Takeaways

• Reality is nonlinear. No future, no past. All is now.
• The world is filled with risk-averse gatekeepers, with little imagination. Find ways to go around them.
• Lack of equity was Phil’s biggest threat, as with many aspiring businesses.
• No micromanaging. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
• For people in their 20’s, don’t settle on a job or profession. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointment will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.
• People sensing my belief, and wanting some of that for themselves. Belief is irresistible.
• If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks seem like sure things.

Takeaways

Part 1: The Technological Challenge

• Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.

 

Lesson 1: Disillusionment: The End of History Has Been Postponed

• Humans think in stories rather than facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths. We’ve gone from three global stories to choose from (fascism, communism, and liberalism) to zero.
• Humans have been far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
• In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant.
• Liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological disaster and technological disruption.
• This might be the first generation that will be lucky just to stay in place

 

Lesson 2: Work – When You Grow Up, You Might Not Have a Job

• Scientists have been allowed to hack humans and gain a much better understanding of how we make decisions. Our choices of everything from food to mates results not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition”.
• The biochemical algorithms of the brain rely on heuristics, shortcuts, and outdated circuits adapted to the african savannah rather than to the urban jungle.
• Two important on human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability. Individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network of robots and computers.
• Homo sapiens are not built for satisfaction. Happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations improve.

 

Lesson 3: Liberty – Big Date Is Watching You

• The liberal story cherishes human liberty as its number one value. It argues that all authority ultimately stems from free will of individual humans, as expressed in their feelings, desires, and choices. However, once somebody gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into and emotional puppet show.
• Feelings are based on calculation, not intuition, inspiration, or freedom. We fail to realize this because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.
• The real problem with robots is that they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.
• Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or numans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”
• There is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger.

 

Lesson 4: Equality – Those Who Own the Date Own the Future

• Following the Agricultural Revolution, property multiplied and with it inequality. As humans gained ownership of land, animals, plants, and tools, rigid hierarchical societies emerged, in which small elites monopolized most wealth and power for generation after generation. Humans to accept this as ideal.
• During the Industrial Revolution, governments invested heavily in the health, education, and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of healthy laborers to operate the production lines and millions of loyal soldiers to fight in the trenches.
• If new treatments for extending life and upgrading physical and cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological castes. There might be a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens.
• In the 21st century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated into too few hands, humankind will split into different species.
• Regulating the ownership of data might be the most important political question of our era.

 

Part 2: The Political Challenge

• The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberalism and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion, and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and makes it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.

 

Lesson 5: Community – Humans Have Bodies

• People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. We need direct physical interaction to be happy. Technology has been distancing ourselves from our body

 

Lesson 6: Civilization – There Is Just One Civilization in the World

• Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreement.
• People still have different religions and national identities. But when it comes to the practical stuff – how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb – almost all of us belong to the same civilization.

 

Lesson 7: Nationalism – Global Problems Need Global Answers

• Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own. A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity and humankind now has at least three such enemies – nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.

 

Lesson 8: Religion – God Now Serves the Nation

• Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.
• Religion divides our civilization into different and hostile camps

 

Lesson 9: Immigration – Some Cultures Might Be Better Than Others

• Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.” Saying that black people commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.

 

Part 3: Despair and Hope

• Though the challenges are unprecedented, and though the disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

 

Lesson 10: Terrorism – Don’t Panic

• Terrorism is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties who cannot inflict much material damage onto their enemies. Fear is the main story in terrorism and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.
• Terrorists opt to produce a theatrical spectacle they hope will provoke the enemy and cause him to overreact. In most cases, the overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.
• We judge terrorism by its emotional, rather than material impact.
• A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us.

 

Lesson 11: War – Never Underestimate Human Stupidity

• Why is it so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars in the 21st century? One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. The main economic assets now are knowledge based.
• The world is far more complicated than a chess board and even rational leadings frequently end up doing very stupid things.

 

Lesson 12: Humility – You Are Not the Center of the World

 

Lesson 13: God – Don’t Take the Name of God in Vain

• Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands”, it means “reducing suffering.” If you really understand how an action causes unnecessary suffering to yourself or to others, you will naturally abstain from it.
• Humans are social animals, and our happiness depends on our relations with others.

 

Lesson 14: Secularism – Acknowledge Your Shadow

• Enshrines the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsibility. Forms the foundation of modern scientific and democratic institutions.
• The secular ideal is the commitment to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than mere faith.
• Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

Part IV – Truth

 

Lesson 15: Ignorance – You Know Less Than You Think

• Most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis. These emotions and heuristics are inadequate for today’s world.
• Individuality is a myth as well because humans rarely think for themselves. We think in groups. What gave homo sapiens an edge over all other animals was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.
• Individually, humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and have come to know less and less as history has progressed. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all of our needs.
• The “knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot but individually we know very little. We take others knowledge as if it is our own.
• The world is becoming more complex and we are ignorant of what’s going on.
• Most of our views are communal groupthink. Bombarding people with facts and attacking their individual ignorance doesn’t work.

 

Lesson 16: Justice – Our Sense of Justice Might Be Out of Date

• Trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas, people resort to one of four methods. First is to downsize the issue. Second is to focus on a touching human story that stands for the conflict. Third is to weave conspiracy theories. The fourth is to create a dogma.
• Religious and ideological dogmas are still highly attractive because they offer us a safe haven from the frustratingly complexity of reality.

 

Lesson 17: Post-Truth – Some Fake News Lasts Forever

• Home-sapiens are a post truth species because our power depends on creating and believing fictions.
• “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lite told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
• Falso stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.
• Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know something at the same time. They can know something then they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it.
• Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you have to renounce power.
• As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort trying to control the world than on trying to understand it.
• If you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might as well be the product. If some issue seems important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

 

Lesson 18: Science Fiction – The Future Is Not What You See in the Movies

• Authenticity is a myth. People are trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within the bigger box of human society.

 

Part V: Resilience

Lesson 19: Education – Change Is the Only Constant

• We have far too much information, we need the ability to make sense of it, to tell the difference between what is important and unimportant
• If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind. You will need a lot of mental flexibility and emotional balance, and feel at home with the unknown.
• We live in the era of hacking humans. The algorithms are watching you right now. Where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Once they know you better than you know yourself, they can control you and manipulate you and you won’t be able to do much about it. If this happens, authority will shift to them. Almost like living in the Truman Show or the Matrix.

 

Lesson 20: Meaning – Life Is Not a Story

• • To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. Second, it must extend beyond my horizons and give me something bigger than myself.

 

• Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe doesn’t work like a story.

 

• Why do people believe in fictions? One reason is that their personal identity is built on the story, they are taught to believe it from early childhood: they find only what their parent shave hidden from them. Second, our collective institutions are built on them.
• Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.
• If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it’s usually enough to convince you that the story is real.
• If you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about you own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is: the answer isn’t  a story.

 

Lesson 21: Meditation – Just Observe

• The deepest source of suffering is the patterns of the mind. It is not objective, rather a mental reactions generated by the mind.

Takeaways

• It’s about knowing who is a friend of a friend. Knowing who your friends are and who their friends are, so you can gain a better understanding of the community, will lead to better odds that your network will enhance your success.

 

Chapter 1: Find Strength In Weak Ties

• Our biggest opportunities and best sources of new information come from our “weak ties” or “dormant ties” – our connections with people we don’t see often or haven’t spoken to in a long time. Reaching out to old friends is a better way to find a job.
• Our weak ties often often build a bridge from one cluster to another and gives us access to new information. They interact with people different than our inner circle and learn different information. They become our  best source for new information.
• Weak ties that used to be stronger are the most effective – dormant ties. Dormant ties hold a wealth of new, different, and unexpected insights. Second, reaching out to them specifically for advice is efficient, contact with them is quicker. Third, because they were once stronger relationships, their trust and motivation for helping us is stronger.

 

Chapter 2: See Your Whole Network

• We are all one big network, and the people who succeed are not the ones with the best collection but the ones who can see and navigate their network best. We all already exist inside a network. We are all a friend of a friend.

 

Chapter 3: Become a Broker and Fill Structural Holes

• People who spend a lot of time with the same other people often get to know one another and when everyone in the local cluster knows or has access to the same information as everyone else, the contacts are likewise redundant.
• The people who fill structural holes – the brokers – end up with control over the flow of information and eventually with more power than those that sit just outside of a cluster.

Chapter 4: Seek Out Silos

• When individuals are clustered together in a work group, they tend to get better at what they do and require less supervision. Clusters are good for us and our growth.
• The majority illusion explains how easy it is to trick a population into believing something is true and widely believed, when the reality is just the opposite. Those with a lower number of connections, observing their more well connected colleagues put forth an idea or trend, conclude that the idea must be more popular than it really is. This can lead to peer pressure and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• If you are looking for an introduction to someone specific, the research on the majority illusion suggest it is best not to rely on just one person you may know to make a connection. Study the network around the target for other connections
• In personal relationships, we are more likely to develop close ties with people who are like us.
• Small initial preferences matter, but how they change future choices strengthens the appearance of a preference for similarity. Opposites don’t attract, similar people do. When similar people connect, they change the broader social network to make more similar connections more probable.
• The key is to deliberately seek out new, dissimilar connections. Who you know affects how you think. It takes deliberate work to move against the strong current of similarity.
• We are better off engaging in activities that draw a cross-section of people and letting those connections form naturally as we engage with the task at hand.
• Powerful networks are formed through sharing in high-stakes activities that bring together a diverse set of participants – projects, teams. There is little room to stick to prescribed roles in these activities. Shared activities stand the best chance of developing potent new network connections when they satisfy three qualities: they evoke passion, they require interdependence, and there is something at stake.
• Multiplexity refers to the number of different social connections between any two individuals. As an example, it is more likely a personal relationship will become business than it is that a business relationship will become personal.
• We don’t have a network; rather, we’re embedded inside a massive network that we must learn to navigate. Navigating your network deliberately – making choices about who your friends are and being aware of who is a friend of a friend – can directly influence the person you become, for better or worse.

The Humor Code

Peter Mcgraw & Joel Warner

Takeaways

• It’s not whether or not your funny, It’s what kind of funny you are. Be honest and authentic.
• It helps to be an outsider. Be skeptical, analytical, rebellious.
• Since most things aren’t funny, come up with a lot of ideas.
• Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. It signals everything is okay and lets others laugh too.
• Good comedy is a conspiracy. Create an in-group with those you want to get the joke.
• Laughter has momentum. Get the guffaws going as quickly as you can.
• Complicated comedy is subjective, but bare bones humor is universal. Keep it simple.
• Context matters. Nobody will laugh if they don’t know what your talking about.
• Know your audience. Making something broadly appealing often kills the funny.
• Making things funny means nearly going over the line. Learn to be a comedic tightrope artist so you don’t go too far.
• No topic is off limit. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to make the violations benign.
• The best comedy turns the world upside down. Make fun of yourself before others get the change to do so.
• Laughter is disarming. Make light of the stuff everyone’s worried about and you’ll negate its power
• Comedy signals an escape from the world. Create a safe, playful space where folks are free to laugh.
• Jokes can be a coping mechanism. Don’t be afraid to kid around about the harsh realities of life.

Takeaways

• Excuses are the common denominator of failure
• Delusions, dishonesties, and foolishness control excuse makers even though in most cases they know better.
• Without a doubt, every perceived problem can be turned into a genuine opportunity for growth.
• If your business is failing, it is only because of you. Someone else is succeeding in the same position and under similar conditions. If you own the failure and truly blame yourself, you will fight it. Own your failures and you will own your success!

 

Excuse #1: FEAR

• “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
• When you hear yourself saying…
  • I’m afraid of failing.
  • I’m afraid of being embarrassed and humiliated.
  • What if things don’t pan out?
  • Others have tried this and failed.
  • Trying this makes me feel scared and uncomfortable.
  • What if I’m wrong?
  • There aren’t any guarantees.
  • What if my reputation suffers?
  • What if I lose the respect of my peers?
  • I might not be able to start over if things don’t work out.

…It’s time to to face your fears and stop bullshitting yourself!

• Don’t think about all the steps needed to get from A to B. Try thinking about the first small step you need to take. Break down a change into small, doable parts to avoid feeling overwhelmed, distracted, or defeated.
• FEAR – is false evidence appearing real.
• Flip your fear by turning it into a question to see how unrealistic or unfounded your fear really is.
• A crucial part of overcoming fear that may keep you from shifting course or tweaking strategies is to continually assess and examine your decision-making process. Knowing you review situations and make solid decisions builds confidence.
• To-Do List
  • Think incrementally. Face fears by breaking them down into small action steps. Take one step at a time.
  • Assess the risk. Ask yourself, is my fear rational? If it is rational, what is the worst thing that could happen if the fear is realized? Would it be devastating or something you could handle? The best way to get over any fear is to face it and act.
  • Take corrective action. Have a plan B before you make a bold move.
  • Check in with yourself. Reevaluating and asses your actions.

Excuse #2: KNOWLEDGE

• When you hear yourself saying…
  • I don’t need to learn anything new. I know enough.
  • I don’t know where to start.
  • I don’t know how to start.
  • I’m not an expert.
  • What if I can’t learn?
  • It’s too hard and all consuming to learn something new.
  • I don’t see the value of going back to school or making the effort to learn more.
  • What’s the point of going back to school or making the effort to learn more.
  • What’s the point of learning something new when the field is constantly changing?
  • I just can’t keep up with the constant changes in my field.

…it’s time to end the bullshit and learn something!

• Ten ways to develop a growth mindset

1. Practice active curiosity. Question more.
2. Embrace challenges.
3. Listen and learn from criticism.
4. Don’t lose your connection to your customers or stakeholders. Get rid of middleman, and go directly to the source of information.
5. Try to learn something new every week.
6. Keep yourself fresh and avoid getting too comfortable by seeking out opinions and knowledge from new sources.
7. Always ask yourself if what you believe about your business is really true.
8. Don’t automatically accept conventional wisdom.
9. Don’t accept anything at face value. Dig deeper.
10. Change your scenery. Take a different route to work. Travel to a new place

• Tips to become a continuous learner

1. Own what you don’t know and make it a point to educate yourself. Don’t assume you know enough to continue to grow and succeed.
2. Make a list of what you need to know to evolve your career or your life. Try to check one of those things off the list once a month. Review and update it monthly.
3. Find someone you admire and learn how became successful. Do what he does.
4. Before meeting someone important to your business or going on a job interview, do your homework.
5. Devote at least 15 minutes a day to learning something new and continuing your education.

• To-Do List
  • Expand your job whenever possible. Jump at the chance to learn a new skill and spend time with people whom you don’t see often or at all.
  • Learn for longevity.
  • Don’t wait until you know everything to start. There’s never a perfect time to start a new project or business. Start now and learn as you go.
  • Access what’s available and devote the right resources to learning.
  • Learn from those you serve.

Excuse #3: TIME

• It’s not that you don’t have enough time, it’s that you are not assessing and valuing your time properly.
• Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
• When you hear yourself saying..
  • I’m too busy for that.
  • It takes too much time.
  • If I do that I won’t have time for anything else.
  • I have too much to do so nothing gets done.
  • Everything takes longer than I think it will.
  • I am stuck on how to prioritize.
  • Too many people make too many demands on me so I have no room for the things I want to do.

…It’s time to lose your time excuse and stop bullshitting yourself!

• If you are procrastinating, ask yourself, is my future important enough to do this, or some of it, today? Will I move forward or stay in my cage?
• Your “later” self won’t necessarily be more disciplined than your “right now” self. If you let yourself slack off now, you’re building a habit of procrastination and actually making it less likely that your later self will get anything done.
• Accomplishments and achievements do not happen by mistake or by themselves- they are the result of a conscious effort to take action. Life is not a coincidence; life is a consequence.
• A few ways to stop making excuses and take control of your time
  • Spend the first 30 minutes of your day working, not checking.
  • Make a list and do the first thing on it.
  • Break down big jobs into small ones.
  • Be nice.
  • Remind yourself why you want to do it.
  • If the timing isn’t right, figure out why and do it anyway.
• Manage priorities, not errands.
• What can you do today that will bring you closer to where you want to be tomorrow? Focus on two or three of the most important tasks with an eye toward completion. Ask yourself the following:
  • What can I make progress on today (aspects of major projects)?
  • What can I actually finish today (important tasks that won’t take more than a couple hours)?
  • What can I get out of the way in a short, prescribed period of time (must-do tasks, like returning or making phone calls or answering emails)?
• Examine how you organize your day. Make a note of what you do each hour using a chart.
• To-Do List
  • Value your time properly. Work on things that matter.
  • Delegate. The things that you are not good at, don’t like doing, are a waste of your time and could be done better, faster, and more cheaply by others.
  • Stop procrastinating.
  • Evaluate yourself on output, not activity. When assessing how you spent your day, look at what you actually accomplished, not the amount of busy work you did.
  • Manage priorities.
  • Stop thinking of family time as a time suck.

Excuse #4: CIRCUMSTANCES

• When you hear yourself saying…
  • My physical condition prevents me from fulfilling my dreams.
  • The neighborhood is bad.
  • The demographics are wrong for my business.
  • My location is bad.
  • There are no good people around to hire.
  • The weather destroys my chances for success.
  • Government policies make it impossible for me to be profitable.
  • My competition is killing me.

…it’s time to face your circumstances excuses and stop bullshittign yourself!

• It’s important to create an environment where failures and obstacles are seen as opportunities to grow. Here’s how:
  • Always give a situation a second or third look.
  • Ask yourself what a particular obstacle is telling you. What information can you glean from the situation so that you can turn it to your advantage?
  • Understand why something failed. Can you remove those components and go back to the drawing board with what’s left?
• There are six ways you can practice being optimistic:

1. Stop putting so much stock into what other people think.
2. Don’t use toxic people and situations as an excuse for toxic reactions. You choose how you behave. You have control over your responses and reactions.
3. Learn from the past but don’t live there.
4. Get out of the constant information loop.
5. Engage your community.
6. Question your assumptions. Actively question negative assumptions about your situation. Be consciously proactive and solution oriented as opposed to reactive to negative events and conditions. Think of your circumstances as an asset, not an obstacle.

• To-Do List
  • Take a second or third look.
  • Take the existing environment and adapt to it so you can serve existing stakeholders and attract new ones. See unchangeable circumstances not as obstacles but as opportunities for growth.
  • Get happy!
  • Practice being optimistic.
  • Deal with existing conditions; don’t be defined by them.
  • Every “problem” has a solution.

Excuse #5: EGO

• When you hear yourself saying…
  • I’m too old/ too young/ to short or tall/ too fat or thin.
  • I’m not as good as/ not as attractive as…
  • My friends and family don’t think i can or should do this.
  • I don’t have anyone to do this with.
  • It’s all about who you know – and I don’t know anyone who can help me.
  • I have had a terrible day so i deserve to do X even though it’s bad for me.
  • I am upset (or angry or anxious, etc) so I have to do this to feel better. / I am excited and happy so I have to do this to celebrate.
  • I am never going to change so I will just give in.
  • Just one more time, and then I’ll start on Monday.

…It’s time to give yousefl soem love and stop bullshittign yourself!

• Five ways to flip your script
  • Implement a zero tolerance policy for your own dark feelings. Visualize throwing away negative feelings or literally do it by writing them down and throwing it away. Write down what’s bothering you.
  • Practice being positive. Have gratitude. Get out of your comfort zone.
  • Ask yourself if it’s really true – do you have proof? Is it just a story you tell yourself – or someone else’s story?
  • Don’t compare yourself with others. The focus should be on you. You never have the full picture of another person’s life. Compare with yourself; compete with yourself.
  • Give it time. Three things necessary for success are the ability to plan for the future; delaying gratification; and something called commonweal orientation, or a general concern for the well being of your community.
• “Just once” is the flip side of procrastination. Instead of putting off something that helps us, we do something that hurts us. It’s an easy trap to fall into because “just one more time” is a hard promise to hold.
• Look in the mirror and ask what behaviors are holding you back and who else is being affected by them. Consider the negative impacts on your own future as well as on that of your loved ones. Find a higher purpose.
• Help yourself:
  • Be accountable. Use your family, a mentor, friend.
  • Keep track. Write behavior in noteback, your emotions, the time.
• To-Do List
  • Get past thinking you’re “too” anything.
  • Flip your script.
  • Self-pity is just a trap that you can get out of.
• Help yourself
• “Just one more time won’t hurt me.” Start to be accountable for your own behavior. Write down your triggers and notice the patterns of your behaviors so you can anticipate and change them.

Excuse #6: SCARCITY

• When you hear yourself saying…
  • I don’t have the money to get started.
  • There is no way I can reduce my expenses.
  • I need to continue earning exactly what I earn now.
  • I can’t make any changes until I pay off my debt.
  • I need more savings before I take a risk.
  • I don’t make enough money to put any aside.
  • What if I can’t make any money at it?
  • I have no safety net.
  • If I fail, I will be left with nothing.

…It’s time to get over your scarcity excuses and stop bullshitting yourself!

• Page 165: Creating a business plan

1. Make your idea specific.
2. Give it a name.
3. Give yourself a deadline.
4. Broadcast it.
5. Work on your business every day.
6. Get creative about funding.

• To-Do List
  • Just try it.
  • Do what you can with the resources you have.
  • Create a plan.
  • Put things on paper.
  • Get ready to work hard and be creative.
  • Get in the trenches and make things happen.
• Finally takeaway
  • Communicate with your clients, customers, and staff every day. Reach out, follow up, ask questions, and, most important, listen.
  • Be present. Work and live in the now.
  • Take time everyday to think about your business, come up with or review ideas, and gain personal insight into how your life and business are going.
  • Educate yourself. What can you learn today?

Takeaways
● Money is often a by-product of enthusiasm. When it comes to making money, attitude is the most important thing.
● You want to know what people DO buy, not what they SAY they buy. You need to know how it really is, not how people (or you) wish it was or how they think it is. You should become a “student of reality.”
● “The only advantage I want is A STARVING CROWD!” – Constantly be on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving for some particular product or service.
● Three main guidelines when picking lists to test:
○ Recency – the more recent they’ve purchased something similar, the better.
○ Frequency – The more often they purchase, the better.
○ Unit of sale – The more they buy, the better.
● Halberts Marketing Law: Sell People What They Want To Buy! – locate a nerve, their “hot button”, observe ads that are working on them.
● “Most of the world’s work is done by people who didn’t feel like getting out of
bed.” – When you don’t feel like working, just start anyway.
● The truth is determined not by how people use their mouths, but rather, how
they use their wallets.
● The more honest you are with yourself and others, the faster you will see what really motivates people.
● As a general rule, the more “custom tailored” your promotion is the more successful it will be.
● Ideas breed other ideas. It’s okay to have bad ideas.
● When you get stuck or emotionally jammed up, one of the ways to get yourself unclogged is to keep moving. Run. Walk. Jog. Write. Do the dishes. The key is movement .
● Books are recommended: “Scientific Advertising”, “The Robert Collier Letter Book”, “2001 Headlines”, “SuperBiiz”.
● Make yourself a collection (“swipe file”) of good ads and good dm pieces and read them and take notes.
● To make your own product:
○ Peruse Amazon, New York Times Non-Fiction best seller list
○ These let you know what info markets are hot. It is easier than ever today to make money working with subjects you love because it is so much easier to target a lot of customers into very odd or strange things.
○ Even if only 1 in 10,000 people feel the same way about your passion, you still have a huge pool of people to target. In fact, it will probably be hard to even find competition in such a highly-targeted and bizarre subject, which makes it easier for you to dominate that market.
● It’s better to be in the spam box of a primary email address than to be in the primary box of a spam email address.
● Putting specifics and details in a letter or email makes it feel more personal and important.
● One key question every business owner should ask is “how can I make it so ordering is even easier?”
● If you can get a person who is not going to order to agree, in his mind, to write and tell you he is not going to order, then you will get more orders.
● Keep two task lists:
○ The first is of every important thing you really should do while at your best.
○ The second is of all the important tasks which I can do equally well regardless of my mood.
● Working in libraries and coffee houses is a way to trick yourself into doing work where everybody else is.
● When trying to stand out, try and fight any urge to sound like a cliche and use phrases which a reader could finish on their own. You only want the reader to get that head-nodding “been there, done that” feeling when you already got the prospect’s attention.
● Many marketing greats keep a power words list. Look at tabloids and make a list of headlines that really suck you in. Divide your list of words into positive and negative. Peruse it before you begin your copy dump.
● Disguise your pitch until you want the prospect to know you are selling something. Add a few videos, use monster headlines with benefits to let the copy appear to be broken up in sections. The proper time to let people know you are pitching is after you have started seriously fueling their desire.
● Before beginning to write the actual copy, you should assemble a file that contains everything you can get your hands on that is relevant to your promotion. Then, start reading and taking notes. Take nuggets so you don’t stuff yourself. They can be one word, a phrases. Write what occurs to you when reading all your material. Always make sure to include complete description of your product and what it will do for you.
● Next, re-read all the notes and put a star next to the really good ones, two stars next to the even better ones, and the red hot ones put three stars next to. After that, stop working on the project. Put it out of your mind for a day or two. Often what occurs during this time is an outstanding sales idea.
● Use a proven sequential outline like AIDA which stands for ATTENTION,
INTEREST, DESIRE, ACTION:
○ First, get his attention
○ Second, get him interested
○ Third, make him desire what you are selling
○ Compel him to take whatever action is needed to get whatever it is you are selling
● Keeping your whole project in a box really helps. Make sure you keep a pen and paper on you at all times because ideas come when you least expect them. ALL great copywriters write their nugget notes, bullets, and headlines by hand. Also, rank everything in terms of what the buyer cares about.
● AIDA
○ Attention comes first. Must get the right kind of attention. Must be relevant.
○ Next, we must catch their interest by feeding interesting facts.
○ Then we must stoke desire by describing the benefits our prospect gets.
○ Get him to take action by being very clear and specific.
● A simple way to get a reader interested it tell their story by telling your story with the problem your solution provides. The key is to switch to talking about them as soon as things get better in the story.
● Describe benefits emotionally. Your second choice headlines often make good bullets.
● Use simple, common everyday words in your copy with short sentences and
paragraphs. Ask questions every once in a while and answer them yourself.
● A good writer is one who makes things perfectly clear. Makes it easy for the reader, easy to understand what he is saying, easy to keep reading.
● THE BEST WAY TO BECOME A GOOD WRITER IS BY WRITING GOOD WRITING.
● Eye relief is an important concept. Go through many edits, cutting everything out until cutting any more would be cutting something the customer would like to know. Chop long sentences into two short ones. Break up paragraphs
● The judicious use of parenthesis can provide “eye relief” for your reader. Your copy should be laid out to be and eye treat. Wide margins, a certain amount of white space, double spacing, short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and an attractive, inviting layout.
● The layout of your advertisement should catch the attention of your reader but not in a way that causes him to “notice” the layout.
● Whenever you write an ad, it should have the look of an exciting news flash.
● You can do a better selling job when at first it does not appear you are attempting to do a sales job.
● You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
● Ideally you want to offer first time buyers three price points.
○ The cheap option which has what you need
○ The deluxe or mid-priced option with some bells and whistles
○ The supreme package with prestige service
● When a person goes in for a job interview, the interviewer decides whether or not to hire the person in the first 40 seconds.
● You either hook a reader or lose him when he very first looks at your ad. Not when he reads it, but when he first looks at it.
● Most of the time, a person will never alter his original impression.
● HALT stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. You should never make a decision when you are any of those things.
● YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET IT RIGHT, YOU JUST HAVE TO GET IT MOVING.
● A little trick to improve your copywriting is to read your copy out loud. Rewrite the
tough spots and read the copy out loud again. Keep repeating until your copy is
completely smooth and you can read it without any stumbling at all.
● You must always find a market first, and then concentrate on a product.
● One way to increase believability it to give exact details

Takeaways
● We have been brainwashed to be average by two places
○ By school and by the system into believing that your job is to do your job and follow instructions.
○ Everyone has a little voice inside of their head that’s angry and afraid. That voice is the resistance – your lizard brain – and it wants you to be average (and safe).
● You weren’t born to be a cog in a giant industrial machine. You were trained to be one.
● People want to be told what to do because they are petrified of figuring it out for themselves.
● There are two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.
● The Law of the Mechanical Turk: Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.
● Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but their still working in the factory. It’s factory work because it’s planned, controlled, and measured, because you can optimize for productivity.
● The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care about.
● The New American Dream
○ Be remarkable
○ Be generous
○ Create art
○ Make judgement calls
○ Connect people and ideas
● We’ve been taught to be a replaceable cog in a giant machine. We’ve been taught to consume as a shortcut to happiness. We’ve been taught not to care about our job or our customers. And we’ve been taught to fit in.
● What they should teach in school: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead
● The law of linchpin leverage : The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. Most of the time you’re not being brilliant. Most of the time you do stuff that ordinary people could do.
● Depth of knowledge combined with good judgement is worth a lot. Knowledge alone is worthless
● Your job is a platform for generosity, for expression, for art. Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction.
● The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds.
● If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.
● Projects are the new resumes.
● Top ten factors that motivate best work
○ 1. Challenge and responsibility
○ 2. Flexibility
○ 3. A stable work environment
○ 4. Money
○ 5. Professional development
○ 6. Peer recognition
○ 7. Stimulating colleagues and bosses
○ 8. Exciting job content
○ 9. Organizational culture
○ 10. Location and community
● An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. An artist takes it personally.
● Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient.
● The easier it is to quantity, the less it’s worth.
● The job is what you do when you are told what to do. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. The job is not the work.
● Your mind has two distinct sections, the daemon and the resistance. The resistance spends all its time insulating the world from our daemon. The resistance lives inside the lizard brain.
● It’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.
● When you have a great backup plan, you end up settling for it. As soon as you say, “I’ll try my best”, instead of “I will,” you’ve opened up the door for the lizard.
● The resistance abhors bad ideas. It would rather have you freeze up and invent nothing than take a risk and have some portion of your output be laughable. One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better.
● Freedom feeds the resistance. It means no one is looking over your shoulder, no one is using as stopwatch on you. Freedom makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
● Fear is the most important emotion we have. If there is no sale, look for the fear. If a marketing meeting ends in a stalemate, look for the fear. If someone has a tantrum, breaks a promise, or won’t cooperate, there’s fear involved.
● If the resistance tells you not to listen to something, read something, or attend something, go. DO IT.
● Signs that the lizard brain is at work:
○ Don’t ship on time. Late is the first step to never.
○ Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect.
○ Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected.
○ Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event.
○ Make excuses involving lack of money.
○ Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you.
○ Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you’ll have no standing in the community.
○ Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills.
○ Spend hours on obsessive data collection.
○ Be snarky
○ Start committees instead of taking action.
○ Join committees instead of leading.
○ Excessively criticize the work of your peers, thus unrealistically raising the bar for your work.
○ Produce deliberately outlandish work product that no one can possibly embrace.
○ Ship deliberately average work product that will certainly fit in and be ignored.
○ Don’t ask questions.
○ Ask too many questions.
○ Criticize anyone who is doing something differently. If they succeed, that means you’ll have to do something differently too.
○ Start a never-ending search for the next big thing, abandoning yesterday’s thing as old.
○ Embrace an emotional attachment to the status quo.
○ Invent anxiety about the side effects of a new approach.
○ Be boring.
○ Focus on revenge or teaching someone a lesson, at the expense of doing the work.
○ Slow down as the deadline for completion approaches. Check your work obsessively as ship date looms.
○ Wait for tomorrow.
○ Manufacture anxiety about people stealing your ideas.
○ When you find behaviors that increase the chances of shipping, stop using them.
○ Believe it’s about gifts and talents, not skill.
○ Announce you have neither.
● It’s interesting to say out loud, “I’m doing this because the resistance.” “My lizard brain is making me anxious.” “I’m angry right now because being angry is keeping me from doing my work.” When you say it out loud (not think about it, but say it) the lizard brain retreats in shame.
● Every day find three tasks to accomplish that will help you complete a project. And do only that during your working hours. An hour a day
● Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear , fear that means nothing. The difference between fear and anxiety: Anxiety is diffuse and focuses on possibilities in an unknown future, not a real and present threat. The resistance is 100% about anxiety, because humans have developed other emotions and warnings to help us avoid actual threats. It is an internal construct with no relation to the outside world. It is always needless.
● Two ways to deal with anxiety: Seek reassurance or sit with the anxiety, don’t run from it. Acknowledge it, explore it, befriend it. It burns itself out.
● Shenpa  is a Tibetan word that roughly means, “scratching the itch”. A spiral of pain as a small itch gets scratched, which makes it itch more, so you scratch more until your in pain.
● The more you want to give in to the inner voice of anxiety, the more resilient you become.
● The Resistance gets its next excuse ready in advance and the only solution is to call all the bluffs at once. Start today, start now, and ship.
● The powerful culture of gifts: First, the Internet has lowered the marginal cost of generosity. Second, it’s impossible to be an artist without understanding the power that giving a gift crates. And third, the dynamic of gift giving can diminish the cries of the resistance and permit you to do your best work.
● Human beings have a need for a tribe, and the makeup of the tribe has changed. It is now composed of our coworkers or best customers.
● A loan with interest is a gift. A gift brings tribe members closer together. A gift can make you indispensable.
● If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness.
● Opportunities come after your inspired, not when your inspired by opportunities.
● “If only” is a great way to eliminate your excuses. “If only” is an obligator, because once you get rid of that item, you’ve got no excuse left.
● Linchpins do two things for the organization. They exert emotional labor and they
make a map. What makes you indespensible:
○ 1. Provide a unique interface between members of an organization.
○ 2. Delivering unique creativity.
○ 3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity.
○ 4. Leading customers
○ 5. Inspiring staff
○ 6. Providing deep domain knowledge.
○ 7. Possessing a unique talent.
● If you’re not the best in the world (the customer’s world) at your unique talent, then it’s not a unique talent. Which means you have two choices:
○ Develop the other attributes that make you a linchpin
○ Get a lot better at your unique talent.
● “The act of deciding is the act of succeeding

Takeaways
● People do business with people they know, like, and trust. So next time you want to ask someone for help, ask yourself these three questions:
○ Do they know me?
○ Do they like me?
○ Do they trust me?
● Become a Double Threat
○ Single Threat = Knows a skill = $
○ Double Threat = Knows a skill + another useful skill = $$
○ Triple Threat = Knows a skill + another useful skill + yet another useful skill = $$$$$
● Tell the world exactly what you’re good at. Tell the story of your life. Write down what your one sentence story is focused on your current skill set. Then create one focused on your future skill set.

The Ten Commandments of Finding a New Job
1. Most jobs waiting to be filled are not posted online.
2. It’s not about who you know. It’s all about knowing the right people who know that you’re good at what you do.
3. Applying for a job online is the worst way to go about it.
4. The resume is dead. LinkedIn should be your new focus.
5. You don’t need a formal education to do your job.
6. People hire people. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people more successful than you.
7. Companies don’t hire you because they like you. They want to make more money!
8. Nobody will hire you for someone you want to be.
9. Switching careers is never a straight line.
10.If your first contact for a job is an online job application, a recruiter, or Human Resources, you’re doing it wrong.

Takeaways
● Entrepreneurship is connecting, creating, and inventing systems—be they businesses, people, ideas, or processes. A job is the act of following the operating system someone else created.
● There are three primary reasons to believe that we are at peak jobs and approaching the End of Jobs:
○ Sharp rises in communication technology and improved global educational standards over the past decade means that companies can hire anyone, anywhere. Jobs are increasingly moving to Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe.
○ The notion of machines, both hardware and software, taking over blue collar factory jobs is now largely accepted—but now they’re increasingly taking over white collar, knowledge-based jobs as well.
○ Traditional university degrees—bachelor’s, master’s, and PhDs—have become abundant, making them less valuable than ever.

The Long Tail or what’s making entrepreneurship more accessible:
1. The Democratization of the Tools of Production: Product Creation Costs Are Decreasing.
2. Democratization of Distribution: Everyone Is a Media Company
3. New Markets Are Revealed Every Day

The Stair Step Method
Step One: Launch a product that sells for a one-time fee and has a single marketing channel: SEO, paid advertising like Google Adwords, Facebook ads, a blog audience, or Amazon
Step Two: Launching enough of those one time products to buy your time back, Where you can quit your job and you’ve got confidence and skills in marketing and building a
business.
Step Three: Now you have time to launch bigger products and projects because you can put in full time hours.

Takeaways
● Elephant in the brain: An important bu unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo.
● Key human behaviors are often driven by multiple motive. Some of these motives are unconscious; we’re less than fully aware of them.
● “Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
● Humans are a species not only capable of acting on hidden motives – were designed to do it. Our brains our built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us”, our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.
● The elephant in the brain is selfishness – the selfish parts of our psyches. It refers to the fact that we’re competing social animals fighting for power, status, and sex; the fact that we’re sometimes willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives – and that we do so in order to mislead others.
● Human behavior is rarely what it seems. The human brain was designed to deceive itself, the better to deceive others. Four strands of research lead to the same conclusion – that we are “strangers to ourselves”:
1. Micro-sociology – Our brains choreograph our small scale interactions without us being consciously aware of what’s going on.
2. Cognitive and social psychology – Our brains intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible pro-social motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas.
3. Primatology – Humans are apes which makes human nature a modified form of ape nature. When we study primate groups, we notice a lot of Machiavellian behavior.
4. Economic puzzles – When we study specific social institutions we notice they frequently fall short of their stated goals. They behave as tho they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals.
● Our hidden agenda explain a surprising amount of our behavior – often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often make choices that prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones. Education isn’t about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together.

The Thesis in Plain English
1. People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the most important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish?
2. Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.
3. This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others.
4. In some areas of life, especially polarizing ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. In such cases, we can all be quite wrong, together, about what drives our behavior.
● Knowledge suppression is useful when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meeting our rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind.

Two broad “lights” where the keys to our big brains might be found:
1. Ecological challenges , such as warding off predators, hunting big game, domesticating fire, finding new food sources, and adapting rapidly to new climates. These activities pit humans against their environment and are therefore opportunities for cooperation.
2. Social challenges , such as competition for mates, jockeying for social statues, coalition politics, intra-group violence, cheating, and deception. These activities pit humans against other humans and are therefore competitive and potentially destructive.
● The Social brain hypothesis : the ideas that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.
● Our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor likely function in large part as elaborate mating displays.
● Social status comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige .
○ Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others.
○ Prestige is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen and is governed by admiration. Our competition for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.
● Collective enforcement is the essence of norms. Its a third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.
● There are many forms of discretion when it comes to norms. These make it harder to enforce and convict
○ Pretexts – These function as ready-made excuses or alibis
○ Discreet communication – Keeping things on the down-low
○ Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright.
○ Subtlety
● Our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves – and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.
● Why do we believe our own lies? – “We hide reality from our conscious minds, the better to hide it from onlookers.” Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.
● Ways that self deceptions helps us come out ahead, personified in four different archetypes:
○ The Madman – “I’m doing this no matter what , so stay out of my way!” When we commit ourselves to a particular course of action, it often changes the incentive for other players.
○ The Loyalist – “Sure, I’ll go along with your beliefs.” Hoping to earn trust in return. We often measure loyalty in relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence. It only demonstrates loyalty to the believe something that we wouldn’t have reason to believe unless we were loyal.
○ The Cheerleader – “I know this is true. Come on, believe it with me!” The goal of cheerleading is to change other people’s beliefs. The more fervently we believe something, the easier it is to convince others it’s true.
○ The Cheater – “I have no idea what you’re talking about. My motives were pure.”
● Self-Discretion – Our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. When we push a thought “deep down” or to the “back of our minds” it’s a way of being discreet with potentially damaging information. When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion.
● Our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games.
● Our brain can rationalize behavior effortlessly. When we rationalize, we’re handing our counterfeit reasons. We’re presenting them an honest account of our mental machinations, when in fat they’re made up from scratch.
● The Press Secretary – The brain module responsible for explaining our actions, typically to third parties. It’s job is to avoid acknowledging our darker motives – to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. There’s a real sense that we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. The parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience. We don’t have privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on in our minds. We think we’re good at introspection but that’s largely an illusion. We’re almost like outsiders within our own minds. We’re like strangers to ourselves. Every time we give a reason, there’s a risk we’re just making things up. Every “because”, every answer to a “Why?” question, every justification or explanation of a motive – every single one of these is suspect.
● One of the most effective ways to rationalize is telling half-truths by cherry picking our most acceptable, pro-social reasons while concealing the uglier ones.
● Actions speak louder than words. Honesty makes body language an ideal medium for coordinating some of our most important activities.
● Few behaviors convey the message, “I’m attracted to you” as convincingly as a lingering come-hither stare. Women also sometimes instinctively “play coy” attempting to hide or downplay their interest, thereby requiring men to put more effort into courtship.
● Nonverbal communication allows us to pursue illicit agendas while minimizing the
risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is the reason we’re strategically unaware of our own body language and helps explain why we’re reluctant to teach it to children.
● The primary function of language is sharing information . On the surface that’s
that it looks like but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with.
● Mechanisms that advertising uses to coax us to buy things. Providing information and making promises . Lifestyle advertising (also know as image advertising) works by using the third-person effect. You might think the ad doesn’t affect you but if you think it will change other people’s perceptions of it, then it might make sense for you to buy it. A good rule of thumb is that the easier it is to judge someone based on a particular product, the more it will be advertised using cultural images and lifestyle associations. Lifestyle ads work better with larger audiences because you need to see the ad and be confident that others have seen it too. Also, some lifestyle ads target non-buyers to create envy. The rich
can see that the poor are being trained to see their product as a status symbol.

Factors that influence our charitable behavior:
1. Visibility – We give more when we’re being watched
2. Peer pressure – Our giving responds strongly to social influences
3. Proximity – We prefer to help people locally rather than globally.
4. Relatability – We give more when the people we help are identifiable and give less in response to numbers and facts
5. Mating motives – We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.
● Students go to school not so much to learn useful job skills as to show off their work potential to future employers. Educated workers are generally better workers not because school made them better. School allowed them to advertise the attractive qualities they already have. School doesn’t raise a student’s value via improvement but rather via certification that makes their value clear to buyers.
● Schools are used for propaganda, originally designed as part of nation building
projects with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor.
● The modern workplace is an unnatural environment for a human creature. One of the main reasons so few animals can be domesticated is that only rare social species let humans sit in the role of dominant pack animal. Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps society at large but in order to do that, they have to break our forager spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy
● When it comes to medicine, the dangers of being abandoned when ill explain why sick people are happy to be supported, and why others are eager to provide support. It’s a simple quid pro quo: “I’ll help you this time if you’ll help me when the tables are turned.” By helping people in need, we demonstrate our value as an ally.
● Most published medical research is wrong because medical journals are too eager to publish “interesting” new results that don’t wait for others to replicate.

PUTTING THE ELEPHANT TO USE
● Better Situational Awareness – having a better, deeper understanding of the human social world. Knowing that what’s left unstated is often just as important as what’s said.
● Physician, Heal Thyself – We often misunderstand our own motives. Knowing about our own blind spots should make us even more careful when pointing fingers at others. Humility. There’s a second side to every story.
● Showing Off – An ability to talk candidly about common human motives can signal attractive qualities. People who are able to acknowledge uncomfortable truths and discuss them dispassionately can show a combination of honesty, intellectual ability, and courage.
● Choosing to Behave Better – We can take steps to mitigate or counteract our hidden motives. However, we have a limited budget for self-improvement. We can also put ourselves in situations where are hidden motives better align with our ideal motives.
● Enlightened Self-Interest – We need ideals as personal goals to strive for and yardsticks to judge others and to let ourselves be judged in return. There’s large value to be had in promising to behave well because it make us more attractive as an ally. This incentivizes us to behave better than if we refused to be held to any standard.
● Designing Institutions – Those who make policy should probably understand their hidden motives to help influence policy and reform institutions. Savvy institution
designers must identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service to and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. “What are this institutions hidden functions, and how important are they?”
● Perspective – We get along with each other remarkably well and are overall very ethical.