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Influence-The Psychology of Persuasion

by Dr. Robert Cialdini 

What are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person and which techniques are used to bring about such compliance? Why it is that a request stated in a certain way will be rejected, while a request that asks for the same favor in a slightly different fashion will be successful? These are questions asked and explained in Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence”. 

Lesson 1: Contrast

Today’s works moves at a fast pace. We need to absorb, process and act on information constantly. When we need to make a decision, we often resort to using shortcuts in the decision making process. One such shortcut is the contrast principle. The contrast principle affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is. This “weapon of influence” as Cialdini calls them does not go unexploited and its greatest advantage is not only that it works but also that it is virtually undetectable. Have you ever been shopping for clothes, selected a fairly expensive suit or dress and then been persuaded to accessorise with a shirt, shoes or bag? I have – at least with the suit, shirt and shoes! That’s the contrast principle in action. It is much more profitable for the salesperson to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them. If we the first thing we buy is comparably cheap the more expensive seems – more expensive. Do you want fries with that?

Lesson 2: Reciprocation

The second of Cialdini’s weapons of influence is the rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. A large number if not all of us have been taught to live up to the rule, and know about the social sanctions and derision applied to anyone who violates it - moochers, freeloaders, spongers. Because there is general distaste for those who take and make no effort to give in return, we will often go to great lengths to avoid being considered one of their number. Cialdini suggests , one of the reasons reciprocation can be used so effectively as a device for gaining another’s compliance is its power. The rule possesses awesome strength, often producing a “yes” response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would have surely been refused. As a marketing technique, the free sample engages the reciprocity rule. The promoter who gives free samples can release the natural indebting force inherent in a gift while innocently appearing to have only the intention to inform. A person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing an uninvited favor. The rule only states that we should provide to others the kind of actions they have provided us; it does not require us to have asked for what we have received in order to feel obligated to repay. Most of us find it highly disagreeable to be in a state of obligation. It weighs heavily on us and demands to be removed. Consequently, we may be willing to agree to perform a larger favor than we received, merely to relieve ourselves of the psychological burden of debt. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Lesson 3: Top Lining

Cialdini’s third weapon of influence is the top lining technique. This is easy to state: first make a larger request of me, one that I will most likely turn down. Then, after I have refused, make the smaller request that you were really interested in all along. Most likely I’ll oblige. Here is a commercial example. You go to buy a new Laptop. The sales assistant, Bob, invariably shows you the deluxe model first. If you buy, great for Bob. He’s just made a bigger margin. However, you’re likely to decline – after all you don’t need the bells and whistles. Bob counters with a more reasonably priced model. You’re hooked, you buy. Bob wins again, after all a sale is a sale. This technique happens all the time in retail. Tomorrow, count the rejection and retreat offers you encounter. I expect there are more than a handful.

Lesson 4: Consistency

Cialdini tells us something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse’s chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet. Of course, nothing about the horse’s chances actually shifts; it’s the same horse, on the same track, in the same field; but in the minds of those bettors, its prospects improve significantly once that ticket is purchased. This is Cialdini’s fourth weapon of influence: The force of consistency. Quite simply, once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we encounter pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. We fool ourselves to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already decided. But because it is in our best interests to be consistent, such consistency can also be exploited by those who would prefer that we don’t think too much in response to their requests for our compliance. Take toy manufacturers wanting to increase sales in January or February. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. The manufacturers undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys which are now in great supply and as a parent we need to be consistent to our promise and hey presto. Double toys, double expense.

Lesson 5: Compliance

“How are you doing today?” The caller’s intent seem to be friendly and caring. But it has a cutting edge. There is a sales pitch approaching. The theory behind this tactic is that people who have just asserted that they are doing fine—even as a routine part of a sociable exchange—will consequently find it awkward to appear stingy in the context of their own admittedly favored circumstances. You’ve fallen into the compliance trap. Cialdini tells us to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such agreements not only increase our compliance with similar, larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier. Whenever you take a stand that is visible to others, you are driven to maintain that stand to look like a consistent person. Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, and effortful. So how are you doing?

Lesson 6: Social Proof

Like Seinfeld? Ever join in the laughter while on your own? To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the nature of yet another of Cialdini’s weapons of influence: the principle of social proof. The principle applies to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the extent that we see others performing it. Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough to us. In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct a phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance.” We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves. We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style. Consequently, those who wish to be liked in order to increase our compliance can accomplish that purpose by appearing similar to us in any of a wide variety of ways. Which leads nicely onto the next lesson

Lesson 7: Liking

An important fact about human nature: We are phenomenal suckers for flattery. Although there are limits to our gullibility—especially when we can be sure that the flatterer is trying to manipulate us—we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false. Liking: Cialdini’s next weapon of influence. A host of examples is possible. Most are familiar, like the new-car salesman who takes our side and “does battle” with his boss to secure us a good deal. In Olympiad years, we are told precisely which is the “official” hair spray and facial tissue of our Olympic teams. The linking of celebrities to products is another way advertisers cash in on the association principle. Professional athletes are paid to connect themselves to things that can be directly relevant to their roles (sport shoes, tennis rackets, golf balls) or wholly irrelevant (soft drinks, popcorn poppers, even after shave).

Lesson 8: Scarcity

The scarcity principle: opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited. Whilst in conversation we are routinely interrupted to answer the ring of our cell phone. And we answer rather than continue talking. In such a situation, the caller has a compelling feature that our face-to-face partner does not: potential unavailability. If we don’t take the call, we might miss it (and the information it carries) for good. Cialdini suggests people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. For instance, homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how much money they could save. As a rule, if it is rare or becoming rare, it is more valuable. A variant of the deadline tactic, much favored by some face-to-face, high-pressure sellers, carries the purest form of decision deadline: right now. Customers are often told that unless they make an immediate decision to buy, they will have to purchase the item at a higher price or they will be unable to purchase it at all. Incidently, scarcity is a also a primary cause of political turmoil and violence. Revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them. When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. So remember once delivered you can’t take it away.

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21 Lessons For The 21st Century   by: Yuval Noah Harari

In his previous best-seller, Sapiens, he explored the past. Now Yuval Noah Harari explores 21 pressing issues that will define our future, including whether or not computers and robots change the meaning of being human.

We've got a lot to get through, so we are going to jump right into it.

Part 1- The Technological Challenge

1. Disillusionment

Our world has many hurdles to overcome and the best way to do so is to give people more liberty. The internet has changed the world more than anything else and our government systems are still struggling to understand it and use it effectively. Soon, AI will take over the political process. The revolution in biotech and info-tech will enable us to control the world and manufacture life, but we still unaware of the political implications. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. AI will eventually turn politicians powerless and the fight will shift from struggling against exploitation to struggling against irrelevance.

Our liberal system may not be perfect but we have no other alternatives, so it will stick. But our biggest problems right now are ecological collapse and technological disruption, and liberalism can’t help with those. Right now, humankind is angry and disillusioned about the current state of the world. The first step is to switch from panic mode to bewilderment and to explore the new possibilities we face and how we can proceed.

2. Work

It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change nearly every line of work, although we’re not exactly sure how long it will take or how it will change the job market.

AI can outperform humans in “uniquely human skills” and uniquely non-human abilities – connectivity and updatability. Computers can easily integrate into a single network, thus they will always be stronger than the abilities of a human individual. Thus, automation will bring immense benefits.

In terms of job security, AI will take the jobs of those with low levels of expertise, but may create more jobs for those with high levels of expertise. Potential solutions include prevention of job loss, creation of new jobs, and how to respond if job losses significantly outstrip job creation. Universal basic support could make job loss irrelevant, as long as we have strong communities and meaningful pursuits.

3. Liberty

Referendums and elections are more about human feelings than about rationality, both for the voters and for the officials. Scientific insights on the brain and body suggest that our feelings are biochemical mechanisms that calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings are based on calculation. Soon, we will have an algorithm for everything – what to study, where to work, and whom to marry. Since humans typically make mistakes, it would be logical to trust the algorithm, just as humans trust the Google algorithm to give us the answers to our questions.

AI is scary because they will always obey their masters – and there is no way for us to ensure that their masters are benign. As algorithms get better, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens and resistance would be utterly impossible. In the meantime, humans are relying on AI to help with their decisions which can lead to serious discrimination. Today, banks are already using algorithms to analyse data and make decisions about us. Digital dictatorships threaten our liberty and equality and could make most people irrelevant.

4. Equality

Globalisation has benefited large parts of the world but it has also increased inequalities between and within societies. Soon, the rich may be able to upgrade physical and cognitive abilities which would separate humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. It’s possible that different human groups will have completely different futures.

To prevent the concentration of all wealth and power, the key is to regulate the ownership of data. It is crucial to get our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to focus on this problem as it may be the most important political question of our era.

Part 2 – The Political Challenge

5. Community

Humans need community to flourish. Over the past two centuries, intimate communities have been disintegrating. Facebook is a great place to start in terms of community building, but in order for it to truly make a difference it will have to transcend into the offline world too. Humans are incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 individuals so it is risky for us to invest too much time and energy in online relationships because that means neglecting offline relationships.

6. Civilization

Humans have always been divided into diverse civilizations with incompatible worldviews. Human tribes tend to come together over time to become larger and larger groups. This process has taken two distinct forms: establishing links between distinct groups and homogenizing practices across groups.

Our planet is divided into sovereign states that generally agree on the same diplomatic protocols and international laws. The Olympic games are an impressive example of global agreement. People still have different religions and national identities, but when it comes to the practical stuff, almost all of us belong to the same civilization.

7. Nationalism

Nationalism is not inherent, but there is nothing wrong it. The problem starts when patriotism becomes ultranationalism – the belief that one nation is supreme. This leads to violent conflict, and with nuclear weapons, the stakes of war are much higher.

Climate change is an alarming issue, but for any serious effectiveness, changes must be made on a global level. In the context of climate change, nationalist isolationism is probably even more dangerous than nuclear war. In order to make wise choices about the future, we must look beyond the nationalist viewpoint and take a global or even cosmic perspective.

8. Religion

To understand the role of traditional religions in the world of the twenty-first century, we need to distinguish between three types of problems:

Technical problems – ie, how should farmers in arid countries deal with severe droughts caused by global warming?

Policy problems – ie, what measures should governments adopt to prevent global warming in the first place?

Identity problems – ie, should I even care about the problems of farmers on the other side of the world, or should I only care about problems of my own tribe and country?

Traditional religions are largely irrelevant to technical and policy problems, but they are extremely relevant to identity problems. However, in most cases they are a major part of the problem rather than a potential solution.

9. Immigration

To clarify matters, Harari defines immigration as a deal with three basic conditions or terms.

1 . The host country allows immigrants in. Pro-immigrationists think that countries have a moral duty to accept those who seek a better future. Anti- immigrationists say that you are never obliged to let people in.

2 .  In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the norms and values of the host country even if that means giving up some of their traditional norms and values. Pro- immigrationists say that having a wide spectrum of opinions, habits and values makes a nation vibrant and strong. Anti- immigrationists argue that immigrants are often the intolerant ones.

3 .  If they assimilate to a sufficient degree over time they become equal and full members of the host country. They become us. Pro- immigrationists demand a speedy acceptance, whereas anti- immigrationists want a longer probation period.

Part 3 – Despair and Hope

10. Terrorism

Terrorists kill very few people but nevertheless managed to terrify billions and shake huge political structures. Air pollution and diabetes kill far more people than terrorist attacks, yet we fear terrorism far more. Terrorists cause damage by creating a theatrical spectacle that they hope will provoke the enemy and cause them to overreact. In order to assuage these fears, the state must respond to the theater of terror with its own theater of security.

A successful counterterrorism strategy is to focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks, keep things in perspective to avoid hysteria, and stop ourselves from overacting to our own fears. If we react in a balanced way, terrorism will fail.

11. War

The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Wars are no longer as economically sensible as they used to be (when winning a war also meant a great deal of profit) so waging war doesn’t make much sense anymore. But humans are stupid so we cannot assume that war is impossible. One potential remedy for human stupidity is humility – seeing our true place in the world.

12. Humility

Most people believe they are the center of the world, and that their religion is too. Many religions praise the value of humility but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe. All humans would benefit from taking humility more seriously.

13. God

Many people think of God as a mysterious lawgiver who can explain the deepest riddles of the cosmos. We turn to God to answer all of the questions that we cannot and we turn to holy books to learn what God wants. However, to the best of our scientific knowledge, all of these sacred texts were written by Homo sapiens.

God is not essential to morality, as sometimes the religions that inspire love and compassion are the same ones that inspire hate and bigotry. Morality means ‘reducing suffering.’ Therefore, in order to act morally, you do not necessarily need a god. Instead, you need to understand suffering.

14. Secularism

Secularism can be defined as a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to a certain religion. The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. The other chief commitment is compassion. Secular people act to reduce the suffering in the world, so they cherish scientific truth in order to know how.

Part 4 – Truth

15. Ignorance

Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as time goes on, they have come to know less and less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all of our needs. We think we know a lot because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own. However, people fail to realise how ignorant they are because they lock themselves inside echo chambers of like-minded friends.

Groupthink and individual ignorance can be extremely dangerous. If you really want truth, you must escape the black hole of power and waste a lot of time experimenting with unproductive paths, dead ends and doubts.

16. Justice

Justice demands a set of abstract values and an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations. In our modern global world, it is difficult to comprehend relationships between millions of people across entire continents. Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices. Most of us cannot understand the major moral problems of the world, thus it is hard to find justice.

17. Post- Truth

Humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens conquered the planet because of the unique ability to create and spread fictions. As long as everybody believes the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

Branding often includes telling the same fictional story again and again until people believe that it’s true. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want truth, at some point you will have to renounce power. Humans prefer power to truth.

18. Science Fiction

In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction because people turn to movies and TV shows to understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time. This means that science fiction needs to be more responsible in the way it depicts reality.

Since your brain and your “self” are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. This might become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

Part 5 - Resilience

19. Education

Today it is more difficult than ever to know what to teach the youth because we have no idea what the future will look like. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050. Currently, schools try to cram information into kids’ brains. But today, it’s easy to access information, and kids need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and unimportant, and to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

Since we don’t know what the world and the job market will look like in the future, we don’t know what skills people will need. Instead, schools should focus on general-purpose life skills such as how to deal with change, learn new things and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.

20. Meaning

When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what my particular role is in the cosmic drama. To give meaning to life, a story needs to satisfy two conditions – it must give me some role to play and it needs to extend beyond my horizons. It must provide me with an identity and give meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself.

This story does not need to be true. A story can be pure fiction yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning.

In order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite. The storyteller in my mind explains who I am, where I come from, where I am heading and what is happening to me right now.

21. Meditation

Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning to control my mind is the best way to stop suffering.

Meditation is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. Self-observation is hard, and as time goes on, humans create more and more complex stories about themselves, which makes it increasingly difficult to know who we really are. If we want to make the effort, we can still investigate who we are. And we need to do it now.

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The Formula by: Albert-László Barabási

People have a deep hunger to understand what contributes to success. Hundreds of researchers studied massive data sets pertaining to success in sports, business, and innovation. And they noticed a series of recurring patterns in most areas of human performance. This summary includes the “Laws of Success” and the scientific inquiries that support each law. For scientific purposes, success will be defined as “the rewards we earn from the communities we belong to.” Thus, they are external and collective.

The First Law – Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

In one study, economists compared students who went to Boston Latin, an elite Latin school, to those that didn’t. Graduates of the Latin school have the fourth-highest average SAT scores in Massachusetts, which suggests that enrollment in this school will lead you to a higher SAT score.However, researchers showed that there were no differences between Boston Latin graduates and non-graduates. Data says that the difference in test scores is not because the school enhances performance. It’s because high achievers continue to excel no matter what education a school offers. That means the prestigious school doesn’t necessarily make your child a better student – your student makes that school prestigious.This is supported by another set of data that shows that the median annual income of Ivy League graduates is equal to the income of those that won entry to an Ivy League school but graduated from another school.Not everything can be measured by performance, such as SAT scores or salary. If there aren’t objective metrics to use, networks shape success. This is evident in the world of art. Artists derive prestige from their affiliation with specific galleries and museums. Galleries and museums build their reputation based on the perceived importance of the artists they represent and exhibit. Therefore, it’s a symbiotic relationship.Success is essentially a feedback loop. Galleries make names for themselves by taking on big-name artists, and big-name artists earn their fame by showing their art at reputable galleries. Therefore, once you’ve made it, it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep your status high.Most artist success can be predicted by the patterns of their first five exhibits. Elite artists continue to exhibit at high-prestige institutions. And, most of the time, local artists don’t. Data shows that 227 out of half a million artists who’d begun their careers at third-tier institutions ended them at the prestigious galleries.  The rare successful artists cast a wide net and relentlessly pitched their art to various galleries. Rather than remaining loyal to a few spaces, they surveyed their options and took advantage of the many opportunities.Networks are what determine anyone’s success. Performance needs to be empowered by opportunity.

The Second Law – Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

The Second Law explains the hidden factors that shape our choices. It tells us why experts are doomed to failure when they try to select the best wines or the most accomplished violinists. The law explains why Tiger Woods’s competitors play measurably worse when he’s on the green and why the last interviewee almost always gets the job.Our performance follows something like a bell curve. There will never be an Olympic sprinter who can run faster than a Ferarri. We know that, after a certain point, convincingly outperforming our competitors isn’t possible.Even though performance drives success, the problem is that the differences among top contenders are so tiny that they’re often nearly immeasurable. Given how bounded performance is, if you can find a small way to stand out, it makes sense to do so.There’s also a flaw that researchers call “immediacy bias” – the later performers, those with the highest immediacy in our brains, come out ahead. In many ways, the boundedness of performance sets most competitions up for failure, forcing judges to choose among people who all nudge the upper limit of performance in their fields. It may be fairer to select the best competitors, acknowledge that we can’t really tell them apart, and give them all a prize.Understanding the inherent randomness in every selection, we can better appreciate how success is often a numbers game. You can’t always control whether you’re the first or last on stage, but you can increase your odds if you keep showing up.Although performance is bounded, success isn’t. Slightly better performance can lead to an outsized amount of success. The unbounded nature of success is based on power-law distributions. They have slowly decaying tails, meaning that they allow for a few large outcomes. Power laws are the reason why the combined wealth of the top eight richest people in the world is more than that of the world’s bottom 50 percent. This is true for all measures of success – impact, visibility, audience, or adoration.

The Third Law – Previous Success x Fitness = Future Success

This law shows us how a subtle phenomenon, preferential attachment, governs all success, from a petition’s popularity to reading comprehension in children. When fitness and social influence work in tandem, success has no boundaries.Up to 70% of Kickstarter projects fail. One scientist conducted an experiment and randomly donated to one hundred Kickstarter campaigns that had zero funding. He used another one hundred non-earners as a control group. Those who received his initial donation more than doubled their chances of attracting further funds, even though he chose them randomly. That shows that success breeds success, a phenomenon called preferential attachment. It’s the snowball effect of success.This is true for reading comprehension too. Research shows that the least motivated readers in middle school read only 100,000 words a year, compared to the average middle schooler who reads roughly a million. Knowledge breeds knowledge, skill breeds skill, expertise breeds expertise. And each of these leads to success, which builds on itself.We can use this strategy to generate initial momentum, first by encouraging those who’ve already praised our projects to do so publicly.Fitness refers to a product’s inherent ability to out-compete similar products. If a product has unique, intrinsic qualities and social proof, its future success is nearly guaranteed.

The Fourth Law – While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.

For a team to succeed, some of its members must overlap, bridging diversity with shared experiences and close-knit relationships. Multiplicity is crucial for team success. Of course, teammates must collaborate to bring a project to fruition, but the role of a leader is the most important.Research shows that the degree to which leaders were engaged with their team played a key role in the team’s success. The more a project was dominated by a single leader, the more successful it was. Diversity creates the best mix for success, but for it to be effective, it needs a leader.One study showed that in professional soccer and basketball teams, access to better talent resulted in more wins. Yet, when the teams had too many outstanding players, they suffered. Soccer and basketball are team sports so having too many all-star players hurts cooperation and performance. When we handpick for talent, prioritizing individual accomplishments over team achievement, we rarely get the results we hope for. In fact, this approach to teamwork is counterproductive – derailed by a desire for dominance, no one can focus on the task at hand. Leaders are essential for team success. But too much leadership can be detrimental. The best teams are those whose members can discuss and listen to one another. Collective intelligence depends on team players who, working with the visionary, discuss and listen and allow diverse perspectives to rise to the surface.Credit for teamwork isn’t based on performance; it is based on perception. Success is a collective phenomenon. Credit allocation is guided by the same rich-get-richer phenomenon we see in every other area of success. The preferential attachment also applies to credit.Working with a recognized name is the best way to build a reputation in science, initially. At some point, though, you need to break out on your own. Otherwise, your work will always be overshadowed by somebody else.Data shows that it’s worse for women. When women coauthor exclusively with men, they’re accorded less than half the usual benefits of authorship. Men pay no price for collaborative work. From a tenure perspective, if you’re a female economist publishing with men, you might as well not publish at all.When we look at the product of teamwork, we have no precise way of knowing who did what. so we assign credit to those with the most consistent track records or the ones we recognize, which can sometimes be glaringly wrong.

The Fifth Law – With persistence success can come at any time.

The Fifth Law explains how it’s possible to do Nobel-winning research after retirement and why it feels like some people are playing the success game with loaded dice. We’ll encounter the Q-factor, which allows us to reduce innovation to an equation. The Fifth Law tells us that while success melts like a snowflake, creativity has no expiration date.Data says that scientists tend to publish their breakthrough work at the beginning of their careers. To be precise, it appeared that a scientist had roughly a 13% chance of publishing her highest-impact work in the first three years of her career. Data also suggests that success is more likely to happen at an earlier age. One analysis of over two thousand scientists showed that the majority made their mark on history before the age of thirty-nine. Numbers are similar to artists and writers.However, it seems that scientists publish far more papers at the beginning of their careers. The chances of a scientist publishing their highest-impact work are the same as them publishing any paper. When they organized the data by sequence instead of the age of the scientist who authored it, each paper – whether it was the first, the second, or the last – had exactly the same chance of being the most important. Age didn’t seem to matter.If creativity has no age, and each paper has the same chance of being a breakthrough, then it looks like productivity decreases with age. Scientists try more often at the beginning of their careers, so they tend to experience more success. Innovation has no age limit as long as we continue to get our work out into the world.Your chance of success has little to do with your age. It is shaped by your willingness to try repeatedly for a breakthrough.New projects always start with an idea. But a good idea isn’t the only factor. Your ability to take that idea and turn it into something useful is equally, if not more, important. This ability is called the Q-factor – the ability to turn an idea into a discovery.Therefore, success is measured by the value of an idea multiplied by your skill. Shockingly, it seems that a scientist’s Q-factor stays the same throughout her career. The same appears to be true for Twitter users – some are much more talented at engaging with their audiences than others, but there seemed to be no systematic growth or decay as users honed their communication skills.Since Q-factors don’t increase with time, if you are repeatedly failing at breaking through, you may be pursuing the wrong vocation. If your Q-factor doesn’t resonate with your job, you must take a moment to decide if you’ve chosen the wrong career path.Once you’ve found the perfect fit, there’s only one thing you need to do: be persistent. Don’t count on chance. Keep trying, and you will have a much better chance of succeeding. Successful people engage in the project after the project. The collaboration will also exploit your Q. Teamwork motivates people and success is a collective phenomenon. 

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The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Each and every day, new entrepreneurs around the world are starting their own enterprises. Most of them are armed with amazing ideas for new products or services (or so they think), but not necessarily the tools required to building an enduring business.

Enter Eric Ries.

Ries has seen numerous businesses start and fail - most notably his own. Through these false starts, he has learned many lessons and has gone on to have great success in building a multi-million dollar enterprise and coaches others to do the same.

For the next 12 minutes or so, you will learn the key components to a system that - almost without fail - can lead you towards building a successful business.

What does it mean to run a Lean Startup?

According to Ries, there are five principles that are critical to the success of a startup, and what makes a startup a “lean” one.

First is the idea that entrepreneurs are everywhere. They are the person who just lost their job in the recession and have struck out on their own. They are the person who has started and sold their first five businesses, and is now onto their sixth. These are the people we traditionally read about in magazines and books, and who are self-made success stories. Entrepreneurs are also found in global corporations, working on the next big idea.

The second idea is that entrepreneurship is management. The goal of an entrepreneur is to build a sustainable enterprise, and so there needs to be a new (and predictable) method of doing so – especially in the middle of the digital revolution we find ourselves in.

The third idea is that startups exist – not to make money or even to serve customers – but to learn how to build a sustainable business. This idea is the most critical to Ries’ entire premise, and it’s a revolutionary one.

Most entrepreneurs start a business with a new idea thinking (most of the time, incorrectly) they have an idea that will be a huge success. I mean, why else start a business and take all that risk, right?

They then plod along, hustling the hell out of that idea until it either succeeds or fails – usually in spectacular fashion. Ries however, argues that if an organization can learn as quicky as possible what the marketplace values enough to pay for, they will be able to adapt their business and grow it into a sustainable enterprise. He calls this validated learning.

The fourth idea is the method in which companies should approach this task: build, measure and learn. The idea is to get back to “build” as quickly as possible after learning from the marketplace. The quicker you can get through this cycle, the faster you’ll learn what the market values, and the better chance you have of surviving and building a sustainable business.

Lastly is the idea of innovation accounting. Although it sounds sexy, this is actually the boring stuff that will make a company successful. It is how you measure the milestones you set and how you prioritize the work you get done.

What these five principles add up to is a new way of thinking about management. If you value innovation as a company – whether as a startup or a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth – this is how you will accomplish it.

Build a product

The first thing you need to do is to build a quality product or service for the marketplace to create what is called the cusomter archetype.

The purpose of the archetype is to humanize the target market for your business. By doing so, it will help guide the decisions you make about product development and allocation of resources moving forward. So, before you make anything, make sure you know exactly who you are making it for.

Next, know you will need to take a leap of faith at some point. No matter how much research you’ve done, and how certain you are of your chances of success, your new venture is going to have to make some assumptions concerning some very important things. The key here is to acknowledge and know when part of the plan requires you to take that leap of faith.

A simple tool to help with this decision would be to analyze analogs and antilogs. According to Ries, there's no problem basing the strategy for your new business on the success (or failure) of others.

For example, when Apple was building the iPod, they knew people would listen to music in public places wearing earphones based on the success of the Sony Walkman. This in itself answered a critical question for Apple. What they didn't know however, was whether or not people would pay for the mustic they were listening too.

The antilog analysis for this question was too examine what other companies had done. Napster for example had just proven that people - in record numbers – would stop paying for music when offered a free (albeit illegal) alternative. So taking this into consideration, Apple decidedly built their now insanely successful business (iTunes) on a leap of faith, but knew exactly where risk lay.

The next step on this process is to build a rapid prototype. Most of us know of or have purchased items from Zappos. Zappos is a billion dollar-a-year online shopping portal that started out as a rapid prototype by founder Nick Swinmurn.

Swinmurn's original idea was to build a brand new retail experience, which he could have pursued at great cost and risk. Instead, he chose to run an experiment to see if pepole would buy shoes online. Hevisited local shoe stores in his community and asked if could take pictures of the shoes they had in stock. He would then take those photos and put them up on a website. If people bought the shoes from him via the website, he would return to the store and buy the actual shoes at full price. There, for a cost of next-to-nothing (except time and energy), Nick had figured out that people would indeed buy shoes online.

There are a few important lessons to glean here:

First, always build what the startup community now calls a “minimum viable product” (MVP). It’s the smallest product or service that you can create and start generating learning from. Nick didn’t need anything more than a simple website to start Zappos, and it’s likely that you need a heck of a lot less than you think to launch your new product or service.

Second, you should be attempting to attract the early adopter market with this MVP. Since these early adopters know they will almost always get a product with “bugs” in it, you don’t need to worry about having the best possible product to launch. In fact, any effort beyond what you need for an MVP is considered waste because it wasn’t driven in a response to the marketplace in the first place.

Measure and Learn

The job of a start-up is to figure out where they are at any given time, confront the cold hard facts, and then design experiments to move the numbers closer to what they've laid out in their business plan.

These come together in what Ries calls the 3 Learning Milestones – (1) establish the baseline, (2) tuning the engine, and (3) pivot (or persevere).

In establishing the baseline, you need to make sure you are setting the right metrics. One thing to be wary of are “vanity metrics.” In the web startup world for example, these metrics might include “website visitors," and in some cases even “registered users." These metrics are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. In almost every case, they can and will lead you to focus on actions that, at best, limit your chances for success.

In order to prevent this from happening, you need to ensure your metrics meet the "3 A's Test." This stands for Actionable, Accessbile and Audit-able.

In order a metric to be actionable, it must demonstrate a clear cause and effect relationship so that you can take definitive action in response to it.

In order for a metric to be accessible, it must be easily understood and available widely to people in the company.

In order for a metric to be audit-able, you need to be able to go back to the source of data to prove that the metrics were telling the true (and entire) story.

One example of these kinds of metrics would be the ones used by Ries' company, IMVU during their startup phase. The company sold a 3D avatar/social networking service that could be described as a chat service where you can dress up your character. Using $5 a day in pay per click advertising, they were able to get 100 visits to their website to test their product. They considered each day’s visitors to be one cohort, and tested each cohort based on the following data points:

Registration – How many people signed up;

Activation – How many people then went on to actually login to their account; and

Retention – How many people had one chat, how many people had five chats, and how many people became paying customers.

A good way to do this for your own business is to pick metrics in the following buckets: registration, activation, retention and referral.

Another great example is Grokit, which is a an online learning company. Grokit used this model in one-month sprints, using “split tests” (sometimes referred to A/B tests) to determine the effectiveness of the changes they were making to the product. Quite often, products get “improved” on when the CEO says that he heard from somebody that they didn’t like feature X, or a product engineer says that they can improve the product by doing Y.

Most often these changes have no effect on customer behaviour at all, and most times that critical fact goes unnoticed. This is a critical point to understand. When making improvements to your product, the only arbiter of whether or not it was successful is the metrics.

And when you are implementing an improvement to your product, you should be testing that improvement against a baseline to see what – if any – impact the change has on your business results.

This is the only way a company should be implementing a product development strategy.

Unless, of course, you somehow have millions of dollars somewhere that doesn’t need to be accounted for to anybody, and that you don’t need to provide a positive return on.

Pivot or Persevere

At some point, you will need to make a decision about whether or not your business strategy has a reasonable chance of success. This is the time where you will need to decide to either “pivot or persevere." Of course, if things are working well and you can see a path the great success and profits, keep working on the idea you’ve started with. Just be sure to base your decision on the cold hard facts.

A pivot is a fundamental change in business strategy. If you conclude that your business strategy isn’t likely to succeed, you can it. This is where the mindset of an entrepreneur truly comes into play. A true entrepreneur is always learning how to build a sustainable enterprise, not trying to make a single product idea a success.

There are many kinds of pivots your company can make:

Zoom-in: Where a single feature of your product becomes the entire product.

Zoom-out: Where your product is too narrow to support a business, and you decide to make a broader product.

Customer segment: Where you realize that you are building a product that solves a need for a segment of customers that is different than the one you started with.

Customer need: Based on an intimate understanding of the customers developed during your iteration process, you realize that the need you were solving for isn’t very important. But you find new needs you can solve instead.

Business architecture: This is where you go from a high margin, low volume solution to a low margin high volume solution.

Technology: Where you realize you could solve the exact same problem using a completely different (and usually less expensive) technology.

Ries discusses other pivots your business could make in the book, but these spoke the most strongy to us and our business. It is important to realize that whatever pivot you make, it’s only the next hypothesis in your business model, and that it should be rigorously tested just like everything else.

Technology company Aardvark is another great example that took this idea and ran with it. An alternative to other search engines where the answer needs some form of human interaction, Aardvark allows people to search on questions such as, “where’s the best place to get a drink after the movies tonight?” This is not something Google will give you a great answer for.

Aardvark however will - but this wasn’t the first product launched by it's founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz. It was their sixth! And it was their sixth product in less than six months!

Because they had used the Lean Startup model of the MVP along with rapid prototyping and measuring the results, they found out very quickly that their first five products were destined to become flops. Aardvark was the first and only product that pointed to success, and not surprisingly, it’s the product that they are now growing using the same principles we’ve discussed so far.

Growth

Now that you’ve found the product that you know will help you create a sustainable business, you need to have sustainable growth.

According Ries, the only way you can build a sustainable business is when your new customers come from old customers and there are three ways to do this:

First, you can create a “sticky” growth engine. This depends on having a product or service that customers will continue to pay for over time. In this model, if you can bring in new customers at a faster rate than your old customers leave the service, your business will grow. The metric that you’ll want to pay the most attention to is your retention rate.

Second, you could create a “viral” engine of growth. In this model, you depend on your current customers to bring in your new customers. The most famous example of this is Hotmail, which was once a slow growth business struggling to get traction. That was until they decided to append each mail message you sent with an invitation for other people to sign up for the service, with a link directly to the sign up page. The metric for this engine is something called the “viral loop." If you can get each new customer to bring in one or more customers, the viral growth will continue.

The last engine for growth is the “paid” model. In this model, you take the profits you’ve earned from your old customers, and invest it into advertising (or any new business development tactic) to attract new customers. The metrics to pay attention to in this case are the Lifetime Customer Value (the profits you’ll make off each customer over the lifetime of doing business with you) and the Customer Acquisition Cost. As long as your LCV exceeds your new customer acquisition costs, you will grow.

Ries makes the point that most companies only have the bandwidth to specialize in one of these engines of growth, and the time it takes to test and fine-tune everything in any particular engine is too great to split your focus. So make sure you pick the engine that is best for your business.

Of course, if you start on one of the engines and you find it isn’t going to work out as you’d hope, you can always do the “growth engine” pivot and focus on a different one moving forward.

Conclusion

So there you have it – everything you need to know in order to begin your Lean Startup journey. If you are truly an entrepreneur, you’ll take Ries’ advice and get passionate about building a sustainable enterprise rather than seeing your new idea succeed at all costs.

[gambhirs-blog]

The Leader Who Had No Title - By Robin Sharma

Robin Sharma’s business fable, “The Leader Who Had No Title” has at its core the following message: Growing and developing the leadership talent of every single person throughout the organization faster than their competition is the only way for companies to avoid getting eaten alive. Companies need to strengthen the capacities of employees at every level to lead in everything they do. It’s quite a challenge. But in his book, Sharma provides easy to understand and apply models based on the characteristics we need to nurture. Join us for 10 minutes to find out what they are and how we can gain real success in business and life. Let’s get started. The only way any organization can succeed in the current economic climate is by effective leadership...by everyone. Everyone needs to inspire their teammates. Everyone needs to take responsibility for results. Everyone needs to lead. Sharma advises each one of us to assume personal responsibility by becoming the CEO of our own roles. Leadership has nothing to do with what we get or where we sit. Leadership is a lot more about how brilliantly we work and how masterfully we behave. So, how do you become a ‘Leader without Title’?

We need Innovation.

Sharma claims that to be a leader without title we need to constantly ask, “What can I improve today?”. We need to avoid what Sharma calls Mediocrity Creep — that unseen and dangerous descent into being average that infects our work without us even knowing it. We need to stop doing the same. In Sharma’s new world of business, the riskiest place we can be is trying to do the same things in the same way as we’ve always done them. Same effort = same result. We need Innovation.

We need Mastery

The comedian Steve Martin said it really well when he advised, “Be so good that people cannot ignore you.” We need to be the first, the most, the only and the best at what we do. In Sharma’s view, the starting point of a move to mastery is to raise our self-expectations. We need to go the extra mile. As Sharma points out, there’s a lot less competition on the extra mile because so few people believe they can play there: few commit to spending their careers there. Everyone wants the rewards right now. Yet mastery takes time, effort, and patience. And too many among us just don’t make that commitment. Lots of people have good ideas. But the masters become masters because they had the courage and conviction to act on ideas. Stick to it. We need Mastery.

We need Authenticity

Being an authentic leader is a common proposition. But it’s never been so important to be trustworthy. It’s never been so important to be someone others respect. It’s never been so important to keep the promises you make to your teammates and customers. It’s never been so essential to be authentic. By being authentic we can gain more commitment from followers. As Dr. Seuss is alleged to have said, ‘Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.’ When we are authentic we give others permission to be authentic too. They begin to relax and open up. Trust grows. And amazing things start to happen. We need Authenticity.

We need Guts

Sharma states that you need no title to be a leader, but you do need to have huge toughness and big guts. To Lead Without a Title, we have to be unrealistically persistent and wildly courageous. We must stay passionately committed to our vision and have the strength to keep expressing the absolute best within ourselves. And that takes confidence. We need Guts.

We need Ethics

Unfortunately in the cut throat world of business, ethics are not always core. Too many leaders cut corners. They go for the cash grab. They think only about themselves. Sharma clearly points out that you will never go wrong in doing what’s right. Nothing is more precious in work than staying consistent with your values and protecting your good name. In so many ways, your reputation is all you have. We need to say what we mean and mean what we say. We need Ethics.

Turbulent Times Build Great Leaders

If we stick our heads under our desks and hope the march of change will go away, we’ll end up losing out. We need to face up to our challenges and meet them head-on with confidence. Holding back will only delay inevitable failure. To Lead Without a Title is to start doing a lot more of what we know we should be doing every day in our work, but in the past have just been too timid to do. Lucky people don’t get lucky. Lucky people create lucky. Here’s how...

We must Speak with Candor.

To be a Leader Without a Title, Sharma states we must face the difficult conversations that weaker people shy away from. Leaders without Title always communicate in a way that’s strikingly direct and stunningly real. An organization that has a culture where everyone’s afraid to speak candidly is a place where people live amid delusion and fantasy. We need to be honest. We need to be frank. We need to be sincere. We need to speak with candor.

We must Prioritize.

It’s not hard to get distracted from our mission, vision, values, and goals. But Leaders Without a Title ‘stick to their knitting’. The stay centered upon only what’s truly most important. They focus to the point of obsession. As a Leader Without a Title we need to focus on the few core activities that have the potential to lead us to mastery in our work. We need to prioritize and stick to the priorities.

Adversity Breeds Opportunity.

Every setback carries with it an even greater opportunity. Leadership is about leveraging hard times and using them to your advantage. Sharma points out that Leaders Without a Title keep moving forward. They recognise doing nothing in the face of turbulent times is the worst thing they can do. So they press on, facing up to the challenges, learning from failure and building on experience. We need to accept that adversity breeds opportunity.

We need to Respond versus React.

The trap that many business-people fall into when challenges show up is to panic and spend their work hours fighting fires. They get up in the morning, go off to work, and waste all their time being reactive. They become part of the problem rather than showing leadership by becoming the source of the solution. Leaders without a Title lean into the challenge. They respond to what is happening rather react to the happenings. They seek out the root cause, not the outcomes. We need to be Responsive.

We need Kudos

Sharma believes being a Leader without a Title involves using kudos to be inspirational in a world that all too often celebrates the worst of things. Sharma also points out that our people need to be appreciated by giving them kudos — for even the smallest things that they do in the face of adverse and stressful times. We need to embrace Kudos.

The Deeper Your Relationships, the Stronger Your Leadership

Sharma points out the main business of business is to connect with — and add value to — people. We must treat people exceptionally well if we are serious about reaching our highest potential in business. But before someone will lend a hand, we must touch their heart. He suggests the best way to inspire our teammates is to lead by example. Here’s how...

We need to be Helpful

We always need to do more than we are paid to do. Our compensation will always be a direct function of our contribution. Leaders without A Title are supports. Peer supports or mentoring supports, our aim is to be there when our colleagues need us.

We need to Understand

To build world-class relationships, we not only need to be astonishingly helpful, it’s also imperative that we are masterful at understanding people. And that comes down to one of the most important of all leadership skills: deep listening. Speaking less and listening more.

We need to Mingle

Being out there connecting with our teammates and networking with our customers is the road to success. We need to put a face to our business. While it is easy in today’s digital world to connect remotely, there’s awesome value in circulation. Positive results and incredible victories begin to show up just because we’re out there mingling with the people you do business with.

We need to Amuse

Most of us think that work needs to be serious. We’re afraid that if we laugh and have some fun and get a bit playful at the right time, we’ll be perceived as wasting time and being unproductive. But here’s the truth: having fun while we do great work will help boost our productivity. Fun makes us more engaged in whatever we are doing.

We need to Nurture.

Twitter and blogs have shown that even one angry customer is one too many. Sharma suggests we leave every single person who intersects our path better, happier, and more engaged than we found them. He tells us, as our grandmothers may also have, take care of people and the money will take care of itself. Help people get to their goals, and people will help us get every single one of ours.

To Be a Great Leader, First Become a Great Person

Sharma advocates the following mantra: lead yourself first. Only then will we get to a place as a person where we can lead others. Personal leadership — leading from the inside out, is the DNA of all enduring excellence. Here’s how….

We need to see Clearly.

Every business result is the direct result of the collective behavior of each of its people. And every action we take is the consequence of a thought. All our thinking drives your behavior and your behavior gives you your outcomes. We need to see clearly.

We need to recognise Health is Wealth.

If we bring our health to its highest state, every other area — from our ability to think clearly during stressful times to our performance levels and moods — get pulled up with it.

We need to realize Inspiration Matters

A day without feeling inspired is a day that we haven’t fully lived. We need to replenish our inspiration levels every day, because the challenges of life drain it every day.

We must never Neglect our Family

Our loved ones matter. What’s the point of becoming super-successful, but ending up completely alone?

We need to Elevate our Lifestyle

Lifestyle isn’t something that we speak about very often. But it’s so important to a life well led. Do something every day to improve your lifestyle. So there you have it, Robin Sharma’s fable for growing and developing the leadership talent of every single person throughout your organization.

[gambhirs-blog]

Atomic Habits

A habit is a routine or behaviour that is performed regularly, and in many cases, automatically. In the long run, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our habits. This summary includes a step-by-step plan for building better habits – cue, craving, response, and reward – and the four laws of behaviour change that evolve out of these steps. There’s no one right way to create better habits, but this summary describes an approach that will be effective regardless of where you start or what you’re trying to change. The Fundamentals Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. However, the difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. The effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter, but over your lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up. Your habits can compound for you or against you. Productivity, knowledge, and relationships positively compound. Stress, negative thoughts and outrage negatively compound. An atomic habit is a tiny change, a marginal gain, a 1% improvement. They are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results. There are three layers of behaviour changes. The first layer is changing your outcomes, such as losing weight, publishing a book, or winning a championship. The second layer is changing your process, such as implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk, or developing a meditation practice. The third and deepest layer is changing your identity, such as your worldview, your self-image, or your judgements about yourself and others. The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. In order to become the best version of yourself, you must continuously edit your beliefs and upgrade and expand your identity. Habits can change your beliefs about yourself. A habit is a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The Four Laws of Behaviour Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are: 1)   Make it obvious. 2)   Make it attractive. 3)   Make it easy. 4)   Make it satisfying. The 1st Law – Make It Obvious Over time, the cues that spark our habits become so common that they are essentially invisible. Our responses to these cues are so deeply encoded that it may feel like the urge to act comes from nowhere. Therefore, the process of behaviour change begins with awareness. Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. This can be difficult to do, but there are two exercises that can help. Pointing-and-Calling is an exercise that involves verbalising each of your actions in order to raise your awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level. Once you’re aware of your habits, keep a Habits Scorecard and mark whether the habit is negative, positive, or neutral. Habits are easier to start if you have an implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. Habit stacking is another exercise that can help. The habit stacking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]. Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behaviour over time. Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out, so make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment. Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behaviour. The context becomes the cue. It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues. You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely. That means you must reduce exposure to the cue that causes bad habits. The 2nd Law – Make It Attractive The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming. Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act. It is the anticipation of a reward – not the fulfilment of it – that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike. Temptation building is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy involves pairing an action you want to do with an action you need to do. The formula is: After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]. Social norms are extremely powerful, and they determine which behaviours are attractive to us. We tend to adopt habits that are praised by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in. We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe) and the powerful (those with status and prestige). One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behaviour is the norm, and you already have something in common with the group. The normal behaviour of a tribe often overpowers the desired behaviour of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. Every behaviour has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive. Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires (ie the desire to connect and bond with others results in the habit of checking Facebook). Your habits are caused by the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling. You can break a bad habit by highlighting the benefit of avoiding it to make it more unattractive to you. Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings. Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. The 3rd Law – Make It Easy The most effective form of learning is to practice. Focus on taking action – the amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it. Human behaviour follows the Law of Least Effort. We will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work. Therefore, you are more likely to succeed if you create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Reduce the friction associated with good behaviours. When friction is low, habits are easy. Increase the friction associated with bad behaviours. When friction is high, habits are difficult. Habits can be completed in a few seconds but continue to impact your behaviour for minutes or hours afterward. Many habits occur at decisive moments – choices that are like a fork in the road – and either send you in the direction of a productive day or an unproductive one. The Two-Minute Rule says, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do” so break your habits down into bite-size chunks. Standardise before you optimise. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist. Committing to habits will increase your future behaviour. The ultimate way to lock in future behaviour is to automate your habits. Prime your environment to make future actions easier. Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases (like buying a better mattress or enrolling in an automatic savings plan) that deliver increasing returns over time. The 4th Law – Make It Satisfying Humans are more likely to repeat a behaviour when the experience is satisfying. The human brain evolved to prioritise immediate rewards over delayed rewards. The Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change says, “What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.” To get a habit to stick, you need to feel immediately successful, even if it’s in a small way. The first three laws of behaviour change increase the odds that a behaviour is performed. The fourth law increases the odds that the behaviour will be repeated. One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit – like marking an X on a calendar on days you did it. Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress. Don’t break the chain. Do your best to keep your habit streak alive. If you do miss a day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible. Never miss twice in a row. We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying. An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us. A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behaviour. It makes the cost of violating your promises public and painful. Knowing that someone is watching you can be a powerful motivator, so use social interactions to motivate behaviour change. Advanced Tactics The secret to maximising your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. Pick the right habit and progress will be easy. If you pick the wrong habit, it will be a struggle. You cannot change your genes, which means they provide a powerful advantage in favourable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavourable circumstances. Habits are much easier when they align with your natural abilities. Choose habits that best suit your genes. Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work, they clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.   The Goldilocks Rule states that your motivation will be at its peak when you work on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard, not too easy. Just right. The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying so we sometimes get bored. Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It is the ability to keep going when it isn’t exciting that makes the difference. Create a schedule and stick to it, regardless of your motivation levels. The benefit of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention to little errors. You can master a habit by narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success and repeating it until you have internalised the skill. Then use this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. Each habit unlocks the next level. Keep building. Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time. Try not to cling to an identity – it makes it much harder to grow beyond it. Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine. If you make habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, you will be more likely to stick to them. If you keep making tiny changes, you will discover remarkable results.

[gambhirs-blog]

The Checklist Manifesto

By- Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande has a startling idea: that many of the problems that we face today can be solved by the simple, humble checklist.

As a surgeon, he realized that many people were contracting serious illnesses - thousands of them dying from them - while they were in the hospital getting treatment for other things. In other words, hospitals were killing people.

His book outlines the solutions he helped implement across surgery sites worldwide, which dramatically improved outcomes for the better.

His book outlines his remarkable story, but also how checklists are solving problems in other industries too - like construction and aviation.

Why Humans Fail

As human beings, we fail for many reasons. Some things are just outside of our control and understanding. Even with the amazing technological advances we've seen in the past 100 years, our physical and mental powers are limited.

However, as Gawande points out, many things are in our control, and we can put them into two buckets.

The first bucket is ignorance. There are areas in which science has only given us a partial understanding of an issue. Try as they might, there are some snowstorms that the weather people just can't predict.

The second bucket is ineptitude. These are areas in which the knowledge exists, but we fail to apply it correctly. These are the buildings that get built incorrectly and collapse, the snowstorms that could have been predicted, and the steps before a surgery that should be followed to prevent infections from developing in a patient.

That last example is the one where Gawande has direct experience. In the US alone, 150,000 deaths occur in hospitals after surgeries each year, and experts predict that at least 75,000 of them are avoidable.

As Gawande says in the book:

"Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated."

The solution in these situations, he says, is the humble checklist.

Checklists that save lives

One of the things that checklists overcome is the failure of human memory and attention. We know this intuitively - anybody who has forgotten where they put their keys knows how poor our memory and attention can be at times.

In particular, Gawande saw this play out time and time again in operating rooms around the world. Ask any surgeon whether or not they consistently take all of the steps necessary to prevent central line infections (caused bacteria or viruses entering the body when an IV is inserted), and they'll say "yes, of course I do - we learned that on the first day of medical school."

Just to bring this example to life, here are the 5 steps doctors are required to take in order to prevent these infections.

Wash their hands with soap.

Clean the patient's skin with antiseptic.

Put sterile drapes over the entire patient.

Wear a mask, hat, sterile gown, and gloves.

Put a sterile dressing over the insertion site once the line is in.

That's it!

If every surgeon followed those 5 steps in every single surgery, there would be no central line infections. Except every surgeon will tell you that they follow the steps all the time, and the data shows that thousands of people get central line infections every single year at hospitals.

Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D. - a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine - decided to give a checklist for these steps a try. First, he asked his nurses to watch the surgeons before the surgery and record whether or not they followed the steps.

After a month, the data was clear. In more than a third of the cases, the surgeons skipped at least one of the critical steps.

He instituted the checklist at the hospital, and found that the ten-day-line-infection rate went from 11 percent to zero. Over the next 15 months, in this single hospital, that checklist prevented forty-three infections, eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in extra costs (central line infections need to be treated).

The state of Michigan decided to implement this remarkable tool state wide, and found that over a period of eighteen months, they saved more than fifteen hundred lives and $175 million in extra costs.

Checklists that make money

As it turns out, checklists can be used for all sorts of things. One of the more exciting findings for entrepreneurs is that they can be used to make more money.

Gawande interviewed three different professional investors who used checklists in their business. One of them was Guy Spier, who runs a company called Aquamarine Capital Management, where he is in charge of a $70 million fund. The second investor didn't want to be identified, but is a director at one of the largest funds in the world that is worth billions of dollars. The third investor is Mohnish Pabrai.

Pabrai is an investor and the managing partner of Pabrai Investment Funds. He has a $50 million portfolio, and uses checklists to determine whether or not to make an investment in a company.

He is a follower of the value investing model (the patron saint of which is Warren Buffet) and over the course of his career has studied every single deal Berkshire Hathaway has done - good and bad. That, along with his own successes and failures, lead him to create a list of dozens of mistakes that they could make in the investment process.

Then, he systematically created a checklist to guard against them all. They ensure that at every step of the investing process they have the critical information they need in order to make the best possible decision.

All three of the investors that Gawande interviewed found that their returns were higher and they made fewer mistakes because of those checklists.

So why don't more investors take this kind of approach?

Psychologist Geoff Smart conducted a revealing research project. He studied and tracked fifty-one venture capitalists over time. For those of you who are unfamiliar, VCs make multi-million-dollar investments in risky, unproven start-up companies.

He studied how those people make their investment decisions, and identified six different approaches.

1. Art Critics are people who assess entrepreneurs almost at a glance, the way an art critic assesses the quality of a painting.

2. Sponges take their time gathering information about their targets, soaking up whatever they could and then making a gut call.

3. Prosecutors interrogated entrepreneurs aggressively testing them with challenging questions about their knowledge and how they would handle different situations.

4. Suitors were more focussed on wooing people rather than evaluating them.

5. Terminators see the entire effort as doomed to failure and skip the evaluation all together.

6. Airline Captains took a methodical checklist-driven approach, studying past mistakes and lessons and then built checklists into their process.

Then Smart tracked the VCs success over time. Not surprisingly, the Airline Captain approach was the clear winner. They had a median 80 percent return on their investments, and the other groups had a median of 35% or less.

The most interesting discovery from his study was that only one in eight VCs used the Airline Captain approach, in spite of its obvious advantages. All of this in spite of Smart publishing his findings in the best-selling book Who.

Let's move on to explore why checklists work, and why most of us refuse to use them in spite of their effectiveness.

Why Checklists Work

Checklists offer solutions for two problems.

First, as we've already discussed, it helps us remember the right sequence of steps to perform an important action. It is particularly helpful in what engineers call "all-or-nothing" processes - where missing one of the steps means you might as well not made any effort at all. The steps for central line infections and the pre-flight checklist for an airline pilot fall into this category.

Second, it prevents us from lulling ourselves into skipping steps even if we remember them.

Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only give us the opportunity to verify we've done things correctly, but also instill a discipline of higher performance.

One industry where checklists are used for pretty much everything is the airline industry. As Gawande points out, Dan Boorman has more experience translating theory into practice than pretty much everybody on the planet. He is a veteran pilot who has spent the past couple decades developing checklist and flight deck controls for Boeing.

The pilot handbook for each Boeing plane is about two hundred pages long and contains scores of checklists.

There are "normal" checklists for things they do every day - how they check the engines, what they do before taxiing to the runway, etc.

Then there are the non-normal checklists, which cover every conceivable emergency situation a pilot might run into - from a dead radio to a copilot becoming disabled.

Boeing issues more than one hundred checklists every single year - either new or revised - and over the years they have learned a thing or two about what makes a good checklist.

Here's how Boorman explains the difference:

Bad checklists are:

Vague and imprecise.

Long, hard to use and impractical.

Made by people with no awareness of the situations they are to be deployed in.

Treat people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step.

Turn people's brains off instead of turning them on.

Good checklists are:

Precise.

Efficient, to the point and easy to use in the most difficult situations.

Do not try to spell out everything.

Provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps - the ones that even highly skilled professionals using them could miss.

Why we don't use them

It's now clear that checklists work, and we have a process for creating good ones. The biggest issue with them is compliance - people don't use them even though they know they work.

A potential reason is that our culture celebrates "heroes". The people who seem to have superpowers to produce results that most of us can only dream of.

One of those heroes in recent memory is Captain Chelsey Sullenberger III, who landed a passenger airplane in the Hudson River in New York City after being hit by a flock of geese shortly after takeoff.

Although the press heralded Sully as a hero (he was), the reality was that he was able to save all of the passengers aboard that flight by relying on his training to go through the checklists.

Maybe if we focused more of our attention on exactly why our heroes are able to create remarkable results, we'll place less emphasis on their personal skills and abilities and more emphasis on the systems and procedures they use to produce remarkable results.

Conclusion

It's exquisitely clear that using checklists will produce better results in almost any area of your business. In fact, the more important the task, the more effective a checklist will be.

The ball is in your court.

[gambhirs-blog]

How to Focus on Studies without getting Distracted?

Does this relate to you?

 You have an exam coming up in a few days, so you realized it's time to focus and hit the books.

You sit down at your study area and start going through your notes. Ten minutes later, your phone beeps. It's a text message from your cousin, Neha. She's asking about the Dashain vacation family trip that you're going on after your exam.

After exchanging five text messages with Neha, you look at the time. Twenty minutes have gone by!

 You put your phone on silent mode and get back to your preparation. Fifteen minutes later, you get a sudden eagerness to check your Instagram. 

You made your mind to spend only a few minutes on Instagram, but you end up browsing through stories, commenting on a few posts, and watching two videos on IGTV.

 You decide to post your status: "Life dilemma: Study for the exam or check Instagram. Instagram wins." All of this takes you another 25 minutes. I'm sure these things happen to you. It happened to me as well when I was a student, and most of my students experience the same too often.

 Don't worry; there is hope. I am mentioning a few techniques you can use to defeat distractions.

Here are six tips for you: 

1.   Switch off your phone or put on silent mode and place it at the other corner of your room.

 If you are a smartphone user, you must know how distracting it is. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Emails, Youtube, Whatsapp, and yes, the whole internet thing is at your fingertips. 

Even an ordinary cellular phone can be extremely distracting!

In this case, I strongly recommend putting your phone in silent mode and place it to another corner of the room before you start your study.

If possible, switch it off.

With this, you won't be distracted by phone calls, text messages, or the ocean of the internet. You can always check your phone every 40-45 minutes when you take a small break and entertain important calls or texts.

2.   Switch off your Internet access.

You might intend to use your laptop/tab for study, but you can easily find yourself on social media or YouTube instead. (You got it what I mean)

When you are using your device to study, the WWW is just a click away. Don't trust yourself to hold that temptation. Turn off your device access to the internet before you begin with your study.

 You can download all the necessary online resources before you turn it off.

The internet is a medium that has the power to both entertain and educates.

3.   When you get distracted, take a deep breath

Distraction comes in waves in the form of desire to watch TV, check WhatsApp or text messages, checking Facebook status, or maybe you feel like cleaning your room when it's time to be productive, right? 

 But these intense urges last only for a short period so you can resist those initial waves and carry on with your studies.

 Here's how to defeat the urge when it hits you: Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in for two seconds, then breathe out for two seconds. If it still persists, repeat until it goes off. 

 Using this simple method, you'll spend four to eight seconds, breathing deeply, after which you'll get back to work. If you don't use this method, you'll probably end up getting distracted for 15 minutes, or even longer.

4. Ask people to provide you privacy.

I'm confident that something like this had happened to you before while you were reading:

Your friend entered your room with a guitar

Your mum came by to ask you about your preparation

Your cousin asked you for advice

Your sister asked you for help with her homework

 The list goes on...

 I understand relationships are significant and strongly believe in relationships. 

But when you're focusing on study, I am damn sure you get interrupted, so I strongly recommend you to go to people who are likely to disturb you and say something like this. “I have my exam coming up in a few days, so I need to concentrate. Would you please give me privacy when I enter my study room and not interrupt unless it's something really urgent?'' 

In this case, your family and friends will respect your privacy and your commitment to academic excellence.

5. Do not skip eight hours of sleep every night. 

As a student, I understand you have so much homework to do, so many projects to work on, so many commitments with friends and family, so many activities to participate.

Compared to all of these activities, sleep seems to be ignored. But sleep is vital if you want academic success. It's a scientifically proven fact that sleep affects your memory, focus, and functioning of your brain. 

 If you're not sleeping enough, you're not going to achieve academic success in your life.

You will easily get distracted when you are sleep-deprived.

 Here is some advice to help you get to bed earlier

Set a nightly alarm to alert yourself to go to bed.

Go to bed every day at the same time. 

Don't drink caffeine after 5 pm.

Read a book before bed will help you wind down

6. Use a tool like Todoist to help you prioritize your tasks.

Todoist is a web or App-based tool that allows you to manage projects and prioritize tasks conveniently.

I started using the Todoist mobile app a year ago, and I've found it to be propitious in keeping my life planned.

Students usually get distracted when they think about all the other tasks they need to complete. This prohibits them from focusing on the task at hand.

By using a tool like Todoist, you'll be able to stay on top of all of your assignments, projects, and other duties. With a well-organized approach toward task management, you'll make the utmost of every study session.

 In conclusion

In our increasingly connected world of high-speed internet, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Smart Artificial intelligence, assistant devices distractions are throughout.

You'll need to make a conscious and committed effort to stay on task. I hope these tips will help you in your quest to win over distraction.