Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

Later they repeated the task while watching an avatar of themselves pedaling in the earlier time trial. What the cyclists didn’t know was that the researchers had turned up the speed on the avatar. And yet the cyclists were able to keep up with their avatars, surpassing what they thought had been their top speed. “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,” said the esteemed neurologist Roger Bannister, best known as the first human to run the mile in less than four minutes.

At the time, conventional wisdom held that the stomach environment was too acidic for bacteria to thrive. And yet there they were. “People who had seen them had always washed them off to look at the stomach cells underneath,” says Marshall, “and just ignored the bacteria stuck all over the surface.” So he asked a beautifully simple question: What in the heck are these bacteria doing here?

1. Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about. 2. Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide. 3. Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different. 4. Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative. 5. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do. 6. Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

It’s not me; it’s you. Whenever you set out to persuade someone, remember that you are merely the producer of the argument. The consumer has the only vote that counts. Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn’t resonate for the recipient, you won’t get anywhere.

Don’t pretend your argument is perfect. Show us a “perfect” solution and we’ll show you our pet unicorn. If you make an argument that promises all benefits and no costs, your opponent will never buy it—nor should he. Panaceas are almost nonexistent. If you paper over the shortcomings of your plan, that only gives your opponent reason to doubt the rest of it.