Merce Cardus's Blog, page 83

How Fascinating Are You?

InFascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation,advertising and media personality Sally Hogshead explores what triggers fascination—one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and influence behavior—and explains how companies can use these concepts to make their products and ideas irresistible to consumers.

F Scores: The Fascination Personality Test

My team and I developed the F Score to objectively evaluate the level of fascination generated by a product, brand, or idea....

Two Reasons Your Vacations Aren’t Making You Happy

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Are your family trips an exercise in pleasure or comfort? Behavior economics guru DanAriely, author ofPredictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,notes that there’s a vivid difference between the two… and it may mean the difference between a fantastic vacation and one that’s just okay.

Vacations are really interesting because for many families it’s one of theirbiggest discretionary expenses thr...

MONDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Ambivert Journey

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Public speaking is a great way to work on that muscle. When up on a stage or in front of a class, just being up there makes people like you. The audience automatically thinks you are outgoing and friendly. The audience believes it takes a special person to do public speaking, as it’s one of the most common phobias. They think you are an extrovert.

~EDWIN PALSMA, author ofAmbivert Journey: A Guide for Introverts

WRITING

Spicing up a story with si...

Why is Friday Better Than Sunday?

In The Optimism Bias, Sharot takes an in-depth, clarifying look at:

• how the brain generates hope and what happens when it fails

• how the brains of optimists and pessimists differ

• why we are terrible at predicting what will make us happy

• how emotions strengthen our ability to recollect

• how anticipation and dread affect us

• how our optimistic illusions affect our financial, professional, and emotional decisions

119.5 seconds

That is the time it takes to pour and serve a perfect pint...

How Control and Chaos Define Your Career

Even if someone works hard at their job and makes all the right moves, there’s still a chance that next week the company will go bottom up. Jon Acuff explains that this scenario is just one of four kinds of “do-over moments” a person will see in the course of their career.

These kinds of changes can happen as a result of a voluntary or involuntary action and their results can be serendipitous or detrimental. The key, Acuff says, “is learning how to navigate these four different seasons” of c...

Unleashing Your Inner Misfit: The Power of Provocation

The Misfit Economyargues that lessons in creativity, innovation, salesmanship, and entrepreneurship can come from surprising places: pirates, bootleggers, counterfeiters, hustlers, and others living and working on the margins of business and society.

The Principle of Provoke

To provoke, of course, means to arouse or stir up feelings, desires, or action. Within the Misfit Economy, provocation is about stepping out of reality, imagining something different. It is about poking and prodding bus...

What Tibet Can Teach the West about Self-Worth

Self-compassion becomes a challenge to some people because self-compassion requires a natural ability on their part to be able to deal with failures as well as successes with understanding, acceptance, and kindness. Once you have that kind of ability to relate to your own situation with kindness, says Thupten Jinpa, it creates a kind of a reservoir of strength and resilience so that you have plenty to draw from. Jinpa is the author ofA Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can...

The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling

Story Engineeringstarts with the criteria and the architecture of storytelling, the engineering and design of a story–and uses it as the basis for narrative. The greatest potential of any story is found in the way six specific aspects of storytelling combine and empower each other on the page.

The Physics of Storytelling

There are many theories and principles floating around in the vast oeuvre of writing instruction. The list of things a writer needs to understand and execute is long an com...

There Are No Shortcuts. You Find Your Path By Walking It

Tavis Smiley, author of My Journey with Mayadictates a letter to a young American with inspiration from his late friend, Maya Angelou. No matter how much you seek theanswers to life from external sources, the truth you seek can only be found within you. You must walk your own path without aid of shortcuts. And you need to acknowledge that the journey toward the authentic you is more important than the destination.

Maya Angelou said to me repeatedly that we find our path by walking it.

We fi...

Does Imitation Spark Innovation In the World of Cuisine?

From the shopping mall to the corner bistro, knockoffs are everywhere in today’s marketplace. Conventional wisdom holds that copying kills creativity, and that laws that protect against copies are essential to innovation–and economic success. But are copyrights and patents always necessary? In The Knockoff Economy, Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman provocatively argue that creativity can not only survive in the face of copying, but can thrive.

Copying versus Creativity

In the spring of...