Deskbound by Kelly Starrett

• Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV, and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.
• Unless we are asleep, we human beings are designed to move. Our normal physiology depends on this important fact.
• Our bodies are built for movement, and in turn movement keeps our bodies healthy. It is a symbiotic relationship that has allowed our species to survive.
• When we sit for long periods, the muscles in our lower bodies literally turn off and become inactive. Simultaneously, we automatically adopt positions that don’t utilize critical muscles and connective tissues that stabilize and support our trunk and spine. The result is compromised body function, and it causes a multitude of common and pernicious orthopedic problems, like back and neck dysfunction, carpal tunnel syndrome, and pelvic floor dysfunction.
• Here is a wonderful fact: your body adapts to the position that you assume for most of the day.
• What most people fail to realize is that the positions we assume for most of the day also impact the ways we move the rest of the day.
• Heel-striking is a problem, and it shouldn't exist in the running human.
• The problem can be distilled to three simple points:
• We are not moving enough.
• We are not moving well.
• We are not performing basic maintenance on our bodies.
• All you have to do is follow four simple guidelines:
• Reduce optional sitting in your life.
• For every 30 minutes that you are deskbound, move for at least 2 minutes.
• Prioritize position and mechanics whenever you can.
• Perform 10 to 15 minutes of daily maintenance on your body.
• Sitting only when necessary is one of the best things you can do for your health.
• Work is the biggest opportunity for change. Switch to a standing desk if you can.
• Sitting is an orthopedic disaster and can cause a myriad of body dysfunctions.
• Sitting means that you are not moving, and being sedentary can have significant negative long-term health impacts.
• Whether or not you consider yourself an athlete, you need to understand how to squat and pick something up off the ground without unduly challenging the structural integrity of your body. You still need full range of motion in your joints and tissues. And you still need to perform basic maintenance on your body.
• Our bodies are designed to be on the move constantly walking, running, squatting, gathering. But in this day and age, it is virtually impossible to remove all sitting from our lives.
• If you fail to provide stability for your spine by actively using your musculature and tissue systems, your body will attempt to create a sort of second-tier, or reactionary, stability on its own.
• In other words, if you don’t stabilize your body the right way, it will default to lesser-quality stability by rounding forward flexion) or arching back (overextension).
• When you sit down, the musculature of your lower body basically turns off.
• The moment you round your upper back, your shoulders internally rotated into a forward, collapsed position.
• When we treat someone in our physical therapy practice for low back pain, or when we see an athlete who is constantly tweaking his back during training, the first thing we address is spinal mechanics.
• Good movement always begins with the spine.
• When standing correctly proves difficult, all movement becomes more difficult.
• Belly-based breathing is the way you want to breathe when at rest and while performing normal day-to-day activities. Breathing diaphragmatically grants you access to your parasympathetic nervous system, which does the opposite of your sympathetic, fight-or-flight nervous system.
• Walking is one of the safest and easiest ways to add movement and increase your non-exercise activity throughout the day.
• Going barefoot as often as possible will not only help you walk as nature intended, but also increase your proprioception, improve your balance and posture, and strengthen your feet and legs.
• Bending and squatting are natural movements that all of use should be able to perform efficiently.
• If you’re unable to achieve a full-depth square due to range of motion restriction, spend 10 minutes hanging out the supported square positions [...].
• When you are able to sit in the bottom position without holding onto anything or complaining about your burning shins, you’ve passed the 10-minute squat test!
• Spending 10 minutes a day in a deep square is a great life goal.
• Standing at work is a far better option than sitting because standing is a gateway to movement.
• Simply put, a foot rail makes it easier to stand comfortably for longer periods. In fact, having some kind of foot support is so critical that we don’t consider a standing workstation complete or acceptable if it doesn't give you a place to rest your foot.
• The primary consideration with your keyboard and mouse is to have your forearms parallel to the floor while you're at work.
• The fact that standing is strenuous is a sign that your body is out of whack, because the human body is designed to be upright and moving.
• The three golden rules of sitting:
• Sit with a neutral spine.
• Get up and move every 20 to 30 minutes.
• Perform 10 to 15 minutes of daily body maintenance work.
• Sitting on the ground is the best option, but not all seated-on-the-ground positions are created equal. The one that trumps them all is lotus, a cross-legged sitting position in which you place each foot on top of the opposite thigh.
• We consider sitting cross-legged to be the second best seated-on-the-ground position.
• Try this test: it cross-legged on the floor. If you are unable to adopt this position comfortably, it means that you have lost your normal hip range of motion.
• Your body has a simple rule: use it or lose it.
• Standing is your best option because it enables you to comply with the greatest number of means to support spinal organization and stability. Standing also promotes more movement throughout the day.
• When standing is not an option, sitting on the ground or in a supported passive position is better than sitting upright in a chair.
• When you have to sit upright in a chair, prioritize your stiff trunk/neutral spine and add a second pillar of support by sitting cross-legged or manspreading.
• We recommend ignoring the backrest and armrests entirely and sitting at the edge of your seat, essentially turning the chair into a stool. Sit with your feet planted firmly on the ground, and be mindful of creating a stuff trunk.
• The ideal office chair is one that mimics a stool.
• It’s useful to have some basic guidelines about restoring your body’s mechanics.
• If something is not in their fight place, get it in the right place.
• If something is not moving, get it moving.
• Mobilize the area of localized pain.
• Work upstream (above) and downstream (below) of the problem to address contributing mechanical issues.
• One of the easiest ways to eliminate mechanics-based pain is to restore normal range of motion to the problem area. 
• We can’t begin to tell you that much pain and dysfunction would be eliminated if our joints could just move through the ranges of motion that they are supposed to.
• The deep (or full) square is a fundamental human shape that everyone should be able to adopt.
• Take the 10-minute squat test: try to hang out in a deep squat or supported squat for 10-minutes. If that seems like too much, break it up and do five 2-minute squatting sessions throughout the day.
• In other words, to improve your range of motion, you need to spend time mobilizing in the shape that you’re trying to change.
• It’s simple: if you apply pressure or compress any soft tissue of your body it shouldn’t hurt.
• Pain is an indication that your tissues are tight, restricted, stiff, or knotted up. Put simply, if you feel pain while you mobiles, your tissues are not normal.
• When it comes to mobilizing in a certain position--say, the bottom of the squat--or smashing a tissue such as your quads, the general rule is to stay in that position in those areas for at least two minutes.
• There is a simple yet efficient way to mobile the issues that are limiting your overhead position.
• Remember, you always want to mobilize in a position that is similar in shape to the movement and position you’re trying to change.
• If there’s one mobilization that deskbound people should commit to doing daily, this [couch stretch] is probably it. Most people are missing the critical ability to extend their hips efficiently.

Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle McDowell

• Big-O time is the language and metric we use to describe the efficiency of algorithms. Not understanding it thoroughly can really hurt you in developing an algorithm.
• In academia, Big-O describes an upper bound on the time.
• Big-omega is the equivalent concept but for lower bounds.
• Big-theta means both big-o and big-omega. That is, an algorithm is big-theta if it is both big-o and big-omega. Big-theta gives a tight bound on runtime.
• We rarely ever discuss best case time complexity, because it’s not a very useful concept. After all, we could take essentially any algorithm, special case some input, and then get an O(1) time in the best case.
• For many--probably most-algorithms, the worst and the expected case are the same.
• Big O, big omega, and big theta describe the upper, lower, and tight bounds for the runtime.
• Space complexity is a parallel concept to time complexity. If we need to create an array of size n, this will require O(n) space. If we need a two-dimensional array of size NxN, this will require O(n^2) space.
• When you have a recursive function that makes multiple calls, the runtime will often (but not always) look like O(branches^depth), where branches is the number of times each recursive call branches.
• Generally speaking, when you see an algorithm with multiple recursive calls, you’re looking at exponential runtime.
• Here’s a list of the absolute, must-have knowledge:
• Data Structures
• Linked lists
• Trees, tries, and graphs
• Stacks & queues
• Heaps
• vectors/ArrayLists
• Hash tables
• Algorithms
• Breadth-first search
• Depth-first search
• Binary search
• Merge sort
• Quick sort
• Concepts
• Bit manipulation
• Memory (stack vs heap)
• Recursion
• Dynamic programming
• big-O time & space
• In particular, hash tables are an extremely important topic. Make sure you are very comfortable with this data structure.
• Despite being possibly slow, a brute force algorithm is valuable to discuss. It’s a starting point for optimizations, and it helps you wrap your head around the problem.
• Once you have a brute force algorithm, you should work on optimizing it.
• Perhaps the most useful approach I’ve found for optimizing problems. “BUD” is a silly acronym for: bottlenecks, unnecessary work, duplicated work.
• A bottleneck is a part of your algorithm that slows down the overall runtime.
• Optimizing a bottleneck can make a big difference in your overall runtime.
• Be particularly aware of any “optimizations” you intuitively or automatically made.
• The best conceivable runtime is, literally, the best runtime you could conceive of a solution to a problem having. You can easily prove that there is no way you could be the BCR.
• Best Conceivable Runtime is not a “real” algorithm concept, in that you won’t find it in algorithm textbooks. But I have found it personally very useful, when solving problems myself, as well as while coaching people through problem.s
• One sign of a careful coder is that she doesn't make assumptions about the input. Instead, she validates that the input is what it should be, either through ASSERT statements or if-statements.
• All else being equal, of course stability is a good thing. No one wants to be fired or laid off. However, all else isn’t actually equal. The more stable companies are also often growing more slowly.
• A hash table is a data structure that maps keys to values for highly efficient lookup. There are a number of ways of implementing this.
• In some languages, arrays (often called lists in this case) are automatically resizable. The array or list will grow as you append items. In other languages, like Java, arrays are fixed length. The size is defined when you create the array.
• When you need an array-like data structure that offers dynamic resizing, you would usually use an ArrayList. An ArrayList is an array that resizes itself as needed while still providing O(1) access. A typical implementation is that when the array is full, the array doubles in size.
• A linked list is a data structure that represent a sequence nodes. In a singly linked list, each node points to the next node in linked list. A doubly linked list gives each node pointers to both the next node and the previous node.
• Unlike an array, a linked list does not provide constant time access to a particular index within the list. This means that if you'd like to find the K-th element in the list, you will need to iterate through K elements.
• The benefit of a linked list is that you can add and remove items from the beginning of the list in constant time.
• The “runner” technique means that you iterate through the linked list with two pointers simultaneously, with one ahead of the other. The “fast” node might be ahead by a fixed amount, or it might be hopping multiple nodes for each one node that the “slow” node iterates through.
• A stack can also be used to implement a recursive algorithm iteratively.
• A binary search tree is a binary tree in which every node fits a specific order property: all left descendants <= n < all right descendants. This must be true for each node n.
• A trie (sometimes called a prefix tree) is a funny data structure. It comes up a lot in interview questions, but algorithm textbooks don’t speed much time on this data structure.
• Bidirectional search is used to find the shortest path between a source and destination node. It operates by essentially running two simultaneous breadth-first searches, one from each node. When they search Coolidge, we have found a path.
• The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a highly efficient way to generate a list of primes. It works by recognizing that all non-prime numbers are divisible by a prime number.
• Be careful you don’t fall into a trap of constantly trying to find the “right” design pattern for a particular problem. You should create the design that works for that problem. In some cases it might be an established pattern, but in many other cases it is not.
• The Singleton pattern ensures that a class has only one instance and ensures access to the instance through the application. It can be useful in cases where you have a “global” object with exactly one instance.
• It should be noted that many people dislike the Singleton design pattern, even calling it an “anti-pattern”. One reason for this is that it can interfere with unit testing.
• The Factory Method offers an interface for creating an instance of a class, with its subclasses deciding which class to instantiate. You might want to implement this with the creator class being abstract and not providing an implementation for the Factory method. Or, you could have the Creator class be a concrete class that provides an implementation for the Factory method.
• While there are a large number of recursive problems, many follow similar patterns. A good hint that a problem is recursive is that it can be built off of subproblems.
• Recursive algorithm can be very space inefficient. Each recursive call adds a new layer to the stack, which means that if your algorithm resources to a depth of n, it uses at least O(n) memory.
• Dynamic programming is mostly just a matter of taking a recursive algorithm and finding the overlapping subproblems (that is, the repeated calls). You then cache those results for future recursive calls.
• One of the simplest examples of dynamic programming is computing the nth Fibonacci number. A good way to approach such a problem is often to implement it as a normal recursive solution, and then add the caching part.
• Drawing the recursive calls as a tree is a great way to figure out the runtime of a recursive algorithm.
• A system can be scaled one of two ways:
• Vertical scaling means increasing the resources of a specific node. For example, you might add additional memory to a server to improve its ability to handle load changes.
• Horizontal scaling means increasing the number of nodes. For example, you might add additional servers, thus decreasing the load on any one server.
• Typically, some frontend parts of a scalable website will be thrown behind a load balancer. This allows a system to distribute the load evenly so that one server doesn’t crash and take down the whole system. To do so, of course, you have to build out a network of cloned servers that all have essentially the same code and access to the same data.
• Sharding means splitting the data across multiple machines while ensuring you have a way of figuring out which data is one which machine.
• An in-memory cache can deliver very rapid results. It is a simply key-vale pairing and typically sits between your application layer and your data store.
• Slow operations should ideally be done asynchronously. Otherwise, a user might get stuck waiting and waiting for a process to complete.
• Some of the most important metrics around networking include:
• Bandwidth: This is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred in a unit of time. It is typically expressed in bits per second.
• Throughput: Whereas bandwidth is the maximum data that can be transferred in a unit of time, throughput is the actual amount of data that is transferred.
• Latency: This is how long it takes data to go from one end to the other. That is, it is the delay between the sander sending information and the receiver receiving it.
• MapReduce allows us to do a lot of processing in parallel, which makes processing huge amounts of data more scalable.
• MapReduce is often associated with Google, but it’s used much more broadly than that. A MapReduce program is typically used to process large amounts of data.
• Understanding the common sorting and searching algorithms is incredibly valuable, as many sorting and searching problems are tweaks of the well-known algorithms. A good approach is therefore to run through the different sorting algorithms and see if one applies particularly well.
• Learning the common sorting algorithms is a great way to boost your performance. Of the five algorithms explained below, merge sort, quick sort, and bucket sort are the most commonly used in interviews.
• No product is fail-proof, so analyzing failure conditions needs to be a part of your testing. A good discussion to have with your interviewer is about when it’s acceptable (or even necessary) for the product to fail, and what failure should mean.
• All data members and methods are private by default in C++. One can modify this by introducing the keyword public.
• The constructor of a class is automatically called upon an object’s creation. If no constructor is defined, the compiler automatically generates one called the Default Constructor. Alternatively, we can define our own constructor.
• The destructor cleans up upon object deletion and is automatically called when an object is destroyed. It cannot take an argument as we don’t explicitly call a destructor.
• Unlike pointers, references cannot be null and cannot be reassigned to another piece of memory.
• Templates are a way of reusing code to apply the same class to different data types.
• Normalized databases are designed to minimize redundancy, while denormalized databases are designed to optimize read time.
• Threads within a given process share the same memory space, which is both a positive and negative. It enables threads to share data, which can be valuable. However, it also creates the opportunity for issues when two threads modify a resource at the same time.
• For more granular control, we can utilize a lock. A lock (or monitor) issued to synchronize access to a shared resource by associating the resource with the lock. A thread gets to a shared resource by first acquiring the lock associated with the resource. At any given time, at most one thread can hold the lock and, therefore, only one thread can access the shared resource.

Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle McDowell & Jackie Bavaro

• A PM is responsible for making sure that a team ships a great product.
• The PM needs to set vision and strategy.
• The PM defines success and makes decisions.
• The day-to-day work of a product manager varies over the course of the product life cycle, you’ll be figuring out what to build; in the middle you’ll help the team make progress; at the end you’ll be preparing for launch.
• During implementation, one of the most important parts of the job is helping the engineers work efficiently. The product manager will check in regularly with his team and learn how things are going.
• For mature products, such as market leaders, most of the work will be iterating on the product and trying to improve it. PMs often have feedback from previous versions as to which areas need the most improvement and can focus on them.
• As a PM on a mature product, it can be very important to make sure you don’t get stuck making small incremental improvements.
• Often, a mature product’s biggest competitor is the last version of that same product. At the same time, mature products often have the luxury of time to make big bets on new ideas.
• PMs are responsible for seeing the entire project through to a successful completion.
• Product managers are able to reduce the number of meetings their teammates need to attend because they’re able to represent the team to other groups and find productive ways of communicating that don’t require meetings.
• Not trusting the engineers’ estimates and promising other teams that the work will be done sooner than the engineers agree to it is one of the fastest ways to ruin your relationship with the team.
• While most roles on the team are crisply defined, product managers have a more fluid role. When you’re a product manager, your job is anything that isn’t being covered by other people.
• As a PM, you’re responsible for the success of failure of your product, and no job is beneath you.
• One of the best ways to get a signal on the culture at a startup is to look at where the founders, PMs, and early employees came from.Since product management doesn’t have a single, well-known definition, teams generally bring along the definition that they learned from their past companies.
• The big difference in being a PM at a startup comes from the scale.
• Since startups don’t have large management structures, the PMs naturally become important leaders for the company. Additionally, startups have fewer resources, so there’s more “white space” for the PMs to fill in and more of a need to be really scrappy.
• Engineers at startups love shipping code quickly and are very wary of overhead, so it’s important to be careful when adding processes like Agile.
• If you ask interviewers what they're looking for in PM candidates, they’ll unusually say that they are looking for smart people who get stuff done.
• One of the best ways to rise above the crowd is to have a side project like a mobile app. This gives you a chance to show your customer focus and product design skills.
• LinkedIn is one of the most valuable sites to focus on for recruiting.
• The most important way a product manager is judged is by the products she’s launched.
• Many people without a background in computer science struggle to form strong working relationships with engineers.
• Great product managers are action-oriented and passionate about delivering results. They will try to take care of what they can themselves, whether that’s gathering data or fixing typos in the product. This frees up development from the more tedious tasks so they’ll be able to do more valuable work.
• Customer Focus is the most important thing to develop when moving from engineering to product management. Engineers and developers can usually pick up most of the other important skills on the job, but a customer focus is one of the defining characteristics of good PMs.
• Many engineers are comfortable in the world of analytical thinking. As an engineer, it’s better to prove things through data than charisma. As a product manager, you need to master both.
• It will be hard to be successful as a PM if you’re still handling a lot of engineering responsibilities; you need to pick up some escape velocity. Consider taking time off between the role switch or having some kind of hand off or party to mark the transition. Then you can dive into your new PM role fully.
• One of the best ways to improve your candidacy for a product management position is to start a side project. This side project gives you a chance to gain experience shipping a product, builds up your resume, shows off your technical skills, shows off your product design skills, and gives you a lot to talk about during your interview. If you hired people to help you, it might also give you a chance to show leadership skills.
• As a PM, the biggest measure of your success will be the products you launch.
• At a growing company, new opportunities are always opening up, and you quickly become one of the more senior employees. This means that even if you had to join a different team or take on a different title from what you wanted, you’d likely get a chance to transition soon.
• Infrastructure teams often don’t sound like a fun place to be a PM, but they’re critically important to the company. The improvements you make as an infrastructure PM can be magnified throughout the company, so they can be a great place for career advancement.
• At some point in your career, your visibility across the company is going to matter if you want to be promoted to higher positions.
• The most straightforward way to build credibility is delivering results. Your teammates all want a good outcome, so they'll naturally start out second guessing your opinions, asking lots of questions, and suggesting different ways of doing things. However, over time they’ll start to see that you’re showing good judgement and getting things done, and they’ll feel comfortable trusting you.
• Another way to build credibility is paying attention to people’s perceptions of you and ensuring that you’re creating the perception you want.
• Make sure you’re building a reputation as a smart, skillful, competent, and dependable person with good judgement.
• Getting an MBA just for the sake of getting an MBA is not worthwhile in tech, at least not in silicon Valley.
• It’s not your experience that lands you an interview; it’s how your resume presents that experience. Even the best candidate in the world won’t get an interview with a lousy resume. After all, a company wouldn’t know that she’s the best candidate in the world.
• A resume isn’t read; it’s skimmed. A resume screen will glance at your resume for about 15 seconds (or maybe less) to make a decision about whether or not to interview you.
• A good rule of thumb is to limit your resume to one page if you have less than 10 years of experience. In more than 10 years, you might be able to justify 1.5 or 2 pages, particularly if you’ve held many different jobs.
• Focus on what is important, and leave out the rest.
• Read through your resume. Anything that’s three lines of text or more should be condensed. Additionally, you should aim to have no more than 50 percent of your bullets expand to two lines. That is, at least half of your bullets should be just one line, with the remainder being two lines.
• People don’t care what you were told to do; they care what you did.
• You want to focus on your accomplishments. Prove to the resume screener you had an impact.
• As much as possible, quantify your accomplishments.
• A good resume is reasonably compact and quickly showcases your highlights.
• Employers want PMs who have technical skills, love technology, possess initiative, are leaders, and will have an impact. A resume is a chance to showcase these parts of your background.
• Don’t list something from a long time ago unless it really makes you stand out.
• You should understand what the company is doing at a deep level.
• You should know not only what the company is doing, but why it is doing it. Knowing the “why” will help your answers fit the company’s view of the world.
• Successful people tend to know where they’re going in life. If you don’t have a plan, an interviewer might worry you’re not very serious about your career.
• Understanding other people is a fundamental part of teamwork, leadership , and persuasion, and therefore a fundamental part of a product management role.
• Failure is okay; helplessness is not.
• Here’s a fun and useful tip: if you need to calculate how long until something doubles, divide 72 by the percent increase.
• Interviewers are looking for structured thinking. The easiest way to show this is to give a structured answer and call out which part of the structure you’re on.
• Strengths are the internal factors that benefit a product. This can include anything about the costs, product features, company culture, reputation, infrastructure, or other aspects.
• SWOT Analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
• The two most common good ways to sort an array are quicksort and merge sort. The others are less efficient in general or only work with specific assumptions.
• Big O notation is a way to express the efficiency of an algorithm. If you’re going to be working with code, it is important that you understand big O. It is, quite literally, the language we use to express efficiency.
• Recursion can be a useful strategy to solve a large number of problems. It works well when the solution to a problem can be defined in terms of the solutions to subproblems.
• Any problem that can be solved recursively can also be solved iteratively, although sometimes doing so is much more complicated. However, recursion comes with a drawback, which is memory usage.
• The top 10% of product managers excel at a few of these things. The top 1% excel at most or all of them.
• Think big - A 1% PM’s thinking won’t be constrained by the resource available to them today or today’s market environment. They’ll describe large disruptive opportunities, and develop concrete plans for how to take advantage of them.
• Communicate - A 1% PM can make a case that is impossible to refute or ignore. They’ll use data appropriately, when available, but they’ll also tap into other biases, beliefs, and triggers that can convince the powers that be to part with headcount, money, or other resources and then get out of the way.
• Simplify - A 1% PM knows how to get 80% of the value out of any feature or project with 20% of the effort. They do so repeatedly, launching more and achieving compounding effects for the product or business.
• Prioritize - A 1% PM knows how to sequence projects. They balance quick wins vs platform investments appropriately. They balance offense and defense projects appropriately. Offense projects are ones that grow the business. Defense projects are ones that protect and remove drag on the business.
• Forecast and measure - A 1% PM is able to forecast the approximate benefit of a project, and can do so efficiently by applying past experience and leverage comparable benchmarks. They also measure benefit once projects are launched, and factor those learning into their future prioritization and forecasts.
• Execute - A 1% PM grinds it out. They do whatever is necessary to ship. They recognize no specific bounds to the scope of their role. As necessary, they recruit, they produce buttons, they do biz dev, they escalate, they tussle with internal counsel, they…
• Understand technical trade-offs - A 1% PM does not need to have a CS degree. They do need to be able to roughly understand the technical complexity of the features they put on the backlog, without any costing inputs from devs. They should partner with devs to make the right technical trade-offs.
• Understand good design - A 1% PM doesn’t have to be a designer, but they should appreciate great design and be able to distinguish it from good design. They should also be able to articulate the difference to their design counterparts, or at least articulate directions to pursue to go from good to great.
• Write effective copy - A 1% PM should be able to write a concise copy that gets the job done. They should understand that each additional word they write dilutes the value of the previous ones. They should spend time and energy trying to find the perfect words for key copy, not just words that will suffice.

Smart Choices by Hamond, Keeney, Raiffa

• The essence of our approach is divide and conquer: break your decision into its key elements; identify those most relevant to your decision; apply some hard, systematic thinking; and make your decisions.
• Our approach is practice, encouraging you to seek out decision-making opportunities rather than wait for problems to present themselves.
• In short, the ability to make smart choices is a fundamental life skill.
• Despite the importance of decision making to our lives, few of us ever receive any training in it. So we are left to learn from experience. But experience is a costly, inefficient teacher that teaches us bad habits along with good ones.
• An effective decision-making process will fulfill these six criteria:
• It focuses on what’s important.
• It is logical and consistent.
• It acknowledges both subjective and objective factors and blends analytical with intuitive thinking.
• It requires only as much information and analysis as is necessary to resolve a particular dilemma.
• It encourages and guides the gathering of relevant information and informed opinion.
• It is straightforward, reliable, easy to use, and flexible.
• Hard decisions are hard because they’re complex, andnoone can make that complexity disappear. But you can manage complexity sensibly.
• The acronym for these--PrOAT--serves as a reminder that the best approach to a decision situation is a proactive one.
• Problem
• Objectives
• Alternatives
• Consequences
• Trade Offs
• The worst thing you can do is wait until a decision is forced on you--or made for you.
• The essence of the PrOACT approach is to divide and conquer. To resolve a complex decision situation, you break it into these elements and think systematically about each one, focusing on those that are key to your particular situation. Then you reassemble your thoughts and analysis into a smart choice.
• Your alternatives represent the different courses of action you have to choose from.
• Assessing frankly the consequences of each alternative will help you to identify those that best meet your objectives--all your objectives.
• What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time.
• The key to dealing effectively with linked decisions is to isolate and resolve near-term issues while gathering the information needed to resolve those that will arise later.
• By sequencing your actions to fully exploit what you learn along the way, you will be doing your best, despite an uncertain world, to make smarter choices.
• First and foremost, always focus your thinking on why it matters most.
• Typically, for all but the most complex decisions, you will not need to consider all the elements in depth. Usually, only one or two elements will emerge as the most critical for the decision at hand.
• Be proactive in your decision making. Look for new ways to formulate your decision problem. Search actively for hidden objectives, new alternatives, unacknowledged consequences, and appropriate tradeoffs.
• Most importantly, be proactive in seeking decision opportunities that advance your long-range goals; your corevaleus and beliefs; and the needs of your family, community, and employer.
• Take charge of your life by determining which decision you’ll face and when you’ll face them.
• The way you state your problem frames your decision. It determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluate them. Posing the right problem drives everything else.
• A good solution to a well-posed decision problem is almost always a smarter choice than an excellent solution toa poorly posed one.
• The greatest danger in formulating a decision problem is laziness.
• Every decision problem has a trigger--the initiating force behind it. Triggers take many forms.
• Be proactive. Seek decision opportunities everywhere.
• As you explore the trigger, beware! Triggers can bias your thinking. They can trap you into viewing the problem only in the way it first occurred to you.
• Question the constraints in your problem statement.
• Problem definitions usually include constraints that narrow the range of alternatives you consider.
• Questioning the problem is particularly important when circumstances are changing rapidly or when new information becomes available. A poorly formulated decision problem is a trap. Don’t fall for it.
• By making sure you’ve identified all your objectives, you will avoid making an unbalanced decision--one that, for example, considers financial implications but ignores personal fulfillment.
• Sometimes, the process of thinking through and writing out your objectives can guide you straight to the smart choice--without your having to do a lot of additional analysis.
• For important decisions, only deep soul-searching will reveal what really matters--to you. This kind of self-reflective effort perplexes many people and makes them uncomfortable.
• The cleanest and most easily communicated form for objectives is a short phrase consisting of a verb and an object.
• Many people mistakenly focus on immediate, tangible, measurable qualities when listing objectives, but these may not reflect the essence of the problem.
• Alternatives are the raw material of decision making. They represent the range of potential choices you'll have for pursuing your objectives. Because of their central importance, you need to establish and maintain a high standard for generating alternatives.
• You can never choose an alternative you haven’t considered.
• No matter how many alternatives you have, your chosen alternative can be no better than the best of the lot.
• One of the most common pitfalls is business as usual.
• Business as usual results from laziness and an overreliance on habit. With only a modest amount of effort, attractive new alternatives can usually be found.
• Many poor choices result from falling back on a default alternative.
• Choosing the first possible solution is another pitfall.
• People who wait too long to make a decision risk being stuck with what’s left when they finally do choose. The best alternatives may no longer be available.
• Remember, get an early start on major decisions. Take charge.
• Many decision problems have constraints that limit your alternatives. Some constraints are real, others are assumed.
• An assumed constraint represents a mental rather than a real barrier.
• One way to increase the chance of finding good, unconventional alternatives is to set targets that seem beyond reach.
• High aspirations force you to think in entirely new ways, rather than sliding by with modest changes to the status quo.
• Setting high aspirations stretches your thinking.
• Start thinking about your decision problem as soon as possible; don’t put it off until the last minute. Once you’ve begun, make a point of thinking about the problem from time to time to give your subconscious a nudge.
• Create alternatives first, evaluate them late.
• Creating a good alternative requires receptivity--a mind expansive, unrestrained, and open to ideas. One idea leads to another, and the more ideas you entertain, the more likely you are to find a good one.
• Bad ideas will almost certainly emerge along with good ones. That’s a necessary part of the process and something you shouldn’t be concerned about at this point.
• Don’t evaluate alternatives while you’re generating them. That will slow the process down and dampe creativity.
• Never stop looking for alternatives. As the decision process moves on to the consideration of consequences and tradeoffs, the evaluation stages, your decision problem will become increasingly clear and more precisely defined.
• Information helps dispel the clouds of uncertainty hovering over some decisions.
• When there are uncertainties affecting a decision, it is useful to generate alternatives for gathering the information necessary to reduce each uncertainty.
• First list the areas of uncertainty. Then, for each one, list the possible ways to collect the needed information. Each of these ways is an information-gathering alternative.
• Whenever you’re uncomfortable about deciding now, questions the deadline. Is it a real deadline, or is it just an assumed constraint?
• It’s an unfortunate truth: the perfect solution seldom exists. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people from endlessly (and unrealistically) pursuing one.
• Be sure you really understand the consequences of your alternatives before you make a choice. If you don’t you surely will afterwards, and you may not be very happy with them.
• The main benefit to be derived from describing consequences is understanding.
• The trick is to describe the consequences with enough precision to make a smart choice, but not to go into unnecessary and exhausting detail.
• Eliminate any clearly inferior alternatives. This step is a terrific time saver for many decisions because it can quickly eliminate alternatives and may lead to a resolution of your decision.
• Important decisions usually have conflicting objectives--you can’t have your cake and eat it too--and therefore you have to make tradeoffs. You need to give up something on one objective to achieve more in terms of another.
• Decisions with multiple objectives cannot be resolved by focusing on any one objective.
• Ben Franklin proposed a wonderful way to simplify a complex problem. Each time he eliminated an item from his list of pros and cons, he replaced his original problem with an equivalent but simpler one. Ultimately, by honing his list, he revealed a clear choice.
• Whenever uncertainty exists, there can be no guarantee that a smart choice will lead to good consequences.
• A risk profile captures the essential information about the way uncertainty affects an alternative.
• For most uncertainties, there will probably be someone out there who knows more about it than you do. Seek out an expert and elicit his or her judgement.
• Pinpoint precision usually isn’t required in assigning chances. Frequently, knowing that a chance falls within a certain range is sufficient for guiding a decision.
• Decision trees are especially useful for explaining decision processes to others.
• Getting into the habit of skethin decision trees, even for relatively simple decisions involving uncertainty, can enhance your decision-making skills.
• Your risk tolerance expresses your willingness to take risk in your quest for better consequences. It depends primarily on how significant you consider the downside--the poorer consequences of any decision--compared to the up side.
• The more likely the outcomes with better consequences and the less likely the outcomes with poorer consequences, the more desirable the risk profile to you.
• Weight desirabilities by chances. More fully stated: weight the desirabilities of the consequences by the chances of their associated outcomes.
• Outcomes with a low chance of occurring should have less influence on an alternatives overall desirability than outcomes with a high chance of occurring.
• When uncertainty is significant, develop a risk profile for each alternative which captures the essence of the uncertainty.
• Think hard and realistically about what can go wrong as well as what can go right.
• An organization’s leaders should take three simple steps to guide subordinates in dealing successfully with risk. First, sketch desirability curves that reflect the risk-taking attitude of the organization. Second, communicate the appropriate risk tolerance by issuing guidelines that include examples of how a typical risky decision should be handled.
• Third, examine the organization’s incentives to ensure they are consistent with the desired risk-taking behavior.
• When a good opportunity feels too risky, share the risk with others.
• Seek risk-reducing information.
• Try to temper risk by seeking information that can reduce uncertainty.
• Diversify the risk.
• Avoid placing all your eggs in just a few baskets. Look for ways to diversify.
• Wherever a risk consists of a significant but rare downside, with no upside, try to insure against it. But don’t overinsure.
• All decisions affect the future, of course.
• Making smart choices about linked decisions requires understanding the relationships among them.
• The essence of making smart linked decisions is planning ahead.
• Makers of effective linked decisions, like successful chess players, plan a few decisions ahead before making their current decision.
• A good quick test to weed out information-gathering alternatives is to ask what you’d pay to completely resolve the uncertainty. If an information alternative costs more, it’s an obvious non contender.
• Flexible plans keep your options open.
• In highly volatile situations, where the risk of outright failure is great, an all-purpose plan is often the safest plan.
• Sometimes the best plan is to act in a way that expands your set of future alternatives.
• Just knowing how sets of decision are linked and using a modest amount of foresight can help considerably in making a smart choice and can practically guarantee avoiding many, if not all, of the dumb ones.
• Over time, making smart choices on linked decisions will affect your life and career more positively and profoundly than making perfect choices on all your simpler decisions put together.
• By now you’re much better prepared to identify and avoid the eight most common and most serious errors in decision making:
• Working on the wrong problem.
• Failing to identify your key objectives.
• Failing to develop a range of good, creative alternatives.
• Overlooking crucial consequences of your alternative.
• Giving inadequate thought to tradeoffs.
• Disregarding uncertainty.
• Failing to account for your risk tolerance.
• Failing to plan ahead when decisions are linked over time.
• Researchers have identified a whole series of such flas in the way we think.
• The best protection against these traps is awareness.
• In considering a decision, the mind gives disproportionate weight to the first information it receives. Initial impressions, ideas, estimates, or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts.
• You’ll be less susceptible to anchoring tactics.
• Never think of the status quo as your only alternative. Identify other options and use them as counterbalances, carefully evaluating al theri pluses and minuses.
• The past is past; what you spent then is irrelevant to your decision today.
• Remember, your decision influences only the future, not the past.
• Expose yourself to conflicting information. Always make sure that you examine all the evidence with equal rigor and understand its implications. And don't be soft on the disconfirming evidence.
• In seeking the advice of others, don’t ask leading questions that invite confirming evidence.
• The same problem can also elicit very different reponsinse when frames use different reference points.
• A poorly framed problem can undermine even the ebay-considered decision. But the effect of improper framing can be limited by imposing discipline on the decision making process.
• Don’t automatically accept the initial frame, whether it was formulated by you or by someone else.
• Always try to reframe the problem in different ways. Look for distortions caused by the frames.
• A major cause of overconfidence is anchoring. When you make an initial estimate about a variable, you naturally focus on midrange possibilities. This thinking then anchors your subsequent thinking about the variable, leading you to estimate an overly narrow range of possible values.
• In fact, anything that distorts your ability to recall events in a balanced dway will distort your probability assessment for estimates.
• Where possible, try to get statistics. Don’t rely on your memory if you don’t have to.
• When you don’t have direct statistics, take apart the event you’re trying to assess and build up an assessment piece by piece.
• Analyze your thinking about decision problems carefully to identify any hidden or unacknowledged assumptions you mahe have made.
• Don’t ignore relevant data; make a point of considering base rates explicitly in your assessment.
• Consider the methodology of “worst-case analysis”, which was once popular in the design of weapons systems and is still used in certain engineering and regulatory settings.
• Documents the information and reasoning used in arriving at your estimates, so others can understand them better.
• To avoid distortions in your thinking, you must curb your natural tendency to see patterns in random events. Be disciplined in your assessments of probability.
• Highly complex and highly important decisions are the most prone to distortion because they tend to involve the most assumptions and the most estimates. The higher the stakes, the higher the risks.
• The best protection against all psychological traps is awareness. Forewarned is forearmed. Even if you can’t eradicate the distortions ingrained in the way your mind works, you can build tests and disciplines into your decision-making process that can uncover and counter errors in thinking before they become errors in judgement.
• Procrastination is the bane of good decision making.
• Deciding By default, by not deciding, almost always yields unsatisfactory results, if only because you spend time wondering if you could have done better. So get started. The sooner you start, the more likely it is that you’ll give your decision adequate thought and find adequate information, rather than being forced to decide in partial ignorance under pressure from the clock.
• Large corporations and the military use this technique, making strategic decisions first, tactical decisions second, and operational decisions last.
• Obsessing over your decision takes a tool in time and psychological energy, but a hasty decision, rushed to avoid emotional stress or hard mental work, is usually a poor decision.
• Seldom does a perfect solution exist, yet too many people endlessly (and unrealistically) pursue one.
• Often, the imagined need for more analysis becomes an excuse for procrastination, for avoiding a decision, because deciding will require accepting some bad along with the good.
• To make a decision beyond your sphere of expertise, you’ll often need to seek advice from others.
• Many of your toughest decisions aren’t as hard as they look. By being systematic and focusing on the hard parts, you can resolve them comfortably.
• Over time luck favors people who follow good decision making procedures.
• Most important, always remember: the only way to exert control over your life is through your decision making. The rest just happens to you.
• Be proactive, take charge of your decision making, strive to make good decisions and to develop good decision-making habits.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Fugere, Hardaway, Warshawsky

• Let’s face it: business today is drowning in bullshit. We try to impress (or confuse) investors with inflated letters to shareholders. We punish customers with intrusive, hype-filled, self-aggrandizing product literature. We send elephantine progress reports to employees that shed less than two watts of light on the big issues or hard truths.
• There is a gigantic disconnect between these real, authentic conversations and the artificial voice of business executives and managers at every level.
• Bull has become the language of business.
• Entire careers can be built on straight talk--precisely because it is so rare.
• The first reason for obscurity is a business idiot’s focus on himself over the reader.
• When obscurity pollutes someone's communications, it’s often because the author’s goal is to impress and not to inform.
• A second reason people fall into the obscurity trap, and ultimately speak like idiots, is a fear of concrete language.
• In business, we like to avoid commitment. Liability scares us, so we add endless phrases to qualify our views on a topic, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions, to the twelve reasons we can’t make a decision now, to the reason we all agree the topic is important, to the reason why decisions in general require a lot of thought, and so on.
• The third move for obscurity is a business idiot’s relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living.
• The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends.
• If someone is onto their incompetence, there’s nothing like some indigestible prose to keep everyone off their trail. And it seems that those at the highest levels of the corporate food chain (supposedly the smartest folks around) are the worst offenders.
• Every profession, even professional bowling, has some subset of words that helps its gurus share their genius in a kind of shorthand.
• When you have nothing to say, jargon is the best way to say it.
• Business people have an incredibly difficult time delivering a tough message, and usually find a way to surround the real nuggets of information with layer upon layer of muck.
• Some acronyms are useful and welcome.
• Acronyms for the sake of acronyms breed acrimony and mass confusion.
• Jargon is the foundation of obscurity. It’s only part of the long slide into idiocy, but if you want to connect with your audience and persuade them, word choice is a good place to start.
• So the single most important things you can do to kick the argon habit is to develop a deep and vitriolic hatred of it.
• Length is supposed to imply insight, but usually the opposite is true.
• Beyond shortness in length, the best speakers also seem to get away with  a lot shorter words (those of the one and two syllable variety).
• The real issue with long-windedness is that it prevents you from connecting with your audience.
• Short presentations pack a punch.
• Short sentences are more memorable than long ones.
• One-syllable words build momentum and give the long ones impact.
• Business idiots have become commitaphobe. They live in constant fear of being held accountable for something tangible and throw together generic statements that sound vaguely positive but really say nothing.
• In business, the real epidemic is obscurity. Only the best leaders seem to be able to resist turning into a mound of Jello when it comes time to actually say something that could be taken as a stand.
• One of the major reasons that business people speak like idiots is that they have lost their human voice. We have allowed our personalities to be systematically neutered and spayed into oblivion.
• Businesses love clones because they can all be trained the same way, be paid the same way, and eventually behave the same way. If a clone leaves, a business can always hire another at the same salary.
• Templates steal your opportunity for individual expression. It’s one way of surrendering your creative powers to software, and a sure way to fall into the anonymity trap.
• Avoiding the anonymity trap is all about making a personal connection with your audience. Templates are your enemy. Humour is your ally.
• The polish we apply to all our performances is one of the downfalls of business presentations.
• Scripting is good--but know your script, and then ad lib a bit--just don’t read from it, or people will tune you out.
• People with a sense of humor rise through the ranks faster and earn more money. It’s a sign of self-confidence and security--a sign that you can afford a moment of levity, because you don’t have to hard-sell everyone on your talent.
• Humor defuses conflict, reduces tension, and puts others at ease because sharing a laugh is a sign of friendship, not competition.
• The bottom line: Humor makes us happy, makes people like us more, and ultimately helps us connect with an audience (whether on paper or in person).
• The top reason people avoid humor at work is because it might offend someone, and this isn’t a stup reason.
• Society is think-skinned, as a rule, and it is fashionable to be oppressed. People actually aspire to victimhood, because it’s a great way to retire young and well-off.
• Self-deprecation is indispensable. The more successful you are, the better it works.
• Humor almost always brings some risk, but remember: it’s always, always open season on yourself.
• Storytelling is a key ally in the fight against the tedium trap, but it’s also indispensable when it comes to humor.
• Oddball, seemingly unrelated quotes are a great way to flex your humor.
• The voice is the ultimate weapon in the war on anonymity and the best way to create a relationship.
• If you want to connect with your audience, keep in mind that people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy.
• Hard sell gets in the way and erodes trust.
• People just seem to like an idea better when they think it’s their own.
• There aren’t many leaders who can deliver bad news with candor. The ability to do this well confers a lot of prestige on the messenger. It demands courage, and immediately lets the audience know that you trust them enough to just say what needs to be said.
• The old rule is to never present a problem without a solution. But there’s an even better rule--never present a problem without actually doing something that represents a positive step to fix it.
• Show momentum toward an answer, even if you don’t know what the answer is.
• Authenticity, promptness, and clear action are the stuff that effective apologies are made of.
• Business people who live by denial appear ignorant, egotistical, and dishonest.
• The harder you go on yourself, the easier others will go on you.
• Business idiots spend their lives delivering the fine print to audiences who don’t really care. Sometimes the message is timely and smart, sometimes it’s the usual bill, but whatever--they assume the audience exists to take notes.
• In real life, though, the audine isn’t there to take notes. We’re continually surfing our environment for something cool.
• If you want to connect with an audience, you have to get their attention. Make it relevant. Make it vivid. Make it compelling. Whether you like it or not, you’re in the entertainment business. If you don’t find a way to keep their attention, someone or something else will.
• Back up the assertion with something real and tangible, or don’t bother making it.
• Subtly can be the difference between good communicators and great ones.
• Most business people think their goal is to get people to pay attention. Not bad, but not good enough. Great communicators get people to think.
• Your goal is to create a rapport with an audience, to show them that your thoughts aren’t so different from theirs. You have the same preoccupations, annoyances, and reactions to life that they do, and you care enough to entertain them.
• What you should be worried about is what your audience is worried about.
• One of the biggest reasons business people speak like idiots is that they spend way too much time talking about what’s in their head and not nearly enough time on what might be floating around in the minds of their audience.
• To your audience, everything you say is irrelevant until it touches on something they care about.
• One way to reveal your humanity is to reveal a weakness. Exposing a weakness builds trust and solidarity. It underscores a person’s authenticity.
• The key to success here is to be authentic.
• Sometimes, simple props are all you need to tell a memorable story.
• Storytelling is a fundamental part of being human. We have only a limited capacity to absorb facs, but an enormous capacity to absorb narratives.

Conspiracies Declassified by Brian Dunning

• Too often, proposed conspiracy theories are so uselessly vague that they are always going to be true.
• The ultimate conspiracy theory is that the Illuminati runs the world, and that all governments and corporations are willingly subservient to the secret powers that be. It is the conspiracy theory that best satisfies our most primal need to believe that everything happens for some reason, according to some place; that there is a method to every apparent madness; and that we ourselves are the ultimate targets of this simmering malevolence.
• Whenever the rich, the powerful, or world leaders gather, a natural reaction among the more paranoid is that they're up to something malevolent.
• Overgrown government control is the ultimate validation of our native paranoia.
• Vaccines are the single most important and successful public health initiative. They are responsible for saving more lives than any other medical intervention in history.
• Throughout the twentieth century, schools began requiring vaccinations before students would be allowed to attend. Because children are the most vulnerable to disease, and schools are where children are most likely to infect one another, this policy is actually one of the most important public health initiatives on the books.
• Vaccination is science's greatest achievement in the fight against disease. No other public health measure comes close.
• It turns out that vaccines are among the least profitable products that pharmaceutical companies make.
• Is it true that autism is more common now than it used to be? No. Or more accurately, there is no evidence of that. It is true that far more cases are being diagnosed today than used to be. There are two reasons for this. First is that the definition of autism spectrum disorders keeps getting broadened as we recognize more and more cases to be connected. Second is that the stigma of being autistic is going away, and parents are more likely to allow their children to be tested and diagnosed than they used to be. So while we do indeed have more diagnoses being reported, there is no reason to suspect that the actual prevalence of autism is higher today than ever before.
• Just because a compound is natural does not mean that it's safe, but the toxicity level of every compound is determined by the dose.
• The contrails you see behind airlines are normal and unavoidable condensation created by the plan burning hydrocarbon fuel in certain high-altitude conditions. No chemtrails are needed to explain them.
• Whenever some person of prominence dies, there's almost always somebody whose agenda is accidentally satisfied. This, of course, makes it really easy to paint anyone who's benefited from the death as a murder suspect. This is the basic genesis of every conspiracy theory surrounding the mysterious death of someone famous.
• A crucial point is the conspiracy theorists' use of the phrase "official story". These are weasel words, used disparagingly to cast doubt without actually saying anything of substance.
• Anti-semitism is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories.
• Holocaust denial is often done by citing vast stores of trivial minutiae: factoids or extrapolations that are so many and varied as to give the impression of comprising an impregnable vault of proof.
• The only driver common to all Holocaust-denying authors is anti-Semitism.
• Any scientist knows that science is a continually self-correcting process. In good science, all conclusions are provisional, and they are always subject to change if new information turns up.
• As with all large conspiracy theories, we should consider the number of people who would have to be in on the truth in order to make it happen.
• Although many obvious fats don't seem to be worth explaining it's always interesting to learn how we know what we know.
• Free energy machines do not and cannot exist, as the laws of physics make them impossible. Specifically, the laws of thermodynamics state thaw when energy is drawn from a system, the system is left with less energy. You can't drink water from a glass and have the glass still remain full.
• The fundamental reason that free energy machines can never work is hinted at in their name. They produce something from nothing. The way the universe works is defined by physical laws--and those laws don't work that way.
• Cancer is not a single disease, but many hundreds of different diseases with different causes and different treatments. There could never be one single cure for all cancers any more than there could be one single fox for all possible automobile mechanical problems, so this idea that there is a single wonder drug in some pharmaceutical company's vault is simply fiction.
• Area 51 is an actual place. Formally, it is called the National Classified Test Facility inside Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and its existence has always been public. The large, flat surface of dry Groom Lake makes it an ideal place for long runways.
• In order to sustain a thermonuclear reaction, a star needs to have a mass greater than about 0.08 solar masses, otherwise it will to have enough gravity to squeeze its core into a mass hot and dense enough.
• Conspiracy theorists typically take evidence that disproves their theory and say it's falsified, and then point to it and say, "Look! It's a cover up!"
• In science, we often point to the law of large numbers when confronted with a manifestation that appears unlikely. This law refers to the mathematical probability of highly unlikely events popping up at predictable intervals.
• The tendency of our brains to spot faces in ordinary objects is called pareidolia. It is an evolved trait in all animals to help us recognize our parents and others of our kind. If we didn't have pareidolia, we would never be able to recognize cartoon characters as being people.

WIN BIGLY by Scott Adams

• Winning fixes most problems.
• Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.
• The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason.
• When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.
• A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.
• If you don’t sample the news on both sides, you miss a lot of the context.
• When your old worldview falls apart, it can trigger all kinds of irrational behavior before your brain rewrites the movie in your head to make it consistent with your new worldview.
• Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts and reason.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate kindness.
• Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique.
• The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.
• Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.
• The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.
• An intentional “error” in the details of your message will attract criticism. The attention will make your message rise in importance—at least in people’s minds—simply because everyone is talking about it.
• If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts.
• If you are not a Master Persuader running for president, find the sweet spot between apologizing too much, which signals a lack of confidence, and never apologizing for anything, which makes you look like a sociopath.
• A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
• Success cures most types of “mistakes.”
• An anchor is a thought that influences people toward a persuader’s preferred outcome.
• Cognitive dissonance is a condition of mind in which evidence conflicts with a person’s worldview to such a degree that the person spontaneously generates a hallucination to rationalize the incongruity.
• Confirmation bias is the human tendency to irrationally believe new information supports your existing worldview even when it doesn’t.
• The key idea behind a filter is that it does not necessarily give its user an accurate view of reality.
• Moist robot is my framing of human beings as programmable entities.
• A persuasion stack is a collection of persuasion-related skills that work well together.
• Cialdini’s two best-selling books, Influence (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016), are master classes in the irrational nature of human decision making.
• Much of what we know to be true by experiment makes absolutely no sense to our limited human brains.
• Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.
• The main theme of this book is that humans are not rational. We bounce from one illusion to another, all the while thinking we are seeing something we call reality. The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.
• As a general rule, irrational people don’t know they are irrational.
• Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can’t go back to your old way of thinking.
• Humans don’t always need to know the true nature of reality in order to live well.
• Hypnotists see the world differently. From our perspective, people are irrational 90 percent of the time but don’t know it.
• When our feelings turn on, our sense of reason shuts off.
• When you experience cognitive dissonance, you spontaneously generate a hallucination that becomes your new reality.
• It is easy to fit completely different explanations to the observed facts. Don’t trust any interpretation of reality that isn’t able to predict.
• Confirmation bias is the human reflex to interpret any new information as being supportive of the opinions we already hold.
• If you don’t understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people’s opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn’t the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren’t wired that way.
• Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.
• Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality.
• Mass delusions are influencing every one of us all the time. Until the spell is broken, you can’t tell you are in one.
• People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.
• Smart CEOs try to create visible victories within days of taking the job, to set the tone. It’s all about the psychology.
• Remember what I taught you in the past year: Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.
• The best leaders are the ones who understand human psychology and use that knowledge to address the public’s top priorities.
• The reality one learns while practicing hypnosis is that we make our decisions first—for irrational reasons—and we rationalize them later as having something to do with facts and reason.
• One of the things I’ve learned as a lifelong student of persuasion is that false memories are common. And sometimes adults don’t tell the truth.
• Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.
• Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible.
• Guess what people are thinking—at the very moment they think it—and call it out. If you are right, the subject bonds to you for being like-minded.
• If you want the audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both unimportant and would give people a reason to think, That’s not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them in with whatever makes them happiest.
• Love, romance, and sex are fundamentally irrational human behaviors, and it helps to see them that way.
• A talent stack is a collection of skills that work well together and make the person with those skills unique and valuable.
• The power of the talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary talents together to create extraordinary value.
• Whenever you see people succeeding beyond your expectations, look for the existence of a well-engineered talent stack.
• Our brains interpret high energy as competence and leadership (even when it isn’t).
• Our brains did not evolve to understand reality. We’re all running different movies in our heads. All that matters is whether or not your filter keeps you happy and does a good job of predicting.
• Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words.
• Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.
• We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t.1 The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later.2 It just doesn’t feel that way to us.
• Analogies are a good way to explain a new concept.
• While analogies are useful and important for explaining new concepts, here’s the important point for our purposes: Analogies are terrible for persuasion.
• When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.
• The first thing you hear about a new topic automatically becomes an anchor in your mind that biases your future opinions.
• If you compare any two things long enough, their qualities start to merge in our irrational minds.
• If you want to influence someone to try a new product, it helps to associate it with some part of an existing habit.
• The main way habits come into play for politics is in the way we consume news.
• Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable rewards.
• Humans reflexively support their own tribe. No thinking is involved.
• Credibility, of any sort, is persuasive.
• When you signal your credentials, people expect you to have more influence over them.
• It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive.
• Pre-suading, or setting the table, is about creating mental and emotional associations that carry over.
• Bring high energy. People with high energy are more persuasive. We’re all drawn to energy.
• Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice.
• Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave.
• People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.
• Visual persuasion is more powerful than nonvisual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large.
• Humans are visual creatures. We believe our eyes before we believe whatever faulty opinions are coming from our other senses.
• In the context of persuasion, you don’t need a physical picture if you can make someone imagine the scene.
• That’s one of a persuader’s most basic and well-known tricks: People automatically gravitate toward the future they are imagining most vividly, even if they don’t want the future they are seeing.
• Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.
• You can use the power of contrast to improve every part of your professional and personal life.
• Participate in activities at which you excel compared with others. People’s impression of you as talented and capable compared with the average participant will spill over to the rest of your personal brand.
• People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely.
• When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time.
• A great sentence sounds good—in a way that music sounds good—independent of the meaning.
• Persuaders know that humans put more importance on the first part of a sentence than the second part. Our first impressions are hard to dislodge.
• People automatically get used to minor annoyances over time.
• People can get past minor annoyances if you give them enough time. Humans quickly adapt to just about anything that doesn’t kill them.
• One of your brain’s best features is its ability to automatically get over your smaller problems so you can focus on your bigger ones.
• What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.
• A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail.
• If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.
• Trump likes to tell us that many people agree with whatever he’s telling us at the moment. That’s an example of “social proof” persuasion. Humans are wired to assume that if lots of people are saying the same thing, it must be true.
• If you are selling, ask your potential customer to buy. Direct requests are persuasive.
• One of the rules of selling is that at some point in the pitch you have to directly ask for what you want.
• Repetition is persuasion. Also, repetition is persuasion. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasion?
• Match the speaking style of your audience. Once they see you as one of their own, it will be easier to lead them.
• Trump’s simple speaking style made him relatable to the average undereducated voter.
• First you match your audience to gain their trust. Then you can lead them. This is powerful persuasion.
• Our minds are wired to believe that the simplest explanation for events is probably the correct one.
• Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones.
• Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable.
• “Strategic ambiguity” refers to a deliberate choice of words that allows people to read into your message whatever they want to hear. Or to put it another way, the message intentionally leaves out any part that would be objectionable to anyone. People fill in the gaps with their imagination, and their imagination can be more persuasive than anything you say.
• Once you join a side—for anything—it kicks your confirmation bias into overdrive.
• It is easy to fit the facts to the past in a way that supports a number of theories.
• PERSUASION TIP 31 If you are trying to get a decision from someone who is on the fence but leaning in your direction, try a “fake because” to give them “permission” to agree with you. The reason you offer doesn’t need to be a good one. Any “fake because” will work when people are looking for a reason to move your way. But
• Good writing is also persuasive writing.
• Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
• Simple means getting rid of extra words.
• Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words.
• Your first sentence needs to grab the reader.
• Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.