty of entrepreneurs through Bisnow, and asked those with book deals to introduce him to their agents. He was doing everything right, but only getting rejected. There was one literary agent left on his list, and she such was a superstar – she’d even rejected Tim Ferriss for his first book – that it seemed pointless even to approach her.

It was Banayan’s college friend Brandon who changed his mind. Brandon was a bookworm and told Banayan a story he’d once read about Walmart. It was the year 2000, and brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart were being hit hard by online shops like Amazon. Walmart was panicking about losing market-share, so they tried to replicate Amazon’s tech and strategy. But it didn’t work. One day, a new executive tried something: She hung a banner up in the office that said, “You can’t out-Amazon Amazon.” Soon afterward, Walmart’s market share boomed as they focused on executing their own business strategy, not copying Amazon’s.

Banayan, Brandon explained, was Walmart. All he’d been doing was copying other people’s strategies for success. He’d been pitching to literary agents as if he was Tim Ferriss, but without the platform and fame that Ferriss had.

Since Banayan had started his mission, he’d studied how successful people got ahead. But while that’s a good way to learn, he discovered he couldn’t tackle every problem that way. On this occasion, he needed his own playbook.

That night, unable to sleep, Banayan got up and wrote an email to his number-one-target literary agent. Instead of repeating his usual spiel, he wrote out why he believed in his mission. He wrote that together, the two of them could change the world. The email was more like a teenage love note than a professional email, but he sent it. A day later, she offered to represent him.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #7: BILL GATES OFFERS LESSONS IN HOW TO BREAK THROUGH YOUR DISCOMFORT ZONE AND ACHIEVE EARLY BUSINESS SUCCESS.

After securing his book deal, Banayan eventually persuaded Bill Gates’s office to set up an interview.

Researching ahead of the meeting, Banayan discovered an incident that he felt explained Gates’s early success. It resonated with Banayan, who had always suffered from nerves when he needed to make an important phone call or conversation. The lesson? Sometimes you have to break through your discomfort.

Aged just 19, Gates and his partner Paul Allen heard that a computer company, MITS, had released the first minicomputer onto the market. Gates saw an opportunity, and the two of them wrote to MITS proposing to sell software to run on the machine. After getting no response, they debated how to follow up. Neither Bill nor Paul wanted to make the phone call. Both were nervous. Eventually, Bill took the leap. Taking some deep breaths, he told the founder of MITS that they wanted to come in and present some software. It worked, and they got the meeting.

There was one small problem – the software didn’t exist. But eight weeks of hard work later, they presented their new code, signed a deal, and made the first of many millions of sales. Having the bravery to make that phone call ultimately kicked off their success.

When the interview finally took place in Gates’s office, Banayan asked him for advice on negotiation and strategy in the early days of your career. Gates had two key pieces of advice: Firstly, if you’re young, you need a way to blast through people’s skepticism. When Gates went to sales meetings, he would overwhelm people with his expertise, talking fast and in great depth about programming language and software platforms until it was clear that he wasn’t some dumb kid.

Secondly, he surprised Banayan by saying that when establishing Microsoft in the early 1980s, he prioritized strategic positioning over immediate profit. When Microsoft began selling to IBM, he took the decision not to push for too much money to ensure he got the deal. He knew that rivals to IBM would emerge and that the prestige of working with IBM would help Microsoft sell to these rivals as well, securing higher profits. The lesson was clear: when starting out, take the position that will help you in the long term over short-term profits.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #8: A DAY SHADOWING ZAPPOS CEO TONY HSIEH TAUGHT THE AUTHOR TO EMBRACE EGO AND ASK FOR HELP.

One day, at a party hosted by his friend, Miki Agrawal, founder of the period-proof underwear business THINX, Banayan saw Tony Hsieh, CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos. Hsieh was walking around with a clipboard that had “Wishes List” written on it, explaining that, for one day, he was acting as fairy godmother.

When Hsieh asked Banayan what he wished for, Banayan knew straight away. I want to be the Zappos CEO for the day, he said. His 20th birthday was coming up soon and he wondered if he could shadow Hsieh. Hsieh was a little surprised, but agreed.

While giving him marketing advice, Hsieh told Banayan that he should consider his end goals for the book. Most people don’t consider what their goals are, and if they do, they’re often not honest about them. In doing so, he helped Banayan understand that it’s okay to embrace your ego. Hsieh himself had written a bestseller, Delivering Happiness. For Hsieh, when he wrote Delivering Happiness, one motive was definitely vanity and ego. He thought it would be nice to tell his mum and dad that his book was number one on the bestsellers lists.

This surprised Banayan, who’d always thought of an ego as a bad thing. But Hsieh went on to explain that it’s worse to have an ego and deceive yourself that you don’t. In reality, it’s better to accept that you can accommodate an ego alongside other goals, such as wanting to inspire young entrepreneurs.

The other lesson Banayan learned from his time with Hsieh was the power of asking for help. While shadowing Hsieh in and out of meetings and through a company-wide presentation, Banayan noticed Zappos employees throwing him a few jealous looks. One approached him to say he’d worked at Zappos for years and dreamed of shadowing the boss. How did Banayan get so lucky?

Later that day, while thanking Hsieh for his time, Banayan asked the CEO why he didn’t let his employees shadow him sometimes. Hsieh looked blank. He’d be happy to, he said. But no-one ever asked him if they could.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #9: THE AUTHOR LEARNED FROM WARREN BUFFETT AND DEAN KAMEN THAT SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO THINK AGAIN TO SOLVE A PROBLEM.

Banayan pursued Warren Buffett for an interview for months. He even flew to Buffett’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, in the hope of bumping into him, only to discover he arrived at the same time as the worst snow-storm for 30 years.

Banayan never met the “Oracle of Omaha,” and instead spent time in his hotel room shivering from the cold. Having read everything there is to know about Buffett, he picked up a few lessons in success.

The first was to find out what people need and use that to get access to them. In 1951, after Buffett finished his studies, he set himself up as a stockbroker. But every time he tried to get a meeting with a local businessman, they turned him down. Who wants to meet some young guy with no track record, trying to sell stocks?

So Buffet thought of a different approach: He started calling business people, telling them he could help save them from paying too high taxes. Now they finally wanted to meet, and Buffett was able to kick-start his career.

Banayan figured out that maybe people don’t want to talk to you for the reasons you want to talk to them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t talk at all. You just need to figure out what they want.

He received a similar lesson when he met Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the first drug infusion pump, among other innovations. Kamen explained that sometimes it’s best to look at a problem from a different angle. Not so long ago, there’d been something of a crisis in science and technology education in the US.

Many people saw this as an educational crisis and tried to solve it by improving the education system – tinkering with course content and training new teachers. Kamen, however, believed that it was a culture crisis. He created a competition called FIRST – a non-profit which treats high-school engineering like sport by running national and international robotics competitions screened on NBC and NASA TV. FIRST has now impacted millions of lives.

So, Kamen said, don’t get frustrated if you don’t break through. Reframe the question in a way that allows you to find a solution.

THE THIRD DOOR KEY IDEA #10: STEVE WOZNIAK SHOWED THAT THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE.

After hearing who Banayan was interviewing, one man said he didn’t feel worthy of being on the list. He was also, by some distance, the happiest guy Banayan had met.

Steve Wozniak was, alongside Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. But unlike Jobs, or Gates, or Buffett, Wozniak has never been seen as a business tycoon, largely because he left Apple in 1985.

When Banayan ate lunch with Wozniak in California, Wozniak oozed happiness. He seemed to genuinely love his life, from his loving relationship with his wife to the cuteness of his dogs and the excitement of his upcoming road trip. Why all this happiness? Wozniak was happy, he said, because he felt he was living life on his own terms and doing what he wants to do, not what society dictates is the right thing.

For example, early on in the Apple story, Steve Jobs was the obvious choice for CEO. Where Wozniak was going to fit into the executive team wasn’t so clear. The last thing he wanted to do was manage staff or deal with internal politics, so he told Jobs he wanted to be a simple engineer. This was something he already knew he loved and was happy to continue doing. Maybe society says that you should reach the highest position possible, Wozniak said. But is that really what’ll make you happiest?

Wozniak’s determination to live life on his own terms also meant living by his values. This often put him in conflict with Jobs.

When Apple was filing its initial public offering in 1980, Jobs and Wozniak were all set for a huge payout. Both would become ultra-rich. But Wozniak discovered that Jobs had refused to give stock options to some employees who’d been with Apple since the beginning. Wozniak saw these people as family. After all, they’d helped make the company what it was. But Jobs wouldn’t budge. In the end, Wozniak gifted some of his own shares to the old employees, so they too could share in the financial reward. The day Apple went public, they became millionaires.

Of the two men, Jobs has gone down in history as the more successful. But as Wozniak sat back, opening a fortune cookie and laughing happily, his success seemed obvious too.

IN REVIEW: THE THIRD DOOR BOOK SUMMARY

The key message in this book summary:

We all have the power to make little choices that can alter our lives forever – to pick up the phone and make that first sales call, bite off more than we can chew, or simply follow our vision. You have the power to choose. You can accept the inertia in your life and continue waiting in line for the First Door. Or you can duck out of the line, run around the back, and take the Third Door. The choice is in your hands.

Actionable advice:

Have a pipeline.

Whatever you’re trying to achieve, build a pipeline of opportunities. Say you want to work in a startup. Don’t concentrate on just one, or two. Build a pipeline and approach them all. You’ll never know which one of your hundred startup CEOs woke up this morning thinking “We really need a new sales guy.” Building a pipeline is one way of increasing the chances that you’ll get lucky.

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Og Mandino’s University of Success by Og Mandino | Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 2 months ago

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Og Mandino’s University of Success by Og Mandino

The greatest success authorities in the world share their most treasured success secrets.

Each powerful lesson will bring you closer to your life’s goals- . How to conquer the ten most common causes of failure . How to make the most of your abilities . How to find the courage to take risks . How to stop putting things off . How to build your financial nest egg . How to look like a winner . How to take charge of your life . And much more in fifty memorable presentations by the greatest success authorities.

Key Takeaways

Know what you are doing: The foundation of success

There is no substitute for knowledge.

Continuous preparation: In our rapidly changing world, the average person must be retrained at least four times during their lifetime. Success today is a journey of constant learning and adaptation, not a destination. To stay relevant and competitive, one must continually expand their knowledge and skills.

Specialization is key: While having a broad understanding of fundamentals is important, it’s crucial to develop expertise in a specific area. This deep knowledge allows you to provide unique value and stand out in your field. As knowledge accumulates at an unprecedented rate, being a generalist is no longer sufficient.

Examples of specialization:
- Developing expertise in a particular industry or technology
- Mastering a specific skill set or methodology
- Becoming an authority on a niche subject

Love what you are doing: Passion fuels excellence

Everybody loves to do business with an optimist.

Intrinsic motivation: Working solely for money is unsatisfying and limiting. When you love what you do, you’re naturally motivated to excel and overcome challenges. This passion translates into enthusiasm that is contagious, attracting others and creating opportunities.

Positive outlook: Maintaining an optimistic attitude, even in difficult situations, is crucial for long-term success and personal fulfillment. This doesn’t mean ignoring problems, but rather approaching them with a constructive mindset. By focusing on possibilities rather than limitations, you’re more likely to find creative solutions and persevere through setbacks.

Benefits of loving your work:
- Increased productivity and creativity
- Greater resilience in the face of challenges
- Improved relationships with colleagues and clients
- Higher job satisfaction and overall well-being

Believe in what you are doing: Conviction drives achievement

People are persuaded more by the depth of your conviction than by the height of your logic—more by your own enthusiasm than any proof you can offer.

Power of belief: When you truly believe in what you’re doing, your conviction becomes a powerful force that can inspire and influence others. This genuine enthusiasm is more persuasive than logical arguments alone, as it taps into people’s emotions and creates a sense of trust and credibility.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: Your beliefs about yourself and your abilities have a significant impact on your performance and outcomes. By cultivating a strong belief in your potential and the value of your work, you’re more likely to take the necessary actions to achieve success. This positive self-reinforcing cycle can lead to remarkable achievements.

Ways to strengthen your belief:
- Continuously educate yourself about your field
- Seek out mentors and role models who inspire you
- Reflect on past successes and the impact of your work
- Visualize your future success and the positive outcomes of your efforts

Set clear goals and create a plan to achieve them

A part of all you earn is yours to keep.

Specific objectives: Setting clear, measurable goals is essential for focusing your efforts and making progress. Without defined objectives, it’s easy to drift aimlessly or become overwhelmed by possibilities. Write down your goals and review them regularly to stay on track.

Action plan: Once you’ve established your goals, create a detailed plan to achieve them. Break down larger objectives into smaller, manageable tasks. This approach makes the process less daunting and allows you to measure your progress along the way. Remember to be flexible and adjust your plan as circumstances change.

Elements of effective goal-setting:
1. Make goals specific and measurable
2. Set realistic but challenging timeframes
3. Write down your goals and review them regularly
4. Break larger goals into smaller, actionable steps
5. Track your progress and celebrate milestones

Develop the habit of saving and investing wisely

A part of all you earn is yours to keep.

Pay yourself first: Make saving a non-negotiable part of your financial routine. Set aside a portion of your income, ideally at least 10%, before allocating money for other expenses. This habit builds financial security and provides resources for future opportunities.

Compound growth: Start saving and investing early to take advantage of compound interest. Even small amounts can grow significantly over time when invested wisely. Educate yourself about different investment options and seek advice from reputable financial professionals to make informed decisions.

Tips for effective saving and investing:
- Automate your savings to ensure consistency
- Live below your means and avoid unnecessary debt
- Diversify your investments to manage risk
- Regularly review and adjust your financial strategy
- Avoid get-rich-quick schemes and focus on long-term growth

Provide exceptional value through quality work

Whatever your vocation, let quality be your life-slogan.

Excellence as a habit: Consistently delivering high-quality work sets you apart from the competition and builds a reputation for reliability and excellence. This commitment to quality should extend to every aspect of your work, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

Long-term perspective: While cutting corners might provide short-term gains, it ultimately undermines your credibility and success. By focusing on providing genuine value and maintaining high standards, you build trust and create opportunities for long-term growth and advancement.

Ways to improve the quality of your work:
- Set personal standards that exceed expectations
- Continuously seek feedback and ways to improve
- Take pride in your work and attention to detail
- Invest in developing your skills and knowledge
- Learn from mistakes and use them as opportunities for growth

Cultivate positive relationships and avoid unnecessary criticism

Criticism is futile because it puts a man on the defensive, and usually makes him strive to justify himself.

Empathy and understanding: Recognize that most people, like yourself, rarely blame themselves for their shortcomings or mistakes. Instead of criticizing, try to understand their perspective and motivations. This approach fosters better relationships and more productive interactions.

Focus on solutions: Rather than dwelling on problems or assigning blame, channel your energy into finding constructive solutions. This positive approach is more likely to inspire cooperation and create a supportive environment for growth and improvement.

Strategies for building positive relationships:
- Practice active listening and seek to understand others
- Offer sincere praise and recognition for good work
- Address issues privately and focus on behaviors, not personalities
- Lead by example and demonstrate the qualities you value in others
- Be generous with your time and knowledge to help others succeed

Embrace continuous learning and self-improvement

School is never out for the person who really wants to succeed.

Lifelong learning: In today’s rapidly changing world, continuous learning is essential for staying relevant and competitive. Embrace new technologies, methodologies, and ideas in your field. Seek out opportunities for formal education, as well as informal learning through reading, podcasts, workshops, and mentorship.

Personal growth: Self-improvement extends beyond professional skills. Develop your emotional intelligence, communication abilities, and leadership qualities. These soft skills are often as crucial to success as technical expertise, especially as you advance in your career.

Ways to foster continuous learning:
- Set aside dedicated time for learning each day
- Attend industry conferences and networking events
- Seek out challenging projects that push you out of your comfort zone
- Read widely, both within and outside your field
- Teach others to reinforce and deepen your own understanding

Take calculated risks and seize opportunities

Opportunity covers a wide area: some people may constrict the totality of its meaning and apply it only to work or financial success, but your opportunities in living are really much wider than this.

Courage to act: Success often requires stepping out of your comfort zone and taking calculated risks. While it’s important to be prepared, don’t let fear of failure paralyze you. Remember that inaction can be riskier than taking a well-considered chance.

Opportunity awareness: Train yourself to recognize opportunities in various aspects of life, not just in work or finances. Be open to new experiences and connections that could lead to unexpected growth or success. Sometimes, the most valuable opportunities come from unlikely sources.

Guidelines for taking calculated risks:
1. Thoroughly research and understand the potential outcomes
2. Assess your capacity to handle worst-case scenarios
3. Seek advice from experienced mentors or professionals
4. Start small and gradually increase your risk tolerance
5. Learn from both successes and failures to refine your approach

Persist in the face of adversity and learn from failures

The world does not demand that you be a physician, a lawyer, a farmer, or a merchant; but it does demand that whatever you do undertake, you will do it right, will do it with all your might and with all the ability you possess.

Resilience: Setbacks and failures are inevitable on the path to success. Develop the mental toughness to persevere through challenges and use them as learning experiences. Remember that many successful people faced numerous failures before achieving their goals.

Growth mindset: Embrace failures as opportunities for growth rather than signs of personal inadequacy. Analyze what went wrong, extract valuable lessons, and apply this knowledge to future endeavors. This approach turns setbacks into stepping stones for future success.

Strategies for building resilience:
- Reframe failures as learning experiences
- Develop a support network to help you through difficult times
- Practice self-compassion and avoid negative self-talk
- Set realistic expectations and celebrate small victories
- Focus on factors within your control and let go of those that aren’t

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How to Win Friends & Influence People in the Digital Age by Dale Carnegie & Associates Book Summary

By Michael George Knight — 2 months ago

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How to Win Friends & Influence People in the Digital Age by Dale Carnegie & Associates

Since its initial publication, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold a total of 15 million copies. The book continues to sell briskly today, but Carnegie never anticipated the ways in which the digital age would provide new tools and challenges for winning friends and influencing people. The advent of social networking sites, the dominance of email, and the ways in which the Internet has supplanted face-to-face interactions have made Carnegie’s precepts all the more immediate and vital. Brent Cole, working in tandem with Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., has reimagined the original book for the digital age, updating and reframing Carnegie’s insights about communication, self-expression, and leadership.

Introduction: Why Carnegie’s Advice Still Matters

There is no such thing as a neutral exchange. You leave someone either a little better or a little worse.

More Than Clever Communication

The two highest levels of influence are achieved when (1) people follow you because of what you’ve done for them and (2) people follow you because of who you are.

Starting Soft

Soft skills link hard skills to operational productivity, organizational synergy, and commercial relevance because all require sound human commitment.
Meaning rules the effectiveness of every medium. Once you have something meaningful to offer, you can then choose the most proficient media for your endeavour.

Straightforward Advice for Succeeding with People Today

It is in the common, everyday moments where altruistic actions most clearly stand out.

Part 1 – Essentials of Engagement

1: Bury Your Boomerangs

Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.
The moment you use a medium to criticize, the subject of your criticism is compelled to defend. And when another is defensive, there is little you can say to break through the barriers he has raised.
In this way critical comments act like invisible boomerangs. They return on the thrower’s head.
The simplest way is to focus on improving yourself instead of others.
Shift your use of media from a spirit of exposé and objection to a spirit of encouragement and exhortation.
Resist badmouthing as a differentiation strategy. Its long-term effect is far more harmful than helpful.
Make your messages meaningful by removing your agenda. Above all, the recipients of every bit of your communication want value.
Calm yourself before communicating to another.

2: Affirm What’s Good

Consider sending that same message to those you’d like to influence. Have you let them know just how valuable you think they are? There is great power in this simple principle, embodied regularly.
We all have an innate, unquenchable desire to know we are valued, to know we matter.
Emerson wrote, “Every man is entitled to be valued for his best moments.”
Which relationship is most strained in your life right now? What would it look like if you began focusing on that person’s best moments and sought to affirm them?
Ultimately, gaining influence is about setting yourself apart, stepping to a higher plane in the mind and heart of another.
We are all united by one single desire: to be valued by another.

3: Connect with Core Desires

Influencing others is not a matter of outsmarting them. It is a matter of discerning what they truly want and offering it to them in a mutually beneficial package.
So much of our digital communication is one-way that we come to believe we have limited opportunity to uncover another’s perspective.
We are far more inclined to focus on how we can best broadcast our points from our own perspective, quickly, broadly, or both.
It is easy to get so caught up in the fray that we forget what we are aiming for: connection, influence, agreement, collaboration.

Part 2 – Six Ways to Make a Lasting Impression

1: Take Interest in Others’ Interests

Dogs know by some divine instinct that you can make more friends in minutes by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in months of trying to get other people interested in you.
We gravitate to what feels real and lasting. We embrace those whose messaging offers mutual benefit.
When you incorporate others’ interests into your own–not merely for the sake of clarifying your market or ascertaining your audience–you find that your interests are met in the process of helping others.
Thoreau wrote, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
The bottom line is that you must become genuinely interested in others before you can ever expect anyone to be interested in you.

2: Smile

There is a simple reason for this phenomenon: when we smile, we are letting people know we are happy to be with them, happy to meet them, happy to be interacting with them. They in turn feel happier to be dealing with us.
Outside of emoticons and emojis, there is only one medium in which you can convey a digital smile–your voice, whether it is written or spoken. How you write an email, the tone you use, and the words you choose are critical tools of friendliness and subsequent influence.
Always begin and end the message on a positive note rather than on a pessimistic or detached one.
Numerous studies have shown that the physical act of smiling, even while on a phone call, actually improves the tone in which your words are conveyed.

3: Reign with Names

Instead of defaulting to hollow, truncated greetings such as “Hey” or “Hi,” default to a greeting that uses the person’s name.

4: Listen Longer

Listening’s power, like that of smiling, is strong. When you listen well you not only make an instant impression, you also build a solid bridge for lasting connection. Who can resist being around a person who suspends his thoughts in order to value yours?

5: Discuss What Matters to Them

When it comes to mattering to others, you must discuss what matters to them.
You are ultimately building a community when you initiate interactions with what matters to others.
Businesses call it a customer retention strategy, but it is best thought of as a lively, meaningful dialogue among a community of friends.

6: Leave Others a Little Better

Small-picture thinking: the foundation of leaving others a little better.
If our minds are focused only on big payoffs, we will overlook the small opportunities that make the biggest difference.
Many people make the mistake of equating inspiration with implementation.
The real key to winning friends and influencing people today, says Robbins, is “moving relationships from manipulative to meaningful. The only way you do that is by constantly adding meaning and value.”
Every single interaction with his spouse sent her one of two messages–that she was the most important person in the world to him or that she wasn’t. He’d sent the latter message far too often.
Many ancient teachings converge to one thing: Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

Part 3 – How to Merit and Maintain Others’ Trust

1: Avoid Arguments

Arguing with the other person will rarely get you anywhere; they usually end with each person more firmly convinced of his rightness. You may be right, dead right, but arguing is just as futile as if you were dead wrong.
In the end you must value interdependence higher than independence and understand that deferential negotiation is more effective in the long run than a noncompliant crusade.

2: Never Say, “You’re Wrong”

“Negotiations become more productive,” “when each party acknowledges that the other may have legitimate concerns.”
“Friendship that insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the name,” exhorted Mahatma Gandhi. “Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences, however sharp they be.”
“We talk because we know something,” “Or we think we know something. Or, in the workplace, because there is an expectation that we ’should’ know something.”
Yet by approaching a conversation with a blank slate, we take a humbler and more honest approach. We acknowledge the possibility that we may not know all the facts and that we may not in fact be the only one who is right. Better yet, we create the possibility for meaningful collaboration–the melting of thoughts, ideas, and experiences into something greater than the sum of two parties.
Telling people they are wrong will only earn you enemies. Few people respond logically when they are told they are wrong; most respond emotionally and defensively because you are questioning their judgment. You shouldn’t just avoid the words “You’re wrong.” You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture, so you must guard against showing judgment in all of the ways that you communicate.
Always default to diplomacy. Admit that you may be wrong. Concede that the other person may be right. Be agreeable. Ask questions. And above all, consider the situation from the other’s perspective and show that person respect.

3: Admit Faults Quickly and Emphatically

If you’ve made a mistake, it is far better that you control the news being spread. Come clean quickly and convincingly.
If we admit our faults immediately and emphatically, it is like shooting a full-page press release across the wires that confirms we genuinely care about the people we hurt, that we are humbled, and that we want to make things right. People rarely hold on to anger and disappointment when they can see that we view ourselves and the situation properly. We are much more forgiving of those who are willing to come clean right away.
While we’d all like our pre-mistake lives back after a mistake has been made, we have to remember that no one changed the circumstances but us. It is not others’ duty to give us back the life we took from ourselves. Only we can get our life back. That always begins with admitting our faults quickly and emphatically.

4: Begin in a Friendly Way

We are more inclined to agree with another person or see things from his perceptive when we have friendly feelings toward him.
Where the initiation of interactions is concerned, no approach sets the tone more effectively than gentleness and affability, even if the other person is a source of pain, frustration, or anger.
“I do not like that man,” Abraham Lincoln once said. “I must get to know him better.”

5: Access Affinity

Chris Brogan talking of the blizzard of business rather than communication snowfall:
“Conversations and relationships are based on several touches. In the traditional marketing and communication world, people would use each touch to ask for something, to issue a call to action. This isn’t how social networks work…They are there to give you permission to reach someone who has opted into a relationship with you…It’s a snowfall. Every individual flake doesn’t mean a lot, but the body of work can change everything.”

6: Surrender the Credit

While it’s easy to see why we want credit for successes for which we laboured, claiming the credit will never win you friends. It will also diminish your influence quicker than just about any other action.
Either you can seek friendships with those who are already successful, or you can seek success for those who are already friends.
In the long run, no one but the originator remembers things such as whose idea it was, who spoke first, or who took the first risk. What people remember is magnanimity.

7: Engage with Empathy

“Cooperativeness in conversation,” wrote Gerald S. Nirenberg, “is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.”

8: Appeal to Noble Motives

While relational improvement and business productivity are centrepieces of our lives, their importance exists because we long to be people who make a difference. Tapping this noble motive in those you’d like to influence can therefore reap great rewards.
To truly connect with people you must celebrate their inherent dignity. Appeal to noble motives and you can move the masses, and yourself along with them.

9: Share Your Journey

More and more common–and commonly effective at building influential relationships–is the authentic intersection of personal and professional life. While this intersection will always have certain judicious boundaries, many of the historically businesslike boundaries have been lowered or removed altogether today because most people have come to remember that the short- and long-term success of all interactions–transactional or otherwise–rides on the depth of the relationship. The more a colleague, friend, or customer shares of your journey, the more you can accomplish together.

10: Throw Down a Challenge

The only way to get the best out of yourself and others is to challenge and collide. While a life of permanent interpersonal pleasantries appears more comfortable and sounds more peaceful, a relationally complacent life is a fruitless life.
It is also true, however, that the challenge itself is just as important as the response to it. Challenges that inspire and compel are very different from challenges that discourage and depress.

Part 4 – How to Lead Change Without Resistance or Resentment

1: Begin on a Positive Note

While a current relationship, whether between a company and its customers or between two individuals, might be strained or even in serious trouble, it does little good to start off a conversation on a negative note.
Instead, begin a conversation with honest and genuine appreciation; the receiver will be more amenable to your ideas and less defensive or resistant.

2: Acknowledge Your Baggage

It isn’t nearly so difficult to be open to a conversation that may include a discussion of your faults if the other person begins by humbly admitting that she too is far from impeccable.
What is lovely about this principle is that we all make mistakes and so have an ample supply of stories to use when trying to put someone at ease.

3: Call Out Mistakes Quietly

Leaders of all kinds have a fantastic tool available to them for sending a subtle message about the behavior they are trying to encourage. They simply have to model that behavior themselves.
In life, sometimes mistakes are the by-product of extenuating circumstances. We don’t always fail at work because of incompetence. We can fail because our hearts and minds are not engaged due to problems at home or elsewhere. The leader understands that mistakes and failures surface from all corners of life and, therefore, should be treated as isolated and redeemable instances rather than fatal flaws.
It is to your advantage to pull people out of their dejected state as quickly as possibly. Do so by calling out their mistakes quietly and returning them to a place of confidence and strength.

4: Ask Questions Instead of Giving Direct Orders

Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable and reduces resentment, it often stimulates creativity and innovation in solving the problem at hand. People are more likely to follow a new path if they feel that they have been involved in shaping it.
Most employees have a keen understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses. While some may be obtuse, most, if you ask, will tell you exactly what you are thinking. Many organizational psychologists recommend instituting a self-appraisal stage in the review process.
Questions allow you to create a conversation–in any medium–that can lead to a better place for all involved.
Wouldn’t you rather be asked a question than be given an order?

5: Mitigate Fault

A technique Sutton calls “forgive and remember,” a critical path for learning from mistakes and changing behavior. The technique was first described by Charles L. Bosk in his book Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure.
The goal is to help individuals achieve accountability while managing the existential problem of failure, a demoralizing inner battle for anyone.
Making it safe for them [employees] to fail is a sure way to ensure that they will more readily admit their mistakes, more quickly recover from them, more fully learn from them.
Five actions that leaders can take to instill organizational resilience within their teams:
Acknowledge that failure happens. Leaders can acknowledge failures quickly when they happen, but they can also discuss with their teams the likelihood of failures occurring.
Encourage dialogue to foster trust. Honestly discussing problems is the best way to learn from them and to trim the seedlings before they become fully grown catastrophes.
Separate the person from the failure. Rather than saying “you failed,” say “the project failed.” In most cases, that is the truth.
Learn from your mistakes. Otherwise, they are lost opportunities for learning and for coaching.
Create a risk-taking and failure system. Being methodical about how we approach risk and failure can help mitigate some of the emotional responses to it.
Alberto Alessi, the great Italian designer, described his company’s approach to design as an effort to find the borderline between what is possible and what is not possible and design along it. The best designs are those that fall right on the edge of the borderline, just this side of possible. That is the space of innovation, the space where we test our talents and grow as individuals. Of course, hugging the line means that you will often flop over it–you will fall into the realm of the impossible and fail.

6: Magnify Improvement

Praise and encouragement: the two essential elements of motivating any person to fulfill their potential, to improve, or to tackle change.
The Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness offers the following advice for praising those around you:
“Deliver praise from your heart.” Be genuine and sincere.
“Deliver praise as soon as possible.” Don’t wait for the next meeting, performance review, or family meeting. By then, the person’s own job at the success has dissipated, and you’ve lost an opportunity to amplify that joy.
“Make praise specific.” A simple thank-you note is not praise; it is politeness. To feel that their efforts are heading them down the path you want them to go, people need to know exactly what you valued in their effort.
“Praise people publicly.” Publicly praising people gets easier every day, so there is no real excuse not to do it.
Praise, while powerful and necessary, also implies evaluation against some standard. What great leaders and those with influence recognize is that the rest of the time, we must use encouragement.
That is the essence of encouragement–showing your belief in the talents, skills, and inherent abilities of another person because she exists, regardless of how things are going right now.
Being encouraging requires a special attitude. When you look at another person, rather than seeing her faults, you need to be able to see her strengths and possibilities, what she is capable of.
Tell someone that you have total faith in his ability to accomplish a goal and encourage him by highlighting all of the skills he possesses that will help him along the way, and he will practice until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.
Magnify improvement and you maximize others’ talents.

7: Give Others a Fine Reputation to Live Up To

Coaches, mentors, leaders, and parents often find that people live up to our expectations of them, no matter how diminished those expectations are. If a man feels unimportant or disrespected, he will have little motivation for improving himself.
To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.

8: Stay Connected on Common Ground

Why is common ground so important? For a leader to effectively influence another’s attitude or behavior, he needs to overcome any potential resistance by making the person feel glad to do what is being asked.
Why shouldn’t we know what our colleagues, coworkers, friends, and family members dream?
It is a simple process to link your desired outcomes with their goals:
Be sincere. Do not promise anything you cannot deliver.
Be empathetic. Ask yourself what it is the other person really wants.
Consider the benefits the person will receive from doing what you suggest.
Match those benefits to the other person’s wants.
When you make your request, put it in a form that will convey to the other person the idea that he will personally benefit.
In digital time and space, with open access and frequent communication, the perfunctory principles of corporate activity have largely broken down and been replaced by the basic principles of human relations.
Your first task remains the business of humanity.

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Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice by Shunryu Suzuki

By Michael George Knight — 2 months ago

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Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

by Shunryu Suzuki

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few

So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it’s all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that’s just the beginning.

In the forty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind has become one of the great modern spiritual classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki presents the basics-from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality-in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Shunryu Suzuki begins the book by stating the essence of Zen Buddhism — “Shoshin (初心)” or “beginner’s mind”.

He says:

“The practice of Zen mind is beginner’s mind. The innocence of the first inquiry — what am I? — is needed through Zen practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realise the original nature of everything.”

He further elaborates:

“In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, “I have attained something.” All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something.”

The purpose of practice is to turn a skill into a habit. To make it automatic, something delegated to your subconscious mind.

But this can result in arrogance. The more you do something, the better you are at it, and the less likely you will be open-minded about it.

“Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it.

The same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while, you will keep your beginner’s mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind.”

This is why it’s a fundamental idea of Zen Buddhism. (And likewise, it can be applied anywhere else.)

Just like everything, keeping a beginner’s mind requires constant practice.

After this, the book is split into the three different aspects of Zen.

The Right Practice

There are three practices of Zen Buddhism: the zazen posture, breathing and bowing.

Zazen (“座禅”)

This is the sitting posture commonly associated with the philosophy.

This is how Suzuki describes each aspect of the posture.

Legs

“When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh, and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they have become one.

The position expresses the oneness of duality: not two, and not one. This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are both two and one. Our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent.”

Posture

“The most important thing in taking the zazen posture is to keep your spine straight. Your ears and your shoulders should be on one line. Relax your shoulders, and push up towards the ceiling with the back of your head. And you should pull your chin in.

Also to gain strength in your posture, press your diaphragm down towards your lower abdomen (hara). This will help you maintain your physical and mental balance.”

Hands

“Your hands should form the “cosmic mudra”. If you put your left hand on top of your right, middle joints of your middle fingers together, and touch your thumbs lightly together (as if you held a piece of paper between them), your hands will make a beautiful oval.”

Breathing

Once your posture is correct, you can focus on your breathing.

Focus on your breath as if it was a door opening and closing. Just watch the door open and close, without trying to open or close the door yourself.

If it helps, his other analogy was to watch your breath as if you were watching the waves of the sea. Just watch the waves come and go, without trying to control it.

And while you’re watching your breath, you’ll realise that your thoughts keep coming and distracting you from your focus. That’s okay. Watch your thoughts as they come. You don’t have to restrict them or control them.

“When you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.”

Bowing

Finally, bowing.

This is done to remove the ego and surrender oneself to the universe.

“Bowing helps to eliminate our self-centered ideas. This is not so easy. It is difficult to get rid of these ideas, and bowing is a very valuable practice. The result is not the point; it is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable. There is no end to this practice.

Each bow expresses one of the four Buddhist vows. These vows are: “Although sentient beings are innumerable, we vow to save them. Although our evil desires are limitless, we vow to be rid of them. Although the teaching is limitless, we vow to learn it all. Although Buddhism is unattainable, we vow to attain it.” If it is unattainable, how can we attain it? But we should! That is Buddhism.”

The Right Attitude

Like with everything, you need to bring the right attitude to practice.

Be present

Here’s an analogy from Suzuki:

“To cook is not just to prepare food for someone or for yourself; it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen.

You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook!

That is also an expression of our sincerity, a part of our practice. It is necessary to sit in zazen, in this way, but sitting is not our only way. Whatever you do, it should be an expression of the same deep activity.

We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else.”

A further elaboration:

“As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now. But there is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment we have to find our own way. Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else, is not the true way for us.”

Being present is not something that is solely reserved for zazen practice. It should be an attitude that is brought everywhere in your life.

“Now zazen is over, and we will go about our everyday activity.” But this is not the right understanding. They are the same thing. We have nowhere to escape. So in activity there should be calmness, and in calmness there should be activity. Calmness and activity are not different.”

Acceptance and non-judgment

He writes:

“Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” or “essence of mind,” or “big mind”. After we are separated by birth from this oneness, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created.

When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.”

This is also applicable to our daily lives, especially in communicating with each other.

“When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other.

Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not even really hear it.”

Not adding anything to your practice

Don’t bring anything to your practice. No ego, no pride, no ideals, no goals.

“When something becomes dualistic, that is not pure. If you think you will get something from practicing zazen, already you are involved in impure practice. It is all right to say there is practice and there is enlightenment, but we should not be caught by the statement.

You should not be tainted by it. When you practice zazen, just practice zazen. If enlightenment comes, it just comes. We should not attach to the attainment.”

The Right Understanding

There are 8 core principles:

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they really are.
We exist not for the sake of something else, but for the sake of ourselves.
Focus on experience, not philosophy.
Do not focus too much on your teachings or what your teacher says. Zazen is all about you. Your teacher gives you the understanding, but only you can find your true nature.
Practice should be done daily and consistently.
Practice should be done according to the individual.
Practice emptiness. Hearing all information as if it’s the first time you heard it. Don’t add your preconceived notions to it.
Buddha is in everyone, everything and in every action. That makes all actions and things equally important. This is why you need to practice presence and mindfulness.

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You Can Negotiate Anything: World’s Best Negotiator Tells You How To Get What You Want Herb Cohen

By Michael George Knight — 2 months ago

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You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen

Regardless of who you are or what you want, you can negotiate anything promises Herb Cohen, the world’s best negotiator.

From mergers to marriages, from loans to lovemaking, the #1 bestseller You Can Negotiate Anything proves that “money, justice, prestige, love-it’s all negotiable.” Hailed by such publications as Time, People, and Newsweek, Cohen has advised presidents on everything from domestic policy to hostage crises to combating internal terrorism. His advice-“Be patient, be personal, be informed-and you can bargain successfully for anything.”

Inside, you’ll learn the keys to using Herb Cohen’s proven strategy for dealing with your mate, your boss, your credit card company, your children, your lawyer, your best friends, and even yourself-

.The three crucial steps to success
. Identifying the other side’s negotiating style-and how to deal with it
. The win-win technique
. Using time to your advantage
. The power of persistence, persuasion, and attitude
. The art of the telephone negotiation, and much more

We all negotiate on a daily basis. Whether it is with our family, friends, business partners, or tax officials.

Negotiations are ubiquitous, though. So you’d better start to developing your skills in negotiations, it will serve you well in life.

Know whom to talk to

The first thing to look for when you are trying to accomplish something is whom to talk to. Who would have the authority or power to give you the desired result? When talking to someone at an organization, you often do better by talking to the manager or director. Every organization has some type of hierarchy, the higher the person you speak to, the more power they will likely have to accomplish what you are trying to negotiate.

The author of this book once he showed up at a Mexican Hotel where there were no free rooms for him. He calmly asked for the manager and examined:

— “Would you have room for the President of Mexico if he shows up?”

— “Sí señor.” Answered the manager.

— “Well, he’s not coming, so I’ll take his room.”

When should you negotiate?

Before you enter into a negotiation, you should ask yourself whether the negotiation will meet your needs, whether you will feel comfortable negotiating to obtain your end goal and whether the negotiation will be worth the effort.

Don’t mistake negotiations for battlefields

Try not to see negotiations as a zero-sum game. The type of negotiations where one party’s gain is another party’s loss is best to be avoided.

One signal of such negotiators, also called Soviet-style negotiators, is the unwillingness to make concessions. They tend to set high initial positions and show an unwillingness to change their position.

Another tactic is to use emotional tactics such as bullying or even crying. Although crying is more often employed in personal relationships for example in spousal arguments.

Using limited authority can also help to avoid having to make concessions. If a person with no power to make concessions on his or her own is sent to make a negotiation, the other party has no choice but to accept the deal as-is.

Win-win deals happen when everyone’s needs are satisfied

Trust is very important in negotiations. You should first build a relationship with the other party. The reason is that in order to meet everyone’s needs, each party has first to be willing to communicate its true needs and make concessions if necessary.

Sometimes both parties have to give up something that they want in order to reach a deal, this is called making a concession and is part of the win-lose negotiation mindset. But win-win negotiations are possible and much better.

For everyone’s needs to be satisfied, they first need to be harmonized. And in order to harmonize, one has to understand their true needs first. Often the exposed desire does not represent the true need, let’s see an example.

Consider a situation where your family is planning to go on vacations. Your spouse wants to go to Texas. Your son wants to go to the Rocky Mountains, while you crave for the beautiful Great Lakes. At first, there seems to be no possible reconciliation for this situation. Each place is mutually exclusive with the other ones, so it appears that this negotiation will end in a deadlock.

It is when you look beyond the apparent demands that you see the true needs are in reality different. Your spouse just wanted to go to a warm place. Your son just wanted to see mountains, and you wanted to swim and snorkel. After identifying the real needs, you decide that going to a resort in Colorado can fulfill everyone’s needs. An at first unsolvable negotiation has ended with a win-win deal.

Tap into sources of power to negotiate successfully

Negotiations often depend on the sources of power each party has at their disposal. An example of the power of authority in negotiations is a boss who has the power to reward or punish his employees through the assignment of different types of tasks.

The power of alternatives

Another often used source of power are alternatives. Imagine you walk into a sales department with the intention to get a discount on a refrigerator. Your could just tell the salesman that another store across the street sells the same refrigerator for less money. The alternative of another store would give you more power over the negotiation.

The power of precedent

Another example is the power of precedent which you could employ by telling the salesmen something like “Look, my brother bought this same fridge with a discount.”

The power of expertise/credentials

Another option is to present yourself as an expert in fridges and telling them something like: “I’m an expert in fridges — here is my card — that fridge over there is overpriced!”

The sales clerk will most likely have several counter arguments like pointing out a sign which says “No discounts.” Usually, the one with the most apparent, not actual power will win the negotiation, because the other party’s power is mostly based on perception, not actual verification.

Let the other party invest time and effort

If you let the other party invest their time and energy in a negotiation, they are more likely to compromise their interests. Let’s see an example. Suppose you go to a store, but instead of directly going to the model of fridge you want, you ask the sales clerk to show you every single fridge in the store.

Furthermore, you could ask him lots of technical questions, forcing him to dig up manuals for each model, then you say you have to think about it and leave. The next day you come back with your friend who “knows fridges” and you ask the sales clerk to demonstrate each model again.

After all this rigmarole you finally ask for a discount. The sales clerk — after having invested so much time — will be likely to make such a compromise on the deal to at least get a sale out of hours of time.

Before entering into a negotiation set a goal with your party

If you enter into a store with your family, in contrast, it is the sales clerk who could easily get you committed to buy a product. Once he gets your spouse and children interested in a fridge, he has more power over your decision to buy that fridge.

That’s why it is beneficial to discuss your party’s shared goals before entering into a deal with someone else.

Gather information about your counterpart

Information about the other party can give you big advantages in the negotiation process. If you know what the constraint, goals, needs and desires of the counterpart are, you will be able to focus your negotiation better.

For example if you want to buy an item, you’d do better if you have some knowledge about the true value of the object. By doing so, you will be more qualified to reach a sound deal. Also when offering your price, for example, 100$, and the seller rejects it angrily, don’t jump to 500$ immediately. Doing so will tell him that you probably will go much higher still.

Or before negotiating a raise with your boss, you could look up next year’s salary budget to see if there is leeway for another rise.

When dealing with experts, it can be useful to play a little dumb and ask lots of questions. Let them explain everything in layman’s terms, doing so can reveal valuable information about their interests to you. Of course, you will probably have to counter with some information too. It would be best if you consider beforehand how you will divulge your information without revealing your constraints.

Deadlines are powerful negotiation influencer

The author once tried to negotiate a deal in Japan on behalf of his employer. He stayed for a full two weeks, but instead of starting the negotiation right away, his hosts insisted that he experienced the Japanese hospitality and culture first. Only the last day they started to discuss the deal seriously. As the author couldn’t return empty handed, he had to compromise to reach a deal on the way to the airport.

When you find yourself in a similar situation, just consider what the consequence of not adhering to the deadline will be and whether it is worth exceeding it.

Don’t get emotionally involved but make the other party do so

Whenever negotiating something it could be easy to take things personally. Try to stay cool instead and imagine you are negotiating on someone else’s behalf.

Sometimes playing emotionally can help your situation, for example when a cop calls you over, you’d be better off playing a confused tourist in a hurry and at the brink of tears than to enter into an argument.

Being likable is powerful, if you like a sales persona at a particular store, you are more likely to shop there. Even courtrooms are not immune to likeability, sometimes the juries will absolve someone of guilt despite overwhelming evidence, simply because the prosecutor seems unpleasant.

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