Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do
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before you know it: the unconscious reasons we do what we do | John Bargh | talk at Google
53:38
Jan 2, 2018
<< if you have time, 60 minute, good stuff >>
<< he talks fast, like faster than average >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdDRVhhx8A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdDRVhhx8A
source:
https://go.forrester.com/blogs/the-forrester-summer-book-club/
blog
May 22 2018 <----------------------------------------------------------------------------> Mar 07, 2018 Daniel rated it
This book summarized Bargh’s life work on the subconscious. I learnt a great deal from it.
There are 2 persons inside each of us: the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious is thoughtful, takes effort and is narrow in scope. It is good for doing maths. The unconscious does not require active thoughts or effort, and is broad in scope. It is good for solving complicated problems with many parameters. Unfortunately, the latter can be quite easily affected by:
1. Culture. Asian female students perform better in maths when reminded of their Asian heritage and worse when reminded of their female gender.
2. Priming. Even looking at certain words can prime us as in point 1. This is also how lots of psychology studies are done.
3. Environment. We are quiet in churches and libraries, mildly noisy in the classroom and office, and very loud in football games. We know how to fit in. Interestingly, the destination can affect people’s behaviour on the way there.
4. Mimicry. The mirror neurons in our brain cause us to mimic what the other person in doing. People like others who have the same posture as them.
5. Our goals. If we are in a rush, we would not stop to help others in distress.
6. Cumulative input. If others keep being rude to us, we would probably flip upon the 3rd or 4th insult, even though each person behaved the same way. So a bad day at work affects how we behave when we reach home when it shouldn’t.
7. Power. Susceptible people deem the opposite sex more attractive when they are in a powerful position.
How to be smarter?
1. Acknowledge the effect of our subconscious mind.
2. Prime ourselves well. For example, we can use tribalism to overcome racism. Just telling people in advance who their team mates are completely remove racism towards others because we are now ‘team’.
3. Remove things that affect our goals. For example, successful dieters do not buy snacks and do not even pass nearby stores that sell unhealthy food. So they do not test their willpower.
4. To solve complex problems, think very hard and narrow down the few critical parameters. Then go do something else, like having a walk or soaking in a tub (how Archimedes discovered his Principle that buoyancy is equal to weight of water displaced). Let our subconscious get to work.
5. Awake at night? The subconscious is bothering you. Resolve to do something about the problem, and you can then probably sleep better.
source:
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
By John Weisman
The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a former Delta Force Commander
By Pete Blaber
Berkley Caliber, $25.95, 324 pages
"You need to understand how the human mind works. The mind has three elementary phases it goes through when it's thinking: saturate, incubate, and illuminate. Although they generally occur in order, all three are continuous processes, so your mind is constantly cycling through all three phases. The saturation phase occurs when the mind if first exposed to something. When you're planning a new mission, you're saturating your mind with facts, assumptions, insights and/or sensory cues - ergo, the saturation phase. the next phase is incubation. This is a critical phase if you ever want to come up with something innovative. The mind needs time to incubate. During this phase the mind subconsciously sorts through all of the inputs and begins to recognize patterns and snap those patterns together to come up with concepts and ideas. This is why you may have heard people say, 'I need to sleep on it' before making a major decision. It's not the sleep per se that they need: it's the time to allow their mind to sort through information and search for patterns. The recognition of patterns that occurs during the incubation phase produces the illumination phase, also known as 'eureka' moments, when your mind begins to translate those patterns and form theÙ¤ into actionable ideas. Saturate, incubate, illuminate - it's how the mind works, and it's probably the main reason why you have lost so much sleep over the years. The best thing you can do is to keep a pen and paper by your bed. Writing down your thoughts while you're incubating and illuminating should help to temporarily get theÙ¤ off your mind and back to sleep." (Page 70)
REVIEWED BY JOHN WEISMAN
• Washington writer John Weisman's most recent books, "SOAR," "Jack in the Box" and "Direct Action" are available as Avon paperbacks. His e-mail address is ﴾blackops@johnweisman.com﴿.
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“On any given day how much of what we say, feel and do is under our conscious control? More importantly, how much is not?”
So here is what is going on… you are being persuaded, primed, affected, effected and subjected to a myriad of subconscious influences constantly. Throughout the day, and night, and will continue to be, for the rest of your existence. Whether you pay attention to this is up to you. But you are being influenced by your unconscious mind irregardless. This is something you should know.
Eminent social psychologist John Bargh PhD has woven over twenty years worth of work on the subconscious mind into Before You Know It - The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do and you will be entertained and informed as a result. You should also be grateful as this book can change the way you think about and see the world.
“Unconscious effects are the water we swim in and we have little awareness of the effect they have on our ideas, opinions and actions”
Although this book covers a lot, from the lingering subconscious influences of our recent and long-forgotten past, to the evolution of our brain and its effects on our present thinking to an evaluation of instincts and intuition and the impacts of social influence. It explores ways to become more aware of the working mechanisms of the subconscious mind and some ideas about how to take control of it to optimize your mental performances.
What is surprising about Before You Know It is how Dr Bragh takes a rather ‘heady’ and abstract subject and injects in with a sense of personality, purpose and passion that is often overlooked in books this steeped in academic research and experimentation. This book is informative and entertaining. Rich in detail without being dry. Influential without being overbearing.
“We trust our intuition for the same reason we trust our senses, because the information that comes into our mind easily and naturally, without having to try to figure it out, ‘seems’ true”
source:
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
44:21 we make every decision based on either fear or love.
44:25 Others say you make your decision based on fear of loss.
44:29 Whichever of those two areas that you fall into,
44:33 the bottom line is fear and fear of loss
44:35 are a big determinant in how people think.
https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2659
https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2659
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https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2634
43:54 So if I understand that dynamic, if they're
43:57 expressing themselves in any way,
43:59 there are things they want to have happen.
44:00 There are things they don't want to have happen.
44:02 All I've got to do is sort of flip it the other way around
44:05 and make them worried about the things
44:06 that they don't want to have happen.
44:08 And then that changes their behavior.
44:09 Because fear of loss is the number one driving-- myself,
44:14 a lot of psychologists believe the fear of loss
44:16 is the number one thing that drives our decisions.
https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2659
44:19 Psychologists usually fall into one or two camps--
44:21 we make every decision based on either fear or love.
44:25 Others say you make your decision based on fear of loss.
44:29 Whichever of those two areas that you fall into,
44:33 the bottom line is fear and fear of loss
44:35 are a big determinant in how people think.
44:38 So I just recognize that and then just use the tools
44:42 that I'm given.
source:
50:43
Chris Voss: "Never Split the Difference" | Talks at Google
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZa7mQV1l0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZa7mQV1l0
Talks at Google
Published on May 27, 2016
Everything we’ve previously been taught about negotiation is wrong: people are not rational; there is no such thing as ‘fair’; compromise is the worst thing you can do; the real art of negotiation lies in mastering the intricacies of No, not Yes. These surprising tactics—which radically diverge from conventional negotiating strategy—weren’t cooked up in a classroom, but are the field-tested tools FBI agents used to talk criminals and hostage-takers around the world into (or out of) just about any scenario you can imagine.
In NEVER SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss breaks down these strategies so that anyone can use them in the workplace, in business, or at home.
▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀
“Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire”
──Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism
https://web.archive.org/web/20081201191332/http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08110
Wayback Machine
Thought Leader
Pankaj Ghemawat: The Thought Leader Interview
by Art Kleiner
The seer of “semiglobalization” argues for appreciating regional distinctions.
... [...] ....
In a way, that’s a symptom of the same issue that affects writing about globalization in general. Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire” captures much of the utopian/dystopian quality of publications about the flat world, the death of distance, the end of history, and so forth. But a reality-based perspective on global strategy leads to different prescriptions. To which I should add, of course, that realism is not a recommendation to stay at home. Columbus managed to believe that the world was round but still took a pretty interesting trip — and discovered some unexpected things on the way!
Reprint No. 08110
Author Profile:
Art Kleiner (kleiner_art@ strategy-business.com) is editor-in-chief of strategy+ business and author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (Doubleday, 2003).
This article is from Spring 2008
strategy+business is published by the global commercial consulting firm Booz & Company.
©2008 Booz & Company. All rights reserved. "booz&co." is a service mark of Booz & Company.
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Amar Bose, MIT professor & co-founder of Bose Laboratory:
Research by definition if it's research, you don't know whether it works or not; if you know the idea [is] going to work, its engineering, develope it; research is at the heart of what bring out better products; fear, fear of the unknown; without probing the unknown, there is no possibility for progress; the unknown could be better (benefit); could be worse (down side); if we know it could be better, there would be no fear.
To make some thing better => it must be different
to be different => courage (require) (to be different)
courage => fear (acknowledge the fears and, the other side of fear)
([ imagine - what if you have no fear and you have no limit - infinite ])
([ what would you do with your life ])
([ or what would you do with the time that you have left on Earth ])
([ okay, now work backward, and start placing limiting parameters on The Plan ])
([ one-by-one ])
Amar Bose of Bose Lab: Bose speakers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation
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Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher : the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer, 1987
p.263
Looking at MI6 in the early 1960s, I was reminded of Lenin's famous remark to Feliks Dzerzhinsky.
“The West are wishful thinkers, we will give them what they want to think.”
MI6 needed a success, and they needed to believe in a success. In Penkovsky they got it.
p.264
It was split into two types: ARNIKA, which was straight intelligence, and RUPEE, which was counterintelligence.
p.268
The only explanation was that a bias had been introduced into Russian signals, with the intention of misleading American detection systems.
(Peter Wright, Spycatcher, 1987; Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher : the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer, 1987, )
____________________________________
Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher : the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer, 1987
p.244
“There are two factors here”, he said after thinking for a while. “We have to do this investigation, and we have to be seen to do this investigation, and that's almost just as important.”
(Peter Wright, Spycatcher, 1987; Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher : the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer, 1987, )
____________________________________
written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982
p.35
But to prevent duplication of effort, it was resolved that the Navy would translate all Japanese diplomatic intercepts originated on odd days and the SIS would handle the even days. The Navy would send the results to the President; and the Army would service the State Department.
p.36
The system was designed to ensure a hermetic seal of security, but at the sacrifice of speed and understanding.
The system was a hodgepodge. No one was responsible for a continuous study of all material. Recipients would read their portion of intercepts, and then it would be whisked away, never to be seen again. There was very little that could be done to put together all the pieces in a cohesive form, or to correlate them with information available from other sources. Though the technical side of COMINT, particularly in the breaking of Purple, had been performed with genius, the analytical side had become lost in disorganization.
In the early morning hours of the first Sunday in December 1941, the Navy's listening post at Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington, intercepted several messages transmitted between Tokyo and Washington, D.C., over the commerical circuits of Mackay Radio & Telegraph Company.
p.37
It had been a busy weekend. Less than twenty-four (24) hours earlier, Bainbridge had snatched from the ether thirteen (13) parts of what appeared to be a fourteen-part (14-part) message from Japan's Foreign Office to its Washington embassy. The long, rambling message, encrypted in Purple, was a reply to a U.S. diplomatic note transmitted eleven (11) days earlier, in which Secretary of State Cordell Hull called on Japan to withdraw all its forces from China and Indochina in return for a U.S. promise to release Japanese funds and resume trade.
p.39
Disorganization and divided responsibility had cost America dearly. It was up to the Secretary of War to turn chaos into order and discord into teamwork.
____________________________________
written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982
p.43
In the land war, COMINT read Rommel's intentions in Africa so well that the Desert Fox, finding himself often outmaneuvered, guessed the truth. But when he confided his suspicions to Berlin, he was summarily informed by the German High Command that such things were not possible.
pp.43-44
In the land war, COMINT read Rommel's intentions in Africa so well that the Desert Fox, finding himself often outmaneuvered, guessed the truth. But when he confided his suspicions to Berlin, he was summarily informed by the German High Command that such things were not possible. And before D Day in France, COMINT told where Von Rundstedt assumed the main Allied attack would come, as well as some of Berlin's replies brushing off his good advice, presumably in favor of Hitler's intuition.
____________________________________
written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982
pp.377-378
“HUMINT [Human Intelligence] is subject to all of the mental aberrations of the source as well as the interpreter of the source,” Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter once explained. “SIGINT isn't. SIGINT has technical aberrations which give it away almost immediately if it does not have bona fides, if it is not legitimate. A good analyst can tell very, very quickly whether this is an attempt at disinformation, at confusion, from SIGINT. You can't do that from HUMINT; you don't have the bona fides ── what are his sources? He may be the source, but what are his sources?”
Having served as deputy director of the CIA and director of the NSA, Carter was one of the very few people to have been intimately associated with both collection systems, and in his opinion SIGINT won by a wavelength. “Photo interpretation,” he explained, “can in some cases be misinterpreted by the reader or intentionally confused by the maker in the first place ── camouflage, this sort of thing. SIGINT is the one that is immediate, right now. Photo interpretation, yes, to some extent, but you still have to say, ‘Is that really a fake, have they confused it?’ It is better than HUMINT, it is more rapid than HUMINT [but] SIGINT is right now; its bona fides are there the minute you get it.”
____________________________________
Jeffrey T. Richelson., The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology, 2001
p.34
Rather than wait for the Soviets to announce their missions, accept whatever information they provided, and trust that it was accurate, the CIA wanted the capability of independently monitoring Soviet space efforts. The agency sought to provide advance warning of missions, to determine whether Soviet claims were accurate, and to identify the failures that the Soviets would surely try to conceal.
Rather than wait for them to announce [their] missions, accept whatever information they provided, and trust that it was accurate, the [intelligence agency] wanted the capability of independently monitoring [their] space efforts. The agency sought to provide advance warning of missions, to determine whether their claims were accurate, and to identify the failures that [they] would surely try to conceal.
(The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology / Jeffrey T. Richelson., 1. united states. central intelligence agency. directorate of science and technology ── history., UB251.U5 R53 2001, )
____________________________________
The Imagineers of War, Sharon Weinberger
The Pentagon's Brain, Annie Jacobsen, 2015
The Technology of Espionage, Lauren Paine
____________________________________
The power of habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012
The power of habit, by Charles Duhigg, published in February 2012
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business is a book by Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter, published in February 2012 by Random House. It explores the science behind habit creation and reformation.
It was long listed for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2012.[5]
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit#Keystone_habits <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
[Habit loop]
The Habit loop is a neurological pattern that governs any habit. It consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Understanding these components can help in understanding how to change bad habits or form good ones. The habit loop is always started with a cue, a trigger that transfers the brain into a mode that automatically determines which habit to use. The heart of the habit is a mental, emotional, or physical routine. Finally there is a reward, which helps the brain determine if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.[6] In an article in The New York Times, Duhigg notes, "The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges".[7]
According to Duhigg, craving drives all habits and is essential in starting a new habit, or reshaping an old one. Duhigg describes how Procter and Gamble used research on the habit loop and its connection to cravings to develop the market for Febreze, a product that eliminates bad odors, to make a fortune.[7]
[7] Duhigg, Charles (2012-02-16). "How Companies Learn Your Secrets". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
[Golden rule of habit change]
The Golden rule of habit change helps stop addictive habits and replace them with new ones. It states that if you keep the initial cue, replace the routine, and keep the reward, change will eventually occur, although individuals who do not believe in what they are doing will likely fall short of the expectations and give up. Belief is a critical element of such a change, though it can be structured in a number of ways including group settings. Often people who join groups like accountability groups are better off than those who act alone as individuals.
[Keystone habits]
A keystone habit is an individual pattern that is unintentionally capable of triggering other habits in the lives of people. Duhigg wrote about the company Alcoa, and how CEO Paul H. O'Neill was able to raise the company's market capitalization by $27 billion by targeting safety in the work environment. O'Neil said, "I knew I had to transform Alcoa, ... [b]ut you can't order people to change, that's not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company."[8]
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit#Keystone_habits
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138. In The Da Vinci Code another device I used to maintain suspense was the mysterious “keystone” that the characters are searching for – a rosewood box, containing the Priory’s greatest secret. “Keystone” is an architectural term used to denote the central stone in an archway, supporting the archway and preventing it from collapsing. Its significance in The Da Vinci Code was entirely my creation, and has no bearing on the actual meaning of the word. It was my idea to link it with the Priory and the bloodline, and it was also my idea that the Grand Master and his seneschals would keep the Priory secret to the exclusion of all others. I decided that the keystone would be the means of keeping the secret. In The Da Vinci Code it is called a clef de voute, because Sauniere is French. It is far more plausible that the Priory would use the French nomenclature.
source:
Dan Brown witness statement in Da Vinci Code case
https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13963
https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13962
https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13961
https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13960
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How Companies Learn Your Secrets
By Charles Duhigg
Feb. 16, 2012
.... ... ....
How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?
Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.
I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.
Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.
When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.
Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?
Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.
All that was left was identifying the cue.
Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:
Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)
What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)
What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)
Who else is around? (No one.)
What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)
The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.
Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).
After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.
.... ... ....
source:
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Story
Allegorically, Who Moved My Cheese? features four characters: two mice, "Sniff" and "Scurry," and two Littlepeople, human metaphor, "Hem" and "Haw." (The names of the Littlepeople are taken from the phrase "hem and haw," a term for indecisiveness.) They live in a maze, a representation of one's environment, and look for cheese, representative of happiness and success. Initially without cheese, each group, the mice and humans, paired off and traveled the lengthy corridors searching for cheese. One day both groups happen upon a cheese-filled corridor at "Cheese Station C." Content with their find, the humans establish routines around their daily intake of cheese, slowly becoming arrogant in the process.
One day Sniff and Scurry arrive at "Cheese Station C" to find no cheese left, but they are not surprised. Noticing the cheese supply dwindling, they have mentally prepared beforehand for the arduous but inevitable task of finding more cheese. Leaving "Cheese Station C" behind, they begin their hunt for new cheese together. Later that day, Hem and Haw arrive at Cheese Station C only to find the same thing, no cheese. Angered and annoyed, Hem demands, "Who moved my cheese?" The humans have counted on the cheese supply to be constant, and so are unprepared for this eventuality. After deciding that the cheese is indeed gone they get angry at the unfairness of the situation. Haw suggests a search for new cheese, but Hem is dead-set in his disappointment and dismisses the proposal.
Meanwhile, Sniff and Scurry have found "Cheese Station N," and new cheese. But back at Cheese Station C, Hem and Haw are affected by their lack of cheese and blame each other for their problem. Hoping to change, Haw again proposes a search for new cheese. However, Hem is comforted by his old routine and is frightened about the unknown. He knocks the idea again. After a while of being in denial, the humans remain without cheese. One day, having discovered his debilitating fears, Haw begins to chuckle at the situation and stops taking himself so seriously. Realizing he should simply move on, Haw enters the maze, but not before chiseling "If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct" on the wall of Cheese Station C for his friend to ponder.
Still fearful of his trek, Haw jots "What Would You Do If You Weren't afraid?" on the wall and, after thinking about that, he begins his venture. Still plagued with worry (perhaps he has waited too long to begin his search...), Haw finds some bits of cheese that nourish him and he is able to continue his search. Haw realizes that the cheese has not suddenly vanished, but has dwindled from continual eating. After a stop at an empty cheese station, Haw begins worrying about the unknown again. Brushing aside his fears, Haw's new mindset allows him to again enjoy life. He has even begun to smile again! He is realizing that "When you move beyond your fear, you feel free." After another empty cheese station, Haw decides to go back for Hem with the few bits of new cheese he has managed to find.
Uncompromising, Hem refuses the new cheese, to his friend's disappointment. With knowledge learned along the way, Haw heads back into the maze. Getting deeper into the maze, inspired by bits of new cheese here and there, Haw leaves a trail of writings on the wall ("The Handwriting On the Wall"). These clarify his own thinking and give him hope that his friend will find aid in them during his search for new cheese. Still traveling, Haw one day comes across Cheese Station N, abundant with cheese, including some varieties that are strange to him, and he realizes he has found what he was looking for. After eating, Haw reflects on his experience. He ponders a return to see his old friend. But Haw decides to let Hem find his own way. Finding the largest wall in Cheese Station N, he writes:
• Change Happens
Ù They Keep Moving The Cheese
• Anticipate Change
Ù Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
• Monitor Change
Ù Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
• Adapt To Change Quickly
Ù The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
• Change
Ù Move With The Cheese
• Enjoy Change!
Ù Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
• Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again
Ù They Keep Moving The Cheese.
•
Ù
Cautious from past experience, Haw now inspects Cheese Station N daily and explores different parts of the maze regularly to prevent any complacency from setting in. After hearing movement in the maze one day, Haw realizes someone is approaching the station. Unsure, Haw hopes that it is his friend Hem who has found the way.[3]
Criticism
In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural reorganization", or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book "the classic of downsizing propaganda" and summarizes its message as "the dangerous human tendencies to 'overanalyze' and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one."[4]
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said that patronizing parables are one of the top 10 complaints he receives in his emails.[5] Scott Adams' retort to the message in the parable is that it is a "patronizing message for the proletariat to acquiesce".[6]
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090131091633/http://icheese.appliedinternet.com/
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How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Credit...Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times
By Charles Duhigg
Feb. 16, 2012
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”
As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.
There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.
“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.
Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”
The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.
This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.
Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.
Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.
An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.
The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.
This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.
Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.
Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends — and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.
To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity — once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats’ brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn’t sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the “maze habit,” and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.
The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all.
But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.
Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.
“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Graybiel told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear.”
Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.
The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward — craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment — and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.
Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.
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February 16, 2012 - In a preview of this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Charles Duhigg details how some retailers profit by predicting major changes in your life.
Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.’s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product — Febreze — the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product’s cues and rewards just right.
The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. “Sophie will always smell like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my furniture doesn’t have to.” The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.
The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.
According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”
“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.
“Do you smell it now?”
“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”
A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn’t selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don’t smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That’s why Febreze was a failure. The product’s cue — the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use — was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze’s reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place.
P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze’s ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people’s daily habits. When that didn’t reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn’t appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.
“I use it every day,” she said.
“What smells are you trying to get rid of?” a researcher asked.
“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal cleaning — a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”
The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet’s corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children’s shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.
“It’s nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.
When they got back to P.& G.’s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.
The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you’ve done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.
And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs — air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents — that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year.
Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the world.
Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.
In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.
But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.
Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.
And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.
The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.
In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.
Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.
At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
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How to Break the Cookie HabitCharles Duhigg explains the science of habits.
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Charles Duhigg explains the science of habits.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me. “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote in a statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”
When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named Alex.
Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?
Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.
I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.
Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.
When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.
Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?
Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.
All that was left was identifying the cue.
Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:
Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)
What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)
What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)
Who else is around? (No one.)
What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)
The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.
Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).
After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.
The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.
Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 — when Pole was hired — and 2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”
Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected this would become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.
A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.
Pole didn’t answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have too many pacifiers.
When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”
source:
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
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What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits
January 2, 201212:01 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Alix Spiegel
8-Minute Listen
U.S. soldiers at Long Binh base, northeast of Saigon, line up to give urine samples at a heroin detection center in June 1971, before departing for the U.S.
AP
It's a tradition as old as New Year's: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of M &Ms that our co-worker has helpfully positioned on the aisle corner of his desk. There will be exercise, and the learning of a new language.
It is resolved.
So what does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior? The answer to this question brings us — strangely enough — to a story about heroin use in Vietnam.
In May of 1971 two congressmen, Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy of Illinois, went to Vietnam for an official visit and returned with some extremely disturbing news: 15 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, they said, were actively addicted to heroin.
People, when they perform a behavior a lot, outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.
David Neal, psychologist, Duke University
The idea that so many servicemen were addicted to heroin horrified the public. At that point heroin was the bete noire of American drugs. It was thought to be the most addictive substance ever produced, a narcotic so powerful that once addiction claimed you, it was nearly impossible to escape.
In response to this report, President Richard Nixon took action. In June of 1971 he announced that he was creating a whole new office — The Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention — dedicated to fighting the evil of drugs. He laid out a program of prevention and rehabilitation, but there was something else Nixon wanted: He wanted to research what happened to the addicted servicemen once they returned home.
And so Jerome Jaffe, whom Nixon had appointed to run the new office, contacted a well-respected psychiatric researcher named Lee Robins and asked her to help with the study. He promised her unprecedented access to enlisted men in the Army so that she could get the job done.
Soon a comprehensive system was set up so that every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home. And in this population, Robins did find high rates of addiction: Around 20 percent of the soldiers self-identified as addicts.
Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.
A GI lights up a cigarette in Saigon in 1971. He poured grains of heroin into the menthol cigarette, from which he had first removed some of the tobacco.
AP
"I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent," Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn't make sense.
"Everyone thought there was somehow she was lying, or she did something wrong, or she was politically influenced," Jaffe says. "She spent months, if not years, trying to defend the integrity of the study."
But 40 years later, the findings of this study are widely accepted. To explain why, you need to understand how the science of behavior change has itself changed.
Outsourcing The Control Of Behavior
According to Wendy Wood, a psychologist at University of Southern California who researches behavior change, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s scientists believed that if you wanted to change behavior, the key was to change people's goals and intentions.
"The research was very much focused on trying to understand how to change people's attitudes," Wood says, "with the assumption that behavior change would just follow."
So researchers studied how to organize public health campaigns, or how to use social pressure to change attitudes. And, says David Neal, another psychologist who looks at behavior change, these strategies did work.
Mostly.
"They do work for a certain subset of behaviors," Neal says. "They work for behaviors that people don't perform too frequently."
If you want, for example, to increase the number of people who donate blood, a public campaign can work well. But if you want them to quit smoking, campaigns intended to change attitudes are often less effective.
"Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they've done it enough, their behavior doesn't follow their intentions," Neal explains.
Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.
"People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says.
Outsourcing control over your behavior sounds a little funny. But consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car.
"Of course on one level, that seems like the simplest task possible," Neal says, "but if you break it down, there's really a myriad set of complex actions that are performed in sequence to do that."
You use a certain motion to put your key in the lock. And then physically manipulate your body to get into the seat. There is another set of motions to insert the key in the ignition.
"All of this is actually very complicated and someone who had never driven a car before would have no ability to do that, but it becomes second nature to us," Neal points out. "[It's] so automatic that we can do it while we are conducting complex other tasks, like having conversations."
Throughout the process, you haven't thought for a second about what you are doing, you are just responding to the different parts of the car in the sequence you've learned. "And very much of our day goes off in this way," Wood says. "About 45 percent of what people do every day is in the same environment and is repeated."
Environment's Key Role In Behavior
In this way, Neal says, our environments come to unconsciously direct our behavior. Even behaviors that we don't want, like smoking.
"For a smoker the view of the entrance to their office building — which is a place that they go to smoke all the time — becomes a powerful mental cue to go and perform that behavior," Neal says.
And over time those cues become so deeply ingrained that they are very hard to resist. And so we smoke at the entrance to work when we don't want to. We sit on the couch and eat ice cream when we don't need to, despite our best intentions, despite our resolutions.
"We don't feel sort of pushed by the environment," Wood says. "But, in fact, we're very integrated with it."
To battle bad behaviors then, one answer, Neal and Wood say, is to disrupt the environment in some way. Even small changes can help — like eating the ice cream with your non-dominant hand. What this does is alter the action sequence and disrupts the learned body sequence that's driving the behavior, which allows your conscious mind to come back online and reassert control.
"It's a brief sort of window of opportunity," Wood says, "to think, 'Is this really what I want to do?' "
Of course, larger disruption can also be helpful, which brings us back to heroin addiction in Vietnam.
It's important not to overstate this, because a variety of factors are probably at play. But one big theory about why the rates of heroin relapse were so low on return to the U.S. has to do with the fact that the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment where their addiction took hold of them.
"I think that most people accept that the change in the environment, and the fact that the addiction occurred in this exotic environment, you know, makes it plausible that the addiction rate would be that much lower," Nixon appointee Jerome Jaffe says.
We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple.
It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are.
source:
► https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits
8 minute
if you go to this NPR web page, you can listen to the show
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Nils Bejerot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bejerot
(September 21, 1921 in Stockholm - November 29, 1988)
Nils Bejerot stressed instead five other factors that causes that increase the risk of the individual and to an epidemic drug use
* Availability of the addictive substance
* Money to acquire the substance
* Time to use the substance
* Example of use of the substance in the immediate environment
* A permissive ideology in relation to the use of the substance.[12]
Bejerot advanced the hypothesis that when addiction supervenes it is no longer a symptom but a morbid condition of its own; its development will not be affected by removal of the initiating factors. Addiction has the strength and character of a natural drive: it may be considered as an artificially induced drive developed through chemical stimulation of the pleasure center.
He compared addiction with a very deep love.
Addiction is "an emotional fixation (sentiment) acquired through learning, which intermittently or continually expresses itself in purposeful, stereotyped behavior with the character and force of a natural drive, aiming at a specific pleasure or the avoidance of a specific discomfort"[13]
This would however not be interpreted as drug addiction was impossible to treat. The abuse was learned, it is also possible to relearn, learn how to live without drugs.
" . . . we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil . . . "
source:
► http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bejerot
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- we become what we repeated do
and what we do - to a greater and lesser degree - are influenced by who we repeatedly hang out with (spend time, invest, and nurture by), in other words, our parents and our peers;
and how we - to a greater and lesser extent - even though it is more true or noticeable in some situations than others - are influenced by - what behavior psychologists would call ‘’environment cues‘’ - our surrounding (repeated exposure) and who we associated with.
____________________________________
Daniel Coyle, The little book of talent, 2012
pp.22-23
Precision especially matters early on, because the first reps establish the pathways for the future. Neurologists call this the “sled on a snowy hill” phenomenon. The first repetitions are like the first sled tracks on fresh snow: On subsequent tries, your sled will tend to follow those grooves. “Our brains are good at building connections,” says Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA. “They're not so good at unbuilding them.”
When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start. Learning fundamentals only SEEMS boring--in fact, it's the key moment of investment. If you build the right pathway now, you'll save yourself a lot of time and trouble down the line.
(Coyle, Daniel., The little book of talent : 52 tips for improving skills / Daniel Coyle., 1. ability., 2012, BF431.C685 2012, 153.9--dc23, )
____________________________________
Ambidextrous Thinking
Rolf A. Faste
Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-4021
September 15, 1994
(selected TEXT)
This philosophy is based on McLuhan's saying, “The medium is the message.” While there is a lot that can be said about this subject, this particular class is essentially about process. Thus, words are less important than doing, and the way in which something is done is as important as what is done.
A related issue is that understanding is less important than getting it. “Getting it” in design can be compared with telling a joke. If people are told a joke and they don't understand it, they will ask to have it explained. After the explanation they will understand it, but they won't laugh. There is nothing funny about the explanation nor the understanding that accompanies it. The point of telling a joke is “getting it”──that is, experiencing the sudden juxtaposition of contradictory concepts and releasing the built-up tension with laughter. It is our intention that students “get it” regarding their ability to draw and to generate creative solutions to problems. For further insight on this issue I highly recommend Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.
To accomplish this we use a teaching strategy we call “bounce-hit”. In The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey [Timothy Gallwey] describes a method for keeping left-side consciousness occupied with a task while letting the right side get on with it. He asks beginning tennis students to say “bounce” when the ball bounces and “hit” when the ball is hit. He says nothing about how to stand, hold the racket or swing. Instead, the students consciousness is focused on a nice easy task while the body gets on with playing tennis. His approach makes it difficult to be thinking critical thoughts like “I swung to late” or, perhaps more importantly, “I screwed up”. We try to incorporate this idea in all our teaching. For example, I no longer lecture on perspective, we simply get on with it. Using this method, drawing correct circles in perspective can be taught in about a half an hour. An observer will hear the students saying a little mantra, “axle, ninety degrees, major axis, ellipse.”
(Rolf A. Faste, Ambidextrous Thinking, 1994, )
____________________________________
John Hargrave, Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days, 2016
p.149
Repetition is key. Also, repetition is key.
One of the best parts about living in Boston, besides the wealth of technology talent, is sledding in the winter, It's a thrill seeker's dream, because you can sled as long as you want, as often as you want, and, unlike roller coasters or hallucinogens, it's totally free.
I live near Wellesley College, the renowed all-women's college that has produced notable alumni like Nora Ephron and Hillary Clinton. Wellesley has a sledding hill that is just phenomenally dangerous. It has (what feels like) an 85-degree incline, where you attain (what feels like) speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. On one side of the hill, a fifteen-foot oak branch spreads out across the snow, like a giant, deadly limbo stick. If you don't press your body flat into the sled, you will be decapitated by the tree. It's insane that they allow sledding on the hill at all, but even more insane is that the women of Wellesley college sled down the hill on plastic trays from the dining hall. (It's funnier if you picture Hillary Clinton on a tray.)
As any sledding enthusiast knows, if you get to the hill after a fresh snow, it's just clean powder. Then, as people sled down the hill, it creates grooves, or tracks, in the snow. After a few days the Wellesley students have built snow ramps and moguls at the bottom, so that the sledding down one of these tracks will launch you into orbit.
A few days after a snow, you'll find one set of snow tracks that take you under the Oak tree of death, and another set that will shoot you off the Ramps into hyperspace. Even if you start your sled on another area of the hill, you end up locking into one of those two tracks.
Our minds are like that hill. The constant repetition of our negative loops cuts deep mental grooves, and it's natural for our minds to “lock into” those grooves, even when the negative loops are self-destructive.
p.150
The good news is, through repetition, you can cut new groove. When I take my kids sledding at the hill, we often have to cut a new track, packing down the snow where we want it to go, when physically slowing and redirecting ourselves to the new tracks. The sled “wants” to lock into the existing groove, but by patiently working the new path we can eventually get the sled to lock into the new one instead.
( Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days / Sir John Hargrave., 1. thought and thinking., 2. change (psychology)., BF441.H313 2016
158.1--dc23, 2016, )
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Lessons from Aristotle on the Art of Connection
“Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.”
By Maria Popova
In particular, what makes for a good happiness-enhancing friendship is the degree of companionship (when you do things together with your friends) and of self-validation (when your friends reassure you that you are a good, worthy individual).
This is where Aristotle comes in: He recognized three types of love — agape, eros, and philia
Agape is a broad kind of love, the kind that religious people feel that God has for us, or that a secular person may have for humanity at large. Eros, naturally, is more concerned with the type of love we have for sexual partners, though the Greeks meant it more broadly than we do. Philia is the type of love that concerns us here because it includes the sort of feelings we have for friends, family, and even business partners.
Aristotle further classified friendships into three distinct categories: of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue:
In friendships of pleasure, you and another person are friends because of the direct pleasure your friendship brings — for instance, you like and befriend people who are good conversationalists, or with whom you can go to concerts, and so on. Friendships of utility are those in which you gain a tangible benefit, either economic or political, from the relationship. Exploitation of other people is not necessarily implied by the idea of utility friendships — first, because the advantage can be reciprocal, and second, because a business or political relation doesn’t preclude having genuine feelings of affection for each other. For Aristotle, however, the highest kind of friendship was one of virtue: you are friends with someone because of the kind of person he is, that is, because of his virtues (understood in the ancient Greek sense of virtue ethics [and] not in the much more narrow modern sense, which is largely derived from the influence of Christianity.)
Once again, Pigliucci takes us back to Aristotle:
Aristotle’s opinion was that friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this (reciprocal) mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons. Friends, then, share a similar concept of eudaimonia [Greek for “having a good demon”, often translated as “happiness”] and help each other achieve it. So it is not just that friends are instrumentally good because they enrich our lives, but that they are an integral part of what it means to live the good life, according to Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers (like Epicurus). Of course, another reason to value the idea of friendship is its social dimension. In the words of philosopher Elizabeth Telfer, friendship provides “a degree and kind of consideration for others’ welfare which cannot exist outside”
source:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/19/aristotle-friendship/
loving = donating
For 15 years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month to keep Brain Pickings going. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Startup Life
Warren Buffett Says 4 Choices in Life Separate the Doers From the Dreamers
By Marcel Schwantes
1. Pick your friends wisely. (choose wisely who you associate with, if you can)
"Of all the things I've learned from Warren," said Gates, "the most important thing might be what friendship is all about. As Warren himself put it a few years ago when we spoke with some college students, 'You will move in the direction of the people that you associate with. So it's important to associate with people that are better than yourself. The friends you have will form you as you go through life. Make some good friends, keep them for the rest of your life, but have them be people that you admire as well as like.'"
2. Go to bed a little smarter each day.
According to Buffett, the key to your success is to go to bed a little smarter each day. Buffett pointed out the strong similarity with investing when he said, "That's how knowledge builds up. Like compound interest."
to read. A lot.
daily routine reading
to make whatever progress you can and improve your life on a daily basis.
3. Improve your communication skills.
"The most important investment you can make is in yourself," said Buffett.
"One easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now at least is to hone your communication skills--both written and verbal."
4. Say no.
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
saying no over and over again to the unimportant things flying in our direction every day, and remaining focused on saying yes to the few things that truly matter.
source:
https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffett-says-4-choices-in-life-separate-doers-from-dreamers.html
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