Chester Grant

2. When you are listening to someone speak, play the game of repeating in your head what the other person is saying as they are saying it, word for word (you can do this out loud, but you might come across as slightly insane).

3. Doing this forced me to stay focused on what exactly was being said and would stop my mind, at least for a little while, from wandering to other topics.

4. Another technique is to make and hold eye contact with the speaker. Eye contact is probably one of the most, if not the most, powerful ways that humans can communicate with each other.

5. By focusing on other people when they speak and actively listening to what it is they're saying, our minds are freed from thinking, which allows us the ability to respond. “Thinking fast” is more a function of being able to respond to what you hear than of thinking of something to say. This in turn allows us to understand and process more information, which invariably leads us to make often‐unexpected connections. And making unexpected connections is just another way of saying “making shit up.”

6.  An improv actor knows that the other actors are going to do the same thing, so each has the confidence to add on and build off of the initial concept. The goal is to take the thinking out of it and focus on listening, making a connection, and responding.

7. In the initial ideation phase, as long as you're responding to what was said by the other actor, it doesn't really matter what you say. As long as your response is inspired in some way by what your scene partner just said, then there is no wrong answer. 

8. Let's take a look at a basic Word Association exercise. I'll start with a word, any word; for example:

Pineapple 

Chunk 

Goonies 

Movies

Popcorn 

Butter 

Ball 

Masquerade 

Intrigue 

Assassination 

9. All I did in this exercise is to associate directly from one idea to get to another. The initial concept is “pineapple.” By associating from one word to the next, I quickly build to the end concept, which is “assassination.” While this is a very basic ideation exercise, it essentially illustrates the fundamentals of improv: listening and building off of other ideas.

10. For one thing, we are generally not raised to make other people's ideas better. Pretty much our entire lives we are taught that there is great value in being an original thinker.

11. Curiosity has been one of the main reasons that I have been fortunate enough to live such an interesting and creative life.

12. I have always found that by doing the things that I am curious about, I have been able to get a deeper understanding of whatever subject I am exploring.

13.  The ability to jump on the spark is the single most important thing for making shit up, in my not‐so‐humble opinion. Look, every asshole has ideas, it's the assholes who do anything with the ideas who can make a difference in their lives.

14. For me the key to identifying a spark is when I get unabashedly excited about something. When I have a positive emotional reaction to an idea, that usually means there is something there to take a look at.

15. One hundred sparks will die out for every one that flickers to life. That is perfectly okay and acceptable. I'm sure there are more talented people than I who have a higher spark‐into‐flame rate. For me it is all about volume. I firmly believe that if I allow enough sparks to start, eventually one will catch.

16. The fear of looking stupid is often one of the biggest reasons we don't go after the things we really want.

17. Maybe you don't immediately hit the open mic stage, but rather you sign up for an improv class. That's all, just sign up. You don't even have to commit in your mind to go, just execute the simplest first step, which is signing up. You don't even need to tell anyone! Then once you do that, force yourself to go to the first class, no commitments after that.

18. What is even stupider than the fear of looking stupid is not pursuing those things in life that you want to try just because you are worried about what other people might think.

19. If we accept that each person thinks mostly about his or her own self then we can infer that everyone else is thinking very little about us. And that is a liberating thing. 

20. The reason that public speaking is consistently in the top three of the list of fears of human beings is because the fear of being humiliated in front of groups is a deep‐seated primal emotion.

21. What I have found helpful is to be declarative in anything that I'm doing. In improv we are trained to make declarative statements wherever possible. This helps drive the action in the scene and also to make very clear to our scene partner as well as the audience what we are trying to achieve.

22. Strong declarative statements help narrow and control the narrative.

23. This is what a declarative statement would look like: “Let's grab a coffee at Dunk's.” This is a strong statement that gives the other actor and the audience clear understanding of the first actor's intent.

24. I have often found that making a strong declarative statement along the lines of “So, I'm doing X now,” tends to stop other people from offering overly negative judgments about what it is I'm doing.

25. It is easy for people to point out why you shouldn't begin something, but it is much more difficult for people to tell you why you should stop doing something, especially if you follow up with the reason why you like doing it. Even the biggest blowhard tends to not want to crush someone else's good vibes. 

26. The declarative statement takes the power of judgment away from the responder.

27. From a functional standpoint, declarative statements shut down negative statements and send the message that you are not overly interested about how the other person feels about what you are doing. By practicing this technique you start to develop somewhere in your brain the ability to care less and less about what people think. This in turn removes one of the biggest obstacles to creating or being original thinker. 

28. Another fun little technique that you can practice is responding to negative thoughts or opinions with two simple words, “Thank you.”

29. “Heightening” is a technique where a concept is built upon in such a way that it grows from a seemingly normal, practical idea into a crazy, outlandish end product that makes people lose their minds.

30. In an improv scene heightening is what builds the stakes and tension and generally leads to humor.

31. The same original premise was still there – customer walks into a coffee shop to buy a cup of coffee – but by making exaggerated choices at different parts in the scene, it became far more compelling to watch.

32. Here is an example of a general idea, heightened: I'm interested in rescue dogs.

What if I rescue stray dogs? 

What if I create a home for them? 

What if that home was a farm? 

How about a ranch? 

10 acres. 

50 acres. 

100 acres. 

1,000 acres. 

A ranch where hundreds of dogs could live. 

Thousands of dogs. 

And I call it Dogland Ranch.

33. I am of the belief that it takes just about the same amount of effort to think big as it does to think small. If I am going to exert my admittedly limited mental energy, I might as well have fun and think big.

34. All communication can be broken down into three avenues of approach; yes, no, or maybe. Do you love me? Yes, no, maybe. You want to grab a beer? Yes, no, maybe. 

35. No. Say it out loud. No! You can feel the power in this simplest of words. No is authority. No is discipline, the parent, the teacher. No by its nature is negative. No is often fearful, afraid of change. No is risk‐averse, happy to maintain the status quo. No is safe.

36. Used correctly, no can help shape the creative process. Wielded in a haphazard way, no can stop the creative process before it ever gets a chance to begin.

37. The idea of “No” has great influence on the creative process, especially at the beginning. In improv we are taught to avoid saying “No,” especially at the very beginning of the scene. If an improv actor offers an idea and their scene partner immediately says “No” to it, then that scene is effectively over.

38. Here is an example of a “No” scene: Gabby: Hey, you want to grab a cup of coffee? Lucy: No, I don't like coffee.

39. Saying “No” at the very beginning of the scene also tends to leads directly to an argument or one‐on‐one conflict. While this can get laughs at first, they will quickly die out as the audience becomes frustrated that no new information is being added and that the story isn't going anywhere.

40. Here is another way this scene typically goes: 

Gabby: Want to grab a cup of coffee? 

Lucy: No, I don't drink coffee. Let's go get some tea.

Gabby: Tea is gross. I hate tea.

41. Saying “No” leads to uninteresting and uncomfortable scenes.

42. When we say “No” to one idea we are typically saying no to three, four, or five ideas.

43. If, though, you are going to have repeated interactions with a person, constantly saying “no” tends to push people away.

44. From a team creation standpoint what can be at least as bad as “No,” and is oftentimes even more problematic, is the “Maybe.”

45. YES, AND. So if “No” stops ideas from moving ahead and “Maybe” slows them down, how exactly do we move ideas along to bigger and better concepts? In modern improvisational theater the actors are trained to use the concept of “Yes, and” to quickly move ideas forward and build to completely new and unexpected concepts that each member of the scene can feel ownership of.

46. If all we ever do is say “Yes,” then we are ceding any control completely to other people. By only saying “Yes” while not offering any of our own ideas, we are taking a very passive approach to the creative process.

47. It is the “and” that kicks the idea in the ass and moves it forward. The “and” leads us to the next action or possibility.

48. Does that mean that we go around on stage constantly saying “Yes, and, Yes, and”? Of course not. That would be terrible and artificial and unbearable to watch. Hell, I will even say something that is practically blasphemous in the improv world: “Yes, and” can sometimes be overblown as a concept. If we never explore conflict or disagreement onstage, then we will miss the opportunity to explore opposing points of view or authentic representations of human interaction.

49. Do we actually say “Yes, and” onstage? Rarely. What we do is try to find ways to agree with our scene partners, and then introduce our own perspective on what is happening. “Yes, and” can be said a hundred different ways: Cool, let's… Awesome, we should… Great, now we can… Sweet, let's go… Nice, now I'm going to…

50. “Yes, and” concept is far more collaborative and leads to a multitude of different possibilities, whereas the “Yes, but” conversation will be far more antagonistic and argumentative and lead to fewer new ideas.

51. Oddly enough, the concept of “No, but” is an effective way of saying no while still keeping somebody on your side and exploring other opportunities.

52. Improv actors are trained to limit their questions onstage and instead make declarative statements.

53. Am I saying we should never ask questions? Of course not. Open‐ended questions, questions of possibility, the “What if” or “How might we” or “Why does” type of question helps us discover new information. Open‐ended questions are excellent tools in the ideation phase of the creative process.

54. Once you get to the “making shit happen” phase, though, they can slow the decision‐making process down to a crawl.

55. The actors are never worried about what the final outcome of the scene would be because they are focused on being in the moment, listening to what is being said, and then continuing to make a series of small decisions.

56. And that is a key component of making shit up. Make a decision and get on with it.

57. In general, people follow passion and energy, not ideas.

58. Humans are drawn to other humans who create energy and stimulate emotions.

59. A simple way of increasing this energy is by consciously moving just a bit faster than we normally do.

60. The first and easiest exercise is to speak louder. I know this must seem like an incredibly trite insight, but I can assure you this, if you consider yourself quiet or shy or an introvert, just increasing your volume a small amount will return great dividends in terms of the energy you exude.

61. If I could give one piece of advice that will immediately make any speech better, it is to inflect different words when you talk. I don't care which ones you pick to INFLECT. They can be NOUNS or they can BE verbs or any other DAMN word you choose. But by simply inflecting different words when you talk you will automatically be better than 90 percent of the speakers who drone on and on, never once altering how they emphasize words. 

62. I decided it was a good opportunity to demonstrate this technique, not only for him but the rest of the group.

63. It read something like this: 

In case of an emergency please exit through the fire doors that can be found at either end of the room. Fire extinguishers are placed in the front and back of the auditorium. Please exit in an orderly fashion and assembled in the designated team area.

64. First I read the instructions in your typical corporate/10th‐grade oral report monotone. Then I read it again like this (caps indicate inflection):

In case of an EMERGENCY please exit through the FIRE Doors that can be FOUND at EITHER end of the room. Fire EXTINGUISHERS are placed in the front AND back of the auditorium. PLEASE exit in an ORDERLY fashion and ASSEMBLE in the DESIGNATED team area. 

65. Through the simple act of inflecting, adding emphasis to various words to break up the monotonous pattern, I took a simple instructional sign and gave it some life and passion.

66. I have found that being impatient in regards to taking action is extremely powerful. Relentlessly push along the things that you tangibly can.

67. Not even near perfection, but tangible results that I can evaluate and then build on. The imperfect results are always better then the near‐perfect idea that never gets implemented.

68. I've always found that when I do something immediately, it begins to create momentum that helps propel me toward my goal. Being impatient helps create the motivation I need to do shit.

69. Patience is about showing up and being there in the moment again and again without any major expectations of results.

70. The single most important thing we ever did at Improv Asylum was to decide to open the doors, turn on the lights, and do shows. Night after night.**

71. I believe that pain tolerance or lack thereof directly correlates to success or failure in the long run in any endeavor we decide to embark upon.

72. You need to go out and put yourself in a position to be lucky. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been hit by a train without being in front of it. It is the same thing with the luck. You need to get out and put yourself in situations or environments where experiences and opportunities can happen.

73. If you manage any kind of team, group, reading circle, whatever, my recommendation to you is to “fire the assholes.” They may be high‐performing, they may generate sales, they may be extremely talented, but over the long haul the assholes will always bring a team's performance down. Assholes are demotivational to those around them.

74. Whenever I am facilitating a meeting or directing a group, a technique I use to disarm “the devil's advocate” or anyone else being overly critical during the ideation or initial creation phase is to make sure that no one can offer negative comments without having some intellectual skin in the game. What I mean by “intellectual skin in the game” is that if someone offers a negative comment or observation, I as the person in charge of the group immediately ask that person to offer an idea or potential solution on his or her own.

75. I will not allow someone to sit back and sharp shoot ideas without offering some of their own.

76. When I want to know how our culture is doing, I just take a look the performance of the ushers. If they are happy and having fun and not quitting in droves, then I know that the culture is strong and that managers above them are setting the right tone and leading by example.

77. If you want your team to reach new heights, take a good look at your culture. Because it is your culture that will propel you to the next level, no matter what level you are currently at.

78. As soon as you identify that there are more important tasks or ideas that you need to/want to work on in your business, hire somebody to do the things that are keeping you from doing them.

79. And the best way to learn about anything is by doing it. You can study comedy all you want but until you actually get on stage and do it, it is nothing but high theory.

80. So here is a list of some positive words and phrases that you can start to use in your everyday dialogue: 

Yes and 

We should 

Cool, let's 

What if 

We can

Agreed, 

You are right 

Fantastic idea 

I love that 

So awesome 

Pretty damn good 

Outstanding

81. In a completely contradictory statement, making shit up has also meant not listening to other people when I felt that their views and opinions were not being offered to help me find a way forward, but rather to stop me from pursuing something far greater for myself.

82. Celebrate your wins. Get ice cream and laugh and rehash the awesome plays that everybody made to help win the game. It makes life more enjoyable.

1. While the rest of us are chasing victory, the best in the world know they must avoid losing before they can win. It turns out this is a surprisingly effective strategy.

2. If there is a tagline to my life, it is “Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out,” and this book is a tribute to that belief.

3. Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned. When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there may be only one. You can think of this a bit like playing Tetris. When you play well, you have many options for where to put the next piece. When you play poorly, you need just the right piece.

4. It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

5. Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.

6. In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

7. So our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.

8. There’s nothing stronger than biological instincts. They control us often without us even knowing. Failing to come to terms with them only makes you more susceptible to their influence.

9. Here’s how each essentially functions: The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self- worth or our position in a group hierarchy. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.

10. The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained. One measure of a person is the degree to which they’ll do the right thing when it goes against the popular belief. However, it is easy to overestimate our willingness to diverge from the crowd, and underestimate our biological instinct to fit in.

11. Princeton professor Robert George wrote, “I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.” 1 No, they wouldn’t have. They may understandably want to send that signal now when it’s safe to do so, but back then they would have likely behaved the same most everyone else did at the time. 

12. The only way to outperform if you’re doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else. 

13. Imagine a team of ditchdiggers working with their hands. A slight variation in the amount of soil moved per hour is barely perceptible. Your work is indistinguishable from that of the person next to you. The only way to move more dirt is to dig for longer. 

14. Within this paradigm, the ditchdigger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy. Not only do they look like a fool for taking a risk, but their cumulative production falls behind for every day they are not digging. Only when the shovel comes along do others see its advantage. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.

15. Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

16. Lou Brock might have put it best when he said, “Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.” In other words, someone who’s possessed by the social default is easy to defeat.

17. The inertia default pushes us to maintain the status quo. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something. We resist change even when change is for the best.

18. “Once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force.”

19. The good news is that the same biological tendencies that make us react without reasoning can be reprogrammed into forces for good.

20. The more time you spend with people, the more likely you start to think and act as they do.

21. The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.

22. Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. 

23. Our defaults work off deeply ingrained biological tendencies— our tendencies for self- preservation, for recognizing and maintaining social hierarchies, and for defending ourselves and our territory. We can’t simply know these tendencies exist and then will them out of existence. On the contrary, the feeling that willpower is all it takes to remove these forces is one of the tricks they use to keep us under their control.

24. To stop our defaults from impeding good judgment, we need to harness equally powerful biological forces. We need to take the same forces that the defaults would use to ruin us and turn them to our advantage. Chief among them is the force of inertia.

25. Establishing rituals is the key to creating positive inertia. Rituals focus the mind on something other than the moment. They can be as simple as taking a quick pause before responding to someone’s point of contention at work. One of my old mentors used to tell me, “When someone slights you in a meeting, take a deep breath before you speak and watch how often you change what you’re about to say.”

26. One effective question to ask yourself before you act is, “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”

27. My grandfather (and many others) used to say, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”

29. No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims.

30. Know thyself.—INSCRIPTION ON THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI

31. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

32. Confidence also Comes from How You Talk to Yourself More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence. But while confidence is often a byproduct of our accomplishments, it also comes from how you talk to yourself.

33. Self- confidence is also the strength to accept hard truths. We all have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better.

34. SELF- ACCOUNTABILITY, SELF- KNOWLEDGE, SELF- CONTROL, and self- confidence are essential to exercising good judgment. Here are a couple examples of how they work together.

35. Suppose you know from experience that you’re susceptible to social pressure. To protect yourself from the influence of the social default, you decide to implement a safeguard. You form a rule for yourself: never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.

36. Practicing this safeguard isn’t very enjoyable. Putting someone on hold for a day might be uncomfortable.

37. As simple as they seem, automatic rules for common situations get results. We’ll explore automatic rules in the next chapter.

38. It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis… that you will grow to be like them…. Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite…. Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.—EPICTETUS, Discourses

39. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

40. We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.

41. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher- than- average standards.

42. Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions. 

43. The best teachers expect more from their students and from themselves. And more often than not, the students rise to meet those expectations. The best leaders expect more from people; they hold them to the same standards they hold themselves— a higher standard than most would otherwise know is possible.

44. When we accept substandard work from others, it’s for the same reason: we’re not all in. When you’re committed to excellence, you don’t let anyone on your team half- ass it. You set the bar, you set it high, and you expect anyone working with you to work just as hard and level up to what you expect or above. Anything less is unacceptable.

45. Masters of their craft don’t merely want to check off a box and move on. They’re dedicated to what they do, and they keep at it. Master- level work requires near fanatical standards, so masters show us what our standards should be.

46. Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence. But most of us aren’t lucky enough to have that opportunity.

47. THERE ARE TWO COMPONENTS TO BUILDING STRENGTH by raising the bar: (a) Choose the right exemplars— ones that raise your standards. Exemplars can be people you work with, people you admire, or even people who lived long ago. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they make you better in a certain area, like a skill, trait, or value.

48. In the previous section, we discussed something most people never think about: if you don’t curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice. That group includes your parents, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sure, your high school friends might be great examples of character and acumen, but odds are they’re average. Sure, your parents might be some of the smartest businesspeople in the world, but odds are they’re not. It’s not that you should remove these people from your life, though; controlling your environment just means intentionally adding exemplars into the mix.

49. As Peter Kaufman once told me, “No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.”

50. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they don’t want to learn from someone who has a character blemish or a worldview that doesn’t align with theirs.

51.  “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” Or, as Cato the Elder put it, “Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others.” Don’t throw away the apple because of a bruise on the skin.

52. The only person you’re competing with is the person you were yesterday. Victory is being a little better today. **

53. Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence. If you eat a chocolate bar or skip a workout today, you’re not going to suddenly go from healthy to unhealthy. Work late and miss dinner with your family a couple nights, and it won’t damage your relationship. If you spend today on social media instead of doing work, you’re not going to get fired. However, these choices can end up becoming habits through repetition and accumulate into disaster.

54. The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.

55. There are two ways to manage your weaknesses. The first is to build your strengths, which will help you overcome the weaknesses you’ve acquired. The second is to implement safeguards, which will help you manage any weaknesses you’re having trouble overcoming with strength alone.

56. THERE ARE MANY INBUILT BIOLOGICAL VULNERABILITIES that can impede good judgment: sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, emotion, distraction, stress from feeling rushed, and being in an unfamiliar environment are just some examples. We can’t avoid finding ourselves in these conditions from time to time. But we can implement safeguards to protect us from our defaults when we are. 

57. Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from ourselves— from weaknesses that we don’t have the strength to overcome.

58. Purging your home of all junk food is an example of one safeguarding strategy: increasing the amount of “friction” required to do something that’s contrary to your long- term goals.

59. My favorites include prevention, creating rules for yourself, making checklists, shifting your frame of reference, and making the invisible visible. Let’s talk about each strategy.

60. The first kind of safeguard aims at preventing problems before they happen. One way to do this is to avoid decision- making in unfavorable conditions. Stress, for instance, is a big contributor to bad decisions. Some studies have shown that stress short- circuits the deliberation process— it undermines the systematic evaluation of alternatives that’s needed for effective decision- making.

61. Alcoholics Anonymous has a helpful safeguard for its members. They call it HALT— an acronym that stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. When you feel like having a drink, they say, ask yourself whether any of these conditions apply. If so, deal with the real problem— hunger, anger, loneliness, or fatigue— instead of reaching for a drink.

62. Daniel Kahneman, the godfather of cognitive biases and thinking errors, he revealed an unexpected way we can improve our judgment: replacing decisions with rules.

63. When it comes to your health, just like many other elements of your life, environment determines behavior. Your environment makes one path easier than another. 

64. It’s easier to make healthy food choices if the only foods available to you are good for you. It’s also easier to stick to a consistent pattern of choices if you’re in your familiar operating environment. When you’re in an unfamiliar environment, it’s harder to maintain your familiar patterns of behavior, which is why a lot of people stop exercising or eating healthy when they travel.

65. Your environment isn’t just your physical surroundings. It also includes people. Sometimes it’s hard saying no to someone. 

66. We’re wired in a way that makes us want to be liked by others, and we’re afraid that saying no to someone will make them like us less. Saying no to someone repeatedly can be even more difficult. We might say no when our friend offers us a sugary beverage after a workout one day, but if he does it three days in a row, we cave. That’s only human.

67. In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

68. Kahneman told me his favorite rule was never to say yes to a request on the phone. He knows that he wants people to like him, so he wants to say yes in the moment, but after filling up his schedule with things that didn’t make him happy, he decided to be more vigilant about what he agrees to do and why. When people ask him for things over the phone now, he says something along the lines of, “I’ll have to get back to you after I think about it.” Not only does this give him time to think without the immediate social pressure, but it also allows a lot of these requests to just drop away because people choose not to follow up. He rarely gets back to any of these people and says yes.

69. Another safeguarding strategy is to increase the amount of effort it takes to do things that are contrary to your goals. I used to find myself checking my email whenever I have a second. I’d check it before I got out of bed, on the walk home from work, in line at the grocery store.**

70. If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things. 

71. Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults. Pilots go through a preflight checklist every time they fly. Surgeons go through preoperative checklists every time they operate. You might have a packing checklist every time you travel. In each of these cases, the checklist acts as a safeguard, forcing us to slow down whatever we’re doing and go back to basics. 

72. ONCE YOU HAVE reprogrammed your defaults to create space for clear thinking, you must master the skill of decision- making.

73. Decisions are different from choices. If you casually select an option from a range of alternatives, you’ve made a choice. If you react without thinking, you’ve made an unconscious choice. But neither of these is the same as a decision. A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought.

74. That process is about weighing your options with the aim of selecting the best one, and it’s composed of four stages: defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating the options, and finally making the judgment and executing the best option. We will discuss each of these components in detail throughout this chapter.

75. When the stakes are low, inaction hurts you more than speed. Sometimes it’s better just to make a quick choice and not spend time deliberating

76. Why waste time when action is inconsequential and its effects are easily reversed? For example, if there are two identical squat racks in the gym and both are momentarily open, it makes no difference which one you take. If you wait and decide, they’ll both be taken by someone else. Just choose either one.

77. When the stakes are higher, though, speed can hurt you. If an action could have a major impact on your life or your business and its effects can’t be reversed, you must decide and not merely choose.

78. In these cases, the magnitude of the potential losses makes careful decision- making a worthwhile investment of your time. In these cases, evaluate the options and decide. Don’t just choose. 

79. The next few sections describe some tools for reasoning better when making decisions. They won’t solve every decision- making problem, because no tool is right for every job; each has its uses and limitations. You need multiple tools in your toolbox. Otherwise, you end up solving the wrong problems. As the old adage says, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

80. “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?” The way you define a problem changes what you see.

81. A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows, is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution.

82. One way to keep meetings short and avoid the signaling that comes from repeating information that everyone knows is simply asking everyone, “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”

83. Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.

84. SAFEGUARD: Use the test of time. Test whether you’re addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than merely treating a symptom, by asking yourself whether it will stand the test of time. Will this solution fix the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future? If it seems like the latter, then chances are you’re only treating a symptom.

85. You can put your energy into short- term solutions or long- term solutions but not both. Any energy that’s channeled toward short- term solutions depletes energy that could be put into finding a long- term fix.

86. ONCE YOU’RE CLEAR ON THE PROBLEM, IT’S TIME TO THINK of possible solutions— ways of overcoming the obstacles to get what you want. The way to come up with possible solutions is by imagining different possible futures— different ways the world could turn out.

87. Luckily, there’s a way to convert the hindsight of tomorrow into the foresight of today. It’s a thought experiment that psychologists call premortem. The concept isn’t new, it originates in Stoic philosophy. Seneca used premeditatio malorum (“ the premeditation of evils”) to prepare for the inevitable ups and downs of life. The point isn’t to worry about problems; it’s to fortify and prepare for them.

88. Imagining what could go wrong doesn’t make you pessimistic.

89. “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.” 

90. THE 3 + PRINCIPLE: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.

91. SAFEGUARD: Imagine that one of the options is off the table. Take each of the options you’re considering, and one at a time, ask yourself, “What would I do if that were not possible?”

92. SAFEGUARD: Come up with Both- And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

93. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all.

94. Most information is irrelevant. irrelevant. Knowing what to ignore—separating the signal from the noise—is the key to not wasting valuable time. Think, for example, of investment decisions. The best investors know which variables probabilistically govern the outcomes, and they pay attention to those. They don’t ignore everything else, but focusing primarily on those variables allows them to filter massive amounts of information very quickly.

100. The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information. Many people treat all sources of information as if they’re equally valid. They’re not. While you might value getting everyone’s opinion, that doesn’t mean each opinion should be equally weighted or considered.**

101. SAFEGUARD: Run an experiment. Try something out to see what kinds of results it yields.

102. An experiment is a low-risk way of gathering important information. For example, if you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it. 

103. That’s what my friends at Tuft & Needle did. They were one of the first companies to ship foam mattresses directly to consumers’ homes. They shared an incredible story with me over coffee one day, about their early days. In order to validate their idea, they set up a landing page, bought some Facebook ads, and started taking orders. 

104. They didn’t even have a product or a company yet; they just wanted to see if people would buy foam mattresses from them. After a few days of receiving orders, they had all the proof they needed that people would buy their product. They refunded all the orders and officially started their company. While this example may be a bit unorthodox, there are many ways in which experimenting can help determine whether there’s sufficient demand for a product or service.

105. Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. Getting even one expert’s advice can cut through a lot of confusion and help you quickly formulate and/or eliminate options.

106. Experts don’t treat all requests for help equally, though. Some requests really don’t feel good to receive. Usually these are requests of the tell-me-what-I-should-do type. Often these people haven’t done the work ahead of time, they just want you to decide for them.

107. Remember: the goal isn’t to have someone tell you what to do; rather, it’s to learn how an expert thinks about the problem, which variables they consider relevant, and how those variables interact over time.**

108. THE STOP, FLOP, KNOW PRINCIPLE: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose.

109. When failure is expensive, it’s worth investing in large margins of safety. A margin of safety is a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. It’s designed to save you when surprises are expensive.

110. A margin of safety is like having insurance. If you know in advance you won’t need to make a claim this year, it’s a waste of money to buy insurance. The problem is that you don’t know in what year you’ll need to make a claim, so you buy it every year. It might seem like a waste of money in years when nothing happens, but it shows its real value in years when something does.

111. Building a margin of safety means giving yourself as much cushioning and coverage in the future as possible. It’s a way of preparing yourself for the widest range of possible future outcomes—and protecting yourself against the worst ones.

112. TIP: The margin of safety is often sufficient when it can absorb double the worst-case scenario. So the baseline for a margin of safety is one that could withstand twice the amount of problems that would cause a crisis, or maintain twice the amount of resources needed to rebuild after a crisis.

113. For example, if you want to feel financially secure even if you lose your job, you can estimate how long it will take you to gain employment again, and then save enough to live off savings for double that amount of time.

114. However, if you have a lot of expertise and data, you can reduce your margin of safety yet further. Here’s an example: Warren Buffett aims to buy stocks that are 30–50 percent less than their true value. So he has a 30–50 percent margin of safety on stocks. But he’ll pay close to a dollar on the dollar for stocks that he understands well. So there’s only maybe a 20 percent margin of safety on the stocks he’s the most confident in.

115. One of Warren Buffett’s core tenets for buying a business is that if he doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t buy it. In other words, if he doesn’t have enough information to calculate a margin of safety, he doesn’t invest at all.

116. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.

117. At some point my kids figured out that it was easier to solve a maze backward than forward, especially if the maze is harder or more complicated than usual. Something about starting with the end in mind, they realized, makes it easier to decide which path to take. Life in general works similarly.

2.  Three characteristics— one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment

3. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

4. And when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

5. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

6.  In all of the city of Colorado Springs— a town of well in excess of 100,000 people— the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars. Who were those 168 people? They aren’t like you or me. They are people who go out every night, people who have vastly more sexual partners than the norm, people whose lives and behavior are well outside of the ordinary.

7. This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well. We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious— how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory.

8. The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.

9. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

10. The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

11. Most of us don’t have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends. In one well- known study, a group of psychologists asked people living in the Dyckman public housing project in northern Manhattan to name their closest friend in the project; 88 percent of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. In general, people chose friends of similar age and race.

12. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity.

13. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do. 

14. The answer is that in the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal. When Milgram analyzed his experiment, for example, he found that many of the chains from Omaha to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern. Twenty- four letters reached the stockbroker at his home in Sharon, and of those, sixteen were given to him by the same person, a clothing merchant Milgram calls Mr. Jacobs.

15. The balance of letters came to the stockbroker at his office, and of those the majority came through two other men, whom Milgram calls Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones. In all, half of the responses that came back to the stockbroker were delivered to him by these same three people.

16. Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

17. These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles— these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize— are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

18. He found that 56 percent of those he talked to found their job through a personal connection. Another 18.8 percent used formal means— advertisements, headhunters— and roughly 20 percent applied directly. This much is not surprising; the best way to get in the door is through a personal contact. But, curiously, Granovetter found that of those personal connections, the majority were “weak ties.” Of those who used a contact to find a job, only 16.7 percent saw that contact “often”— as they would if the contact were a good friend— and 55.6 percent saw their contact only “occasionally.” Twenty- eight percent saw the contact “rarely.” People weren’t getting their jobs through their friends. They were getting them through their acquaintances.

19. Word- of- mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors.

20. Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also— and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word- of- mouth epidemics— a Maven. The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.

21. The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too.

22. Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word- of- mouth epidemics. What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help

23. A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word- of- mouth epidemics.

24. In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people— Salesmen— with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word- of- mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who are these Salesmen? And what makes them so good at what they do?

25. If we think about emotion this way— as outside- in, not inside- out— it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.” Senders have special personalities.

26. They are also physiologically different. Scientists who have studied faces, for example, report that there are huge differences among people in the location of facial muscles, in their form, and also— surprisingly— even in their prevalence. “It is a situation not unlike in medicine,” says Cacioppo. “There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It’s not that emotional contagion is a disease. But the mechanism is the same.”

27. Only the charismatic person could infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions.

28. The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

29. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

30. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes: Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.

31. This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious— just as a fashion trend is contagious— that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.

32. Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.

33. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context.

34. There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.

35. Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out. Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop- out rates, for example, demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family.

36. Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

37. Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species— the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain— and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8— or roughly 150. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

38. Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter- gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4.

39. Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men,” Dunbar writes. “This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war.

40. Then there is the example of the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years have lived in self- sufficient agricultural colonies in Europe and, since the early twentieth century, in North America. The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. “Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people,” Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.”

41. The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors that can make a big difference.

42. Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater “need” for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex.

43. At age nineteen, for example, 15 percent of nonsmoking white women attending college have had sex. The same number for white female college students who do smoke is 55 percent.

44. Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

45. In a series of large and well-designed studies of twins — particularly twins separated at birth and reared apart — geneticists have shown that most of the character traits that make us who we are — friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on — are about half determined by our genes and half determined by our environment, and the assumption has always been that this environment that makes such a big difference in our lives is the environment of the home. The problem is, however, that whenever psychologists have set out to look for this nurture effect, they can’t find it.

46. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.

47. Two years later, Columbia University psychologist Alexander Glassman discovered that 60 percent of the heavy smokers he was studying as part of an entirely different research project had a history of major depression. About 80 percent of alcoholics smoke. Close to 90 percent of schizophrenics smoke.

2. ‘The salesperson never decides when the sale is over; the customer does.’ Then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Eric, your fear of hearing the word ‘no’ is the only thing standing between you and greatness.’

3. “After the conversation with Harold I started really looking at what set successful people apart from the masses, and their willingness to fail was at the top of the list.

4. Successful people fail eagerly while failures avoid failing. The whole point of becoming willing to fail more is to become a success, so that one day you won’t be forced to look back on your life and say to yourself, ‘I’m a failure.’

5. A willingness to fail means a person will tolerate just enough failure to get what they need from life, and no more. A wantingness, on the other hand, means you’re not just tolerating the no’s in your life, you’re actually beginning to seek them.

6. What if we decided to make each no we received and every rejection we encountered something that empowers us? Instead of avoiding rejection, what if we made the decision to seek rejection? Instead of avoiding no or perhaps simply tolerating it, what if we went out of our way to actually go for no!”

7. “Simple. Rather than setting goals for the number of yes’s you are planning to get each week, you set goals for the number of no’s you’re going to collect.”

8. “Let’s use my friend Paul who is in network marketing, for example. If his goal is to get ten people per week to come to a meeting, and typically about five percent of the people he approaches are willing to attend, then his goal would be to get one hundred and ninety people to say ‘no thanks.’”

9. Believe it or not, research shows that eighty-five percent of all interactions between retail salespeople and shoppers end without the salesperson ever asking for a buying decision.

10. “Absolutely! Studies show that as many as 80% of all salespeople don’t make it through their first year for the simple reason that they failed to make enough calls. That’s it. Nothing else.”

11. “That reminds me of this telemarketing guru I heard about,” I interjected. “He recommends that phone solicitors ask customers in the first ten seconds if they have interest in hearing about the product they’re selling. If the customer says no, then they politely say thank you and move on rather than going through their entire pitch. As a result, they make ten times as many calls, but only invest their time making their complete sales pitch to prospects who have just qualified themselves.” “It’s the same basic premise,” Cheryl replied. “You know, when you mine for gold, you don’t really look for the gold, you remove the dirt. Selling and gold mining are very much alike. It’s the people who remove the most dirt, who work their way through the greatest number of no’s, who ultimately discover the greatest number of golden yes’s!”

12. “the best piece of advice I can offer is to learn that no doesn’t mean never, it means not yet. Statistically, research shows that forty-four percent of salespeople give up after one no. Twenty-two more give up after the second no. Fourteen percent more give up after the third no. Twelve more give up after the fourth no. What does that come to?”

13. “Correct. Ninety-two percent of all salespeople give up without asking for the sale a fifth time, but research also shows that sixty percent of all customers say no four times before they finally say yes. That means the quickest way to separate yourself from the rest of the pack is to get at least five no’s from everyone you try to sell to!” “And you track that?” I asked.

14. “Because when I get someone to say no, I can immediately move to the next step which is to ask, ‘why?’ Let me think about it teaches me absolutely nothing, but if they say no and I follow up with why, now I’m on the verge of discovering what I need to do next to make the sale.”

15. “Well, I’d have to say my advice would be this… If you’re going to fail, fail big!” Kurt stated. “Elaborate on that,” Eric encouraged. “What I mean is simply this,” Kurt continued. “Common sense says that if you’re going to get a no from somebody, get it from the client who needs twenty copiers, not just two. Get rejected by the purchasing agent from the company that buys forty thousand gallons of cleaning solution every month, not just forty.

16. “Think about the numbers for a moment. If I call on one hundred accounts that each have the potential to lease two copiers from me, and my closing ratio is ten percent, then I end up with twenty units out the door, right? But by focusing on accounts with the potential to lease twenty copiers, I only needed to close one sale to get the same twenty units!”

17. “For starters, I’d say that a primary key to creating outrageous success is to understand the need to fail exponentially. After all, one person can only fail so fast. Great leaders help everyone in the organization understand the need to fail faster.

18. “Exponential failure requires someone in the organization to be an exponent, in other words an advocate or spokesman, of the failure concept and to champion it. But I can’t begin to tell you how many executives I’ve seen who reach the top and suddenly forget what got them there. They start trying to avoid failure, and when a leader is afraid to fail, everyone in the organization knows it. Not only do people sense it but they figure that if you’re afraid of something, there’s a good chance it’s something they should be afraid of, too.”

19. “The second is to reward people for their failures, not just their successes,” he responded. “Everyone runs over to congratulate people for their sales successes, but how often do we go out of our way to congratulate people for their failures?” “Virtually never,” I said.

20. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all in favor of rewarding people for their successes, but not to the exclusion of recognizing the people who’ve displayed a true willingness and wantingness to fail.

21. “At CopyQuest, we recognize the top ten salespeople with a ‘Producers Pin’ award,” Eric continued, “but we also recognize the ten salespeople in the organization with the greatest number of failed attempts with what we call the ‘Go for No!’ award. And, if I recall correctly, Cheryl and Kurt made both lists.”

22. “That’s because we’ve caught on to the concept that winning a ‘Go for No!’ award almost assures that you’ll end up with a Producers Pin. Or, put another way,” Kurt concluded, “Yes is the destination, No is how you get there!”

1.If an unlucky man sold umbrellas, it would stop raining; if he sold candles, the sun would never set; and if he made coffins, people would stop dying. - Yiddish saying

2. Throw a lucky man in the sea and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. - Arab proverb

3.People are not born lucky. Instead, lucky people are, without realising it, using four basic principles to create good fortune in their lives.

4. People who were lucky in their financial lives also reported being lucky in their home lives, and people who were unlucky in their careers were also unlucky in their relationships. 

5. Luck could not simply be the outcome of chance events. There were too many people consistently experiencing good and bad luck for it all to be chance. Instead, there must be something causing things to work out consistently well for some people and consistently badly for others.

6. There are four main differences between the lives of lucky and unlucky people:

• Lucky people constantly encounter chance opportunities. They accidentally meet people who have a very beneficial effect on their lives and come across interesting opportunities in newspapers and magazines.

• Lucky people also make good decisions without knowing why

• Lucky people’s dreams, ambitions and goals have an uncanny knack of coming true.

• Lucky people also have an ability to turn their bad luck into good fortune.

7. The results indicated that luck wasn’t due to psychic ability.

8. Lucky people are far more satisfied with all areas of their life than unlucky and neutral people. The unlucky people were consistently the most dissatisfied.

9. The results of the experiment were clear – being lucky and unlucky is not related to intelligence. 

10. Lucky people’s expectations of winning were more than twice that of unlucky people.

11. When it comes to random events like the lottery, such expectations count for little. Someone with a high expectation of winning will do as well as someone with a low expectation.

12. However, life is not like a lottery. Often, our expectations make a difference. They make a difference to whether we try something, how hard we persist in the face of failure, how we interact with others and how others interact with us.

13. Principle: Lucky people create, notice and act upon the chance opportunities in their life

14. . I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind.

15. What is behind Lynne, Wendy and Joe’s winning ways? Their secret is surprisingly simple. They all enter a very large number of competitions. Each week, Wendy enters about sixty postal competitions, and about seventy Internet-based competitions.

16. Likewise, both Lynne and Joe enter about fifty competitions a week, and their chances of winning are increased with each and every entry. All three of them were well aware that their lucky winning ways are, in reality, due to the large number of competitions they enter. As Wendy explained, ‘I am a lucky person, but luck is what you make it. I win a lot of competitions

17. After years of research, most psychologists agree that there are only five underlying dimensions to our personalities: five dimensions on which we all vary. These dimensions have been found in both the young and old, in men and women and across many

18. These dimensions are often referred to as Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism and Openness.

19. Interestingly, lucky people scored no higher on Agreeableness than unlucky people.

20. But once again, there was very little difference in the Conscientiousness scores of lucky and unlucky people.

21. The groups did, however, obtain very different scores on the remaining three personality dimensions – Extroversion, Neuroticism and Openness.

22. There are  three ways in which lucky people’s extroversion significantly increases the likelihood of them having a lucky chance encounter – meeting a large number of people, being a ‘social magnet’, and keeping in contact with people.

23. First, in the same way that Lynne, Joe and Wendy increase their chances of winning prizes by entering lots of competitions, so lucky people dramatically increase the possibility of a lucky chance encounter by meeting a large number of people in their daily lives. The concept is simple. The more people they meet, the greater opportunity they have of running into someone who has a positive effect on their lives.

24. ‘Social magnets’ exhibit the types of body language and facial expressions that other people find attractive and inviting.

25. The lucky people smiled twice as much as unlucky people and engaged in far more eye contact.

26. However, perhaps the biggest differences emerged when we examined the degree to which they engaged in ‘open’ or ‘closed’ body language. People exhibit ‘closed’ body language when they cross their arms and legs, and orient themselves away from the person they are speaking to. ‘Open’ body language is exactly the opposite. People point their bodies towards the person that they are speaking to, uncross their arms and legs and often make gestures that involve them displaying open palms.

27. Lucky people tended to engage in three times as much ‘open’ body language as unlucky people.

28. Lucky people are effective at building secure, and long lasting, attachments with the people that they meet. They are easy to get to know and most people like them. They tend to be trusting and form close friendships with others. As a result, they often keep in touch with a much larger number of friends and colleagues than unlucky people, and time and time again, this network of friends helps promote opportunity in their lives.

29. Neuroticism. People who obtain a low score on this dimension are generally calm and relaxed, whilst people who obtain a high score are more tense and anxious.

30. Because lucky people tend to be more relaxed than most, they are more likely to notice chance opportunities.

31. Exactly the same principle applies when they meet and chat with other people. They do not go to parties and meetings trying hard to find their dream partners or someone who will offer them their perfect job. Instead, they are simply relaxed and therefore more attuned to the opportunities around them. They go to parties and listen to people. Lucky people see what is there, rather than trying to find what they want to see.

32. These centre around another important dimension of their personalities referred to as ‘Openness’. People who obtain a high score on this dimension like to have a great deal of variety and novelty in their lives. They love trying new experiences, new kinds of food and new ways of doing things. They tend not to be bound by convention and they like the notion of unpredictability.

33. People who obtain a low score on openness tend to be much more conventional. They tend to like to do things the way that they have been done in the past.

34. Lucky people have much higher openness scores on the personality test than unlucky people.

35. To help disrupt this routine, and make life more fun, he thinks of a colour before he arrives at the party and then chooses to speak only to people wearing that colour of clothing!

36. It is exactly the same with luck. It is easy to exhaust the opportunities in your life: keep on talking to the same people in the same way; keep taking the same route to and from work; keep going to the same places on holiday. But new or even random experiences introduce the potential for new opportunities.

37. Smile when you see someone you know or someone that you would like to make contact with. Don’t try to fake it by putting on a false smile. Instead, think about how you genuinely feel. Also, force yourself to adopt an ‘open’ posture. Uncross your arms and legs, and keep your hands away from your face.

38. Suggested Exercise: Each week for the next month, I would like you to strike up a conversation with at least one person who you don’t know very well, or don’t know at all.

39. Do not try to chat to people who make you feel uncomfortable – instead, only try to initiate a conversation with people who look friendly and approachable.

40. Try to avoid making your opening gambit look artificial and contrived. Instead, capitalise on a naturally occurring situation, such as when you find yourself standing next to someone in a line, or happen to be in the same section of a bookshop as them, or you sit next to them on a train or aeroplane.

41. To break the ice, ask the person for information or help. In a store you might ask them if they know when the store closes, in the street you might ask them for directions or whether they know a good place to eat. Alternatively, find something about the person that you like, or find interesting, and comment on it.

42. Most important of all – don’t be afraid of rejection. Your first few attempts may simply involve a brief interaction and nothing more. Don’t take it personally – perhaps the person was busy or just didn’t feel like chatting – instead, keep on going.

43. Suggested Exercise: Play the contact game Each week, I would like you to make contact with one person who you haven’t been in touch with for a while. Many people find this difficult. Here are some ideas about how to do it: Look through your address book and make a list of the names and telephone numbers of everyone that you haven’t spoken to for a while. Go back over your past school, work and community connections. Make the list as long as possible. Then, each week play the ‘ten-minute contact game’. Give yourself ten minutes to talk to someone that you haven’t spoken to for a while.

44. Be open to new experiences in your life. Many lucky people maximise the likelihood of encountering chance opportunities by being open to new experiences. Many people regularly try different routes to and from work, and sometimes even have fun by making random decisions using dice.

45. Principle: Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition

46. The results were fascinating. As you can see in the graph on page 75, a very large percentage of lucky people used their intuition when making decisions in two of the four areas mentioned on the questionnaire. Almost 90% of lucky people said that they trusted their intuition when it came to their personal relationships, and almost 80% said that it played a vital role in their career choices.

47.

1. The pair is the primary creative unit. In his study of creative circles ranging from the French impressionists to the founders of psychoanalysis, the sociologist Michael Farrell discovered that groups created a sense of community, purpose, and audience but that the truly important work ended up happening in pairs, as with Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess.

2. Why is this? For one thing, it’s probably true that we’re set up to interact with a single person more openly and deeply than with any group, given that our psyches take shape through one-on-one exchanges with caregivers.

3. The dyad is also the most fluid and flexible of relationships. Two people can basically make their own society on the go. When even one more person is added to the mix, the situation becomes more stable, but this stability may stifle creativity, as roles and power positions harden.

4. Three legs make a table stand in place. Two legs are made for walking or running (or jumping or falling).

5. Pairs naturally arouse engagement, even intensity. In a larger group, an individual may lie low, phone it in. But nobody can hide in a pair. “The decisive characteristic of the dyad is that each of the two must actually accomplish something,” wrote Georg Simmel, “and that in the case of failure only the other remains—not a supra-individual force, as prevails in a group even of three.”

6. By comparing hundreds of creative pairs, I found that they moved through six stages:

• Meeting. Looking at the earliest encounter of individuals who will form a pair, the conditions and characteristics that engender chemistry or electricity—unusual similarities coinciding with unusual differences—become clear. 
• Confluence. Over time, two individuals move beyond mere interest and excitement in each other—they truly become a pair by surrendering elements of their singular selves to form what psychologists call a “joint identity.” 
• Dialectics. In the heart of their creative work, pairs thrive on distinct and enmeshed roles, taking up positions in archetypal combinations that point to the essential place of dichotomy in the creative process. 
• Distance. To thrive for the long term, pairs need more than closeness. They must also find an optimal distance from each other, carving out sufficient space in which to cultivate distinct ideas and experiences in order to give a partnership an ongoing frisson. 
• The Infinite Game. At the height of their work, pairs operate at the nexus of competition and cooperation, a dialectic that reveals the stark nature of power and the potential for conflict. 
• Interruption. Looking at how pairs end, we see them driven apart by the same energies that pushed them forward. They lose, not their spark, but their balance, often due to some critical change in the context around them. And yet, considering how they remain bound up in each other practically and psychologically, we can also say that creative pairs never truly end.

7. Before we start, you may want to know just what I mean by creativity. I have borrowed a broad definition from the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “to bring into existence something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture.”

8. Put another way: The individuals in great dyads will be very different from each other and very much alike.

9. Similarity is a good place for us to start, because common interests and sensibilities usually bring future partners together in the first place.

10. Consider a study by the sociologists Duncan J. Watts and Gueorgi Kossinets on how friendships form on a university campus. Roughly 45 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends, and another 41 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends and shared contexts (like classes).

11. The formation of new ties varied with network distance, meaning that individuals who were separated by two intermediaries (that is, they shared neither friends nor classes) were thirty times less likely to become friends than individuals who were separated by just one intermediary.

12. A 2011 study of Facebook found that, of its 721 million users at the time, the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74—less, even, than the “six degrees of separation” made famous in John Guare’s play of that name.

13. But making those links isn’t necessarily easy. In fact, some clusters of society can be devilishly hard to penetrate.

14. A study by the sociologist Mark Granovetter, well over half of a sample of professionals in Newton, Massachusetts, got their jobs through personal connections. And more than 83 percent of the personal connections that led to jobs involved only occasional or rare contact.

15. The second major way people meet vital partners—and enact the loop between personal interest and social connection—is by going to what the sociologist Michael Farrell calls a “magnet place,” or a locus for people with shared interests or yearnings.

16. Schools are obvious magnet places. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the co-creators of South Park, met in an undergraduate film class at the University of Colorado. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who would go on to create behavioral economics, first connected when Kahneman invited Tversky to talk to his class at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

17. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google, met on a tour Brin led in the spring of 1995 for students (including Page) who had been admitted to Stanford’s grad school.

18. Magnet places exude a power even for people who come without any concrete ambition.

19. Indeed, a magnet place needn’t even be an institution; it could be an event that lasts only a matter of hours, like the Atlanta church service in the fall of 1950 where two young preachers, Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., met, the first contact of a partnership that led to the American civil rights movement.

20. According to a 2010 study of thirty-five thousand papers in biomedicine that had at least one author from Harvard, the work of physically close collaborators resulted in many more citations (an indication of the importance of the research) than the work of collaborators who were farther from one another.

21. And the advantages of personal contact include experiences we can’t consciously register. In a shared space, people plug into what the psychologist Daniel Goleman has called “neural WiFi,” “a feedback loop,” he writes in Social Intelligence, “that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies.”

22. Of course, many pairs don’t have a first-meeting story that we know about—or even that they know about. Most siblings—Orville and Wilbur Wright, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Joel and Ethan Coen—won’t remember a time they didn’t know each other.

23. The other common feature of early-intimacy pairs like siblings is that, as much as they share a world together from the start, their creative work begins only after a critical separation.

24. The point is that pairs with deeply entwined early lives must also develop disparate experiences, attitudes, or emotional styles. This is the next layer to unpeel in meeting stories. The catalyst is not similarity alone but the joining of profound similarities with profound differences.

25. For primates, familiarities signal safety—and in higher-order brains, this comfort forms the foundation for connection. People report feeling more at ease when there is similarity in factors like income, education, physical appearance, ethnicity, and race.

26. Yet the comfort of similarity is only one ingredient for creative progress. Think about an outstanding dinner party. As guests arrive to the smell of good food and the sight of drinks laid out, there’s instantly a feeling of ease. Some people know one another already—none are farther apart than two degrees.

27. Many have similar interests or backgrounds. The early part of the evening should be weighted toward familiarity, but when the dinner begins, the priority shifts from comfort to stimulation. Disparate experiences are shared; disagreements erupt.

28. We need similarities to give us ballast, and differences to make us move.

29. One study for the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the two reasons venture capitalists choose partners: for their ability or for their affinity, such as a shared ethnic background or having worked at the same firm. Similarities of ability enhanced performance, but similarities of affinity “dramatically reduces the probability of investment success,” the study found. The problem isn’t the similarity itself. That’s fine as a foundation. The problem is when members of a group look at situations the same way, and fail to appreciate difficulties coming down the pike, loyalty and devotion can outstrip independent thinking.

30. “Bisociation”—“the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices, of thought.” This is the stuff of creative breakthroughs, which helps explain why, in the history of innovation, the outsider with critical knowledge and a fresh perspective so often plays a crucial role—why mavericks, for example, and not the pedigreed employees of Western Union or IBM, invented the telephone and the personal computer.

31. The authors of a new paradigm can’t be total strangers to the field or they won’t have the knowledge to do their work, let alone the influence to effect change. But they can’t be vested insiders either, or they’ll be constrained by convention.

32. The best climate for progress is a mix of deference and defiance. Corporate teams do well with a clear mission and a deviant who asks uncomfortable questions.

33. “The two people who have the most creative potential,” the psychologist and management consultant Diana McLain Smith told me, “are the people who are most different. The question is how do they harness that difference in the service of creativity instead of canceling each other out.”

34. Many great pairs do not much like each other at first. When C. S. Lewis initially noticed J.R.R. Tolkien, at an Oxford faculty meeting, he came home and wrote: “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”

35. One trope of first meetings is the endless conversation. “Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill [Fernandez]’s house for the longest time, just sharing stories,”

36. According to Carl Jung, when he met Sigmund Freud, they “talked uninterruptedly for thirteen hours.”

37. Both animating conflict and absorbing conversation draw on the same two elements: a shared framework to provide common ground, and sufficient difference to keep things novel and surprising.

38. The movement to true partnership is often slow and meandering.

39. Buffett slowly came around to Munger’s view that bargain hunting (which he had learned as gospel from his mentor Ben Graham) often made less sense than paying a reasonable price for a good company.

40. It’s common to find some sizable gap in time between meeting and pairing. J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis knew each other for three years before they shared their work.

41. For pairs, the most basic thing is a regular meeting time.

42. Many pairs have what we could fairly call a private language.

43. Private language emerges organically from constant exchange. Intimate pairs talk fluidly and naturally, having let go of what psychologists call “self-monitoring”—the process of watching impulses and protean thoughts, censoring some, allowing others to pass one’s lips.

44. “You just get so high-bandwidth,” Bill Gates said about talking to Steve Ballmer, his longtime deputy at Microsoft (and eventual successor). “Steve and I would just be going from talking to meeting to talking to meeting, and then I’d stay up late at night, and write him five e-mails.

45. Asymmetrical. In some pairs, one partner absorbs the other, as when a clear leader works with a deputy or a disciple takes up with a guru. This asymmetry is often signified by the nature of credit.

46. Distinct. In a second type of bond, each partner maintains a separate public identity. There may indeed be no public marker of their confluence, no unambiguous sign of union. C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t jointly credit any of their published work.

47. Overt. In the third type of bond, partners join together in rough equality to produce work with which both are publicly associated.

48. I’ve noticed that three archetypes recur most often—the star and the director; the liquid and the container; the dreamer and the doer—and each speaks to a significant dialectic in the creative life. 

49. Dialectic is a fancy word, but really it just describes the process by which something singular emerges out of an interaction or duality.

50. The star and the director - Many partnerships have one member in the spotlight and another offstage.

51. “But there’s a saying, ‘When two men ride the same horse, one has to be in the back.’”

52. The relationship between order and disorder has been an object of fascination from the time of the ancient Greeks, who extolled the sharp departure from clarity and coherence followed by the pleasing restoration of same. The gods Dionysus and Apollo framed this dialectic. Two sons of Zeus, they embodied the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of man (the Dionysian) and the rational, ordered, and self-disciplined aspects (the Apollonian).

53. Modern creativity research hits on the same key relation of making and breaking, challenging and refining—the “essential tension,” noted the psychologist Frank Barron, “between two seemingly opposed dispositional tendencies: the tendency toward structuring and integration and the tendency toward disruption of structure and diffusion of energy and attention.” 

54. Though I considered organizer and disrupter and maker and breaker, I settled on liquid and container as the primary way to describe this archetypal pair. In its natural state, liquid tends to disperse. Liquid-type creatives are drawn to make lateral associations rather than linear progressions. They’re often exciting, excitable characters; boundless. They embody the promise and peril of risk and are simultaneously repelled by and drawn to people who impose constraints, who can offer them shape. Without those constraints, they will spill out onto the sidewalk, evaporate in the sun.

55. Creativity is what happens when the dreamer meets the doer.

56. Many dreamer-type creators have enormous strength of character. They generate ideas, start new projects, inspire others to join them. They may also start things they can’t finish and break promises. Doer-type creators are the inverse. Productive, efficient, and dependable, they excel at finishing, have a realistic sense of what’s possible, and can set priorities and make decisions. Yet doers may struggle to be original, to initiate, to see the long view, and to identify a sense of purpose.

57. In a study of 121 major historic events—paradigm shifts in science, reform movements, and political revolutions—Frank Sulloway found that later-born children were roughly twice as likely as earlier-borns to take the radical position, while earlier-borns were more likely to defend the status quo.

58. In a meta-analysis of 8,340 participants in 24 different studies of athletic participation, later-borns were found to be 1.5 times more likely than firstborns to engage in dangerous sports such as rugby, football, and soccer, whereas firstborns and only children preferred safer sports such as swimming, tennis, and track.”

59. My friend Adam Goodheart, while writing 1861, his celebrated study of the origins of the Civil War, had the good fortune to live near the legendary nonfiction writer Richard Ben Cramer. Adam told me that, more than once, Richard gave him this advice: “Don’t be afraid to be a son of a bitch.” Meaning: Say no, ignore phone calls, hole up and do what you need to do.

60. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “they tend to report the highest levels of creativity when walking, driving, or swimming; in other words, when involved in a semiautomatic activity that takes up a certain amount of attention, while leaving some of it free to make connections among ideas below the threshold of conscious intentionality.”

61. Certainly, direct face-offs improve performance in all manner of conditions, an effect that has been validated empirically: One study found weightlifters able to bench-press an average of two kilograms (about four and a half pounds) more when competing with another person than when facing a crowd alone. Another found that people could squeeze a handgrip twenty-one seconds longer.

62. Great work emerges from rivalry.

63. Playing with the best brings out your best, and if the other guy is gunning to beat you, that may be bad for your stress level but it’s ideal for your performance.

64. From my research, I’ve come to see three key benefits rivals offer. First, they push us to work harder. This is motivation, as basic a drive in performance as hunger is in physiology. Rivals quicken the blood, animate the spirit. Second, they model what we need to do. This is inspiration, and whether it comes from an example we want to follow, one we want to reject, or one we want to improve on, the impact is much the same. Third, they keep us in the game. This is dedication—perseverance, persistence, tenacity, the power to not just approach a task with zeal but stick with it even when we want to quit.

65. When researchers studied U.S. presidential debates, they found that in every election between 1960 and 2000, the candidate that adjusted to the other’s timbre lost the popular vote.

66. The chief advantage of power clarity is absence of strife. “Although positions within a hierarchy are born from contest,” wrote the primatologist Frans de Waal, “the hierarchical structure itself, once established, eliminates the need for further conflict. Obviously, those lower on the scale would have preferred to be higher, but they settle for the next best thing, which is to be left in peace.

67. So this is the tension: power clarity can negate conflict but stifle creativity. Along with sufficient clarity, pairs need some fluidity. Thus conflict is an organic part of the process. That’s the bad news.

68. The death knell to real collaboration, he said, is “politeness.”

69. According to the research of psychologist James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas on the word content of correspondence, high indices of conflict are positively associated with an experience of intimacy. Think about the people you can really argue with. They’re often your dearest friends.

70. The marriage researcher John Gottman said couples likely to remain married exchange five positive remarks for every one that’s negative.

71. John Gottman found in a study that peaceful couples early in their relationships reported more marital happiness than couples who bicker. But in follow-ups three years later, the peaceful couples were far more likely to be divorced or headed for divorce, while the bickering couples tended to have worked out their troubles and stuck together.

72. Surprisingly, rigid divisions of power can actually lead to the most fluid exchanges.

73. One of my favorite end-of-relationship studies is by the sociologist Diane Felmlee. She asked people what had initially attracted them to an ex and what repelled them at the end. For about 30 percent of people, both answers were really the same, just cast in a very different light. 

74. One partner was wonderfully “strong-willed” and later obnoxiously “domineering.” A partner with a great “sense of humor” later “played too many jokes.”

75. My therapist gave me the same instruction: “Talk to yourself like you’d talk to your child.”

76. Wagner and Born concluded, “facilitates extraction of explicit knowledge and insightful behavior.” another study, by Deirdre Barrett, a professor at Harvard Medical school, asked seventy-six college students to pick a problem from their lives and focus on it each night before bed. “After one week,” Mcnerney wrote, “Barrett found that about half of the students dreamt about their problem and about a quarter dreamt a solution.”

1. Money by itself is likely to produce self-serving behavior and skin-deep organizational commitment rather than the type of institution-building

2. But pride is more than simply an emotional reward for high achievement; it also motivates us toward such achievement. Because justifiable feelings of pride are so extremely rewarding, the anticipation of those feelings is also very motivating.

3. Like the best mothers, they realize that the anticipation of feeling proud is a more powerful motivator than the anticipation of being punished.

4. As with most people, “making Mom proud of me” was behind my early efforts to perform well. She always made it clear what would make her proud of me—and what would not.

5. I came away with renewed insights about how to instill pride in myself and those I work with:

• Set aspirations that touch the emotions: Impossible dreams are a source of pride even though they remain unachievable.

• Pursue a meaningful purpose: Great organizations whose aspirations are not necessarily “noble” still pursue clear missions that provide a meaningful purpose for their people as well as to their customers and shareholders.

• Cultivate personal relationships of respect: Probably the most lasting benefits to be gained from a lifetime of work in different occupations come from the personal relationships of mutual trust and respect that one develops along the way.

• Become a person of high character: Integrity, common courtesy, emotional commitment, and unassuming pride in group performance are the hallmarks of great human beings—not intellect, charisma, power, or personal gain.

• Look for the humor along the way: As Mary Poppins said, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

6. Richard Cavanagh, an old friend and current CEO of the prestigious Conference Board, makes a point of not hiring people who lack a sense of humor; so do I.

7. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs cannot be ignored. There is a baseline of monetary need and “fairness” beneath which motivation and pride will sink. When people are not paid enough to meet their fundamental human-safety and comfort needs, neither pride nor loyalty prevails.

8. Similarly, institution-building pride can motivate people behaviors that are bad for the enterprise.

9. Good results accrue to the enterprise only when the emphasis is on individual and group efforts that fit with organizational priorities and enhance long-term business success. The best leaders and managers will influence people to take pride in achieving personal goals that align with company goals, building skills that match company needs, and creating teams that achieve important business results.

10. SELF-SERVING PRIDE - This kind of pride encompasses both power and materialism, and the latter is primarily a game of “show me the money”—and the more you can earn, accumulate, and visibly deploy, the better. People who play this game well focus their attention on whatever will reward them the most monetarily, and whatever will position them to control the most resources (human and economic).

11. Institution-building pride is based upon largely intangible values and basic human emotions, rather than tangible compensation and crystal-clear logic.

12. It almost goes without saying that the prospect of earning more money motivates higher performance. In fact, most well-intended managers believe that the best way to reward as well as motivate their employees is by dangling more “coin of the realm” in front of them. Yet this conventional wisdom of “pay for performance” is both incomplete and misleading.

13. Moreover, relying on money as the primary source of motivation can get expensive for the company, particularly if it doesn’t really produce commensurate results.

14. People who are emotionally committed to something—be it a person, a group, an enterprise, a cause, or an aspiration—behave in ways that defy logic and often produce results that are well beyond expectations. They pursue impossible dreams, work ridiculous hours, and resolve unsolvable problems.

15. Monetary compensation is simply not a motivational factor within a true performing team because the extra performance the group achieves results from collective or joint efforts that are rarely recognized by monetary rewards.

16. Self-serving pride is unavoidable because it stems from basic human needs. We must have money to buy the food, clothing, and shelter that

17.Nonetheless, when it comes to generating higher levels of performance over the long term, self-serving pride has many shortfalls, including the following:

• Money attracts and retains people better than it motivates them to excel.

• Money works only as long as you can pay more than the competition.

• A monetary focus can obscure the fundamentals because you cannot easily convert short-term earnings into lasting value.

• Self-serving employees can take advantage of monetary incentive plans.

• Money and title differentials work better at the top than at the bottom because the value-added differences are more evident.

• Money and ego motivate individuals better than they do teams or groups. 

• Materialism easily turns into greed and self-serving behaviors.

18.  From an enterprise point of view, money only works as long as some other enterprise does not offer your top performers a higher amount. 

19. And as implied before, whenever the company faces tough times, the positive aspects of monetary incentives turn negative. The best people leave just when you need them the most. And the mediocre performers hang on as long as possible, because they fear they cannot find good-paying jobs elsewhere.

20. In the Corps, however, we expect Marine leaders at all levels to worry only about two things. First and foremost is mission accomplishment: you must accomplish your mission—no matter what—unless the person who gave you that mission changes it. 

21. The second thing we want you to worry about is taking care of your troops—each and every one of them. We expect you to bring them home dead or alive under any and all conditions.

22. The following comments excerpted from the focus groups we conducted reflect the different kinds of pride that motivate Microsoft people:

• The products: “We work on products that everyone is likely to use—and I mean everyone. More than one hundred million people use Office, my product. People will stop me in the middle of a conversation and say, ‘You worked on that [feature]?’ It’s instant respect and a great ego rush.”

• The project teams: Project teams often came up as a source of pride. “People on my former project were so superexcited to be working on this application technology. They didn’t really care where they were in the organization or what title they had—they just wanted to work with this technology. We still get together whenever a customer has a problem that needs to be solved.”

• The people: “I really think that it’s all about the talent. We have the best technical talent in the world, and what’s even better is that anyone here can have access to all of it!

• The impossible dream: One focus group member put it in a much more personal way: “I make products that even my grandmother uses!

23. PRIDE IN HOW YOU WORK The “how” refers to the set of values, standards, work ethics, and commitment you apply to your job.

24. There is a right way to do almost any job, and the best workers take pride in mastering it.

25. While such leaders are in short supply at every level of the company, they do exist. However, it takes much more than lip service to increase the supply and capitalize on its performance potential. You start by encouraging leaders at all levels to pay close attention to, and diligently cultivate, what employees already take pride in.

26. It is important to make heroes and role models out of such people. It is even more important to find ways to transfer their skills and techniques and tools to others.

27. But what motivates upper-level executives and professional leaders is considerably different from what motivates frontline employees and supervisors. This difference is even more pronounced when a company is not doing particularly well.

28. Rich works to reinforce a sense of ownership and pride in his employees by 

(1) communicating constantly to be sure his people understand the broader “why” behind their work, 

(2) tying their day-to-day activities to the larger goals of the unit and the company, and 

(3) showing them how their everyday efforts are progressing toward these larger goals.

29. So whenever someone’s good work receives praise or thanks from a customer, Rich publicizes it among all of his employees. Thus, he gets employees to take pride and ownership in their work along the way as well as when major “pride-inducing” milestones occur.

30. For employees on the front line, however, Brian spends the majority of his efforts on creative recognition and celebration. 

31. Here, Brian is far more a cheerleader than a “numbers guy.” His enthusiasm is as infectious as it is evident as he speaks in detail about the many different programs and the small, mostly nonmonetary incentives that engage frontline employees and make them proud to be part of the Tampa office.

32. He has established numerous trophies, pizza parties, and monthly newsletter features to recognize specific employees for such things as exceptional performance on quality measures, attention to detail, and pride in serving the customer.

33. Some of these originate as managerial, but others are peer-induced. For example, one program encourages employees to send notes of congratulations or “Gotcha’s” to their peers (with a copy to managers), recognizing a job well done or positive feedback from customers. Recognition from peers, of course, is an excellent complement to Brian’s managerial regimen of reinforcement. It enables employees to get actively involved in the celebration, as well as to interpret and better understand the office’s strategic priorities.

34. When Morton was describing some of the leadership teams that I was planning to research, he would often point out that the primary criteria in selecting each member of the group were complementary skills rather than personal characteristics. Others would worry that such groups “wouldn’t get along,” but Morton was confident that their mutual respect for one another’s skills and experience would more than offset any personality differences.

35. In short, money attracts and retains, whereas pride motivates!

36. That pride is instilled and cultivated by a set of processes and metrics that were essentially designed and monitored by the employees themselves.

37. Enterprises such as Hills Pet Nutrition that excel along the P&M path take the process and metrics doctrine one important step further: They insist that the technicians who will be measured against and guided by a particular set of processes and metrics are an active and integral part of designing those elements for the organization. Sounds simple enough, but it is pretty rare to find that principle in practice.

38. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, taught him about how people listen best to behavior: “Your behavior is so loud I can’t concentrate on what you are saying.”

39. We also found that the best “manager motivators” concentrate their efforts along three fundamental themes: 

(1) always have your compass set on pride (don’t mistake pride in the destination for pride along the journey), 

(2) localize as much as possible (don’t wait for the company or its senior leaders to instill it), and 

(3) integrate multiple sources of pride around a few simple messages (don’t confuse your people with needless complexity).

40. Pride-builders are always in hot pursuit of emotional commitment rather than rational compliance; that is why their compass always points to pride. Four specific techniques are worth mentioning:

• Clarify exactly what matters and why it matters.

• Stimulate people’s memories, both real and vicarious. Since people can seldom feel the pride of completion at the beginning of a difficult journey, it is critical for them to remember what it will feel like. Recalling their own experience along earlier successful journeys,

• Celebrate the “steps” as much as the “landings.”

41. Peter Senge once reminded me that if you have ever been a member of a true high-performance team, you will probably spend the rest of your life searching for another one. And most of us can vicariously recall team feelings of pride when we watch a movie like The Dirty Dozen. Pride-builders use both real and vicarious techniques of recall to great advantage.

42. Localize as Much as Possible Despite the impressive leadership systems in the peak-performance organizations, we have discovered that the best efforts are localized.

43. These local sources of pride provide the kind of flexibility to adapt that is so critical over time.

44. Draw primarily on local analogies and role models. If you have ever watched the Special Olympics on television (or been fortunate enough to attend in person),

45. Tap into family, community, and union events. Pride-builders invariably go outside the workplace to find sources of pride that will be relevant to the workplace.

46. Trigger the “anticipation” of feeling proud locally.

47. When you are trying to instill pride in future performance, it is much easier to get your people to anticipate those motivation feelings by drawing upon stories and heroes that are local and well-known to your people. Triggering feelings of pride that must anticipate future performance is easier to do when the trigger mechanisms are familiar and credible.

48. Develop and repeat your most compelling stories. People seldom tire of good stories that stir up feelings of pride.

49. Perhaps the worst pitfall is the one to conclude on: complexity. Don’t overload the system! Because institution-building pride comes from many sources and utilizes many mechanisms, it is all too easy to try to do it all at once.

1. Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

2. Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

3. Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

4. “Our thinking can be divided into two streams, one that is fast, automatic, and largely unconscious, and another that is slow, deliberate, and judicious.”

5. The first system, “the reflexive system, seems to do its thing rapidly and automatically, with or without our conscious awareness.” The second system, “the deliberative system . . . deliberates, it considers, it chews over the facts.”

6. The differences between the systems are more than just labels. Automatic processing originates in the evolutionarily older parts of the brain, including the cerebellum, cerebellum, basal ganglia, and amygdala. Our deliberative mind operates out of the prefrontal cortex.

7. The prefrontal cortex doesn’t control most of the decisions we make every day. We can’t fundamentally get more out of that unique, thin layer of prefrontal cortex. “It’s already overtaxed,”

8. Our goal is to get our reflexive minds to execute on our deliberative minds’ best intentions.

9. The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck. In chess, luck is limited in its influence, so it’s easier to read the results as a signal of decision quality. That more tightly tethers chess players to rationality.

10. That’s chess, but life doesn’t look like that. It looks more like poker, where all that uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data.

11. But getting comfortable with “I’m not sure” is a vital step to being a better decision-maker. We have to make peace with not knowing.

12. What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

13. If we misrepresent the world at the extremes of right and wrong, with no shades of grey in between, our ability to make good choices—choices about how we are supposed to be allocating our resources, what kind of decisions we are supposed to be making, and what kind of actions we are supposed to be taking—will suffer.

14. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good.

15. No matter how far we get from the familiarity of betting at a poker table or in a casino, our decisions are always bets.

16. In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

17. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”

18. Two years later, Gilbert and colleagues demonstrated through a series of experiments that our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true. Even when that information is clearly presented as being false, we are still likely to process it as true.

19. We form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information.

20. Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.

21. Flaws in forming and updating beliefs have the potential to snowball. Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge.

22. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

23. “Wanna bet?” triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to. Being asked if we are willing to bet money on it makes it much more likely that we will examine our information in a less biased way, be more honest with ourselves about how sure we are of our beliefs, and be more open to updating and calibrating our beliefs.

24. The more we recognize that we are betting on our beliefs (with our happiness, attention, health, money, time, or some other limited resource), the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe.

25. Admitting we are not sure is an invitation for help in refining our beliefs, and that will make our beliefs much more accurate over time as we are more likely to gather relevant information.

26. By communicating our own uncertainty when sharing beliefs with others, we are inviting the people in our lives to act like scientists with us. This advances our beliefs at a faster clip because we miss out on fewer opportunities to get new information, information that would help us to calibrate the beliefs we have.

27. How we figure out what—if anything—we should learn from an outcome becomes another bet. As outcomes come our way, figuring out whether those outcomes were caused mainly by luck or whether they were the predictable result of particular decisions we made is a bet of great consequence.

28. We have the opportunity to learn from the way the future unfolds to improve our beliefs and decisions going forward. The more evidence we get from experience, the less uncertainty uncertainty we have about our beliefs and choices. Actively using outcomes to examine our beliefs and bets closes the feedback loop, reducing uncertainty. This is the heavy lifting of how we learn.

29. If making the same decision again would predictably result in the same outcome, or if changing the decision would predictably result in a different outcome, then the outcome following that decision was due to skill.

30. If, however, an outcome occurs because of things that we can’t control (like the actions of others, the weather, or our genes), the result would be due to luck.

31. Stanford law professor and social psychologist Robert MacCoun studied accounts of auto accidents and found that in 75% of accounts, the victims blamed someone else for their injuries. In multiple-vehicle accidents, 91% of drivers blamed someone else. Most remarkably, MacCoun found that in single-vehicle accidents, 37% of drivers still found a way to pin the blame on someone else.

32. Blaming the bulk of our bad outcomes on luck means we miss opportunities to examine our decisions to see where we can do better. 

33. Taking credit for the good stuff means we will often reinforce decisions that shouldn’t be reinforced and miss opportunities to see where we could have done better.

34. Human tendency: we take credit for good things and deflect blame for bad things.

35. Black-and-white thinking, uncolored by the reality of uncertainty, is a driver of both motivated reasoning and self-serving bias. If our only options are being 100% right or 100% wrong, with nothing in between, then information that potentially contradicts a belief requires a total downgrade, from right all the way to wrong.

36. Watching is an established learning method. There is an entire industry devoted to collecting other people’s outcomes.

37. When any of us makes decisions in life away from the poker table, we always have something at risk: money, time, health, happiness, etc. When it’s someone else’s decision, we don’t have to pay to learn. They do.

38. When it comes to watching the bad outcomes of other people, we load the blame on them, quickly and heavily. We see this pattern of blaming others for bad outcomes and failing to give them credit for good ones all over the place.

39. When we treat outcome fielding as a bet, it pushes us to field outcomes more objectively into the appropriate buckets because that is how bets are won. Winning feels good. Winning is a positive update to our personal narrative. Winning is a reward. With enough practice, reinforced by the reward of feeling good about ourselves, thinking of fielding outcomes as bets will become a habit of mind.

40. Once we start actively training ourselves in testing alternative hypotheses and perspective taking, it becomes clear that outcomes are rarely 100% luck or 100% skill.

41. If the ship’s navigator introduces a one-degree navigation error, it would start off as barely noticeable. Unchecked, however, the ship would veer farther and farther off course and would miss London by miles, as that one-degree miscalculation compounds mile over mile. Thinking in bets corrects your course. And even a small correction will get you more safely to your destination.

42. Recruiting help is key to creating faster and more robust change, strengthening and training our new truthseeking routines.

43. In fact, as long as there are three people in the group (two to disagree and one to referee*), the truthseeking group can be stable and productive.

44. In combination, the advice of these experts in group interaction adds up to a pretty good blueprint for a truthseeking charter: 

• A focus on accuracy (over confirmation), which includes rewarding truthseeking, objectivity, and open-mindedness within the group; 

• Accountability, for which members have advance notice; and 

• Openness to a diversity of ideas.

45. Win bets by relentlessly striving to calibrate our beliefs and predictions about the future to more accurately represent the world. In the long run, the more objective person will win against the more biased person. In that way, betting is a form of accountability to accuracy.

46. A productive decision group can harness this desire by rewarding accuracy and intellectual honesty with social approval.

47. It is one thing to commit to rewarding ourselves for thinking in bets, but it is a lot easier if we get others to do the work of rewarding us.

48. I experienced firsthand the power of a group’s approval to reshape individual thinking habits. I got my fix by trying to be the best credit-giver, the best mistake-admitter, and the best finder-of-mistakes-in-good-outcomes.

49. “The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”

50. We should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

51. In other words, the opinions of group members aren’t much help if it is a group of clones.

52. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

53. Just as we can recruit other people to be our decision buddies, we can recruit other versions of ourselves to act as our own decision buddies.

54. When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don’t ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive. This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.

55. We are built for temporal discounting, for using the resources that are available to us now as opposed to saving them for a future version of us that we aren’t particularly in touch with in the moment of the decision.

56. We’re not perfectly rational when we ponder the past or the future and engage deliberative mind, but we are more likely to make choices consistent with our long-term goals when we can get out of the moment and engage our past- and future-selves.

57. Reconnaissance has been part of advance military planning for as long as horses have been used in battle.

58. To start, we imagine the range of potential futures. This is also known as scenario planning.

59. The idea is to consider a broad range of possibilities for how the future might unfold to help guide long-term planning and preparation.”

60. After identifying as many of the possible outcomes as we can, we want to make our best guess at the probability of each of those futures occurring.

61. By at least trying to assign probabilities, we will naturally move away from the default of 0% or 100%, away from being sure it will turn out one way and not another. Anything that moves us off those extremes is going to be a more reasonable assessment than not trying at all.

62. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

63. The most common form of working backward from our goal to map out the future is known as backcasting.

64. Backcasting makes it possible to identify when there are low-probability events that must occur to reach the goal. That could lead to developing strategies to increase the chances those events occur or to recognizing the goal is too ambitious.

65. Working backward helps even more when we give ourselves the freedom to imagine an unfavorable future.

66. A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens

67. Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative

68. Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.

69. We start a premortem by imagining why we failed to reach our goal: our company hasn’t increased its market share; we didn’t lose weight; the jury verdict came back for the other side; we didn’t hit our sales target.

1. When success is the only acceptable outcome, Little Bets advocates a bold and radical approach in which failure is good,

2. I had worked before then as a venture capital investor, and in that work, I had learned that most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.

3. These creators use experimental, iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually build up to breakthroughs. Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work toward their goals.

4. Little Bets is based on the proposition that we can use a lot of little bets and certain creative methods to identify possibilities and build up to great outcomes. At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.

5. They begin as creative possibilities that get iterated and refined over time, and they are particularly valuable when trying to navigate amid uncertainty, create something new, or attend to open-ended problems.

6. When we can’t know what’s going to happen, little bets help us learn about the factors that can’t be understood beforehand. The important thing to remember is that while prodigies are exceptionally rare, anyone can use little bets to unlock creative ideas.

7. Fundamental to the little bets approach is that we: 

• Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms. 

• Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged. 

• Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up. 

• Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem. 

• Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion. 

• Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock does to perfect his act.

8. Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain, and that it facilitates the development of means as we progress with an idea.

9. Seasoned entrepreneurs, she emphasizes, will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains.

10. Of course the subject of affordable losses highlights a key issue with the little bets approach—it inevitably involves failure.

11. In almost any attempt to create, failure, and often a good deal of it, is to be expected.

12. Hewlett’s approach to identifying new opportunities using small bets did not come without numerous failures. In 1971, HP featured over 1,600 products in its catalog, none of which averaged sales of more than ten units per day, according to Chuck House. In fact, Hewlett estimated that roughly only six out of every 100 new HP products would become breakout successes.

13. By advocating the little bets approach, I am in no way arguing against bold ambition. Ambitious (dare I employ the overused word audacious) goals are essential.

14. A big vision provides the direction and inspiration through which to channel aspirations and ideas. But one of the most important lessons of the study of experimental innovators is that they are not rigid in pursuit of that vision, and that they persevere through failures, often many of them.

15. Central to Pixar’s success in fostering this growth mind-set through the ranks is the company’s attitude about failure. Pixar’s managers see a host of failures, false starts, and problems as the modus operandi for developing their films. In fact, when Ed Catmull sums up Pixar’s creative process, he describes it as going from suck to nonsuck.

16. Pixar film ideas begin on rough storyboards that suck until they work through thousands of problems throughout the process in order to take films from suck to nonsuck.

17. Of course, just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.

18. One of the methods that can be most helpful in achieving this balance, in order to embrace the learning potential of failure, is prototyping. What the creation of low cost, rough prototypes makes possible is failing quickly in order to learn fast.

19. Failing quickly to learn fast is also a central operating principle for seasoned entrepreneurs who routinely describe their approach as failing forward. That is, entrepreneurs push ideas into the market as quickly as possible in order to learn from mistakes and failures that will point the way forward.

20. Novelist Anne Lamott believes that every good writer writes what she calls shitty first drafts.

21. The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird. Just get it down on paper, she recommends. Write like a child, whatever comes to your mind. “All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.”

22. Ed Catmull’s belief that it’s better to fix problems than prevent errors.

23. The level of feedback you get is so much more valuable and impactful…. The problem with showing something to consumers when it’s almost totally done, people don’t necessarily want to give negative feedback at that point because it looks like, “This company has spent a lot of money already getting it to this stage and now I’m going to tell them, ‘It sucks.’” On the other hand, if something hangs together with tape, and it’s clear that it’s an early prototype, the mindset of consumers often is, “These people still need some help, so let me tell you what I really think about it.”

24. Analogous to Limb’s findings, Ansari and Berkowitz found that during improvisation, the right-temporoparietal junctions of the pianists’ brains were deactivated. Neuroscientists associate this area of the brain with the ability to make judgments, particularly about differences differences between self and others. The experienced pianists seemed to be able to turn off a judging part of their mind, freeing them up to create novel melodies. According to Berkowitz, brain scans of nonartists do not exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests that experiencing creative processes could help to build certain creative muscles.

25. There are several major improvisation principles. One is that you should “accept every offer.”

26. So, for example, if two people were performing an improvised skit, Bob might say to Sherry, “I was thinking we could watch Silence of the Lambs tonight.” To which Sherry would accept that offer by saying something like, “Yes, and we can still have time to watch the Late Show afterward.” To which Bob might reply, “Yes, and then we can check email!” It’s a simplified and somewhat silly example, but the point of accepting every offer is that nothing is too silly.

27. After all, if Sherry had spurned Bob’s initial offer by replying, “That’s a stupid movie,” Bob would start thinking and censoring himself, shutting down the possibilities that might come. The effect is deadening.

28. That Bob and Sherry lift one another up relates to another foundation of improvisation: Make your partner look good. Because Bob and Sherry aren’t criticizing one another, it creates a positive atmosphere to generate possibilities. Positive energy drives improvisation, and reduces inhibitions and doubts. By making each other look good, it’s easier for Bob and Sherry to get in a zone.

29. Throughout the Pixar creative process, they rely heavily on what they call plussing; it is likely the most-used concept around the company. The point of plussing is to build upon and improve ideas without using judgmental language. Creating an atmosphere where ideas are constantly being plussed, while maintaining a sense of humor and playfulness, is a central element of Pixar’s magic.

30. Rather than criticize an idea in its entirety (even if they don’t think it’s good), people accept the starting point before suggesting improvements.

31. Instead of criticizing the sketch or saying “no,” the director will build on the starting point by saying something like, “I like Woody’s eyes, and what if we …” Again, notice the use of the word and rather than a word that implies a judgment, such as but.

32. A host of studies indicates that humor creates positive group effects. Many focus on how humor can increase cohesiveness and act as a lubricant to facilitate more efficient communications.

33. One reason for that is that humor has also been demonstrated to increase trust. In order to produce positive mental effects, however, researchers Eric Romero and Anthony Pescosolido found that humor first must be considered funny to the people involved, not seen as demeaning, derogatory, or put-downs.

34. Romero and Pescosolido argued, based on a broad assessment of humor research, should affirm group identities in terms of: who we are, what we are doing, and how we do things.

35. Research evidence suggests a strong link between inquisitiveness and creative productivity.

36. Innovators routinely networked with people who came from different backgrounds.

37. Learning a little bit from a lot of people was one of the main ways Tim identified so many unique ideas and insights.

38. Wiseman’s research is that lucky people pay more attention attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people.

39. For example, Wiseman found that the lucky people had three times greater open body language in social situations than unlucky people. Lucky people also smiled twice as much as unlucky people, thus drawing other people and chance encounters to them.

40. von Hippel found that one group, which he called active users or lead users, were responsible for developing over 75 percent of the innovations.

41. These people not only serve as cutting-edge taste makers, they actively tinker to push and create new ideas on their own.

42. Since the needs of these active users precede and, according to the research, often anticipate, what the masses will like, they become incredibly valuable as idea development partners.

43. The ideas they help generate can then be tested with broader audiences and commercialized. The same is true for good comedy.

44. For example, singer and songwriter John Legend does so as he develops a new song. The first part of Legend’s songwriting process is to develop a good back-beat working closely with music producers like Kanye West, will.i.am, or Raphael Saadiq. Once he’s found a beat he likes, Legend will then develop melodies on top of it, often working at a piano, and finally write the lyrics. Kanye West, in particular, is a classic innovator and active user, constantly consuming and tinkering with music. Legend and others consider West to be a creative genius in many respects, with a well-tuned ear for what broader audiences will like. His early involvement in a song routinely drives later success. So, Legend will bounce ideas around with West at all stages of the process, especially at the beginning. It’s strategic trial and error.

45. A small win is “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” They are small successes that emerge out of our ongoing development process, and it’s important to be watching closely for them.

46. Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward.

47. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course.

48. It is helpful for alcoholics to focus on remaining sober one day at a time, or even one hour at a time. Stringing together successive days of sobriety helps them to see the rewards of abstinence and makes it more achievable.

49. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

50. Another benefit of small wins is less immediately obvious: They enable the development of the means to attain goals. Recall from Saras Saravathy’s research how important the development of means is to seasoned entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs use their available means, such as their expertise, networks, or financial resources, to develop their ideas and access additional resources and means. One way that Ed Catmull (and later Steve Jobs) developed Pixar’s means was by steadily bringing in new talent with complementary skills.

51. Additional resources also flow toward winners.

52. One last, yet important, point about small wins is that often, rather than validating a direction we’ve been pursuing, they will provide a signal to proceed in a different way.

53. It is much easier to decide to make a change of approach when we are doing so not because things aren’t working but because something has started to work.

1. To describe the Mastermind concept, let me give you a quick analogy. Let’s say that you have an apple and I have an apple. If we trade apples, you still only have one apple and I still only have one apple. But, let’s say that you and I both have an idea. If we exchange ideas, then you have two ideas and I have two ideas. That is, you have your original idea plus my idea, and I will have your idea plus my original idea.

2. Hill stumbled upon this particular principle while researching the life of Henry Ford. He found that Ford met formally with a group of men who did not work at Ford Motor Company at least once per month with the intent of sharing ideas, solving problems, and identifying opportunities.

3. In this eclectic group, Ford found solace, like minds, and inspiration. When asked about the secret of his success, he said on several occasions that his monthly group meetings with these four men were pivotal in helping him reach the heights to which he arose.

4. Why You Should Join or Start a Mastermind Group:

• The Ability to Work “on” Your Business Instead of Just “in” Your Business

• Camaraderie and Understanding - I have long said entrepreneurs are some of the loneliest people on the planet.

• Unique Perspectives

• Motivation - When you surround yourself with business people who are excited, passionate, and energetic about the challenges they’re presented with, you can’t help but feel the same way.

• Accumulated Experience - No two people will ever see the same events the same way.

• Ability to Serve - I know it sounds cliché and it probably is, but it is still true: the more you give, the more you receive.

• Accountability

5. It is much easier to recruit potential members when limiting group membership to only one company per industry. Think about your own industry. If you were in a group with one or two of your biggest competitors, would you be as open when it comes to sharing ideas and strategies? Probably not. So, do your best to find members from different industries.

6. Commitment - For the group to be as effective as possible, individual members must be committed to it. If attendance is sporadic or inconsistent, there will be subpar results. Besides that, it’s not really fair to other members if one or two don’t attend regularly. The whole point is to have a collaboration of ideas. When people aren’t there, collaboration suffers.

7. Membership Dues One of the most effective ways to ensure group commitment is to charge membership dues. These can range from $25 up to $1,000 or more a month. There will be some costs involved in running a group such as food, beverages, handouts, printing costs, room rental, and marketing materials. Apart from having the funds to pay for these items, there is also a psychological reason for charging dues.

8. If someone is paying to be a part of your group, he or she is much more likely to stick with it and take it seriously. I currently charge $297 per month for members to join our Mastermind Group, and members rarely miss a meeting.

9. Charge whatever you want, but make sure it is enough to keep them committed.

10. Similar Situations - Although you should only have one person per industry in your group, you should also make sure that everyone is relatively similar in where they are in their business’s growth stage.

11. You don’t want a member who has a fifty-million-dollar, twenty-year-old company partnered with a company that has been in business for three years and is barely making five hundred thousand dollars annually.

12. Optimism and a Positive Attitude - It’s okay to plan for worst-case scenarios and create alternative plans, should your Plan A not work out, but there is no room for the eternal pessimist. Find members who have a generally positive outlook on life and business.

13. The pessimists of the world are fairly easy to spot, and you need to be on the lookout for them within your group. This is the guy (or gal) who complains about every little detail, from the venue to the food to the topics being presented.

14. Remember, one of the main benefits of the Mastermind Group is to be inspired and motivated by smart, sophisticated, passionate business owners. One bad apple can spoil the bunch, and nothing will make your group disintegrate faster than negativity.

15. If you encounter a pessimist in your group, you will need to take quick action to rectify the situation. I recommend first having a frank discussion with that person. If things do not improve, you may have to ask them to leave the group.

16. Absolute Discretion It is critically important that you instill a grave sense of discretion among your Mastermind members. This goes beyond the whole “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” concept. Your members (and you) are going to be sharing intimately personal details about themselves, their employees, their competitors, their business practices, and their trade secrets. It is absolutely imperative that the group members treat this with the utmost respect and care. Trust is mandatory.

17. My Mastermind members are required to sign nondisclosure agreements that have stiff violation penalties. Fortunately, I have never had to use any of the penalties against anyone, but the simple fact that I take it so seriously with my members goes a long way in fostering a culture of openness and trust. I strongly suggest you do something similar.

18. Finally, traditional Mastermind Groups consist of no more than six people, each from different industries.

19. Concentrate on keeping your group to a total of around four to six members, including you. Keep in mind that you can set up as many of these groups as you want, depending on the kind of time commitment you can make. My colleagues in other areas of the country are running anywhere from five to eight Mastermind meetings at once.

20. If you ask people to shell out $300 to $1,000 a month to attend your Mastermind Group, then you need to make it a GREAT event. Catered food is virtually mandatory.

21. The way you sell this thing to people is by making it an elite, exclusive club into which they are being invited. It’s not something just anyone can join. There is a screening process and possibly a waiting list. Reality is perception. Every little component—every little component—has to be congruent with this positioning, including the food. Maybe even especially the food.

22. There’s a time and a place for casual dining, but your Mastermind Group meeting is not one of those times or places.

23. Along with the food, make sure you provide plenty of drinks. I usually buy a few types of soda, juices, teas, and then also have plenty of bottled water on hand.

24. However, our traditional Mastermind Groups are held in a large conference room at a local credit union.

25. Venue layout is important to the overall flow of your meetings. For a smaller group (four to six members), a round-table-type layout tends to work well. You don’t want members sitting in rows where some sit behind others. For high group interaction, a layout like that is highly inconvenient. Members should sit in a circle or half circle where everyone is facing inward, towards everyone else, making group discussion much easier.

26. Any large room free from distractions will work. If in a large conference room, make sure you can close the doors to limit the amount of noise and distractions.

27. Other options for meeting rooms are hotel conference rooms, universities, public libraries, corporate offices, or executive suites. (Executive suites often provide a large conference room to its tenants, and these can sometimes be rented for less than one hundred dollars.) Look into various options, and you should be able to find an acceptable venue without too much trouble.

28. Depending on how many people are in the group, I will go over a marketing topic for the first thirty to forty-five minutes of the meeting. We then take a quick restroom break and start with the first group member. That group member then has about forty-five minutes to talk about three or four challenges they are having in their business. The whole group participates in making suggestions, giving ideas, or fleshing out concepts related to the particular challenges under discussion.

29. Someone, usually my assistant, will take notes of the interaction and create checklists, to-do lists, and action items for that member to complete during the next month. This gives that member something tangible to take home and implement in business during the next thirty days. These meetings are not just about theory or ideas. They are about action.

30. After the first member is finished, we move on to the second person and the cycle repeats itself.

31. A lot of the real growth in the group comes from hearing about a successful strategy in one business or industry and then applying it to another business or industry, with only minor modifications. In this way, we all get to have a chance at shortcutting the learning curve, and more importantly, we get to implement something in our own businesses that has already been proven in another business.

32. At the end of each meeting, I will usually take five to ten minutes to leave the group with a motivational or inspirational thought. This ends the meeting on a positive note and gets everyone excited to get back to work and start implementing their ideas through the next month until we meet again.

33. Every new member receives a copy of a welcome letter (a letter welcoming him or her to the group and providing the necessary contact information to get in touch with me), a copy of the nondisclosure agreement (which must be signed and turned in before the meeting starts), and a copy of the ground rules (which I will cover here).

34. Ground Rules for the Meeting:

• Attend Every Meeting - I am pretty firm about this one. If you can’t make a meeting, then you need to have a very good excuse. It’s just not fair to the rest of the group (or to you) to miss a meeting. I have actually instituted a “Two Strikes, You’re Out” policy, where if you miss two meetings during a calendar year, then you are gone.
• Stay for the Whole Meeting - The group is only as strong as the members’ willingness to give to one another.
• Silence/Turn Off Cell Phones - This is the one place where you give yourself permission not to be at the mercy of the daily distractions that plague you. The group needs everyone’s full attention, so turning off cell phones is a must.
• Actively Participate - If members just sit there without offering anything to the group, I will usually try to gently draw them into the discussion with a friendly, “Well we’ve heard from everyone so far except for you, Jack. What do you think about this problem?”
• Constructive Criticism Only/Be Positive
• Don’t Interrupt One Another
• Keep Your Comments Concise. Don’t Be a Time Hog.

35. A basic meeting agenda will look like this: 

• 9:00 a.m.–9:45 a.m. Presentation to Group 

• 9:45 a.m.–9:50 a.m. Break 

• 9:50 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Member 1 Speaks 

• 10:30 a.m.–11:10 a.m. Member 2 Speaks 

• 11:10 a.m.–11:15 a.m. Break 

• 11:15 a.m.–11:55 a.m. Member 3 Speaks 

• 11:55 a.m.–12:05 p.m. Lunch 

• 12:05 p.m.–12:45 p.m. Member 4 Speaks 

• 12:45 p.m.–1:00 p.m. Wrap Up/Q&A/Etc. 

36. This agenda assumes you have at least four members in your group. The times will have to be adjusted if there are more or fewer members.

37. Talk About During Their Allotted Time? The short answer is “whatever they want.”

38. In the event they need a little guidance to get started, ask them to come prepared with three challenges or opportunities they are facing right now.

39. Marketing generally isn’t sequential, but here is a basic process you can follow: identify, find, attract, and convert.

40. The biggest thing you want to look for are business owners who read a lot of self-help books, business books, and any other nonfiction works designed to help them improve their lives or business.

41. The second character trait you want to look for in a business owner is aggressive marketing. These entrepreneurs are the ones actively and aggressively trying to grow their business and aren’t afraid of spending money to do it.

42. Finally, you want to find those business owners who are somewhat established. Entrepreneurs involved with very young companies or startups are pinching every penny and may balk at spending money to join your group, even if it will benefit them.

43. Referrals: This is the best place to begin your efforts. Keep in mind that like attracts like. In other words, we tend to associate with and attract those who are similar to us. Even if you only have a few Mastermind members right now, you’ll want to start by getting them to refer their friends and colleagues to you.

44. Chances are, they are friends with and can positively influence potential members who would be a great fit for your group.

45. Members will come and members will go, so you will always need to keep your pipeline full of potential prospects.

46. Keep this in mind when recruiting members for your Mastermind Group. You want those individuals who have a great work ethic and will be master implementers. Their natural enthusiasm for work will spread to the other group members and everyone in turn will benefit.