Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger.

Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.

history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others’. This doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them human.

But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

you should focus on small problems whenever possible.)

until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

“entrepreneurs of error,” as the economist Edward Glaeser calls them, political and religious and business leaders who “supply beliefs when it will increase their own financial or political returns.”

That is a lethal combination—cocky plus wrong—especially

suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life.

“It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely.

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

the more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedback.

One reason is tradition.

A second reason is lack of expertise:

But there is a third, grimmer explanation for this general reluctance toward experimentation: it requires someone to say “I don’t know.”

The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t.

if you ask the wrong question, you are almost guaranteed to get the wrong answer.

Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

elite athletes can be tricked into improvement by essentially lying to them.

“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.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

So rather than address their root causes, we often spend billions of dollars treating the symptoms and are left to grimace when the problem remains.

most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected by current gun laws.

As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.

period. Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they’re hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours. It is remarkable how stinky some ideas become after just one day in the sun.)

It all starts with thinking small.

approach. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance. “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age,” he wrote. “Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.”

Here’s another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don’t be afraid of the obvious.

But best as we can tell, there is no correlation between appearing to be serious and actually being good at what you do. In fact an argument can be made that the opposite is true.

The key is to learn to climb inside other people’s minds to figure out what really matters to them.

The key is to think less about the ideal behavior of imaginary people and more about the actual behavior of real people. Those real people are much more unpredictable.

Why do some incentives, even those created by smart and well-intentioned people, backfire so badly? We can think of at least three reasons:

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

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn’t want to be persuaded? The first step is to appreciate that your opponent’s opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases

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.

persuasive, it’s a good idea to acknowledge not only the known flaws but the potential for unintended consequences.

Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent’s argument.

Keep the insults to yourself.

Why you should tell stories.

the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things. A good story also includes the passage of time, to show the degree of constancy or change; without a time frame, we can’t judge

events, to show the causes that lead up to a particular situation and the consequences that result from it.

exerts a power beyond the obvious. The whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts—the facts, the events, the context—that a story creates a deep resonance.

tell stories is simply that they capture our attention and are therefore good at teaching.

“And to do that we discovered that the first thing you have to do is you have to entertain folks enough so they will pay attention.”

A premortem tries to find out what might go wrong before it’s too late. You gather up everyone connected with a project and have them imagine that it launched and failed miserably. Now they each write down the exact reasons for its failure.