Too busy to read?

A big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means as soon as you tell yourself that you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pinpointed.

For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.

what happens on average when a thousand people do something once is not a clue to what will happen when one person does something a thousand times. In this, it seems, evolved human instinct may be a much better at statistics than modern economists.fn4 To explain this distinction using an extreme analogy, if you offered ten people PS10m to play Russian roulette once, two or three people might be interested, but no one would accept PS100m to play ten times in a row.

When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. You can shortcut the need for a genetic advantage (or for years of practice) by rewriting the rules. A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.

The three most familiar divisions of time we make today continue to be based on the motions of heavenly bodies, though now we call this astrophysics. The length of a year is determined by the time it takes the earth to circle the sun; the length of a month is (more or less) the time it takes the moon to circle the earth; the length of a day is the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis (and observed by us as the span between two successive sunrises or sunsets). But further divisions are not based on any physical laws and tend to be based on historical factors that are largely arbitrary. There is nothing inherent in any biological or astrophysical cycle that would lead to the division of a day into twenty-four equal segments.

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.

This chapter has touched on terrifying events: natural disasters (0.1 percent of all deaths), plane crashes (0.001 percent), murders (0.7 percent), nuclear leaks (0 percent), and terrorism (0.05 percent). None of them kills more than 1 percent of the people who die each year, and still they get enormous media attention.

The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be.

Because language is not a perfect medium for the expression of thought, because one word can have many meanings and two or more words can have the same meaning, we saw how complicated was the relation between an author's vocabulary and his terminology. One word may represent several terms, and one term may be represented by several words.

Over the very narrow time increment, the observation will reveal close to nothing. Yet the dentist's heart will not tell him that. Being emotional, he feels a pang with every loss, as it shows in red on his screen. He feels some pleasure when the performance is positive, but not in equivalent amount as the pain experienced when the performance is negative. At the end of every day the dentist will be emotionally drained. A minute-by-minute examination of his performance means that each day (assuming eight hours per day) he will have 241 pleasurable minutes against 239 unpleasurable ones. These amount to 60,688 and 60,271, respectively, per year. Now realize that if the unpleasurable minute is worse in reverse pleasure than the pleasurable minute is in pleasure terms, then the dentist incurs a large deficit when examining his performance at a high frequency.

skewness issue; it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

First, we observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our life? The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation--to simply say what people are doing that we either like or don't like. Next, we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated? And thirdly, we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified.

The key to becoming world-class in your endeavors is to build your performance around world-class routines. It can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can almost always control how your day starts and ends.

If you don't make decisions about how you're going to live, then you've already made a decision, haven't you? You're making a decision to be directed by the environment instead of shaping your own destiny.

There is one final question the effective decision-maker asks: 'Is a decision really necessary?' One alternative is always the alternative of doing nothing. Every decision is like surgery. It is an intervention into a system and therefore carries with it the risk of shock. One does not make unnecessary decisions any more than a good surgeon does unnecessary surgery. Individual decision-makers, like individual surgeons, differ in their styles. Some are more radical or more conservative than others. But by and large, they agree on the rules.

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the "happiness formula:" H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 The challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range.

It's important to recognize, both in lotteries and medicine, you can do things that change a probability by a large amount but with no real-world, practical significance. You can increase the odds of winning that state lottery by a factor of 100 by buying 100 lottery tickets. But the chance of winning remains so incredibly low, 1 in 100,000, that it hardly seems like a reasonable investment. You might read that the probability of getting a disease is reduced by 50% if you accept a particular treatment. But if you only had a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting it anyway, it may not be worth the expense, or the potential side effects, to lower the risk.

Epictetus counsels that when we say good-bye to a friend, we should silently remind ourselves that this might be our final parting.9 If we do this, we will be less likely to take our friends for granted, and as a result, we will probably derive far more pleasure from friendships than we otherwise would.

As I write this paragraph, my wife and our good friends are wondering why I'm selfishly lagging behind and not meeting them for an afternoon of sitting in the sun. I'll get there soon. And when I do, I'll feel energized and satisfied and be far more fun to be around. No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I'm in a better mood when I show up. That's the trade-off. Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

Perhaps your school allows you to select a foreign language: Do you want to install a software module into your brain that enables you to speak French, or one that enables you to speak Spanish? Do you want to learn to play tennis or chess? Do you want to study to become a chef, a lawyer or a pharmacist?

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how humans (and animals and, in some cases, computers) process information. Traditionally, cognitive psychologists have made a distinction among different areas of study: memory, attention, categorization, language acquisition and use, decision-making, and one or two other topics. Many believe that attention and memory are closely related, that you can't remember things that you didn't pay attention to in the first place. There has been relatively less attention paid to the important interrelationship among categorization, attention, and memory.

The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less. Mental models are a tool set that can help you be wrong less. They are a collection of concepts that help you more effectively navigate our complex world.

recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you're in one of those low-energy states, do those things. Casual reading (magazines, articles, catalogs, Web surfing), contact data that needs to be inputted, file purging, backing up your computer, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler--these are some of the myriad things that you need or want to deal with sometime anyway.

This puts God in a tricky situation. Ancient books relate how God unleashed all His wonders on Egypt. __He feels a little defensive now, because He doesn't have any more wonders to unleash, and He's increasingly concerned that we would see the strings if He tried. He's in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults__. All this is reflected in the steady decline of attempted miracles in the past millennia. He is too noble to rely on bluffing, and the thought of being caught and revealed as an amateur embarrasses Him. This is why God has increasingly kept a professional distance from His favorite species. As He grew more withdrawn, saints and martyrs filled the vacuum as His marketing team. He's ashamed now that He didn't put a stop to them earlier; instead, he slipped into seclusion as they generated endless chronicles.

The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. Think about it. If we have useful work, sustaining relationships, and the promise of pleasure, it is hard to be unhappy.

I wanted to work with people smart enough to have independent thinking but strong enough to change their opinion when evidence or logic suggested it.

Personally, I'm always happy when something is hard. Why? Because I know that most people won't do what it takes; therefore, it will be easier for me to step in front of the pack and take the lead. I love what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge." When you press on despite difficulty, tedium, and hardship, that's when you earn your improvement and gain strides on the competition. If it's hard, awkward, or tedious, so be it. Just do it. And keep doing it, and the magic of the Compound Effect will reward you handsomely.

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

This is the adaptation principle at work: People's judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.9 Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they "habituate," firing less to stimuli that they have become used to.

the labour market - a market in which humans lacking access to land or tools must survive by auctioning off their labour, by commodifying their toil.

The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of your psyche will continue to hold you accountable.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

"the aggregation of marginal gains," which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together."

definition of emotional maturity I've ever come across--"the ability to express one's own feelings and convictions balanced with consideration for the thoughts and feelings of others."

When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is 'I love him' or 'I love her.' But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex - unless we are homosexually oriented - even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes.

Cognitive psychologists have provided mountains of evidence over the last twenty years that memory is unreliable. And to make matters worse, we show staggering overconfidence in many recollections that are false. It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.

Now the civil servant called the trades that ended up as losers "gross mistakes," just like journalists call decisions that end up costing a candidate his election a "mistake." I will repeat this point until I get hoarse: A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

The solution is to design and use a workflow system that does the following five things: Make work visible. Limit work-in-progress (WIP). Measure and manage the flow of work. Prioritize effectively (this one may be a challenge, but stay with me--I'll show you how). Make adjustments based on learnings from feedback and metrics.

In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn't answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times--one might have gone out for a walk or be between places, and so if someone couldn't reach you (or you didn't feel like being reached), that was considered normal. Now more people have cell phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their cell phones to say, "I'm sorry, I can't talk now, I'm in a meeting." Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.

Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or simply label their effect: "What about this doesn't work for you?" "What would you need to make it work?" "It seems like there's something here that bothers you." People have a need to say, "No." So don't just hope to hear it at some point; get them to say it early.

Governments are approaching the cocaine market as if it were the chocolate market, in which a rise in the price of cocoa beans leads to a corresponding rise in the price of chocolate bars. In reality, it is more like the art market, in which the tiny cost of the raw materials is insignificant compared with the high price of the finished product. Attempts to raise the price of cocaine by forcing up the cost of coca leaves is a bit like trying to drive up the price of art by raising the cost of paint.

None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it's impossible to share your world with anyone else.

we can use our reasoning ability to conclude that many of the things that our evolutionary programming encourages us to seek, such as social status and more of anything we already have, may be valuable if our goal is simply to survive and reproduce, but aren't at all valuable if our goal is instead to experience tranquility while we are alive.

The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics. People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things. They get bored in a second when the conversation turns to things. Once you know whether you are dealing with a thing person or a people person, you can craft your conversation to his or her sweet spot. It makes a big difference in how people react to you, and that in turn will make you more confident and less shy.

We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer - and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more.

Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn't read deeply and regularly. "I cannot understand," he said, "how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth."

Putting the benefit statement in your verbal Nutshell Resume brings your job to life and makes it memorable.

Every Sunday night, also at 6 p.m., we have our RR (Relationship Review). This is a practice I picked up from relationship experts Linda and Richard Eyre during an interview I did with them for our October 2009 SUCCESS Audio Series. During this time, we discuss the previous week's wins, losses, as well as the adjustments we need to make in our relationship. We start the conversation by telling each other a few things we have appreciated about the other during the previous week--it's helpful to start with the good stuff. Then, using an idea I picked up from my interview with Jack Canfield, we ask each other, "On a scale of one to ten (ten being the best), how would you rate our relationship this week?" This gets the discussion of wins and losses flowing--oh, boy! Then we discuss the adjustments that need to be made through this follow-up question: "What would it take to make your experience a ten?"

One thing that many successful people do for time management is to calculate how much their time is subjectively worth to them. This is not necessarily what it is worth in the marketplace, or what their hourly pay works out to, although it might be informed by these--this is how much they feel their time is worth to them. When deciding, for example, whether to steam clean your carpets or hire someone to do it, you might take into account what else you could be doing with your time. If a free weekend day is rare, and you are really looking forward to spending it bicycling with friends, or going to a party, you may well decide that it's worth it to pay someone else to do it.

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

"We know today that, just like when you open a Microsoft Word file on your computer, when you retrieve a memory from where it is stored in the brain, you automatically open it to 'edit.' You may not be aware that your current mood and environment can influence the emotional tone of your recall, your interpretation of events, and even your beliefs about which events actually took place. But when you 'save' the memory again and place it back into storage, you can inadvertently modify it. ... [This] can bias how and what you recall the next time you pull up that 'file.'

it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts. It is a pure accounting fact that, aside from the commentators, very few people take home a check linked to how often they are right or wrong. What they get is a profit or loss.

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors: First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through. Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. You must use your mind to get things off your mind. Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn't be a part of your life if you didn't consciously seek them out.

I take the view that it is this remembering self with which we should be more concerned. Kahneman gives examples that support this preference: would you go on a holiday knowing that all memory of it would be wiped from your brain (and camera) the moment it was over? Probably not. Mere pampering to the experiencing self is not enough; we want memories too.

"The banquet is in the first bite." Taking this adage to heart will help you enjoy your food and eat more slowly. No other bite will taste as good as the first, and every subsequent bite will progressively diminish in satisfaction. Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility, and it argues for savoring the first few bites and stopping sooner than you otherwise might. For as you go on, you'll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.

Our failures to update from interacting with reality spring primarily from three things: not having the right perspective or vantage point, ego-induced denial, and distance from the consequences of our decisions.

Or his emphasis, explained throughout the book, on relying on an "external brain"--that is, tools that can do routine categorizing and remembering for us, from simple folders in which to store receipts to established places in which you will always put keys, glasses, or other things you don't want to hunt for each time.

So when you watch the Tokyo Games in 2020, remember that this seeming competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global agreement. For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that humankind is capable of organising such an event.

Because of the way the mind developed, it is brilliant at recognition, but terrible at recall. You can glance at today's calendar and in the course of a few seconds get a coherent sense of the day and its contents and contexts. But you'd have a terrible time trying to recall the contents of the next fourteen days on your calendar merely from memory.

Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

Slogans used to be important because you could put them in TV commercials and get your message across in just a few seconds. Today, that same conciseness is important but for a different reason. A slogan that accurately conveys the essence of your Purple Cow is a script. A script for the sneezer to use when she talks with her friends. The slogan reminds the user, "Here's why it's worth recommending us; here's why your friends and colleagues will be glad you told them about us." And best of all, the script guarantees that the word of mouth is passed on properly - that the prospect is coming to you for the right reason.

I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work.

'Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don't need are more difficult to obtain.'

People who are "unconsciously incompetent" don't know they're incompetent--they know so little about the subject that they can't fully appreciate how little they actually know. That's why every barber and taxi driver you meet is an expert on the economy and international politics.

The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced they will be of the existence of the imaginary recipient. A poor peasant sacrificing a valuable bull to Jupiter will become convinced that Jupiter really exists, otherwise how can he excuse his stupidity? The peasant will sacrifice another bull, and another, and another, just so he won't have to admit that all the previous bulls were wasted.

To find your annual salary, just take your hourly rate, double it, and add three zeros to the end. If you make PS20/hour, you make approximately PS40,000/year. If you make PS30/hour, you make approximately PS60,000/year. This also works in reverse. To find your hourly rate, divide your salary by two and drop the three zeros. So PS50,000/year becomes approximately PS25/hour.

It is foolish to complain of the misfortunes which have come to pass through your own fault.

So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I'm with them. I'm happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic."

Perhaps the biggest problem with human memory is that we don't always know when we're recalling things inaccurately. Many times, we have a strong feeling of certainty that accompanies an incorrect, distorted memory. This faulty confidence is widespread, and difficult to extinguish. The relevance to organizational systems is that the more we can externalize memory through physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, underprecise memory.

Remember, it is not an argument; it is an open exploration of what's true.

Jeff Bezos again, in a 1997 letter to shareholders: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. __The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time__.

Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure. There is no such thing as a 'good man'. Good for what? is the question.

When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It's not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you'll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you'll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend--and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.

I had no wish to go along with a culture that treated success as a zero-sum game. For me to succeed, you have to fail. I did, however, come away with a strong belief that there were plenty of other people out there who thought like me. They were people who craved belonging and purpose at least as much as money and status, who wanted to be part of something that they could believe in.

I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. __I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn't appeal to me__. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line--and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

Professionals forget the following reality. It is not the estimate or the forecast that matters so much as the degree of confidence with the opinion.

When they introduce people, they buy an insurance policy on the conversation with a few simple add-ons: 'Susan, I'd like you to meet John. John has a wonderful boat we took a trip on last summer. John, this is Susan Smith. Susan is editor-in-chief of Shoestring Gourmet magazine.'

Hey, I thought. This YOU stuff really works. To test my hypothesis, I tried it a few more times. I kept asking passers-by my three forms of the question. Sure enough, whenever I asked, 'Could YOU tell me where ...' people were more pleasant and helpful than when I started the question with I or Where.

Remember that you're looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself. The answer doesn't have to be in your head; you can look outside yourself. If you're truly looking at things objectively, you must recognize that the probability of you always having the best answer is small and that, even if you have it, you can't be confident that you do before others test you. So it is invaluable to know what you don't know.

The right way to find out So how do you find out what someone does for a living? (I thought you'd never ask.) You simply practise the following eight words. All together now: 'How ... do ... you ... spend ... most ... of ... your ... time?'

Suppose a genetic test indicates that your would-be daughter will in all likelihood be smart, beautiful and kind - but will suffer from chronic depression. Wouldn't you want to save her from years of misery by a quick and painless intervention in the test tube? And while you are at it, why not give the child a little push? Life is hard and challenging even for healthy people. So it would surely come in handy if the little girl had a stronger-than-normal immune system, an above-average memory or a particularly sunny disposition. And even if you don't want that for your child - what if the neighbours are doing it for theirs? Would you have your child lag behind? And if the government forbids all citizens from engineering their babies, what if the North Koreans are doing it and producing amazing geniuses, artists and athletes that far outperform ours? And like that, in baby steps, we are on our way to a genetic child catalogue.

HERE ARE SOME USEFUL RATIOS TO TRACK: --Return on Promotion: For every $1 you spend in advertising, how much revenue do you collect? --Profit per Employee: For every person you employ, how much profit does your business generate? --Closing Ratio: For every prospect you serve, how many purchase? --Returns/Complaints Ratio: For every sale you make, how many choose to return or complain?

TRANSFORM LOCAL DISCOVERIES INTO GLOBAL IMPROVEMENTS When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge. In other words, when teams or individuals have experiences that create expertise, our goal is to convert that tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing) into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else's expertise through practice.

Cortes started a war with the Aztecs that led to the destruction of their empire. However, he had only six hundred men, whereas the Aztecs controlled most of modern-day Mexico. The odds were obviously thought to be heavily against the Spanish, and many of Cortes's soldiers were reasonably wary of his plans. To secure their motivation, Cortes sank his ships to make sure they had no option but to succeed or die. Without the escape hatch of going back to Spain on the boats, the soldiers' best option was to fight with Cortes. Translation errors led some to believe he burned the boats, but now we know he just had them damaged to the point of sinking. Nonetheless, burn the boats lives on as a mental model for crossing the point of no return.

To make sure the message we sent is the message that's received, ask the listener to reflect it back.

Make sure you have something every day you're looking forward to. Maybe it's your job, maybe it's a basketball game after work or a voice lesson or your writing group, maybe it's a date. But have something every day that lights you up. It'll keep your soul hungry to create more of these moments.

It is our own human fingers that wrote the Bible, the Quran and the Vedas, and it is our minds that give these stories power. They are no doubt beautiful stories, but their beauty is strictly in the eyes of the beholder. Jerusalem, Mecca, Varanasi and Bodh Gaya are sacred places, but only because of the feelings humans experience when they go there. In itself, the universe is only a meaningless hodge-podge of atoms. Nothing is beautiful, sacred or sexy - but human feelings make it so. It is only human feelings that make a red apple seductive and a turd disgusting. Take away human feelings, and you are left with a bunch of molecules.

Recognize that conflicts are essential for great relationships . . . . . . because they are how people determine whether their principles are aligned and resolve their differences. Everyone has his or her own principles and values, so all relationships entail a certain amount of negotiation or debate over how people should be with each other. What you learn about each other will either draw you together or drive you apart. If your principles are aligned and you can work out your differences via a process of give-and-take, you will draw closer together. If not, you will move apart. Open discussion of differences ensures that there are no misunderstandings. If that doesn't happen on an ongoing basis, gaps in perspective will widen until inevitably there is a major clash.

One eighteenth-century monarch, Frederick the Great, used the same magic in the promotion of the potato as a domestic crop, transforming something worthless and unwanted into something valuable through the elixir of psychology. The reason he wanted eighteenth-century Prussian peasants to cultivate and eat the potato was because he hoped that they would be less at risk of famine when bread was in short supply if they had an alternative source of carbohydrate; it would also make food prices less volatile. The problem was that the peasants weren't keen on potatoes; even when Frederick tried coercion and the threat of fines, they simply showed no interest in eating them. Some people objected because the potato was not mentioned in the Bible, while others argued that, since dogs wouldn't eat potatoes, why should humans? So, having given up on compulsion, Frederick tried subtle persuasion. He established a royal potato patch in the grounds of his palace, and declared that it was to be a royal vegetable, that could only be consumed by members of the royal household or with royal permission.fn1 If you declare something highly exclusive and out of reach, it makes us all want it much more - call it 'the elixir of scarcity'. Frederick knew this and so posted guards around his potato patch to protect his crop, but gave them secret instructions not to guard the patch too closely. Curious Prussians found they could sneak into the royal potato patch and could steal, eat and even cultivate this fabulously exclusive vegetable for themselves.

So I don't ask. Instead, I say, "In case you're worried about volunteering to role-play with me in front of the class, I want to tell you in advance ... it's going to be horrible." After the laughter dies down, I then say, "And those of you who do volunteer will probably get more out of this than anyone else."

Although Epictetus and the other Stoics think we should be indifferent to people's opinions of us, they would advise us to conceal our indifference. After all, to tell someone else that you don't care what he thinks is quite possibly the worst insult you can inflict.)

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.

'The secret, darling, is to love everyone you meet. From the moment you meet them. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Start from a position that they are lovely and that you will love them. Most people will respond to that and be lovely and love you back and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you can then achieve the most wonderful things.' Then she leant forward and whispered in my ear. 'But get rid of any of the bastards that let you down.'

Shackleton was looking for those with something more. He was looking for a crew that belonged on such an expedition. His actual ad ran like this: "Men wanted for Hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." The only people who applied for the job were those who read the ad and thought it sounded great.

Because Essentialists will commit and "go big" on only the vital few ideas or activities, they explore more options at first to ensure they pick the right one later.

In her autobiography, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg reluctantly admits to carrying a notebook and pen around to keep track of her To Do list, and confesses that at Facebook, where she is the COO, this is "like carrying around a stone tablet and chisel." Yet she and many others like her persist in this ancient technology. There must be something to it.

Some foods that we consider haute cuisine today, such as lobster, were so plentiful in the 1800s that they were fed to prisoners and orphans, and ground up into fertilizer; servants requested written assurance that they would not be fed lobster more than twice a week.

Everyone should be up-front in expressing how confident they are in their thoughts. A suggestion should be called a suggestion; a firmly held conviction should be presented as such--particularly if it's coming from someone with a strong track record in the area in question.

Pretend you live inside the world's largest rental store. Why would you own anything? You can borrow whatever you need within arm's reach. Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. You have no responsibility to clean, to repair, to store, to sort, to insure, to upgrade, to maintain.

Most of the studies simply confirmed Dale Carnegie's 1936 classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.3 His wisdom for the ages said success lay in smiling, showing interest in other people, and making them feel good about themselves. 'That's no surprise,' I thought. It's as true today as it was over sixty years ago.

When it is a Patagonian Toothfish - renamed into a Chilean Seabass for promotional purposes. The price and popularity of fish seems to have little to do with taste or nutritional content, and everything to do with marketing. To give just one example, Patagonian Toothfish was undesirable until a Californian fish merchant marketed it as the new-found delicacy of Chilean Seabass in the late 1970s29, pushing the price to over PS60/$85 per kilo. It isn't even a seabass! Sadly, the result of all the popularity is that stocks of this once-abundant fish, found in the deep (by which I mean anything from 300 m to over 3.5 km down) Southern Ocean, and able to grow to over 2 m in length and 100 kg in weight, are now threateningly low. And it takes 45 years to replace a 45-year-old fish.

SUMMARY We close this chapter with a few summarizing lines. One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people's external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.

It's more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.

The Rule of 72 is a fast trick you can do to figure out how long it will take to double your money. Here's how it works: Divide the number 72 by the return rate you're getting, and you'll have the number of years you must invest in order to double your money. (For the math geeks among us, here's the equation: 72 / return rate = number of years.) For example, if you're getting a 10 percent return rate from a tracker fund, it would take you approximately seven years (72 / 10) to double your money. In other words, if you invested PS5,000 today, let it sit there, and earned a 10 percent return, you'd have PS10,000 in about seven years. And it doubles from there, too. Of course, you could have even more by adding a small amount every month using the power of compounding.

To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

There is no fruit which is not bitter before it is ripe.

Revenue-protecting work is a major target of Thief Neglected Work. Because the business is often unaware of what's involved in keeping a system secure, reliable, and functioning, revenue-generating work is considered a higher priority than intangible maintenance and sustainment work.

you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type. It's a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers. __Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I'll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment__. The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.

Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others--that is too high a price to pay.

As Harvard developmental psychologist Bob Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, likes to say, in most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others' impressions of how they're doing their job.

The Compound Effect is based on a principle I've used in my own life and training; that is, your decisions shape your destiny. The future is what you make of it. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default.

When asking someone for a favour, let them know how much it means to you. You come across as a straight shooter, and the joy of helping you out is often reward enough. Don't deny them that pleasure!

So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It's up to each expert to decide their availability.

at Bridgewater the key shared values that maintain our culture are meaningful work and meaningful relationships, radical truth and radical transparency, an open-minded willingness to explore harsh realities including one's own weaknesses, a sense of ownership, a drive for excellence, and the willingness to do the good but difficult things, we look for highly capable people who deeply want all of those things.

Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this has been shown to be a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multi-task well. ... When people think they're multi-tasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so."

On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don't become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don't do something about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever.

We're apes. We think we're all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we're just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. --L. P. Jacks...

Technique 37: Never the naked thank you Never let the words thank you stand alone. From A to Z, always follow it with for : from 'Thank you for asking' to 'Thank you for zipping me up.'

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be.

Remember that every story has another side. Wisdom is the ability to see both sides and weigh them appropriately.

Free recall. Wenderoth assigns her students to spend ten minutes at the end of each day sitting with a blank piece of paper on which to write everything they can remember from class. They must sit for ten minutes.

If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone on his side, he ought to ask for a favor.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

"Courage over comfort." Just a simple reminder that there's nothing comfortable about being courageous. Everyone wants to be brave, but no one wants to be vulnerable.

The cliche in medical diagnostics is "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." In other words, don't ignore the base rate of what is most likely, given the symptoms.

one of the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does. American gas stations now make more money inside selling food (and cigarettes) than they do outside selling gasoline. But consider what kind of food this is: Except perhaps for the milk and water, it's all highly processed, imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become "processed corn stations": ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you. Don't eat here.

Finally, the Stoics are careful to avoid becoming connoisseurs in the worst sense of the word--becoming, that is, individuals who are incapable of taking delight in anything but "the best." As a result, they will be capable of enjoying a wide range of easily obtainable things.

Villages that gained a reputation for producing really good wine, olive oil or ceramics discovered that it was worth their while to specialise nearly exclusively in that product and trade it with other settlements for all the other goods they needed. This made a lot of sense. Climates and soils differ, so why drink mediocre wine from your backyard if you can buy a smoother variety from a place whose soil and climate is much better suited to grape vines? If the clay in your backyard makes stronger and prettier pots, then you can make an exchange. Furthermore, full-time specialist vintners and potters, not to mention doctors and lawyers, can hone their expertise to the benefit of all. But specialisation created a problem - how do you manage the exchange of goods between the specialists?

Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp.

Unfortunately, the existence of such emotional tags, while making memory retrieval quicker and easier, does not guarantee that the memory retrieval will be more accurate. Here is an example. If you are like most Americans, you remember right where you were when you first learned that the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City had been attacked on September 11, 2001. You probably remember the room you were in, roughly the time of day (morning, afternoon, evening), and perhaps even who you were with or who you spoke to that day. You probably also remember watching the horrifying television images of an airplane crashing into the first tower (the North Tower), and then, about twenty minutes later, the image of a second plane crashing into the second tower (the South Tower). Indeed, according to a recent survey, 80% of Americans share this memory. But it turns out this memory is completely false. The television networks broadcasted real-time video of the South Tower collision on September 11, but video of the North Tower collision wasn't available and didn't appear on broadcast television until the following day, on September 12.

The point is that we love to debate minutiae. When it comes to weight loss, 99.99 percent of us need to know only two things: Eat less and exercise more. Only elite athletes need to do more. But instead of accepting these simple truths and acting on them, we discuss trans fats, diet pills, and Atkins versus South Beach.

The 1st law (Cue) Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving) Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response) Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward) Make it satisfying.

That's why it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table. People will begin to judge each other through those expectations. And if they feel like their basic expectations have been violated, the reserve of trust is diminished. We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are--or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them. But, as the demonstration shows, sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.

Remove chronic annoyances. There are many things in life that can wear on your nerves. Examining ways to reduce or eliminate chronic stresses or annoyances can generate significant improvements in life satisfaction.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

The methods I present here are all based on three key objectives: (1) capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you--now, later, someday, big, little, or in between--in a logical and trusted system outside your head and off your mind; (2) directing yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the "inputs" you let into your life so that you will always have a workable inventory of "next actions" that you can implement or renegotiate in the moment; and (3) curating and coordinating all of that content, utilizing the recognition of the multiple levels of commitments with yourself and others you will have at play, at any point in time.

Research has shown that your impression of someone is generally based on the average of the available information about them, not the sum. So telling people one great thing about yourself will leave them with a better impression of you than telling than one great thing and one pretty good one. And it gets worse if you tell them one great thing, one pretty good thing, and two mediocre things. Stop with one great thing.

BEGIN EACH DAY by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness--all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil."

Our lives are not the days that have passed, but the days we will remember for ever.

Ask your spouse to make a list of ten things he or she would like for you to do during the next month. Then ask your spouse to prioritize those by numbering them 1-10, with 1 being the most important and 10 being least important. Use this list to plan your strategy for a month of love.

I understand that Tough Mudder is not a race but a challenge. I put teamwork and camaraderie before my course time. I do not whine - kids whine. I help my fellow Mudders complete the course. I overcome all fears.

Make it a daily habit Be open and ready to recognize people in and outside work. Try to make it a daily habit to compliment, thank and credit people around you. You don't need to wait for something large and obvious to acknowledge. Allow small and inconsequential things to get your attention.

The five thieves of time that prevent you from getting work done include: Too Much Work-in-Progress (WIP)--Work that has started, but is not yet finished. Sometimes referred to as partially completed work. Unknown Dependencies--Something you weren't aware of that needs to happen before you can finish. Unplanned Work--Interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point. Conflicting Priorities--Projects and tasks that compete with each other. This is exacerbated when you are uncertain about what the most important thing is to do. Neglected Work--Partially completed work that sits idle on the bench.

Embrace Reality and Deal with It 1.1 Be a hyperrealist. a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. 1.2 Truth--or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality--is the essential foundation for any good outcome. 1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent. a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. b. Don't let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships. 1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works. a. Don't get hung up on your views of how things "should" be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. b. To be "good," something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything. d. Evolve or die. 1.5 Evolving is life's greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward. a. The individual's incentives must be aligned with the group's goals. b. Reality is optimizing for the whole--not for you. c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing--and decide what you want to be. e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have. 1.6 Understand nature's practical lessons. a. Maximize your evolution. b. Remember "no pain, no gain." c. It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one's limits, which is painful. 1.7 Pain + Reflection = Progress. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. b. Embrace tough love. 1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences. 1.9 Own your outcomes. 1.10 Look at the machine from the higher level. a. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes. b. By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify your machine. c. Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. d. The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others' weaknesses again and again. e. Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change. f. Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn't be doing. g. Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others and the whole body of evidence. h. If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want.

The most powerful way to do this is by having the courage to say, "I believe in you," in whatever words and way are comfortable for you. These four words--or their equivalents--constitute the most inspirational message a leader can convey. There are many different ways to do it, but the fundamental and underlying message must always be the same: "I believe in you. I know you can do the job."

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop. The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies, all the while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice that talks to us in our head all the time as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, every day is new, and memory and identity are burdens from the past that prevent us from living freely in the present.

Ignore the unfairness--there is no fair. Play the hand that you're dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death.

One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. I realized that discovering ideas and strategies that could help me to shape human behavior and emotion could give me virtually everything I wanted in my life.

The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos. The second was kairos. The Greek god Chronos was imagined as an elderly, grey-haired man, and his name connotes the literal ticking clock, the chronological time, the kind we measure (and race about trying to use efficiently). Kairos is different. While it is difficult to translate precisely, it refers to time that is opportune, right, different. Chronos is quantitative; kairos is qualitative. The latter is experienced only when we are fully in the moment - when we exist in the now.

When you want to give someone the subliminal feeling you're just alike, use their words, not yours. Suppose you are selling a car to a young mother who tells you she is concerned about safety because she has a young toddler.

The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to differences and changes-that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation.

If someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, 'Could you save that question until I'm finished - and well on my way home?'

Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don't know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.

Say, "Yes. What should I deprioritise?" Saying no to a senior leader at work is almost unthinkable, even laughable, for many people. However, when saying yes is going to compromise your ability to make the highest level of contribution to your work, it is also your obligation. In this case it is not only reasonable to say no, it is essential. One effective way to do that is to remind your superiors what you would be neglecting if you said yes and force them to grapple with the trade-off.

If I invited you to a blind taste test of a $12 wine versus a $1,200 wine, could you tell the difference? I bet you $20 you couldn't. In 2001, Frederic Brochet, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux, ran a study that sent shock waves through the wine industry. Determined to understand how wine drinkers decided which wines they liked, he invited fifty-seven recognized experts to evaluate two wines: one red, one white. After tasting the two wines, the experts described the red wine as intense, deep, and spicy--words commonly used to describe red wines. The white was described in equally standard terms: lively, fresh, and floral. But what none of these experts picked up on was that the two wines were exactly the same wine. Even more damning, the wines were actually both white wine--the "red wine" had been colored with food coloring. Think about that for a second. Fifty-seven wine experts couldn't even tell they were drinking two identical wines.

Practice appreciation with honest, personalized compliments. People thrive on compliments--whether two or twenty, nine or ninety, a person craves praise.

Our unique quality is our capacity for reason, and if we exercise that well, the Stoics argued, we gain a psychological strength that protects us from disturbance. This continues on from Aristotle's thoughts about judging a thing by how well it does the thing it is uniquely supposed to do.

You can't please everyone, so proudly exclude people.

"If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise."

The Phi Beta Delta fraternity had almost collapsed the year before, because there were two different cliques that had split the fraternity in half. There was a group of socialite characters, who liked to have dances and fool around in their cars afterwards, and so on, and there was a group of guys who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances. Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had made an important compromise. They were going to get together and help each other out. Everyone had to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would teach them and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every dance. If a guy didn't know how to get a date, the other guys would get him a date. If the guy didn't know how to dance, they'd teach him to dance. One group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were teaching them how to be social.

Comm-YOU-nication also enriches your social conversation. Gentlemen, say a lady likes your suit. Which woman gives you warmer feelings? The woman who says, 'I like your suit.' Or the one who says, 'YOU look great in that suit.'

The Streisand effect applies to an even more specific situation: when you unintentionally draw more attention to something when you try to hide it. It's named for entertainer Barbra Streisand, who sued a photographer and website in 2003 for displaying an aerial photo of her mansion, which she wanted to remain private. Before the suit, the image had been downloaded a total of six times from the site; after people saw news stories about the lawsuit, the site was visited hundreds of thousands of times, and now the photo is free to license and is on display on Wikipedia and many other places.

I'm here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

It always takes longer than expected, per Hofstadter's Law, even when--and this is the critical part--one takes Hofstadter's Law into account.

Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result. Being radically open-minded enhances the efficiency of those feedback loops, because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and others that there can't be any misunderstandings.

Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks.

stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

Curious, she asks one of the them why he doesn't seem very worried. He replies with a puzzled look, "I'm a developer--I work on features. I give them to QA and Ops to test and deploy. Then I work on the features for the next release. That keeps me plenty busy."

Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.

Lady Philosophy tries several other reframing tactics. She points out that his wife, sons, and father are each dearer to him than his own life, and all four still live. She helps him see that adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for more, but adversity makes them strong. And she draws Boethius's imagination far up into the heavens so that he can look down on the Earth and see it as a tiny speck on which even tinier people play out their comical and ultimately insignificant ambitions.

I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday. They insist on bringing into today the failures of yesterday, and in so doing, they pollute a potentially wonderful present.

For our purposes, let's agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can't tell if they're moving you in the right direction.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself? I step back ... and slow down ... and ask the five whys. And when I am done, I also ask if I am afraid of something but too afraid to admit it.

If you are disappointed because you can't be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody can do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team?

Keep a "Gift Idea Notebook." Every time you hear your spouse say: "I really like that," or "Oh, I would really like to have one of those!" write it down in your notebook.

When you do someone a favour and they obviously 'owe you one,' wait a few weeks. Don't make it look like tit for tat. Allow the favour asker the pleasurable myth that you joyfully did the favour with no thought of what you're going to get in return.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

If you want to die the richest man, then just stay sharp. Keep investing. Don't spend anything. Don't eat any capital. Don't have a good time. Don't get to know yourself. Don't give anything away. Keep it all. Die as rich as you can. But you know what? I heard an expression that puts it well: __There's no pocket on that last shirt.__ --Susie Tompkins Buell...

If you want to be a more peaceful person you must understand that being right is almost never more important than allowing yourself to be happy. The way to be happy is to let go, and reach out. Let other people be right. This doesn't mean that you're wrong. Everything will be fine. You'll experience the peace of letting go, as well as the joy of letting others be right.

Fuck that. People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That's what we try to encourage at Basecamp. JOMO! The joy of missing out.

The simple rule for "I" versus "me" is that the sentence has to make sense if you remove the other person mentioned in the sentence. For example, if you say, "Bob and I went to a movie," it would still make sense if you removed "Bob and" and said, "I went to a movie." If the sentence is "Please give the documents to Bob and me," you can remove "Bob and" and it still makes sense as "Please give the documents to me." You'll often hear smart people get this rule wrong, so don't be fooled by how many times you hear it incorrectly.

Pay twice as much and buy half as many. Commit this answer to memory.

run around with fire extinguishers in times of flood.

the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory - until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik's follow-up research, we also know that we don't actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That's right: The brain doesn't distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

'as sure as your shadow will follow you.'

"We need to learn the slow 'yes' and the quick 'no.'

The statistics show that nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year - on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Road traffic accidents rank as the ninth leading cause of death and account for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally.8 By comparison, deaths from plane crashes totalled 303 in 2016 and just 79 in 2017.

Technique 82: Tit for (wait ... wait) tat When people do you favours and it's obvious 'they owe you one,' wait a suitable amount of time before asking them to 'pay.' Let them enjoy the fact (or fiction) that you did it out of friendship. Don't call in your tit for their tat too swiftly.