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That can obviously be valuable too. But realistically, you wouldn’t be reading this book if you could throw a baseball a hundred miles
per hour or compose hit songs in your head.
When writing a résumé, a handy trick you’ll learn from experts is to ask yourself if there are any words in your first draft that you would be willing to remove for one hundred dollars each. Here’s the simple formula:
What matters is that the formula steers your behavior in the right direction.
As is often the case, simplicity trumps accuracy.
Likewise, I think it’s important to think of each new skill you acquire as a doubling of your odds of success.
If I told you that taking a class in Web site design during your evenings might double your odds of career success, the thought would increase the odds that you would act.
Looking at the familiar in new ways can change your behavior even when the new point of view focuses on the imaginary.
If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach,
When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.
set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet.
I was a learning machine. If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics. In my cartooning career I’ve used almost every skill I learned in the business world.
Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones.
Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else. One of my lifelong practices involves reading
about world events every day, sometimes several times a day. Years ago that meant reading a newspaper before work. Now it usually involves reading news aggregator sites on my phone or tablet computer whenever I have a minute or two of downtime. The great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge. The formula for knowledge looks something like this:
The simple entry point for developing a news-reading habit is that you read only the topics that interest you, no matter how trivial they might be. That effectively trains you to enjoy the time you spend reading the news, even if the only thing you look at involves celebrity scandals and sports.
It will feel easy and natural, which is the sign of a good system.
smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.
Personally, I try to avoid stories involving tragic events and concentrate on the more hopeful topics in science, technology, and business. I
don’t ignore bad news, but I don’t dwell on
I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don’t think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.
are you equally clear about the odds that rule over other areas of your life?
Some of the most powerful patterns in life are subtle.
it helps to see the world as math and not magic.
If you find yourself in a state of continual failure in your personal or business life, you might be blaming it on fate or karma or animal spirits or some other form of magic when the answer is simple math. There’s usually a pattern, but it might be subtle. Don’t stop looking just because you don’t see the pattern in the first seven years.
The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.
This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.
Public speaking Psychology Business writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology (hobby level) Proper voice technique
My fellow employee bounded onto the stage as if he had just won the lottery. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious. He had no notes. He prowled the stage and owned it. We, the audience, locked onto him like a tail and we let him wag us. He was funny, expressive, engaging, and spontaneous. It was the best speech by a nonprofessional I had ever seen. I could tell he loved every second onstage, and yet he had the discipline to keep things brief.
Twenty-some students had been thinking this woman had just crashed and burned in the most dramatically humiliating way. She had clearly thought the same thing. In four words, the instructor had completely reinterpreted the situation.
Today when I see a stage and a thousand people waiting to hear me speak, a little recording goes off in my head that says today is a good day. I’m the happiest person in the room. The audience only gets to listen, but I get to speak, to feel, to be fully alive. I will absorb their energy and turn it into something good. And when I’m done, there’s a 100 percent chance that people will say good things about me.
The most important is the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.
I’ve had a number of occasions since then to test the powers of praise, and I find it an amazing ...
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Adults are starved for a kind word.
When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If
changed. Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.
Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
Even an engineer who deals mostly with the material world needs to understand how his boss feels, how customers feel, and how users will perceive the product. You can’t get away from the need to make decisions based on psychology.
Dilbert was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace. At the time there was nothing to compare it with. That allowed me to get away with bad artwork and immature writing until I could improve my skills to the not-so-embarrassing level. Since the launch of Dilbert in 1989, dozens of cartoonists have tried to enter the workplace-comic space and gotten clobbered by unfavorable comparisons to a mature Dilbert.
Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.
It was still a neighborhood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. But compared with other restaurants in the area it was a step up in design. It made people feel uncomfortable. To make matters worse, our food quality wasn’t up to the level people expected for a place with that type of decor.
Our business model assumed people would prefer eating upscale comfort food in an unusually attractive setting. It was a bad idea.
You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power.
the skills and insights I gleaned from studying hypnosis have improved my performance in just about everything I’ve done since then, from business to my personal life. It was time well spent.
hypnosis treats people as if they were machines that can be programmed. If you provide the right inputs, you get the outputs you want.
My experience with hypnosis completely changed the way I view people and how I interpret the choices they make. I no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.
It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision. If you’ve ever had a frustrating political debate with your friend who refuses to see the logic in your argument, you know what I mean. But keep in mind that the friend sees you exactly the same way.
A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.
Wow
That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie. If you’re perplexed at how society can tolerate politicians who lie so blatantly, you’re thinking of people as rational beings. That worldview is frustrating and limiting.
Your reasoning can prevent you from voting for a total imbecile, but it won’t stop you from supporting a half-wit with a great haircut.
