Forough

Chapter 6 Summary Part I: • Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. • Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. • When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress. • Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible.

The best quitting criteria, combined two things: a state and a date. Kill criteria, generally, include both states and dates, in the form of "If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit." Or "If I haven't done X by Y (time), I'll quit." Or "If I haven't achieved X by the time I've spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit."

We mortals daily take chances with our lives, because we know they are going to end anyhow. So we go on treks in the Himalayas, swim in the sea, and do many other dangerous things like crossing the street or eating out. But if you believe you can live for ever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that.

How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos.

What is a nurture email campaign? Nurture emails are designed to be ongoing email campaigns that continue to "nurture" your relationship with a client. Some people calls these drip campaigns because they slowly drip information to customers over a long period of time. With a nurture campaign, you'll be dripping information to customers about how you can solve their problems and offer them value.

Bad news is perceived as more relevant than good news. Negative information has twice the impact that positive information does. In psychology, this is called negativity bias, and it can be observed in even one-year-old infants. They respond more sensitively to negative stimuli than to positive ones. Adults are no different. A stock falling by ten per cent makes us twice as unhappy as a stock climbing by ten per cent makes us happy. Negativity bias is innate.

We ought to try and understand the 'generators' underlying these events. We ought to be investigating the 'engine room' behind them. Sadly, shockingly few journalists are able to explain these causal relationships, because the processes that shape cultural, intellectual, economic, military, political and environmental events are mostly invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our brains to digest. This is why news corporations focus on the easy stuff: anecdotes, scandals, celebrity gossip and natural disasters. They are cheap to produce and easy to digest.

As soon as a piece of news is in the world, it becomes public knowledge and you will not enjoy an advantage in knowing about it. You will, however, gain a huge advantage over your peers and competitors if firstly you have a deeper awareness of the background context and secondly, if that context is not widely disseminated. And you will only reach this awareness through intensive reading and thought.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. The media is feeding us titbits that taste palatable but do nothing to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and well-researched long-form articles, the news cannot satiate us. We can gobble down as many articles as we like, but we will never be doing more than gorging on sweets. As with sugar, alcohol, fast food and smoking, the side effects only become apparent later.

The relationship between relevance and media attention seems inverse: the greater the fanfare in the news, the smaller the relevance of the event. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the items journalists don't report on are usually the very things you actually want to know!

To the media, what's relevant is anything that grabs attention. This is the racket at the heart of the industry's business model. The news they supply us is irrelevant, but it's sold as relevant. 'The relevant versus the new': it's the fundamental battle facing us today.

Lead Generator: In business relationships, lead generators are a great excuse to exchange contact information without being awkward. Think of the exchange going something like this: "Hey, let me send you that information I was talking about. What's your email address?"