Mike's notes.
The most powerful decision hack is ease. Make something easy to choose (ex. social proof), make it easy to execute (ex. now), make it easy to justify (ex. let the person tell a good story) and so on. Economist John List joined Tim Ferriss (Overcast) and talked about how we do that with childhood vaccinations.… Continue reading Vaccine ease
Neville Medhora writes great copy because Neville Medhora made copywriting easy. Let me give you his steps. But first, a warning. Copywriting can work too well. There are many scammy producers who use copywriting to sell scammy products. Copywriting joins JTBD and negotiations and Alchemy as selling tools to be used ethically. Copywriting has two… Continue reading How to write great copy
The best analogy to understand Loretta Breuning’s book Status Games is calories. For many years survival was difficult. One problem was calories. So ‘evolution selected’ creatures with a mutation where certain foods (fat, sweet, salt, etc.) released good brain chemicals. Those creatures did better than others and became dominant. In a world with plentiful food… Continue reading Status Games (book review)
Alchemy is about taking existing or marginal resources and deploying them for non-linear effect. Sometimes small changes go boom. One way to see this is in the expression 20,000×1 != 1×20,000. Rory Sutherland introduced this idea through travel. A new rail line, Sutherland said, that saves many people a few minutes is worth less than… Continue reading 20,000×1 != 1×20,000
One difference between the human brain and the laptop computer is that location matters. A human thinks differently, a computer compiles the same. This makes alchemy possible. This also makes academia tough. In behavioral science information presentation is everything. Order your tickets in the next 14:59. Put another way, what we see is all there… Continue reading Where are the notifications?
There’s always a reason why, and if we can find reasons why that are real, but not acknowledged, there is opportunity. Cruising, for instance, might have some hidden reasons and opportunities. The JTBD framework is built around this idea too. Economists call it stated and revealed preferences. Danny Meyer noticed reasons-why as a restaurateur. It’s… Continue reading Free Breakfast Hack
How do you fit the triangle in the circle? One way to think about Alchemy, said Rory Sutherland, is to think of a Sudoku puzzle. In Sudoku each column, row, and 3×3 box must have one through nine once and only once. Sutherland’s suggestion is to shift back and forth between the rows, columns, and… Continue reading Triangle problems
The success equation notes that results are combinations of skill and luck. Some parts of life have a larger luck outcome than others. So, to improve, we look at the skill slice. Poker’s appeal is this idea. Play more hands with positive expected value. But not every sport is as clean as poker. Football, for… Continue reading Three star recruits
“A question that stymied me for years and years, a question I got almost anywhere I went, it seemed like every organization asked, ‘How do you manage to hire so many awesome people?’. “I said to look for fifty-one percenters, people who are emotionally wired to be happier themselves when they delivery happiness to you.”… Continue reading Danny Meyer is an Alchemist (and you can be too)
One of the challenges of running a business is seeing a business from the customer’s perspective. Internally your worldview is all website updates and payment processing, employees and benefits, and hiring and HR. Externally the customer wonders: does this do what I want? Enter jobs-to-be-done. Job-father Bob Moesta joined Customer Camp to conduct a mock-interview… Continue reading ‘Peloton doesn’t offer discounts’
The Waiter's Pad 