The 100 Most Important Words in the Bestseller “Made to Stick”

We will give you suggestions for tailoring you ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

-Page 24, Made to Stick

The concept described here is so powerful. It took a little while to really sink in when I first read it. But I find myself referencing this idea ALL THE TIME.

Don’t just read what this passages says, but what it implies. What they’re describing here applies to so much more than just creating sticky ideas. It describes the process for effectively doing almost ANYTHING.

The message: Don’t start from scratch and try to reinvent the wheel. The things that work almost always follow a common pattern. Research what others have said the successful pattern looks like. If you can’t find any research, at least make an attempt to infer the pattern on your own.

A page earlier the authors write,

Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creatives ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

Whatever you want to do there’s a small finite number of effective approaches that are far superior to randomness or just “trying stuff and seeing what happens”, whether it’s creating sticky ideas, creating a startup, getting people to like you or achieving happiness.Taking this idea a level of abstraction higher is an homage to the patternist view of life. We are not our matter, we are our pattern.

To transcend means to “go beyond,” but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.

-Ray Kurzweil

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Why You Can’t Get More Happiness, Money and Love By Pursuing Them Directly

Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity, Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

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When Advice Contradicts It Usually Doesn’t

A pheonemna that really interests me is when advice from smart people clashes and there appears to be a contradiction.

However I don’t think there is actually a contradiction. Usually the contradiction can be resolved in one of 3 ways:

1) One or both people are wrong

2) They are actually both right, but they are describing different circumstances. For example the advice for a B2B business is different than that of B2C. Or what is useful advice for 5 year old may not be useful for a 25 year old. Overgeneralizing causes these different circumstances to be conflated and creates an apparent contradiction.

Note that most advice comes from people abstracting patterns from their experiences and since they likely had very different circumstances most of their advice doesn’t apply to you.

3) They are describing the same circumstance, and what they’re really describing are two different schools of thought, each viable. There is often more than one correct way to solve a problem.

Advice is not universal. It can only apply to finite number of circumstances and remain correct. But not all advice is created equal. Some statements apply to more situations than others, such as the golden rule: “Do to others as you want them to do to you.”

But even the golden rule as it’s limitations. People have come up with the platinum rule that describes even more circumstances than the golden rule. The platinum rule says: “treat others as they would like to be treated”.

What I am describing is partial truth. Things can be true but some things are more true than others.

I just wrote this post, attempting to resolve the contradictory advice given by Sean Ellis and Ash Maurya on pricing.

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Thrashing Duck Syndrome

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Most people like to create the perception of having it all figured out. Most people have duck syndrome.

These are people who look calm on the surface but are paddling furiously just to stay afloat.

It’s important to be able to present yourself well, but I find the paddling much more interesting. How do you brush the water back with your feet? How far down the horizon are you looking? Are you studying the angle that propels your feet forward the fastest? Have you asked yourself where and why you are paddling?

I don’t care about looking calm on the surface. I want to let everyone know I’m thrashing, splaying water in every direction. I know that means my head will get dunked from time to time and choking on water will be a frequent occurrence. But I’ll learn from my mistakes, and by acknowledging my turmoil I’ll get better advice from people about how to overcome it. There’s a famous quote, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” One of the best ways to accelerate the rate of change in your life, the 2nd derivative if you will, is to increase your transparency. But increased transparency is scary because you’re going to have to expose your flaws and admit that you don’t have it all figured out.

Transparency Aids Iteration And Thereby Growth

Transparency is the answer to better government, better policy, better science, and better business. Let’s explore how transparency can make us better, too.

Transparency means that you will be showing off a more accurate picture of yourself, both the good and bad. But why would you want to go out of your way to admit you have a chink in your armor? A dented chainmail certainly isn’t as attractive as a pristine one. And we all know people are attracted to shiny, beautiful objects. Don’t you wish you were a shiny beautiful object? If you could take a nice snap shot of your armor, a well angled picture that captured only your good features, a “MySpace shot” as they say (or used to because no one uses it anymore), wouldn’t you do it?  Wouldn’t that shininess win you friends, fame and a high rolling job?

In the short term yes, but in the long term absolutely no. A lesson that will surface time and time again is think long term. If you want to make the most of this life, start thinking long term now.

Most people take the approach of showing only their positive sides. Exposing only positive traits can aid the cultivation of a mystique. If you can prove you are exceptional at a few things, always remain confident and composed and reveal little else about yourself, many people will fill in the blank by extrapolating from your exceptional qualities and assume your are exceptional at everything. So taking well-angled snapshots can create the perception of being an absolute magnet. But sadly, you aren’t. Sooner or later you’ll be found out or you can spend your life protecting your pristine image, seeing other people only when you can show off. You can’t be that perfect knight in shining armor, if you haven’t yet been to battle. If you’re young you should be looking for battles that challenge you and have good chance of knocking you down. And when you rise again and dust yourself off after hitting the ground. Now is the time to be transparent and look for feedback. If you gave your all and know where to look there will be plenty of people who want to help you get to the next stage and overcome the challenge.

You’ve pushed yourself and taken what is traditionally known as failure not as a sign that you’re not good enough but as an opportunity to gain feedback for how to improve. If you get back up and learn from your defeats you’ve turned a failure into a great learning experience. I will be talking more on the blog about transparency and feedback, as those I believe are universal principles underlying progress.

When you get back up show off your ugly dents and battle scars because you’re in a rare class of people. You’re dreaming big and willing to fight for something. You haven’t just talked you have taken action. You haven’t just taken any action you’ve put yourself on the line and got burned, learned from your mistakes and asked for more.

That process isn’t really that hard but so few people are willing to embark on it with any vigor and consistency. Because they don’t want to be transparent about their inadequacies, they want to seem like they’ve got it all figured it out. So they don’t grow. Transparency = Increased Feedback. Feedback + Effort = Growth.

Start this process and great things will happen. Dream big. Take Action. Get knocked down. Share your difficulties and ask for help from those with more experience. Learn from your mistakes. Get back up and try again.

Every one starts out with a shiny wide-eyed awe view of the world. But then we start to take some hits and most people don’t get back up. They seek shelter. They crave comfort. But growth is uncomfortable. If you want to grow you have to get used to being uncomfortable. Comfort is overrated anyway. There is nothing interesting about comfort. It is a homeostatic state of complacency. Comfort comes when you’ve mastered a skill relative to the difficulty of your surroundings and you refuse to seek higher competition. Discomfort is the only way to get the best things in life, and why would you settle for anything less. And believe it or not, the walls that guard those abandoned dreams are very surmountable, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked around at the hordes people licking their wounds and the cacophony of cries telling you not to climb because you will get hurt. Don’t listen. All that is needed is the conviction to endure a little discomfort and the will power to persist and take the right, but uncomfortable actions. Understand that a negative emotion here and there isn’t the worst thing in the world. As Randy Pausch said, “Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.”  And it works remarkably well. 99% of people are deterred by discomfort; they follow their emotions. Your emotions just want to ensure basic survival. But if you’re like me and care about doing something remarkable with your life, you’re not just looking to survive, you’re looking to thrive.

Focus on Growth

A muscle grows only when it’s been pushed just past its limit. Growth requires becoming okay with admitting your weaknesses and the limits of your abilities. Growth requires embracing your present state, having the desire and pushing yourself to move beyond it, and listening to the feedback about how you can improve. I’m not saying you should focus on fixing all your weaknesses, that’s an outdated paradigm. Dan Pink (who I’m a huge fan of) says the new paradigm for success is to focus on strengths not weaknesses. But even your strengths have limits, and in order to strengthen your strengths you must be willing to acknowledge their limits and push past them, a necessary discomfort for growth.

Be more transparent about your growth process and you will increase your pace of change and paths to change.

Transparency increases self-awareness because you know other people are watching, thereby increasing accountability. Accountability is an influence that isn’t given enough consideration because if we were perfectly rational, we wouldn’t need external pressures to make sure we do what we say we will do. It’s been proven that if a person sets the goal of going to the gym 3 times a week, they are more likely to fulfill that goal if they give a friend $100 and allow them to keep the money if they don’t achieve their goal of making it to the gym 3 times that week. It’s even more effective if you give the money to an organization you hate, like the National Organization for Marriage. Transparency makes it more likely you will uphold your commitments because you’ve added a nudge of social pressure.

Take Heed

Being more transparent will certainly help achieve goals faster, but it is not without risk.

When you’re exposing your weaknesses, or the limits of relative strengths, you do need to be careful how you present them. Toeing the line between complaining and problem solving is a delicate balance. Especially if you’re putting in the effort to solve the problems you are struggling with. The main difference between complaining and problem solving is whether you are just looking for sympathy or are actively looking to adopt solutions.

Transparency Has Negatives But Negatives Used Correctly Have Virtues

Projecting negativity is unattractive. It is not emotionally pleasing and the recipients of your negative anecdotes could leave with a sour taste in the mouth. But negativity shouldn’t be avoided at all costs. It’s a necessary discomfort of using increased transparency to grow faster.

Even though there are things to be gained from sharing problems you still must be careful not to emotionally pollute your relationships. Sharing negativity is like injecting a little toxic gas that could cause decay, but if the noxious gas is overcome the relationship has built immunity and the bond is strengthened.

The key difference between the good and bad kind of negativity is whether you are proactively trying to problem solve or are just complaining to get things off your chest. The good and bad become grossly intertwined when you intend to share the good kind of negativity but it is misconstrued and misinterpreted as complaining. But that is your fault not the recipient’s. The meaning of the communication is the response you get. Of course, another variable is the person who is receiving the communication. So an additional filter is to recognize whether you respect the person who misunderstood you and whether they are trying to help you or are merely projecting their own insecurities.

Even though risks exist, don’t let potential negatives of sharing problems overshadow the positive. If you express the desire that you want to improve you are more likely to receive advice and opportunities about how to improve rather than unconstructive criticism. Unfortunately humans are incredibly risk averse and place considerably more importance on avoiding losses and than achieving gains and frequently miss out on learning opportunities because they mistakenly feel they have more to lose than to gain.

A simple rule of thumb for knowing when to share things that aren’t going well in your life is whether you have established some level of trust or respect with the person you are talking to. (If you’re sharing issues online you will be better received if you’ve already established credibility and reputability). But don’t go around sharing your problems with everyone you meet. Negativity is a double-edged sword that if used carelessly is more likely to cut you than your problems.

I consider myself an overwhelmingly positive person. But I think a healthy dose of negativity is a good thing. At first glance 100% positivity attractive, but on second glance, it is not because it is not an accurate portrayal of anybody. Everybody has things in their life that aren’t perfect, that they could improve. Overconfidence can be attractive but it is not honest. That attraction can be useful when a leader is trying to inspire the fainter hearted to take on challenges they would normally shy away from, but if you are someone who is a calculated risk taker, understanding limitations is essential for growth.

The question is do you want to take the safe route and save face whenever possible or are you willing to take a risk and admit you have a problem with the intent to improve?

Value Process Over Tips and Nuggets

The process of hearing how another person solves problems in their lives is filled with transferable lessons and teachable moments. Few people talk about their challenges because they don’t want to expose any vulnerability. The common answer I hear when most people’s problems come up in conversation is, “Whatever, I’ll figure it out,” an attempt to quickly divert any attention from being focused on their struggle.

Personally, I find it very interesting to hear about people’s challenges and how they are approaching solving them. Our information society often reveals only the successes and punchy takeaways, hiding the process and all the false starts along the way. Success is often the result of  ordinary actions taken over and over again. There is no magic formula and by exposing your intermediary steps you can gain feedback on the daily processes that really matter instead of just relying on a few lessons that the winners have encapsulated and enshrined after their triumph. Brian Kim voices this well, “There’s a hidden danger that comes with relying on tips that most people don’t realize. The people who offer these tips in a short article or book often attribute the solution to a particular problem via these tips, when in reality, they’ve actually laid the foundation down first which is the real solution without ever realizing it. The tips they offered are then byproducts of that foundation.”

Not revealing the process or placing due importance on it is very dangerous. The anecdotes of those who have failed are often more informative and insightful than the anecdotes from those who succeeded. I find it more interesting to hear about what isn’t going well is than to hear about what is going well. Assuming though, that we’re not taking a failure story from someone who is completely incompetent. There are more lessons to be had from a failure story if it appeared the person had a lot going for them. And when you hear negative anecdotes from a person, it’s not as interesting, from a perspective of success, if they’ve frequently made poor decisions throughout their life compared to someone who appears to be making all the right moves.

Similarly in business, common wisdom says to keep business ideas to yourself. But this is not the smart move. It’s extremely unlikely somebody will steal your idea and you’ll learn much more from the feedback you receive as a result of freely sharing your ideas. When you start talking about your idea with everyone you will get a very large source of wisdom and a diversity of perspectives that will likely reveal opportunities and challenges you never considered. Business ideas are almost always about solving a problem. And a negative issue of life if framed correctly, similarly should be about solving a problem, in which case many business principles apply. In fact, in many cases thinking about your life as a company is a helpful analogy for finding the best places to improve and grow.

Being more transparent about dilemmas in our life is healthy and productive.  It is sexy to project an attitude that you’ve got it all figured out all the time, but there’s a lot to be gained from sharing it all, including the struggles. Don’t just share the end result of your winning battles, share the process both the good and the bad and your success will hasten. But most people figure it foolish to let others know they are thrashing.

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Elite Are Elite Because They Have Better Genes. But For How Long?

Lessons in Survivial an article than ran in Newsweek details an experiment run at military training camp that explains scientifically why Special Forces units are able to bounce back faster than ordinary soldiers. The study shows that their bodies are simply genetically better suited for enduring and recovering from high pressure, high stress situations.

Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal.

With so much more NPY in their systems, the Special Forces soldiers were much more clearheaded under interrogation stress and performed better according to the trainers. Special Forces soldiers really are special and different from the rest of the Army. They stay more focused and engaged in a crisis and bounce back faster afterward because their bodies produce massive amounts of natural anti-anxiety chemicals. In the fog of war—and everyday life for that matter—that’s a major advantage.

The results beckon the classic debate of nature vs. nurture. At present nature appears to be winning this battle, by the tide is soon to turn.

This evidence destroys a big part of the mystery of why some people are simply in a different class compared to others in their field. You can explain differences between the elite and ordinary based on this study, very roughly in mechanistic way. For example, African Americans are on average are better athletes than white people. Roughly speaking they naturally produce more fast twitch muscle fiber and other important chemicals essential for athletics.

But if the metric we’re defining success by is talent how much can you chalk up to having genes that produce the optimum amount of chemicals vs. undergoing rigorous training that increases important chemicals in your body?  Does having better genes make you automatically better than most of your peers? At present training, practice and hard work is the determining factor for most people. But that’s because most people have genes that deviate little from the average, which gives only a slight advantage in terms of expressed talent. So nurture matters a lot today. That’s where you get theses like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. But it’s undeniable that the genetic outliers have a distinct advantage. If Lebron James never practiced playing basketball his whole life, he could still probably beat 99% of dedicated amateurs his age. But in most cases nurture still reigns supreme of nature given an average genetic composition. But the balance starts to swing in nurtures favor very soon. Most medical science today is horribly imprecise, with drugs having all sorts of unintended effects, yet macroscopically still being able to produce somewhat of the desired effect. But the biotechnology and nanotechnology on the very near horizon will allow personalized medicine and allow everybody to have the same kind of chemical advantages that the genetic freaks have gotten naturally and luckily.

Soon we will be able to model the chemical composition of these genetic freaks  and transfer that pattern to everybody. Not long after that we will begin trying patterns that no humans currently possess naturally. Admittedly all of this is a gross simplification but these types of technologies and procedures are on the horizon.

These are dangerous waters that certainly need to be tread carefully. And I sure hope open science is in full bloom by then. But don’t I must take a moment to refute the argument about how this experimentation is bad thing because we may end up with perfect humans. First of all perfection won’t be achieved because no matter how good something this there is always room for improvement. We won’t be perfect we will only have a higher baseline standard.  And there’s nothing wrong with striving for “perfection” anyway. I’ve heard many people afraid that biotechnology like this will make everybody the same, a meme propagated by movies like Gattica. But I’m sure this won’t be true. Whenever there’s been an increase in control over our environment diversity as increased not decreased. When the baseline standard of humanity’s capabilities are raised our possible lifestyles, and creative works of art and discovery will increase exponentially. Look at the incredible diversity of applications of computer technology today. All computer programs are just unique patterns of 1′s and 0′s, just going really, really fast.  Think about the difference between the current Mac OS X operating system and the punch card operating systems of the early computing days.

We’ll when this new technology comes around faster than you expect, because “technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view“, humanity will be operating on an incredibly more powerful operating system.

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Update: Are Happiness and Innovation at Odds?

See the original post here.

What motivates people is something that interests me. I do not think reactivity is the core of innovation, but I do think it plays a notable role. All areas of life bleed into one another and shade them accordingly. Sectors of life don’t exist in isolation. In rereading my post I do find the tone paints a condescending tone that I did not intend. This format is interesting to me because it’s not proper to revise content but much is shot from the hip. I do intend to be provocative and dancing on the lines of controversy does require my opinions to go through multiple revisions. The main idea that interests me here is that throughout history many of the world’s greatest artistic and scientific achievements were created by highly troubled people. The creative process is highly tumultuous, and it appears many times things are created out of fear rather than love. This is especially evident in the existentialist class I am currently enrolled in, as I read the works of Nietzche, Dostoevsky, Kafka and others. I’m interested in understanding the composition of many different kinds of lives, both the mundane and the ones of great contribution. What role does happiness play in all this? I’m not sure, but I have started to notice a pattern in some fairly prevalent circumstances where happiness and contribution have an inverse relationship.

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Are Happiness and Innovation at Odds?

See update to this post.

It seems many people’s innovative drive come from a reactive desire to prove themselves. They try to prove, often to the opposite sex, that they are someone worth knowing by showing they are extremely competent in some unrelated discipline like science or technology. It pains me to see people with such a distorted sense of reality. Someone who acts this way surely can’t be happy. But on the other hand, for some people, I think this void in their life leads to them making incredible contributions to society. Here I’m referring to my sense of many science and technology savants who I’ve met and read about.

It is a desire of mine for everybody to live fulfilling, happy lives. It is also a desire of mine that everybody make a contribution towards creating a better world. These things shouldn’t be irreconcilable. Shouldn’t happiness and contribution be related? In this case, though I think the social frustration of geeks leads to a net gain for society. Would spending more time nurturing deep relationships and taking care of a family decrease their productivity? Almost certainly, yes, in the short term. But what about over the long run? I’m not so sure about this. For one, it’s important to note I think we always need to look both long and short term and the most people have a tendency to only look short term. In fact, thinking exclusively short term is a societal epidemic. And we deprive ourselves of long term gains by not focusing on robustness and short term sacrifice for long term gain. Saving regularly and reaping the benefits of compound interest is the canonical example. The latest outbreak would be the current economic crisis.

But returning to geek innovation, would the more sustainable lifestyle of having both a solid work and social life lead to increased innovation and contribution over the long term? I hope the answer is yes, that would fit with many of my current assessments of living effectively. One argument that comes to mind against sustainability is that great things often require intense focus and full immersion. So let’s say societal contribution and personal happiness are at odds. How do we reconcile the two? The selfless answer it seems would be to take a short term hit on your internal happiness for the good of society, is it not?

I’m planning to write another post about how almost anything that increases your happiness has the potential to increase lifetime impact. And also a more detailed post about the relationship between sustainability and impact.

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