I recently read a wonderful book by Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck. The original book is called “Mindset: The new psychology of success.” The name was translated into Russian as “Flexible Consciousness”. Let me say right away that I really liked this book. This article contains an overview of the book and some of my explanations and additions to the main content of this work.
At the end of the post I wrote a few of my thoughts that develop and clarify the author’s ideas. Therefore, I hope that this post will be of interest not only to those who are planning to read the book, but also to those who have read it.
Basic questions of the book
In her book, Carol Dweck answers the following questions:
- Are all people born with qualities determined once and for all by nature (intelligence, strength, creativity, character traits) or can these qualities be changed during life?
- Some people believe that talented individuals do not need to make any effort to engage in activities that fall within the scope of their talent. Everything supposedly comes easily and effortlessly to these people. And if they have to make an effort, then they are not talented enough. Is this really true?
- Many people believe that a person without talent is doomed to be a failure. And, no matter how hard he tries, no matter what efforts he makes, he will forever remain in the shadow of talented lucky ones and will never become as successful as them. Is this opinion correct?
- Which people actually achieve more success in their careers, in family relationships, in sports, in personal development: those who maintain a belief in the immutability of their own innate qualities (whether they are “natural geniuses” or people convinced of their own natural mediocrity) or those individuals who believe that personal qualities can be developed, no matter what abilities nature has endowed these people with?
- How does belief in unchangeable human qualities affect human psychology? What is the difference between a person with the mindset of developing his qualities and people with the mindset that the qualities are given to them by nature in an unchangeable form? How can different attitudes affect success, personal life, self-esteem, reaction to criticism, and attitude towards other people?
- How to develop in yourself, in your children, colleagues, students those personal attitudes that correspond to the development of the individual and his innate talents?
Healing
Procrastination reduces the quality of life. Missed deadlines, broken promises, missed opportunities, and unmet goals all cause personal and professional damage.
Neil Fiore, author of The Easy Way to Stop Procrastinating, notes that some procrastinators manage to get things done on time, but at the same time feel exhausted and dissatisfied with the result. A person suffering from procrastination is unable to enjoy life and realize their potential.
If you want to overcome procrastination, there is no need to look for a magic pill. It is important to figure out what exactly is stopping you from taking action right now.
Free yourself from the slavery of deadlines. Allow more time for a project than is actually required. If a flood, fire, or other disaster occurs, you will still have time to complete the work at a normal pace. Reward yourself for each stage of work completed with time to spare.
Get rid of the inner critic. Perfectionism is the killer of all endeavors and creative solutions. You will not begin to work truly fruitfully until you get rid of self-flagellation.
Select priority areas. There is no point in wasting energy scrolling through all possible scenarios in your head. Decide on key areas of activity and concentrate on them.
Start before you're ready. It is impossible to achieve mastery in any area by discussing it in theory. Take the first step towards practice. Your view of the matter may change dramatically.
Don't wait for inspiration. Make a schedule, make appointments in advance, structure your day. If a brilliant idea strikes you in the middle of the night, great! But waiting for such an idea can waste valuable days, weeks and even years.
Text: Zhanna Omelyanenko
Illustrations: Konstantin Amelin
Photo at the beginning: Oleg Tabakov in the film “A few days in the life of I.I. Oblomov"
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Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
In answering these questions, the author introduces two central concepts: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset think to themselves: “I am who I am, I cannot change, all my qualities are predetermined.” People with a growth mindset believe that “any skill can be developed. A person is not what he is, but what he has become!”
Often there is a mixed installation. Some people, for example, are sure that intelligence can be developed, but creative abilities cannot. Or vice versa.
In my article, Myth 1 – You Can’t Change Yourself, I wrote that the most dangerous human delusion is the belief that personality is given to us from birth, and we cannot influence it in any way. I wrote that people with such a conviction do not use the opportunity for self-development, because they simply do not believe in such an opportunity.
As a result, they remain at their “natural development” level, while people with a growth mindset develop and become happier and more successful because they know that personality traits can be developed and character can be changed.
At the very basis of self-development and spiritual self-improvement lies faith in the development of one’s own potential, in other words, a growth mindset. Without a growth mindset, self-development is simply impossible.
That is why in one of my first articles I wrote that everyone can change themselves. In it, I recalled how discovering that I could make myself the person I always wanted to be changed my life!
All my ideas, one might say, stem from a growth mindset, a desire for development and personal metamorphosis. Outside of this setting, these ideas would make no sense.
“Why develop yourself, why meditate to become better and happier, if it is impossible to change your personality?” - Many people might think so.
I think this kind of thinking is very dangerous because it deprives people of their best opportunities. But after reading Carol Dweck's book, I realized that a fixed mindset is much more dangerous than I previously thought!
It turns out that a fixed mindset not only interferes with your success and self-improvement, but also makes you less self-confident, more vain, and creates an inability to adequately evaluate yourself and perceive other people's criticism. A fixed mindset ruins your relationships, your career, and your happiness.
People with a fixed mindset tend to:
- Poor control of emotions
- Afraid of failure
- Sabotages long-term goals by trying to satisfy short-term desires
- They cannot adequately assess their strengths and weaknesses
- Failing in business
- Envy
- They do not know how to adequately perceive criticism addressed to them
- Not developing
- Susceptible to depression and chronic dissatisfaction
- Depend on success
- They make a lot of excuses
- They blame other people for their failures. Can't take responsibility
- Afraid of change
- They cannot deal with problems in love relationships. Relationships often don't work out
- They don't know how to forgive
- Suffer from shyness
- Find joy in humiliating other people
- They broadcast their attitude to their children, subordinates, and students.
These qualities can be caused by a fixed mindset. True, this does not mean that any person with this attitude will have such qualities. This also does not mean that only a fixed mindset gives rise to these shortcomings. Don't assume that people with a growth mindset are completely free from these shortcomings. But there is a big connection between them and the fixed mindset.
If you read the book, you will understand that human belief in the immutability of personality, in innate talent, can give rise to a lot of unpleasant consequences.
The fixed mindset is the rotten foundation of the human personality, which makes your “I” unstable and shaky, weak and dependent. And the growth mindset is the strong support for your building that makes it strong and allows you to grow higher!
Afterword
I never thought that I was susceptible to procrastination. But few manage to avoid this disease.
Two months ago I was invited to speak at a conference and share my Megaplan experience. I put off the topic of my speech until the last minute: I was busy with other things. It seemed to me that they were a priority, and the idea of a performance would fall out of the sky when the time came. The time has not come.
On the day of the deadline, I forced myself to sit down, think and formulate the topic: “Business without a lawyer: what a manager must know” - about the required minimum legal knowledge for the head of a company. The result satisfied me, but the means did not satisfy me: anxiety and fear spent waiting for the muse. You can see the result of my torment on March 26th. Come or listen online.
Sergey Kozlov, CEO of Megaplan
Curse of Geniuses
Someone, after reading this list, will think that these troubles are only the lot of people who are mediocre by nature, while geniuses and great talents are not threatened by these problems, even if they do not believe that personality can be changed.
The author of the book gives many convincing examples of how success and belief in one's own genius ruined great athletes, politicians and businessmen, even if these people really had outstanding abilities!
High self-esteem, rejection of criticism, fear of failure, reluctance to develop and make efforts are associated with a fixed mindset. And it was precisely these qualities that pulled truly talented and capable people into the abyss of failure. The awareness of their natural genius made their heads spin and made them forget that in life, in order to achieve something, it is not enough just to be a genius or talent, but you need to work hard. Inflated arrogance, a sense of one’s own uniqueness, a sense of superiority have become the curse of many gifted people!
In contrast, Carol Dweck talks about people who never showed much talent as children but became extraordinary people. And these are not just some mediocrities who, with sweat and blood, managed to achieve some semblance of success, which is available only to true geniuses and talents. These are truly famous artists (Pollock), athletes (Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan - the most famous basketball player in the world!) and businessmen.
Who would have thought that Michael Jordan was not a golden child who was already shooting three-pointers into the basket from his crib. He showed no outstanding achievements as a child. And, as he himself admits, his entire brilliant career is the result of hard work on himself and a long series of failures.
The text is replete with examples from the lives of various famous people. The downside is that the book was most likely originally written for American readers. Therefore, these examples often feature national heroes of an American football or baseball league, American businessmen, that is, people whom the European or Russian reader has never heard of.
But because of this, I believe, these examples do not become less indicative.
The author proves that intelligence, character and even creativity can be developed! And many people who are considered "geniuses" actually had to work hard to become what they became.
Why can a fixed mindset have such a fatal impact on a person’s life and character? Why does she ruin careers and ruin destinies? I wrote questions and facts, but did not provide answers or explanations.
You will find all the explanations in this book, and I highly recommend you read it.
If it were my will, I would forcibly give it to school and college teachers, coaches and parents, so that these people would stop instilling in the younger generation the destructive belief in the immutability of personal qualities.
I believe in the exceptional social role of this book; it can be very useful, both for the individual and for society as a whole.
Decision paralysis
The world opens up so many opportunities for us that our eyes widen. I would like to become an astronaut, a ballerina and a Nobel laureate in physics all rolled into one. We don't know what to grab onto.
Financial analyst Masha comes home and tries to decide what to do in the evening after a working day. Masha is tired of numbers and analytics, she wants to look out the window and draw in watercolors in her album. On the other hand, Masha understands that she needs to understand the calculation algorithms for the new software product that the company recently introduced. There is no time for this at work.
Masha is torn between what she wants and what is right. As a result, Masha does neither one nor the other - she spends the entire evening mindlessly surfing information sites and social networks.
Masha was overcome by decision paralysis. Thinking over the options exhausted her cognitive resource, and Masha chose not to decide anything at all.
Author of the book “Beat Procrastination!” Peter Ludwig suggests representing all available possibilities in the form of scissors. We think that a variety of opportunities makes us happier. But the opposite happens: the more options, the more difficult it is to choose one thing, the wider the scissor blades open. Even after making a decision, we can be overcome by doubts and regrets - we begin to wonder what would have happened if we had chosen a different option.
To overcome such obstacles, Ludwig suggests turning to personal vision. Personal vision helps you determine priority areas in life and stop being torn between a thousand possibilities.
If Masha puts her career at the forefront, then without regret she does work in her free time. If creative fulfillment is a priority, Masha draws in the evenings and is not offended when someone else gets a promotion.
Advantages of the book
The book is easy and quick to read, despite the fact that it is quite voluminous. The language, the structure of the text, the use of examples - everything is done at a very high level. When I read, I tried to learn the brilliant logic of the author’s thought development in order to improve my article writing skills.
Also, I must say, an excellent translation that captures the wonderful language of this book.
My wife, for example, found the book to be lengthy and it seemed to her that there were too many examples in it and they all just repeated the main ideas of Carol Dweck over and over again.
I cannot but agree with her that after you grasp the main idea of the text, reading further becomes more boring. But, firstly, in each example I found something new, fresh and easily read the book to the end. The author avoids literal self-repetition.
Secondly, I see nothing wrong with once again illustrating the ideas that lie at the heart of the book, ideas that are undeniably important and significant. Still, this is not a textbook on mathematics and the book does not tell about abstract truths that you only need to hear about once to remember them.
The book talks about things that underlie the foundation of personality. And for a person to move from a destructive fixed mindset to a beneficial growth mindset, it is not enough to tell him once that a growth mindset is cool and useful.
As the author herself says:
“It’s not easy to say goodbye to something that for many years you considered to be your “self”, that served as a source of self-esteem for you. It is especially difficult to replace it with an attitude that encourages you to open your arms to face what you have always perceived as a threat: difficulties, struggles, criticism and defeats.”
In other words, the fixed mindset is not always easy to break. I'm not saying that a growth mindset needs to be instilled through monotonous repetition. The author simply approaches the description of the role of our attitudes from different aspects of life: from the side of relationships, from the career side, from the side of raising children, from the side of playing sports, from the side of friendship. And in each of these descriptions he gives his own examples.
This helps the reader to draw parallels between the book’s examples and his own life and to better understand the destructive role of a fixed mindset and, with this understanding, move towards changing his attitudes. The last chapter of the book is called “how to change your setup.” But, in my opinion, just reading the book is already a change in attitude!
I stopped believing in innate qualities and in the immutability of character even before I read this book. But despite this, I was still very interested in reading it, I learned a lot of new things. Moreover, it will be interesting and useful for people who believe that they cannot change themselves and are reaping all the bitter fruits of this belief.
In order not to limit myself to just a review of the book, as I promised at the beginning, I would like to supplement and develop some of the author’s thoughts and tell a little about examples from my own life.
Eternal deadline
It's hard to imagine a world without deadlines. They help structure and organize life. Many people hate deadlines, but are willing to set them.
In 2002, the journal Psychological Science published the results of a study conducted by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Students were asked to set their own deadlines for submitting three papers during the semester. 27% of participants set the deadline for all assignments to be the latest date possible. The remaining students distributed their deadlines across semesters. The majority were right - compared to the first group, the quality of their work turned out to be higher, and there were fewer violations of deadlines.
Deadlines temporarily help you work more efficiently, but in the long run they become addictive and have the opposite effect.
Everyone had to finish the work on the last night before delivery. The reason could be objective: the illness suddenly incapacitated him or his colleagues let him down by not providing the necessary information in a timely manner.
You mobilize your body’s strength and almost miraculously deliver your work on time. You consciously promise yourself that this will not happen again. But at the physiological level, the body draws completely different conclusions: thanks to the surge of adrenaline, you completed the work in record time, and the quality turned out to be acceptable. The body discovers a great way to save energy.
This dependence is formed during student years. We go from daily school assignments to large papers due throughout the semester. Also, dependence on a deadline is typical for workers in creative fields and other areas where activities take place in a “fire-fire!” mode.
A person accustomed to adrenaline stimulation cannot act until a deadline looms on the horizon. But not everything in life needs to be completed to a deadline.
It is important to take care of your health while it is not completely lost, and it is better to learn a foreign language in advance, and not the night before an interview with a foreign company.
Deadline addiction is treated the same way as any other addiction: through rehabilitation. This is a long and painstaking process - in small steps, learn to do the work in advance and be sure to reward yourself for small successes.
Make a report for a client two hours early and leave work on time. Get your documents in order before the inspection comes, and give yourself a day off.
Additions to the book
Depression
In one of the chapters, the author writes about the connection between a fixed mindset and depression. When studies were conducted on the behavior of students suffering from depression, they found that students with a fixed mindset suffered more severe forms of depression than students with a growth mindset. Why?
Students from the first group (fixed mindset) gave up when depression overtook them. They stopped going to lectures and studying and instead stayed at home, where they indulged in thoughts of their worthlessness. And students from the second set (growth mindset) went to classes, worked hard, despite depression, so they had less time for whining and self-pity (yes, an example of these people is especially for you, my dear readers, who say that during depression there is no way to do anything). Naturally, such actions alleviated the symptoms of depression.
The author explains this by the attitude towards failures of people of both types.
I'd like to draw some more connections between fixed mindset and depression. Many people suffering from depression often attribute the onset of the disease to their own personality traits (“I was always too emotional, worried a lot and often focused on myself”). There is nothing wrong with that, I myself believe that depression is not just a curse that can affect anyone, but the resulting effect of your personality traits.
But the danger is that many of these people are convinced that they cannot do anything about themselves and recover from depression. “I am such a person, I am naturally restless and shy, I have a tendency to suffer, I am melancholic. This is who I am, and that’s why depression will always accompany me.”
This is a fixed mindset in a person. People who believe that character can be changed try to do so and often achieve good results and get rid of depression (as happened with me). But people who don’t believe in the possibility of change do nothing, throw up their hands and only know what to whine about how unhappy they are.
The role of attitudes in culture
The author notes how strong the role of attitudes is in society and in our perception of people. People are used to admiring someone's innate talent rather than someone's efforts.
We say with aspiration and admiration: “he’s a genius,” “that’s talent,” “a man from God,” when we listen to some piece of music, watch someone play in a sports competition, or read literature.
And when we say that, we don’t even want to think about how much effort this person put into his business, how many failures he suffered before becoming what he is now.
And this happens because we want to see in those whom we adore special people, celestial beings, and not ordinary men or women who earned their fame only through sweat and blood. “They are not like us, so we admire them.”
I absolutely agree that this is how everything happens in the human world. I would just like to extend this idea a little to other fragments of our culture.
The fixed mindset is very deeply ingrained in public attitudes. I am convinced that belief in horoscopes and zodiac signs is a symptom of a fixed mindset. Not far removed from this belief is the belief in temperaments and psychotypes, more adapted to scientific terminology.
When we say: “I am Scorpio”, “I am melancholic”, we thereby proclaim the presence of some unchangeable qualities given to us from birth or by the will of nature or by the will of the stars. Therefore, I consider horoscopes and all kinds of psychological tests designed to reveal your personality type as harmful spreaders of a fixed mindset.
About genius
The author briefly touches on one important idea that I want to dwell on. The book conveys the idea that geniuses are formed not only by phenomenal innate abilities, but also by their obsession with some idea!
People believe that if they are deprived of natural abilities, for example, in mathematics or in playing chess, then they don’t even have to try to achieve something in this area.
Although, it's not just about ability.
Bobby Fischer is one of the most famous chess players in the world, a former world champion. He was a very eccentric, sickly man, so he must have been a classic genius to many people, a man who they thought had a chess computer installed in his head from birth.
But do you know what Bobby Fischer did when ordinary people went to school and sat in class? Played chess and trained! What did he do when these people grew up hugging girls in the back rows of movie theaters? He played chess, he was not interested in girls!
He was obsessed with it, he made his choice, chess, not studies, chess, not girls! He trained and worked on his game all day long, and this allowed him to become a world champion! What would happen to Bobby Fischer if he thought “I’m a genius, I don’t need to train to win.” I think he would not have made it further than some small city competitions.
Genius, as we see, is determined not only by great luck in receiving some special brain as a gift from nature. Genius is built through hard work and obsession. The ability to sacrifice many opportunities and desires for the sake of one goal. And even many geniuses have to work hard to become something...
Therefore, do not give up your ideas and dreams just because you think that nature has not endowed you with outstanding abilities. It is hard work that allows people to achieve their dreams, not innate qualities. And qualities develop during this work.
If you develop all your abilities and don’t give up on what you have achieved, then in the future you will be able to develop skills that you didn’t even know you had! And then, perhaps, people with a fixed mindset will say about you: “what a talent”, “this person must be naturally gifted”! And they will not even realize that there was no innate gift, but only work and development!
Installation development
The last chapter of the book is called “Develop Your Mindset.” The chapter gives good advice on how you can develop a growth mindset in your children, students, and friends.
In my opinion, a good way to develop a growth mindset in people is to teach them about the role of work, effort, and error analysis in the success of any endeavor, using someone else’s example or your own.
In my last review of self-help literature, I talked about how, after reading the book, I used a technique from it on my neighbors who were disturbing my sleep. Here I will continue this tradition and share how I tried to teach a growth mindset to a co-worker.
My colleague is currently looking for a job, but things are not going well for him. It seems to me that this happens because he is lazy and believes that work should find a person on its own.
A few days ago he began to say that “there is no way to find a job.” I asked: “Is it really that hard to find a job?” My colleague, a qualified young specialist, is looking for a job in Moscow and therefore his words puzzled me. It seemed to me that there should be no problems for him in finding a job.
To my question he answered: “It may be easy for you to find. You are clever and can wag your tongue. But I can’t find it, because I’m not that kind of person.”
This is the fixed mindset in action! His words can be translated as: “there is a problem, but it is, in principle, unsolvable, because that’s the kind of person I am! Nothing dedends on me". A fixed mindset deprives people of a sense of responsibility and the ability to somehow influence the situation. “I’m the kind of person, what can I do?”
(Note 01/23/2014: This is why, in my opinion, the fixed mindset is so attractive and can be so difficult to get rid of. It seems to me that often many people believe in the impossibility of changing, not because this opinion was imposed on them, but because they want to believe in it. Recognizing that all qualities can be changed turns into responsibility for everything that happens to a person. Since you can change everything, that means you are responsible for everything, then only you are to blame for the fact that your life turned out this way, and not otherwise. You had the opportunity to change yourself and your life, but you didn’t take advantage of it. And a fixed mindset helps to remove this responsibility from yourself. “I’m such a person, I was born this way, I’m just unlucky, I’m not good at anything.” guilty. I'm lazy, stupid, untalented, what can I do with myself? Therefore, I would like to add to the author that while developing a growth mindset, one must also develop a sense of personal responsibility in a person. These two things go hand in hand")
First, I explained to my colleague that his problem was not due to the fact that he was such a person, but to the fact that he might be doing something wrong. Naturally, I didn’t talk about the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, even though I had finished reading a book about mindsets the day before. Instead of resorting to theory, I told my colleague that before I got a real job, I went to interviews for a year (!!!), while working at another job.
I attended 50 interviews and at first received nothing but rejections. Refusal after refusal. But I gradually gained experience, and my performance in job interviews became better and better. At the same time, I didn’t wait for the job to find me on its own. I sent several dozen resumes a day to different companies. I didn't just post a resume and wait for someone to respond to it.
I consulted with my HR friends on how best to write this resume. I constantly reworked and improved it. I changed my interview tactics and watched the reaction to my answers.
And my ability to speak at an interview is not a consequence of my talent, but a consequence of experience and work! If it weren’t for experience, if it weren’t for my efforts, I would still be working in some dull job.
I tried to prove that my skills did not just appear, that at first I, too, did not succeed in finding a job, and if my colleague continues to passively wait for the job to come to him on its own, then he will not find anything worthwhile.
To be honest, I didn’t think my words had an effect, but just because it didn’t work in this case doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all.
Still, if you want to eliminate the fixed mindset in your children or students, tell them more often how difficult it was for you to develop what they consider your talent.
The eternal student complex
Doing something for the first time is always exciting. What if the process doesn't go according to plan, and we don't have the experience to handle the situation correctly. We imagine the most terrible outcome in our imagination and come to the conclusion that it is better not to get involved at all.
A music college student wants to earn extra money by giving private guitar lessons, but it seems to him that he himself is not a virtuosic enough player.
A sales manager dreams of making short films, but is afraid that without professional education he will not succeed.
A marketer is planning to open a small business specializing in market research, but keeps putting it off - he needs to earn a little more money and gain experience.
The student, manager and marketer feel that they are not yet ready to start a new business. This is true, but not because of a lack of necessary skills, but because of imaginary obstacles. They create a mental labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape. However, real difficulties, unlike imagined ones, can be overcome.
The author of the book “What to Dream About,” Barbara Sher, suggests stopping theorizing and moving on to real action. Even the smallest practical step will provide more confidence and awareness than thought experiments. The principle Barbara suggests is simple: do it before you're ready.
It is impossible to learn to swim without getting your feet wet. In the same way, in theory, it will not be possible to master a foreign language, write a book, or learn how to manage a business. It will not be possible to embark on such undertakings “fully armed”, because most of the knowledge can only be learned from practice.
Steve Rowling. “I want more ideas!”
To develop creative thinking, the author and former BBC journalist encourages readers to understand the process behind creativity. Rowling is confident that creativity in any of its manifestations is not a magical gift, but a way of working and solving problems that everyone can understand, master and put into practice.
I would very much like to call Rowling’s work a guide—it is from this position that it was written. The book is logically divided into two blocks: in the “reviews” you will find brief abstracts and small exercises, and in the “analysis” you can immerse yourself in the topic.
Book in MYTH
Steve Rowling's book will teach you how to generate ideas:
“We were once taught to work a certain way, and that’s how we work. Very soon the method becomes familiar, and “we did it once” turns into “this is how we work.” The old and proven can become an obstacle to fresh ideas.”
On the website of the publishing house "MYTH" you can get a 15% discount on any product if you enter the promotional code SKILLBOX.
Michael Mikalko. "Hacking creativity"
Michael Mikalko's book is one of the main bestsellers dedicated to the development of creative thinking. The author’s work can safely be called a full-fledged study in which he collected the thinking strategies of world-famous geniuses, starting with Leonardo da Vinci and ending with Picasso. According to the author, creativity is completely unrelated to the level of intelligence, but rather a special way of perceiving the world and analyzing a situation.
In the book you will find dozens of examples of stories of great thinkers, illustrating their approach and technologies for developing creative thinking, as well as a lot of exercises that will help you consolidate the acquired skill.
Book in MYTH
The book “Hacking Creativity” tells what means of developing creative thinking were used by great geniuses:
“Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and an ordinary person. He replied that if anyone was asked to find a needle in a haystack, he would stop searching when he found that needle. Einstein himself, on the contrary, would comb the entire haystack in search of all possible needles.”
Chip Heath and Dan Heath. "Made to Stick"
Brothers Chip and Dan spent years analyzing ideas, trying to understand why some of them were phenomenally successful, while others were forgotten almost immediately. In the course of their research, the brothers were able to derive and formulate six principles of a “sticky” idea: simplicity, surprise, specificity, authenticity, emotionality and narrative - the ability to convey your idea in the form of a story. The authors examine these principles in detail and use real examples to demonstrate how they can be applied in life.
Coming up with an idea is half the battle, another serious task is to convey your idea to the world, boss or client. This is exactly what the Heath brothers' research can help you with.
Book in MYTH
Made to Stick is one of the top bestsellers of 2018:
“We wanted to take a detailed look at sticky ideas, both natural and created, and figure out what makes them sticky. What makes urban legends so fascinating?
