"SKEPTIC: VIEWING THE WORLD WITH A RATIONAL EYE" by Michael Shermer

• If scientific observations are to be of any use, they must be tested against a theory, hypothesis, or model.
• It does not matter who you are or how important you think your idea is, if it is contradicted by the evidence it is wrong.
• The unwillingness to submit to peer review and the inability to admit error are antitheses of good science.
• Scientism is a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.
• Feynman thought in visual metaphors,
• Because we are primates with such visually dominant sensory systems we need to see the evidence to believe it,
• In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong; it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.
• To detect baloney—that is, to help discriminate between science and pseudoscience—I suggest ten questions to ask when encountering any claim.
• 1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
• But science is messier than most people realize.
• 2. Does this source often make similar claims?
• 3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
• 4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• 5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought?
• The confirmation bias is powerful and pervasive and is almost impossible for any of us to avoid.
• 6. Does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s conclusion, or a different one?
• 7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• 8. Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomenon, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing explanation?
• 9. If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?
• 10. Do the claimants’ personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
• We must always be on guard against errors in our reasoning.
• To be skeptical is to aim toward a goal of critical thinking.
• The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial, and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry.
• smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
• Most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing).
• Science is a way of thinking that recognizes the need to test hypotheses so that the process is not reduced to mere opinion mongering, that the findings of such tests are provisional and probabilistic, and that natural explanations are always sought for natural phenomena.
• Lacking a fundamental comprehension of how science works, the siren song of pseudoscience becomes too alluring to resist, no matter how smart you are.
• The study of animals whose existence has yet to be proven is known as cryptozoology, a term coined in the late 1950s by the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.
• The reason why cryptids merit our attention is that there have been enough successful discoveries made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori.
• “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”
• The anecdotal tales make for gripping narratives, but they do not make for sound science. After a century of searching for these chimerical creatures, until a body is produced skepticism is the appropriate response.
• Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. Like all other animals, we evolved to connect the dots between events in nature to discern meaningful patterns for our survival.
• Cold reading, where you literally “read” someone “cold,” knowing nothing about them. You ask lots of questions and make numerous statements and see what sticks.
• Warm reading, utilizing known principles of psychology that apply to nearly everyone.
• Hot reading, where the medium obtains information on a subject ahead of time.
• Data and theory. Evidence and mechanism. These are the twin pillars of sound science. Without data and evidence there is nothing for a theory or mechanism to explain. Without a theory and mechanism, data and evidence drift aimlessly on a boundless sea.
• A meta-analysis is a statistical technique that combines the results from many studies to look for an overall effect, even if the results from the individual studies were insignificant.
• To be tested scientifically Bible coders would need to predict events before they happen.
• Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, designed to detect signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world.
• Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations—A appears to be connected to B, but it is not
• Skepticism is the default position because the burden of proof is on the believer, not the skeptic.
• Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
• Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God.
• Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries.
• Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year.
• The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
• If cloning does work there is no reason to ban it because the three common reasons given for implementing restrictions are myths: the Identical Personhood Myth, the Playing God Myth, and the Human Rights and Dignity Myth.
• Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
• Thus I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.
• The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session.
• Most of us are not good at lie detection because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do.
• Although motivation seminarists publish countless glowing testimonials in their promotional literature, there is no scientific evidence showing that self-help programs work, and some reasons to think that they may do more harm than good.
• Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.
• The reason why folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we live.
• Since humans are storytelling animals, we are more readily convinced by dramatic anecdotes than we are by dry data.
• Memory is more like an editing machine than it is a tape recorder, and as we misremember the past, we thus mispredict the future. The road to unhappiness is paved with false memories.
• truth in science is not determined democratically.
• It does not matter whether 99 percent or only 1 percent of the public believes a theory. It must stand or fall on the evidence, and there are few theories in science that are more robust than the theory of evolution.
• It is not enough to argue that creationism is wrong; we must also show that evolution is right.
• We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as Ambulocetus natans, but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they converge to reveal that life evolved in a specific sequence by a particular process.
• At a February 12, 2002, news briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the limitations of intelligence reports: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
• This boundary between the known and the unknown is where science flourishes.

"SIX EASY PIECES: ESSENTIALS OF PHYSICS EXPLAINED BY ITS MOST BRILLIANT TEACHER" by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands

• Science is a people-driven activity like all human endeavor, and just as subject to fashion and whim. In this case fashion is set not so much by choice of subject matter, but by the way scientists think about the world.
• Theoretical physics is one of the toughest intellectual exercises, combining abstract concepts that defy visualization with extreme mathematical complexity.
• A summation of his teaching philosophy was found among his papers in the Caltech archives, in a note he had scribbled to himself while in Brazil in 1952: First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
• It’s impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned.
• Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.
• The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.”
• all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
• Now the jiggling motion is what we represent as heat: when we increase the temperature, we increase the motion.
• order to confine a gas we must apply a pressure.
• Air consists almost entirely of nitrogen, oxygen, some water vapor, and lesser amounts of carbon dioxide, argon, and other things.
• An ion is an atom which either has a few extra electrons or has lost a few electrons.
• Everything is made of atoms.
• From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the places where they do work!
• The ultimate basis of an interaction between the atoms is electrical.
• the chemical properties depend upon the electrons on the outside, and in fact only upon how many electrons there are.
• Magnetic influences have to do with charges in relative motion, so magnetic forces and electric forces can really be attributed to one field, as two different aspects of exactly the same thing.
• The electromagnetic field can carry waves; some of these waves are light, others are used in radio broadcasts, but the general name is electromagnetic waves.
• The only thing that is really different from one wave to another is the frequency of oscillation.
• If we increase the frequency to 500 or 1000 kilocycles (1 kilocycle = 1000 cycles) per second, we are “on the air,” for this is the frequency range which is used for radio broadcasts.
• Instead, it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.
• there is a rule in quantum mechanics that says that one cannot know both where something is and how fast it is moving.
• it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.
• We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.
• There is no distinction between a wave and a particle. So quantum mechanics unifies the idea of the field and its waves, and the particles, all into one.
• The fact that a particle has zero mass means, in a way, that it cannot be at rest. A photon is never at rest; it is always moving at 186,000 miles a second.
• To summarize it, I would say this: outside the nucleus, we seem to know all; inside it, quantum mechanics is valid—the principles of quantum mechanics have not been found to fail. The stage on which we put all of our knowledge, we would say, is relativistic space-time; perhaps gravity is involved in space-time. We do not know how the universe got started, and we have never made experiments which check our ideas of space and time accurately, below some tiny distance, so we only know that our ideas work above that distance.
• All proteins are not enzymes, but all enzymes are proteins.
• Proteins have a very interesting and simple structure. They are a series, or chain, of different amino acids.
• But the most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
• It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.
• The general name of energy which has to do with location relative to something else is called potential energy.
• In quantum mechanics it turns out that the conservation of energy is very closely related to another important property of the world, things do not depend on the absolute time.
• What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.
• First of all, Kepler found that each planet goes around the sun in a curve called an ellipse, with the sun at a focus of the ellipse.
• Kepler’s second observation was that the planets do not go around the sun at a uniform speed, but move faster when they are nearer the sun and more slowly when they are farther from the sun,
• Thus Kepler’s three laws are: I. Each planet moves around the sun in an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. II. The radius vector from the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time. III. The squares of the periods of any two planets are proportional to the cubes of the semimajor axes of their respective orbits: T ∝ a3/2.
• Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in.
• The moon pulls the water up under it and makes the tides—people
• If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong.
• so far as we now know, gravity seems to go out forever inversely as the square of the distance.
• Even light, which has an energy, has a “mass.”
• “Quantum mechanics” is the description of the behavior of matter in all its details and, in particular, of the happenings on an atomic scale.

"SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS" by Carlo Rovelli

• The gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the general theory of relativity. Newton’s “space,” through which things move, and the “gravitational field” are one and the same thing.
• A momentous simplification of the world: space is no longer something distinct from matter—it is one of the “material” components of the world.
• Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves.
• Space curves where there is matter.
• The whole of space can expand and contract.
• Einstein’s equation shows that space cannot stand still; it must be expanding.
• space and gravitational field are the same thing.
• Einstein showed that light is made of packets: particles of light. Today we call these “photons.”
• In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.
• Science begins with a vision.
• Scientific thought is fed by the capacity to “see” things differently than they have previously been seen.
• The things we see are made of atoms. Every atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. Every nucleus consists of tightly packed protons and neutrons.
• Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us. They are the “elementary particles” studied in particle physics.
• There is no such thing as a real void, one that is completely empty.
• Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities.
• Our world may have actually been born from a preceding universe that contracted under its own weight until it was squeezed into a tiny space before “bouncing” out and beginning to re-expand, thus becoming the expanding universe that we observe around us.
• A hot substance is a substance in which atoms move more quickly.
• Cold air is air in which atoms, or rather molecules, move more slowly. Hot air is air in which molecules move more rapidly.
• Heat, as we know, always moves from hot things to cold.
• Friction produces heat.
• The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder.
• Heat does not move from hot things to cold things due to an absolute law: it does so only with a large degree of probability. The reason for this is that it is statistically more probable that a quickly moving atom of the hot substance collides with a cold one and leaves it a little of its energy, rather than vice versa.
• It is not impossible for a hot body to become hotter through contact with a colder one: it is just extremely improbable.
• To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known.
• There is a detectable difference between the past and the future only when there is the flow of heat.
• To be free doesn’t mean that our behavior is not determined by the laws of nature. It means that it is determined by the laws of nature acting in our brains.
• Our free decisions are freely determined by the results of the rich and fleeting interactions among the billion neurons in our brain: they are free to the extent that the interaction of these neurons allows and determines.
• There is not an “I” and “the neurons in my brain.” They are the same thing. An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.
• It is not against nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.
• Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral.

"HOW NOT TO BE WRONG: THE POWER OF MATHEMATICAL THINKING" by Jordan Ellenberg

• Math is woven into the way we reason. And math makes you better at things.
• With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way.
• A mathematician is always asking, “What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?” This can be annoying. But it can also be very productive.
• Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.
• The specialized language in which mathematicians converse with one another is a magnificent tool for conveying complex ideas precisely and swiftly.
• Without the rigorous structure that math provides, common sense can lead you astray.
• Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.
• A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.
• Every smooth curve, when you zoom in enough, looks just like a line.
• Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand.
• Anytime a lot of people in a small country come to a bad end, editorialists get out their slide rules and start figuring: how much is that in dead Americans?
• An important rule of mathematical hygiene: when you’re field-testing a mathematical method, try computing the same thing several different ways. If you get several different answers, something’s wrong with your method.
• That’s how the Law of Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what’s already happened, but by diluting what’s already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionally negligible that it can safely be forgotten.
• Great Big Book of Horrible Things,
• Don’t talk about percentages of numbers when the numbers might be negative.
• Negative numbers in the mix make percentages act wonky.
• Improbable things happen a lot.
• Trial and error is a very powerful weapon.
• The point is, reverse engineering is hard.
• Many scientific questions can be boiled down to a simple yes or no: Is something going on, or not?
• The “does nothing” scenario is called the null hypothesis. That is, the null hypothesis is the hypothesis that the intervention you’re studying has no effect.
• So here’s the procedure for ruling out the null hypothesis, in executive bullet-point form: Run an experiment. Suppose the null hypothesis is true, and let p be the probability (under that hypothesis) of getting results as extreme as those observed. The number p is called the p-value. If it is very small, rejoice; you get to say your results are statistically significant. If it is large, concede that the null hypothesis has not been ruled out.
• New things require new vocabulary. There are two ways to go. You can cut new words from fresh cloth, as we do when we speak of cohomology, syzygies, monodromy, and so on; this has the effect of making our work look forbidding and unapproachable. More commonly, we adapt existing words for our own purposes, based on some perceived resemblance between the mathematical object to be described and a thing in the so-called real world.
• twice a tiny number is a tiny number. How good or bad it is to double something depends on how big that something is!
• Impossible things never happen. But improbable things happen a lot.
• The logarithm of a positive number N, called log N, is the number of digits it has. Wait, really? That’s it? No. That’s not really it. We can call the number of digits the “fake logarithm,” or flogarithm. It’s close enough to the real thing to give the general idea of what the logarithm means in a context like this one.
• Data is messy, and inference is hard.
• The purpose of a court is not truth, but justice.
• In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.
• Bayes’s Theorem can be seen not as a mere mathematical equation but as a form of numerically flavored advice.
• A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.”
• This sounds weird, but as a logical deduction it’s irrefutable; drop one tiny contradiction anywhere into a formal system and the whole thing goes to hell.
• when you’re working hard on a theorem you should try to prove it by day and disprove it by night.
• Proving by day and disproving by night is not just for mathematics. I find it’s a good habit to put pressure on all your beliefs, social, political, scientific, and philosophical. Believe whatever you believe by day; but at night, argue against the propositions you hold most dear.

"GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES" by Jared Diamond

• Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies.
• Peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the modern world in wealth and power.
• Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood.
• The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide.
• Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking.
• Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.
• The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.
• “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
• Far more Native Americans and other non-Eurasian peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian guns or steel weapons.
• the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.
• But most wild animal and plant species have proved unsuitable for domestication: food production has been based on relatively few species of livestock and crops.
• In the case of technological innovations and political institutions as well, most societies acquire much more from other societies than they invent themselves.
• A larger area or population means more potential inventors, more competing societies, more innovations available to adopt—and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies.
• Without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting our meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago.
• The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy.
• prediction. In chemistry and physics the acid test of one’s understanding of a system is whether one can successfully predict its future behavior.
• In fact, in proportion to its available area of farmland, Japan is the most densely populated major society in the world.
• Today, Japan is the largest catcher, importer, and consumer of fish in the world.
• My main conclusion was that societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology.
• The Musket/Potato Wars illustrate the main process running through the history of the last 10,000 years: human groups with guns, germs, and steel, or with earlier technological and military advantages, spreading at the expense of other groups, until either the latter groups became replaced or everyone came to share the new advantages.
• This suggested to me the Optimal Fragmentation Principle: innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation: a too-unified society is at a disadvantage, and so is a too-fragmented society.
• We Americans often fantasize that German and Japanese industries are super-efficient, exceeding American industries in productivity. In reality, that’s not true: on the average across all industries, America’s industrial productivity is higher than that in either Japan or Germany.
• If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don’t want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation.
• Among the many “good institutions” often invoked to explain the greater wealth of the first-named country of each of these pairs are effective rule of law, enforcement of contracts, protection of private property rights, lack of corruption, low frequency of assassinations, openness to trade and to flow of capital, incentives for investment, and so on.

"BE SLIGHTLY EVIL: A PLAYBOOK FOR SOCIOPATHS" by Venkatesh Rao

• Tempo was a book about decision-making based on a rather ambitious Grand Design that covered a lot of territory I was already familiar with.
• “The Gervais Principle” was a series I wrote on ribbonfarm.com about organizational politics and decision-making.
• As you learn more, you should have less need for moral opinions.
• I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least mildly hostile to it.
• in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do something.
• The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world.
• If you are driven by your own principles, you’ll generally search desperately for a calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life.
• As Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
• If you are reasonable, and decide to simply be somebody, you can achieve your “be somebody” objective and wrap up your very successful life, having offended nobody, and with nobody caring that you actually lived.
• If you are unreasonable, even if you actually manage to find a calling and do something that you will be remembered for, chances are high you’ll die destitute and unrecognized, after a lifetime of maneuvering, fighting and making implacable enemies and loyal-to-the-death friends at every turn.
• Realism is a way of viewing the world, pragmatism is the related way of acting within it.
• Action for the Slightly Evil favors chaos creation.
• if you don’t know who the sucker is, it is probably you).
• When you are genuinely in a fight, you don’t want a fair fight if you can help it. You should prefer a dumb enemy over a smart one.
• You can only stabilize at Slightly Evil if you make sure you always “pick on someone your own size” in a general sense.
• “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools.
• Reality is usually somewhere between neutral and slightly unpleasant,
• In America, all politics and religion has been idealist for the last century.
• Felt status, played status and perceived status have almost nothing to do with each other at a fundamental level.
• Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• The best way to break patterns in random ways is simply to play situations in ways that suit your situational objectives.
• Even if you are only slightly evil, you need to pick one of these two styles; obvious wolf, or wolf in sheep’s clothing? I recommend “obvious wolf,” but done intelligently.
• To wield influence, it pays to appear predictable in very simple ways around others. Fly your true colors high.
• Trying to be yourself and expressing your true personality in every situation certainly is a very adolescent thing to do. Expressing yourself completely is downright childish. That amounts to publishing all your buttons for anybody to push.
• I believe that all organizations are psychic prisons.
• every kind of social context has certain prison-like elements.
• The smart way is to acknowledge the reality of true conflict and judiciously decide, for each obstacle, whether to go through it or around it.
• Going around is generally cheaper and less damaging.
• Plowing through an element of opposition demonstrates a willingness to fight when necessary, force of will and social intelligence in navigating status hierarchies.
• “Going through” is almost never the right strategy when dealing with staff. You must pick somebody with line responsibilities.
• Playing exactly by the rules is a powerful form of industrial collective action known as “work to rule,”†† in which workers stick religiously to their job descriptions, defined policies and procedures.
• Rules are most often designed to protect and insure rather than enable and create.
• If your team can’t escape certain consequences when things go wrong, by saying “my manager said it was okay,” you are not doing enough for them.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency of human beings to preferentially seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs.
• one of the easiest ways to figure someone out is to look at the information they choose to consume.
• Drawing conclusions from people’s reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people.
• Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a sense of political correctness. Don’t be.
• First, lying and lie-detection are extremely non-trivial disciplines.
• To lie at a level that can fool experts who are used to being lied to (such as cops or polygraph machines), or to lie-detect at that skill level, takes years of practice.
• Second, in case you hadn’t noticed, very few well-adjusted people (“well-adjusted” is not a compliment in my book) lie outright about anything consequential.
• The point is, the everyday social world is not a harsh and dangerous one built on widespread deceit. It is mostly a slightly timid, risk-averse and benign world, full of people who are uncomfortable lying about anything serious.
• The lying happens at the extremes: lots of little white lies on one end, that don’t matter and don’t snowball, and a smaller world of professional, risk-managed, money-making lying on the other end, that includes marketers, cops, con-men and spies.
• For everyday use, being able to tell apart people who are telling the truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more important skill than lie detection. There are two important pseudo-truth-telling behaviors.
• The first behavior is candor. When somebody leans back, opens with something like “let me be completely honest here,” and says things in a very sincere, disarming and open way, chances are they believe what they are saying.
• Truth-telling requires you to first calmly separate your feelings from the facts and tell yourself the truth before you tell others. Candid people often fail to separate things this way and blurt out unprocessed thoughts.
• The second behavior is cursing. When somebody gets mad and offers an opinion interspersed with curses.
• Cold-blooded listening is, for slightly evil sociopaths, what nice, good-natured “active listening” is for losers.
• the only way to get to total impassivity in the face of strident criticism and insults is practice.
• Assuming that pseudo-technical labeling equals inoculation is a delusion pattern peculiar to geekdom.
• An interpersonal interaction is open if both parties are seeking to trade or discover information. It is closed if even one party is seeking status validation, conflict or harmony instead.
• So you get the following four basic types of attitude informing an interaction: Condescension: I am better than you and for you Contempt: I am better than you and against you Supplication: I am worse than you and for you Insolence: I am worse than you and against you
• The key to conflict without ego is the observation that you cannot get mad at facts.
• in routine negotiations, almost all the work is done away from the actual negotiating table, and before the critical face-to-face encounters.
• The best way to avoid negotiation altogether is to do so much pre-work that you understand the other parties’ options, costs and benefits better than they do, and can actually work out the “best for everybody” solution before you even get to the table.
• Revenge emerges when you add up two traits: an innate tendency towards vindictiveness and a capacity for long-range planning.
• The modern world is an uneasy mix of tribal and non-tribal dynamics.
• never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
• Our world is not fully civilized.
• To put it in the context of the most familiar battleground for most of us, if you do not push back when pushed in the office, you will have people walking all over you.
• Status is a matter of social perception.
• If you aren’t deceiving others, you are likely deceiving yourself. Or you’re in denial.
• Any sort of deception, to be justifiable within your personal morality, needs to be driven by a certain amount of moral certainty regarding your own intentions.
• When a true failure looms, you must play or be played.
• Wanting to be liked is a significant need that must be overcome on the slightly evil path.
• In information wars, filters are power and useless data are weapons.
• When two parties have divergent agendas, the party that controls data flows is usually the one that wins. To control how a decision is framed and made, you have to control the data flows that feed into that decision.
• being intelligently data-driven is simply about asking the right questions at the right time, which is something that takes hard thinking and a sense of timing rather than technical skills.It
• more data is only useful if it is being generated and intelligently analyzed faster than options are expiring due to a ticking clock.
• They key is to recognize that CDDDs do everything they do out of risk aversion, but are hazy about what data reduce what risks and uncertainties.
• If you know that a decision will tend towards a default option you like, if left unmade, you can suggest delaying or deferring a decision until more data is in.
• More generally, sending people off on useless learning missions and digital wild-goose chases is one of the best ways to distract them from substantive issues.
• A real thinker will not move on to technical questions about sampling (“is this i.i.d?”) before thinking through the qualitative and narrative questions (“are women really the target market here?”).
• Sometimes conversations just start off wrong. So wrong that you need to hit the reboot button.
• The basic trick is simple: you repeat all or part of their opening line, but with zero emotional content. Deadpan.
• When faced with an emotionally charged stimulus, your own emotional reaction will race ahead and censor the options generated by your cognitive reaction.
• The key to giving way graciously, as it happens, is to slow your movements down to below the walking tempo of the oncomer. This is a status win because slow movements are associated with higher status.
• The problem here with K is that she forgot the first rule of dueling: as the challenged party, you need to exercise your prerogative to choose the time, place and manner of combat.
• Impro by Keith Johnstone.
• Here’s the effective method: you need to interrupt as soon as you’ve roughly understood that there is an objectionable point being made (which can be before the speaker has finished making it), and before you’ve decided what to say. You do so by thinking out aloud, going “Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” or “Ehhhhummmmmm!” clearly, and stretching out your interrupt phrase over several seconds, until the interruptee shuts up and looks towards you.
• Important people feel confident enough about their situational status to effectively say, “I disagree, but I am important enough that you should all shut up and wait while I figure out why, even if it means wasting 10 seconds of everybody’s time.”
• Question evasion is a highly-recognizable behavior, even when done well.
• The key is to make the original decision dependent on another decision which requires your subjective interpretation of some emotion-laden missing information.
• By injecting enough subjective and emotion-laden information into a decision indirectly, you can make it impossible for others to question your right to make the call unilaterally.
• For the first law, in place of win-win or no-deal, I offer you: adult-adult or no deal.
• It is important to avoid demanding, or promising, absolute loyalty.
• When you deal with adults, loyalty is not a value you have to apply but a budget you have to manage.
• The second law is about drawing a good line in the sand between slightly evil and true evil: any loyalty you offer or accept has to be contingent but sincere.
• The third law of slightly evil loyalty: never be your own #1.
• To summarize: Adult-adult or no deal: don’t ask for, or offer, absolute loyalties Contingent but sincere: don’t play loyalty games Don’t be your own #1: it is easier to Be Slightly Evil on behalf of others
• Ultimately, the only rules that actually matter in competition are the ones individuals and organizations impose on themselves and voluntarily follow.
• Habits and automation are at the heart of the vulnerability that makes inside-the-tempo attacks possible.

"ALGORITHMS TO LIVE BY: THE COMPUTER SCIENCE OF HUMAN DECISIONS" by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

• But an algorithm is just a finite sequence of steps used to solve a problem, and algorithms are much broader—and older by far—than the computer.
• Long before algorithms were ever used by machines, they were used by people.
• Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age.
• Applying the lens of computer science to everyday life has consequences at many scales. Most immediately, it offers us practical, concrete suggestions for how to solve specific problems.
• At the next level, computer science gives us a vocabulary for understanding the deeper principles at play in each of these domains.
• Examining cognition as a means of solving the fundamentally computational problems posed by our environment can utterly change the way we think about human rationality.
• Instead, tackling real-world tasks requires being comfortable with chance, trading off time with accuracy, and using approximations.
• Over the past decade or two, behavioral economics has told a very particular story about human beings: that we are irrational and error-prone, owing in large part to the buggy, idiosyncratic hardware of the brain.
• Life is full of problems that are, quite simply, hard.
• The 37% Rule* derives from optimal stopping’s most famous puzzle, which has come to be known as the “secretary problem.”
• Instead, the optimal solution takes the form of what we’ll call the Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for “looking”—that is, exploring your options, gathering data—in which you categorically don’t choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the “leap” phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase.
• As the applicant pool grows, the exact place to draw the line between looking and leaping settles to 37% of the pool, yielding the 37% Rule: look at the first 37% of the applicants,* choosing none, then be ready to leap for anyone better than all those you’ve seen so far.
• Every day we are constantly forced to make decisions between options that differ in a very specific dimension: do we try new things or stick with our favorite ones?
• Simply put, exploration is gathering information, and exploitation is using the information you have to get a known good result.
• The old adage tells us that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” but the math tells us why: the unknown has a chance of being better, even if we actually expect it to be no different, or if it’s just as likely to be worse.
• Exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best.
• If the Gittins index is too complicated, or if you’re not in a situation well characterized by geometric discounting, then you have another option: focus on regret.
• These regrets are often about the things we failed to do, the options we never tried.
• Regret is the result of comparing what we actually did with what would have been best in hindsight.
• Sorting is at the very heart of what computers do.
• sorting is essential to working with almost any kind of information.
• After all, one of the main reasons things get sorted is to be shown in useful form to human eyes, which means that sorting is also key to the human experience of information.
• This is the first and most fundamental insight of sorting theory. Scale hurts.
• Worst-case analysis lets us make hard guarantees: that a critical process will finish in time, that deadlines won’t be blown.
• Computer science has developed a shorthand specifically for measuring algorithmic worst-case scenarios: it’s called “Big-O” notation.
• Big-O notation has a particular quirk, which is that it’s inexact by design.
• Big-O notation deliberately sheds fine details, what emerges is a schema for dividing problems into different broad classes.
• Computer science, as undergraduates are taught, is all about tradeoffs.
• The basic principle is this: the effort expended on sorting materials is just a preemptive strike against the effort it’ll take to search through them later.
• Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.
• Caching plays a critical role in the architecture of memory, and it underlies everything from the layout of processor chips at the millimeter scale to the geography of the global Internet.
• The idea of keeping around pieces of information that you refer to frequently is so powerful that it is used in every aspect of computation.
• As it explains, the goal of cache management is to minimize the number of times you can’t find what you’re looking for in the cache and must go to the slower main memory to find it; these are known as “page faults” or “cache misses.”
• The optimal cache eviction policy—essentially by definition, Bélády wrote—is, when the cache is full, to evict whichever item we’ll need again the longest from now.
• The LRU principle is effective because of something computer scientists call “temporal locality”: if a program has called for a particular piece of information once, it’s likely to do so again in the near future.
• LRU teaches us that the next thing we can expect to need is the last one we needed, while the thing we’ll need after that is probably the second-most-recent one. And the last thing we can expect to need is the one we’ve already gone longest without.
• This fundamental insight—that in-demand files should be stored near the location where they are used—also translates into purely physical environments.
• Having a cache is efficient, but having multiple levels of caches—from smallest and fastest to largest and slowest—can be even better.
• The left-side insertion rule, Noguchi specifies, has to be followed for old files as well as new ones: every time you pull out a file to use its contents, you must put it back as the leftmost file when you return it to the box. And when you search for a file, you always start from the left-hand side as well. The most recently accessed files are thus the fastest to find.
• The Noguchi Filing System clearly saves time when you’re replacing something after you’re done using it.
• Unavoidably, the larger a memory is, the more time it takes to search for and extract a piece of information from it.
• Getting Things Done advocates a policy of immediately doing any task of two minutes or less as soon as it comes to mind. Rival bestseller Eat That Frog! advises beginning with the most difficult task and moving toward easier and easier things.
• The Now Habit suggests first scheduling one’s social engagements and leisure time and then filling the gaps with work—rather than the other way around, as we so often do.
• By having the shortest washing times at the start, and the shortest drying times at the end, you maximize the amount of overlap—when the washer and dryer are running simultaneously. Thus you can keep the total amount of time spent doing laundry to the absolute minimum. Johnson’s analysis had yielded scheduling’s first optimal algorithm: start with the lightest wash, end with the smallest hamper.
• Thus we encounter the first lesson in single-machine scheduling literally before we even begin: make your goals explicit.
• This is something of a theme in computer science: before you can have a plan, you must first choose a metric.
• Minimizing the sum of completion times leads to a very simple optimal algorithm called Shortest Processing Time: always do the quickest task you can.
• Shortest Processing Time gets things done.
• Again, there’s no way to change the total amount of time your work will take you, but Shortest Processing Time may ease your mind by shrinking the number of outstanding tasks as quickly as possible.
• A commitment to fastidiously doing the most important thing you can, if pursued in a head-down, myopic fashion, can lead to what looks for all the world like procrastination.
• As business writer and coder Jason Fried says, “Feel like you can’t proceed until you have a bulletproof plan in place? Replace ‘plan’ with ‘guess’ and take it easy.” Scheduling theory bears this out.
• Every time you switch tasks, you pay a price, known in computer science as a context switch.
• Every context switch is wasted time.
• This is thrashing: a system running full-tilt and accomplishing nothing at all.
• Another way to avert thrashing before it starts is to learn the art of saying no.
• The moral is that you should try to stay on a single task as long as possible without decreasing your responsiveness below the minimum acceptable limit.
• This is the crux of Bayes’s argument. Reasoning forward from hypothetical pasts lays the foundation for us to then work backward to the most probable one.
• The best way to make good predictions, as Bayes’s Rule shows us, is to be accurately informed about the things you’re predicting.
• Once you know about overfitting, you see it everywhere.
• Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, echoes Jobs’s words of caution: “It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.
• Simply put, Cross-Validation means assessing not only how well a model fits the data it’s given, but how well it generalizes to data it hasn’t seen.
• But as computer scientists have discovered over the past few decades, there are entire classes of problems where a perfect solution is essentially unreachable, no matter how fast we make our computers or how cleverly we program them.
• It’s possible to quantify the difficulty of a problem. And some problems are just … hard.
• One of the simplest forms of relaxation in computer science is known as Constraint Relaxation. In this technique, researchers remove some of the problem’s constraints and set about solving the problem they wish they had. Then, after they’ve made a certain amount of headway, they try to add the constraints back in. That is, they make the problem temporarily easier to handle before bringing it back to reality.
• If you can’t solve the problem in front of you, solve an easier version of it—and then see if that solution offers you a starting point, or a beacon, in the full-blown problem.
• Sometimes the best solution to a problem is to turn to chance rather than trying to fully reason out an answer.
• Laplace’s proposal pointed to a profound general truth: when we want to know something about a complex quantity, we can estimate its value by sampling from it.
• Today the Monte Carlo Method is one of the cornerstones of scientific computing.
• Algorithms for finding prime numbers date back at least as far as ancient Greece, where mathematicians used a straightforward approach known as the Sieve of Erastothenes.
• The Miller-Rabin primality test, as it’s now known, provides a way to quickly identify even gigantic prime numbers with an arbitrary degree of certainty.
• Time and space are at the root of the most familiar tradeoffs in computer science, but recent work on randomized algorithms shows that there’s also another variable to consider: certainty.
• When it comes to stimulating creativity, a common technique is introducing a random element, such as a word that people have to form associations with.
• Wikipedia, for instance, offers a “Random article” link, and Tom has been using it as his browser’s default homepage for several years, seeing a randomly selected Wikipedia entry each time he opens a new window.
• First, from Hill Climbing: even if you’re in the habit of sometimes acting on bad ideas, you should always act on good ones. Second, from the Metropolis Algorithm: your likelihood of following a bad idea should be inversely proportional to how bad an idea it is. Third, from Simulated Annealing: you should front-load randomness, rapidly cooling out of a totally random state, using ever less and less randomness as time goes on, lingering longest as you approach freezing. Temper yourself—literally.
• The foundation of human connection is protocol—a shared convention of procedures and expectations, from handshakes and hellos to etiquette, politesse, and the full gamut of social norms.
• In a packet-switched network, rather than using a dedicated channel for each connection, senders and receivers atomize their messages into tiny shards known as “packets,” and merge them into the communal flow of data—a bit like postcards moving at the speed of light.
• In packet switching, on the other hand, the proliferation of paths in a growing network becomes a virtue: there are now that many more ways for data to flow, so the reliability of the network increases exponentially with its size.
• Exponential Backoff has become the default way of handling almost all cases of networking failure or unreliability.
• Exponential Backoff is also a critical part of networking security, when successive password failures in logging into an account are punished by an exponentially increasing lockout period. This prevents a hacker from using a “dictionary attack” against an account, cycling through potential password after password until eventually they get lucky.
• In human society, we tend to adopt a policy of giving people some finite number of chances in a row, then giving up entirely. Three strikes, you’re out. This pattern prevails by default in almost any situation that requires forgiveness, lenience, or perseverance. Simply put, maybe we’re doing it wrong.
• Essentially, AIMD takes the form of someone saying, “A little more, a little more, a little more, whoa, too much, cut way back, okay a little more, a little more…” Thus it leads to a characteristic bandwidth shape known as the “TCP sawtooth”—steady upward climbs punctuated by steep drops.
• The lesson of the TCP sawtooth is that in an unpredictable and changing environment, pushing things to the point of failure is indeed sometimes the best (or the only) way to use all the resources to their fullest. What matters is making sure that the response to failure is both sharp and resilient.
• As the saying goes, “the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
• When a networking buffer fills up, what typically happens is called Tail Drop: an unceremonious way of saying that every packet arriving after that point is simply rejected, and effectively deleted.
• Dropped packets are the Internet’s primary feedback mechanism.
• Smoothing out bursts is great if you are, on average, clearing things at least as quickly as they’re arriving—but if your average workload exceeds your average work rate, no buffer can work miracles.
• One of the fundamental principles of buffers, be they for packets or patrons, is that they only work correctly when they are routinely zeroed out.
• The feeling that one needs to look at everything on the Internet, or read all possible books, or see all possible shows, is bufferbloat.
• We used to request dedicated circuits with others; now we send them packets and wait expectantly for ACKs. We used to reject; now we defer.
• With their inherent latency, buffers are bad for most interactive processes.
• Capacity does matter sometimes: for transferring large files, bandwidth is key.
• For interhuman applications, however, a quick turnaround time is often far more important, and what we really need are more Concordes.
• As Alan Turing proved in 1936, a computer program can never tell you for sure whether another program might end up calculating forever without end—except by simulating the operation of that program and thus potentially going off the deep end itself.
• Here’s the problem. No matter what your accomplice does, it’s always better for you to defect.
• A dominant strategy avoids recursion altogether, by being the best response to all of your opponent’s possible strategies—so you don’t even need to trouble yourself getting inside their head at all. A dominant strategy is a powerful thing.
• Properly appreciating the mechanics of financial bubbles begins with understanding auctions.
• Investors are said to fall into two broad camps: “fundamental” investors, who trade on what they perceive as the underlying value of a company, and “technical” investors, who trade on the fluctuations of the market.
• Adopting a strategy that doesn’t require anticipating, predicting, reading into, or changing course because of the tactics of others is one way to cut the Gordian knot of recursion. And sometimes that strategy is not just easy—it’s optimal.
• If changing strategies doesn’t help, you can try to change the game.
• Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.
• First, there are cases where computer scientists and mathematicians have identified good algorithmic approaches that can simply be transferred over to human problems. The 37% Rule, the Least Recently Used criterion for handling overflowing caches, and the Upper Confidence Bound as a guide to exploration are all examples of this.
• Second, knowing that you are using an optimal algorithm should be a relief even if you don’t get the results you were looking for.
• Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results—which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between “process” and “outcome.”
• A theme that came up again and again in our interviews with computer scientists was: sometimes “good enough” really is good enough.
• One of the implicit principles of computer science, as odd as it may sound, is that computation is bad: the underlying directive of any good algorithm is to minimize the labor of thought.
• The deeper point is that subtle changes in design can radically shift the kind of cognitive problem posed to human users.

"59 SECONDS: THINK A LITTLE, CHANGE A LOT" by Richard Wiseman

• The message is clear—those who do not feel in control of their lives are less successful, and less psychologically and physically healthy, than those who do feel in control.
• Happiness does not just make you enjoy life more; it actually affects how successful you are in both your personal life and your professional life.
• Regardless of the method used, the overall result was clear—happiness doesn’t just flow from success; it actually causes it.
• Happiness makes people more sociable and altruistic, it increases how much they like themselves and others, it improves their ability to resolve conflict, and it strengthens their immune systems. The cumulative effect means that people have more satisfying and successful relationships, find more fulfilling careers, and live longer, healthier lives.
• The bad news is that research shows that about 50 percent of your overall sense of happiness is genetically determined, and so cannot be altered.7 The better news is that another 10 percent is attributable to general circumstances (educational level, income, whether you are married or single, etc.) that are difficult to change. However, the best news is that the remaining 40 percent is derived from your day-to-day behavior and the way you think about yourself and others.
• One of the most important writing techniques for boosting happiness revolves around the psychology of gratitude.
• The results revealed that those who had described their best possible future ended up significantly happier than those in the other groups.
• In short, when it comes to an instant fix for everyday happiness, certain types of writing have a surprisingly quick and large impact. Expressing gratitude, thinking about a perfect future, and affectionate writing have been scientifically proven to work—and all they require is a pen, a piece of paper, and a few moments of your time.
• There are many things in your life for which to be grateful.
• Our memory of experiences easily becomes distorted over time (you edit out the terrible trip on the airplane and just remember those blissful moments relaxing on the beach). Our goods, however, tend to lose their appeal by becoming old, worn-out, and outdated.
• So, scientifically speaking, if you want some real retail therapy, help yourself by helping others. It has a direct effect on your brain that in turn makes you feel happier.
• Want to buy happiness? Then spend your hard-earned cash on experiences.
• When it comes to happiness, remember, it is experiences that represent really good value for the money.
• The science shows that exactly the opposite is true—people become much happier after providing for others rather than themselves.
• A few dollars spent on others may be one of the best investments that you ever make.
• People behave in highly predictable ways when they experience certain emotions and thoughts.
• Get people to behave in a certain way and you cause them to feel certain emotions and have certain thoughts.
• People smile when they are happy, but they also feel happier because they are smiling.
• The message from this type of work is simple: if you want to cheer yourself up, behave like a happy person.
• There are a number of happiness-inducing behaviors that can be quickly incorporated into your everyday life. Most important of all, smile more.
• So, to maximize happiness, choose intentional change over circumstantial change. Make the effort to start a new hobby, begin a major project, or try a sport that you have never tried before.
• A large body of research has shown that doing a favor for someone often results in their giving significantly more in return.
• So, for maximum persuasion, remember: save your favors for strangers, it really is the thought that counts, and the favor has to appear to come from the heart, not the head.
• To prime your mind for thinking creatively, spend a few moments describing a typical musician or artist. List their typical behaviors, lifestyle, and appearance.
• For successful lie detection, jettison the behavioral myths surrounding the Anxiety Hypothesis and look for signs more commonly associated with having to think hard.
• According to Hancock, people are reluctant to lie in e-mails because their words are recorded and what they say can come back to haunt them. So if you want to minimize the risk of a lie, ask others to e-mail you.
• Research shows that people have a strong tendency to underestimate how long a project will take and that people working in groups are especially likely to have unrealistic expectations.
• Even when they are trying to be realistic, people tend to imagine that everything will go according to plan, and they do not consider the inevitable unexpected delays and unforeseen problems.
• Develop the Gratitude Attitude. Having people list three things that they are grateful for in life or three events that have gone especially well over the past week can significantly increase their level of happiness for about a month. This, in turn, can cause them to be more optimistic about the future and can improve their physical health.
• Be a Giver. People become much happier after even the smallest acts of kindness. Those who give a few dollars to the needy, buy a small surprise gift for a loved one, donate blood, or help a friend are inclined to experience a fast-acting and significant boost in happiness.
• Hang a Mirror in Your Kitchen. Placing a mirror in front of people when they are presented with different food options results in a remarkable 32 percent reduction in their consumption of unhealthy food. Seeing their own reflection makes them more aware of their body and more likely to eat food that is good for them.
• Buy a Potted Plant for the Office. Adding plants to an office results in a 15 percent boost in the number of creative ideas reported by male employees and helps their female counterparts to produce more original solutions to problems. The plants help reduce stress and induce good moods, which, in turn, promote creativity.
• Touch People Lightly on The Upper Arm. Lightly touching someone on their upper arm makes them far more likely to agree to a request because the touch is unconsciously perceived as a sign of high status. In one dating study, the touch produced a 20 percent increase in the number of people who accepted an invitation to dance in a nightclub and a 10 percent increase in those who would give their telephone number to a stranger on the street.
• Write About Your Relationship. Partners who spend a few moments each week committing their deepest thoughts and feelings about their relationship to paper boost the chances that they will stick together by more than 20 percent. Such “expressive writing” results in partners’ using more positive language when they speak to each other, leading to a healthier and happier relationship.
• Deal with Potential Liars by Closing Your Eyes and Asking for an E-mail. The most reliable cues to lying are in the words that people use, with liars tending to lack detail, use more “ums” and “ahs,” and avoid self-references (“me,” “mine,” “I”). In addition, people are about 20 percent less likely to lie in an e-mail than in a telephone call, because their words are on record and so are more likely to come back and haunt them.
• Praise Children’s Effort over Their Ability. Praising a child’s effort rather than their ability (“Well done. You must have tried very hard”) encourages them to try regardless of the consequences, therefore sidestepping fear of failure. This, in turn, makes them especially likely to attempt challenging problems, find these problems enjoyable, and try to solve them on their own time.
• Visualize Yourself Doing, Not Achieving. People who visualize themselves taking the practical steps needed to achieve their goals are far more likely to succeed than those who simply fantasize about their dreams becoming a reality. One especially effective technique involves adopting a third-person perspective: those who visualize themselves as others see them are about 20 percent more successful than those who adopt a first-person point of view.
• Consider Your Legacy. Asking people to spend just a minute imagining a close friend standing up at their funeral and reflecting on their personal and professional legacy helps them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality.

"The Millionaire Next Door" by Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko

• Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier.
• Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.
• Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and most of all, self-discipline.
• Seven common denominators among those who successfully build wealth:
• They live well below their means.
• They allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
• They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.
• Their parents did not provide economic outpatient care.
• Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.
• They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
• They chose the right occupation.
• Multiply your age times your realized pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be.
• If you are in the top quartile for wealth accumulation, you are a PAW, or prodigious accumulator of wealth. If you are in the bottom quartile, you are a UAW, or under accumulator of wealth.
• To be well position in the PAW category, you should be worth twice the level of wealth expected.
• What are three words that profile the affluent? Frugal, frugal, frugal.
• Being frugal is the cornerstone of wealth-building.
• The affluent tend to answer “yes” to three questions:
• Were your parents very frugal?
• Are you frugal?
• Is your spouse more frugal than you are?
• Great offense in economic terms means that household generates an income significantly higher than the norm. Great defense is when a household is frugal when it comes to spending for consumer goods and services.
• Most people will never become wealth in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyper-consumer.
• The foundation stone of wealth accumulation is defense, and this defense should be anchored by budgeting and planning.
• They become millionaires by budgeting and controlling expenses, and they maintain their affluent status the same way.
• Financially independent people are happier than those in their same income/age cohort who are not financially secure.
• On average, millionaires spend significantly more hours per month studying and planning their future investment decisions, as well as managing their current investments, than high-income non-millionaires.
• You would be wise to use your expertise to help you make your investments.
• Small expenses become big expenses over time. Small amounts invested periodically also become large investments over time.
• To build wealth, minimize your realized (taxable) income and maximize your unrealized income (wealth/capital appreciation without a cash flow).
• It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood.
• You will never become financially independent without purchasing investments that appreciate without income realization.
• If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income.
• Living in less costly areas can enable you to spend less and to invest more of your income.
• People who become wealthy allocate their time, energy, and money in ways consistent with enhancing their net worth.
• There is a strong positive correlation between investment planning and wealth accumulation.
• Begin earning and investing early in your adult life.
• There is an inverse relationship between the time spent purchasing luxury items such as cars and clothes and the time spent planning one’s financial future.
• Planning and controlling consumption are key factors underlying wealth accumulation.
• Having adult children who are UAWs greatly reduces the probability that their parents will ever become wealthy.
• Planning and wealth accumulation are significant correlates even among investors with modest incomes.
• Operate your household like a productive business. The best businesses hire the best people. They also patronize the best suppliers. Utilizing the best human resources and top suppliers are two major reasons the most productive organizations succeed while others fail.
• One of the great advantages of being a self-employed business owner is the ability to leverage your organization’s patronage habits.
• In general, the more dollars adult children receive, the fewer they accumulate, while those who are given fewer dollars accumulate more.
• Whatever your income, always live below your means.
• Discipline and initiative can’t be purchased like automobiles or clothing off a rack.
• Rules for affluent parents and productive children:
• Never tell children that their parents are wealthy.
• No matter how wealthy you are, teach your children discipline and frugality.
• Assure that your children won’t realize you’re affluent until after they have established a mature, disciplined, and adult lifestyle and profession.
• Minimize discussions of the items that each child and grandchild will inherit or receive as gifts.
• Never give cash or other significant gifts to your adult children as part of a negotiation strategy.
• Stay out of your adult children’s family matters.
• Don’t try to compete with your children.
• Always remember that your children are individuals.
• Emphasize your children’s achievements, no matter how small, not their or your symbols of success.
• Tell your children that there are a lot of things more valuable than money.
• Self-employed people are four times more likely to be millionaires than those who work for others.

"Secrets of Mental Math" by Arthur Benjamin & Michael Shermer

• If I were forced to summarize my method in three words, I would say, “Left to right.”
• When you compute the answer from right to left (as you probably do on paper), you generate the answer backward. That’s what makes it so hard to do math in your head.
• To paraphrase an old saying, there are three components to success -- simplify, simplify, simplify.
• You need to know your multiplication tables backward and forward.
• To find the number of years that it will take for your money to double, divide the number 70 by the rate of interest.
• A principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trails has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials.
• A psychological factor called the confirmation bias is where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs.
• The blind spot bias is one in which subjects can recognize the existence and influence in others of different cognitive biases, but they fail to see those same biases in themselves.
• The Baloney Detector Kit:
• How reliable is the source of the claim?
• Does this source often make similar claims?
• Have the claims been verified by another source?
• How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought?
• Does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s conclusion, or a different one?
• Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomena, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing explanation?
• If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?
• Do the claimants’ personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
• You’ve probably heard that math is the language of science, or the language of Nature is mathematics. Well, it’s true. The more we understand the universe, the more we discover its mathematical connections.
• Mathematics, particularly arithmetic, is a powerful and dependable tool for day-to-day use that enables us to handle our complicated lives with more assurance and accuracy.
• How to multiply, in your head, and two-digit number by eleven:
• Simply add the digits.
• Place the sum between the two digits.
• If the sum is greater than 9, carry the tens to the next digit.
• To square a two-digit number that ends in 5, you need to remember only two things:
• The answer begins by multiplying the first digit by the next higher digit.
• The answer ends in 25.
• If I were forced to summarize my method in three words, I would say, “Left to right.”
• To calculate a 15% tip:
• Calculate 10% of the bill (by moving the decimal place).
• Cut the new number in half (this is 5%)
• Sum the 10% and 5% numbers to get 15%.
• When you compute the answer from right to left (as you probably do on paper), you generate the answer backward. That’s what makes it so hard to do math in your head.
• A fundamental principle of mental arithmetic -- namely, to simplify your problem by breaking it into smaller, more manageable parts. This is the key to virtually every method you will learn in this book. To paraphrase an old saying, there are three components to success -- simplify, simplify, simplify.
• Most human memory can hold only about seven or eight digits at a time, this is about as large a problem as you can handle without resorting to artificial memory devices, like fingers, calculators, or mnemonics.
• When subtracting two-digit numbers, your goal is to simplify the problem so that you are reduced to subtracting (or adding) a one-digit number.
• If a two-digit subtraction problem would require borrowing, then round the second number up (to a multiple of ten). Subtract the rounded number, then add back the difference.
• Notice that for each pair of numbers that add up to 100, the first digits (on the left) add to 9 and the last digits (on the right) add to 10.
• Complements are determined from left to right. The first digits add to 9 and the second digits add to 10 (An exception occurs in numbers ending in 0).
• Complements allow you to convert difficult subtraction problems into straightforward addition problems.
• You need to know your multiplication tables backward and forward.
• An especially easy type of mental multiplication problem involves numbers that begin with five. When the five is multiplied by an even digit, the first product will be a multiple of 100, which makes the resulting addition problem a snap.
• You saw how useful rounding up can be when it comes to subtraction. The same goes for multiplication, especially when you are multiplying numbers that end in eight or nine.
• I can assure you from experience that doing mental calculations is just like riding a bicycle or typing. It might seem impossible at first, but once you’ve mastered it, you will never forget how to do it.
• How to square a two-digit number:
• Round the number up & down by the same amount to a multiple of ten.
• Multiply the rounded numbers.
• Add the product and the square of the amount rounded.
• To factor a number means to break it down into one-digit numbers that, when multiplied together, give the original number.
• The cube of a number is that number multiplied by itself twice.
• How to count on your fingers:
• To represent numbers 0 through 5, all you have to do is raise the equivalent number of fingers on your hand.
• To represent numbers 6 through 9, place your thumb on your pinky through index finger.
• With three-digit numbers, hold the hundreds digit on your left hand and the tens digit on your right.
• How to check divisibility:
• 2 -- check if the last digit is even
• 4 -- check if the two-digit number at the end is divisible by 4
• 8 -- check if the last three digits are divisible by 8
• 3 -- check if the sum of the digits is divisible by 3
• 9 -- check if the sum of the digits is divisible by 9
• 6 -- check if the number is divisible by 3 and even
• 5 -- check if the number ends in 0 or 5
• To find the number of years that it will take for your money to double, divide the number 70 by the rate of interest.
• To check computations, add the numbers again in the opposite direction and check for a match. By adding the numbers in a different order, you are less likely to make the same mistake twice.
• You can check sums with the mod sums method.
• Sum the individual digits of each number in the sum.
• Repeat, until you have a single digit for each number.
• Sum the new digits, until you have a single digit, this is the mod sum.
• Compute the mod sum of the answer.
• The mod sums should be the same.
• Mnemonics work by converting incomprehensible data (such as digit sequences) to something more meaningful.
• Phonetic code for memorizing digits:
• 1 -- t or d sound
• 2 -- n sound
• 3 -- m sound
• 4 -- r sound
• 5 -- l sound
• 6 -- j, ch, or sh sound
• 7 -- k or hard g sound
• 8 -- f or v sound
• 9 -- p or b sound
• 0 -- z or s sound
• Aside from improving your ability to memorize long sequences of numbers, mnemonics can be used to store partial results in the middle of a difficult mental calculation.
• Without using mnemonics, the average human memory can hold only about seven or eight digits at a time.
• A principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trails has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials.
• A psychological factor called the confirmation bias is where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs.
• The confirmation bias explains how conspiracy theories work. People who adhere to a particular conspiracy theory will look for and find little factoids here and there that seem to indicate that it might be true, while ignoring the vast body of evidence that points to another more likely explanation.
• The confirmation bias also helps explain how astrologers, tarot-card readers, and psychics seem so successful as “reading” people.
• People typically invoke the term miracle to describe really unusual events, events whose odds of occurring are a “million to one.”
• This is a short primer on how science works. In our quest to understand how the world works, we need to determine what is real and what is not, what happens by chance and what happens because of some particular predictable cause. The problem we face is that the human brain was designed by evolution to pay attention to the really unusual events and ignore the vast body of data flowing by; as such, thinking statistically and with probabilities does not come naturally. Science, to that extent, does not come naturally. It takes some training and practice.
• The data do not just speak for themselves. Data are filtered through very subjective and biased brains. The self-serving bias dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us.
• The blind spot bias is one in which subjects can recognize the existence and influence in others of different cognitive biases, but they fail to see those same biases in themselves.
• How does science deal with such subjective biases? How do we know when a claim is bogus or real? We want to be open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don’t want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out. This problem led us at the Skeptics Society to create an educational tool called the Baloney Detector Kit. In the Baloney Detector Kit, we suggest ten questions to ask when encountering any claim that can help us decide if we are being too open-minded in accepting it or too closed-minded in rejecting it.
• How reliable is the source of the claim?
• Pseudo-scientists have a habit of going well beyond the facts, so when individuals make numerous extraordinary claims, they may be more than just iconoclasts.
• Science is messier than most people realize.
• Does this source often make similar claims?
• What we are looking for here is a pattern of fringe thinking that consistently ignores or distorts data.
• Have the claims been verified by another source?
• Typically pseudo-scientists will make statements that are unverified, or verified by a source within their own belief circle.
• How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• An extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how it fits.
• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought?
• This is the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek confirmatory evidence and reject or ignore disconfirmatory evidence. The confirmation bias is powerful and pervasive and is almost impossible for any of us to avoid. It is why the methods of science that emphasize checking and rechecking, verification and replication, and especially attempts to falsify a claim are so critical.
• Does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s conclusion, or a different one?
• The theory of evolution, for example, is proven through a convergence of evidence from a number of independent lines of inquiry.
• Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomena, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing explanation?
• This is a classic debate strategy -- criticize your opponent and never affirm what you believe in order to avoid criticism.
• If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?
• Do the claimants’ personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?

"Smart Couples Finish Rich" by David Bach

• Money has very little to do with love...and a lot to do with how much you fight.
• It takes very little money to make money...as long as you are patient and disciplined.
• Becoming rich is nothing more than a matter of committing and sticking to a systematic savings and investment plan.
• Everyone makes enough to invest.
• The truth is that most couples don’t have an income problem; what they have is a spending problem.
• Taxes and inflation are never going to be completely under control
• If the two of you don’t start talking about money, you’ll more than likely die broke.
• By planning your finances together as a couple, you will significantly improve your chances of becoming wealthy and being happier together.
• There are three fundamental truths of financial planning
• You can’t plan your finances if you don’t know where you’re starting from.
• You can’t plan your finances if you don’t know where you want to end up.
• In order to stay on track from your starting point to your destination, you have to monitor your progress.
• One of the worst things you can do when you want to move forward positively in a relationship and deal with your finances is to start jumping all over your partner about what he or she is not doing.
• Simply writing down a few meaningful goals can literally transform your future in just a matter of days.
• Life is totally fair. You get what you go for. Go for nothing and you get nothing. Go for something, and even if you miss your main goal, you might still achieve a lot of good stuff along the way.
• Goal-setting works. It’s a fact.
• Make sure your goals are based on your values.
• The clearer you are about your values, the easier it is to base your goals on them -- and the more you base your goals on your values, the more likely it is that you will achieve them.
• Make your goals specific, detailed, and with a finish line.
• In order to achieve a goal, you must know precisely what it is that you’re after.
• Put your top five goals in writing.
• People who write down their financial goals get rich. It’s a fact. Study after study has shown that writing down your goals makes it much more likely that you’ll achieve them.
• Start taking action toward your goals within 48 hours.
• Enlist help.
• No one ever reaches a really important goal without some sort of help from some other person. No matter what the situation is, human beings need other human beings to help them move forward.
• Get a rough idea of how much money it will cost to achieve your goals.
• Make sure your goals match your values...as a couple.
• The reality of life is that just about everyone in America makes enough money to be wealthy. So why aren’t we all rich? The problem isn’t our income; it’s what we spend.
• Over time money compounds. Over a lot of time money compounds dramatically!
• You can’t think your way to wealth; you must act your way to wealth.
• If you want to be rich, forget about the government’s help -- you need to plan for your own financial future.
• There are only a few ways of amassing substantial wealth in America today. You can inherit it, you can win it, you can marry it...or you can pay yourself first.
• Paying yourself first means putting aside a set percentage of every dollar you earn and investing it for your future in a pretax retirement account.
• To finish rich, you should pay yourself first by contributing as much as you can to a pretax retirement account.
• You should be saving 10 percent of your pretax income each year.
• That 10 percent you’re paying yourself first is not for anything else but your retirement.
• If you are not paying yourself the first 10 percent of your income, you are living beyond your means.
• If you want to be really rich, you should save 15 percent of your income.
• Paying yourself first as much as you can into your 401(k) plan is essential if you and your partner are really serious about getting -- and finishing -- rich.
• The single biggest mistake people make when it comes to 401(k) plans is not spending enough time reviewing their investment options before they decide which ones to pick.
• Every dollar you invest in your 401(k) investments is a pretax investment. When you invest on your own, you lose that advantage.
• Even if you participate in a 401(k) plan at work, you can still fund an IRA if you wish.
• With a traditional IRA, you must start taking money out when you reach the age of 70.5
• Couples who maximize their 401(k) plans and then contribute to Roth IRAs are setting themselves up to finish rich! I strongly recommend this.
• Contributions to a Roth IRA aren’t deductible, so they will not reduce your current taxes. On the other hand, the money you put in a Roth IRA will grow tax-deferred. Most important, when you take it out, it’s totally tax-free -- provided it’s been in the account for at least five years and you are over the age of 59.5.
• The first priority for both of you should always be to max out your contributions to a 401(k) or similar tax-deductible company-sponsored plan.
• When you convert a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA, you’ve got to pay income taxes on the money in the account.
• Unlike a traditional IRA, with its mandatory withdrawal requirement for people over 70.5, you can leave money in a Roth IRA for as long as you live.
• Remember, whether you’re dealing with an IRA, a 401(k), or any other kind of qualified retirement plan, the process is always the same: you open the account and then you decide where to invest the money.
• As a business owner, the best way to pay yourself first is by setting up one of the three types of retirement plans meant for self-employed people:
• Simplified Employee Pension Plan
• Defined Contribution Plan
• Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees
• Know what your money is doing.
• Make sure your retirement money is invested for growth.
• You can’t finish rich with fixed-return investments.
• The fact is, most people undercut their ability to finish rich by investing too conservatively.
• If your money is not growing at a rate at least 4 to 6 percentage points higher than inflation, you face the possibility of outliving your income. The bottom line here is that you need to invest for growth.
• Allocate your assets so that you maximize return while minimizing risk.
• The rule of thumb when it comes to investments is simple: the higher the return, the higher the risk.
• Take your age and subtract it from 110. The number you get is the percentage of your assets that should go into equities; the remainder should go into bonds or other fixed-income investments.
• If you’d prefer to keep things even simpler, forget about subtracting your age from anything -- just put 60 percent of your retirement in stocks and the remaining 40 percent into bonds. This allocation typically delivers about 90 percent of the stock market’s return with about 30 percent less risk.
• Invest in your company’s stock, but do your homework.
• Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
• Set aside a cushion of cash.
• The rates that money markets pay are usually three to four times what a typically bank account is paying.
• Both of you absolutely must write a will or set up a living trust.
• Wills and living trusts are not documents you should ever try to draft at home by yourself.
• A living trust is basically a legal document that does two things. First, it allows you to transfer ownership of any of your assets to a trust while you are still alive. Second, it designates who should be given those assets after you die. By naming yourself trustee of your trust, you can continue to control your assets -- which means that as long as you live, the transfer of ownership will have no practical impact on your ability to enjoy and manage your property.
• The three most common errors people make with wills and trusts:
• Not seeing it through
• Hiding documents where no one can find them
• Not keeping things up to date.
• Buy the best health coverage the two of you can afford.
• You must have health insurance. The only questions in your mind should be how do you get it and what are your options.
• Protect those who depend on you with life insurance.
• Protect yourselves and your incomes with disability insurance.
• If either of you is in your sixties, it’s time to consider long-term care coverage.
• Almost anything is possible if you just plan for it.
• Why investing in mutual funds makes sense:
• They are easy to invest in
• They offer instant diversification
• They offer professional money management
• They are cost-efficient
• They are liquid and easy to monitor
• They are boring
• A money-market account is a mutual fund that typically invests in very liquid, very safe, very short-term government securities.
• You should never invest in any mutual fund without first reading its prospectus.
• The ten biggest financial mistakes couples make:
• Having a 30-year mortgage
• Not taking credit-card debt seriously
• Trying to get rich quick by day-trading
• Buying stocks on margin
• Not starting a college-savings plan soon enough
• Not teaching your kids about money
• Neglecting to sign a prenuptial agreement
• Not having a greater purpose beyond the two of you
• Not figuring out who’s responsible for what
• Not getting professional financial advice
• By all means take out a 30-year mortgage, but under no circumstances should you take the full 30 years to repay it.
• When you make extra mortgage payments, pay close attention to your monthly statements. Banks often don’t credit mortgage accounts properly.
• Watch your mortgage statement like a hawk!
• If you discover any inaccuracies or mistakes in any of your credit reports, get them fixed immediately.
• The likelihood that you will get rich actively trading stocks is somewhere between slim and none.
• You shouldn’t even consider putting aside money for your kids’ college costs unless you are already putting at least 10 percent of your income into a pretax retirement account.
• The rich almost always use financial advisers.
• Eight golden rules for hiring a financial adviser:
• Hire locally
• Get a referral
• Check out the adviser's background
• Be prepared
• Always ask about the adviser's philosophy
• Go with your gut
• Be prepared to pay for the advice you get
• If you can’t get a referral, do your own research
• The best way to find a top-notch financial adviser is to ask the wealthiest person you know whom he or she uses as a financial adviser.
• Past performance is no guarantee of future performance!
• When your financial adviser makes you some money, take a moment to say “thank you.”
• Good people who work their tails off and add real value get job raises in bad economies.
• At work we don’t get what we deserve...we get what we go for.
• Raises don’t just fall into your lap; you have to go out and get them.
• Don’t be embarrassed to ask for more money. You deserve it.
• Self-employed people can give themselves raises by increasing what they charge for the goods and services they provide.
• Nine week plan to a raise:
• Get real
• How much do you earn on an hourly basis?
• Are you working for a good company?
• Are you currently in complaint mode or action mode?
• Write down exactly what you want
• Clean up the mess
• Get clear on how you add value
• Focus on the 80/20 rule
• Put yourself in play
• Practice asking for the raise
• Ask for the raise
• Nothing will change your attitude about your life and work faster than cleaning up your messes.
• If you have a cluttered office or cubicle or desk at work it’s going to cost you money -- and possibly a raise.
• Throw it away and see if it comes back...
• If it is really important and I throw it away, it will come back. Someone will always let me know if I’ve missed something important.
• Use three criteria to decide what to keep and what to throw away:
• Do you love it?
• Do you use it?
• Is it of either real or sentimental value?
• If you can’t answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, out it goes.
• The only reason a boss will give an employee a raise is because that employee is worth it -- in other words, because he or she adds value to the enterprise. So before you ask your boss to give you a raise, you need to make sure you understand exactly how you add value.
• 20 percent of what you do accounts for 80 percent of your results. In other words, 80 percent of your effort really doesn’t matter all that much.
• You may be paid for your time, but you are rewarded for your results.
• In simple terms, it’s all about focusing on what gets results, and cutting out everything else that wastes your time and energy.
• A big part of being able to get a raise is having the confidence to ask for one.
• It’s often a good idea to backup your verbal request with a written one. Putting almost anything in writing makes it more real. At the very least, it will make your request impossible to ignore.
• I can’t emphasize enough the importance of hearing yourself asking for the raise and stating your case out loud a half-dozen times.
• When asking for a raise -- whether of your boss or your customers -- remember to present your request in percentage terms, not a dollar amount.
• The three words “I love you” can never be heard enough.