Men will not look at things as they really are, but as they wish them to be—and are ruined.

He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.

”He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him.”

“Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.

But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former.

“A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune chances it may find him prepared to resist her blows.”

“Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable.”

“Whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.”

It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

“You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.”

"But to enable a prince to form an opinion of his servant there is one test which never fails; when you see the servant thinking more of his own interests than of yours, and seeking inwardly his own profit in everything, such a man will never make a good servant, nor will you ever be able to trust him; because he who has the state of another in his hands ought never to think of himself.”

“On the other hand, to keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more, many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him dread chances."

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”

“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.”

And well-ordered states and wise princes have taken every care not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to keep the people satisfied and contented, for this is one of the most important objects a prince can have.

The Prince s a 16th-century political treatise written by Italian diplomat, philosopher, and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in the form of a realistic instruction guide for new princes...

The most famous book on politics ever written, The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the first scientific treatment of politics as it is practiced rather than as it ought to be practiced. Harvey C. Mansfield's brilliant translation of this classic work, along with the new materials added for this edition, make it the definitive version of The Prince, indispensable to scholars, students, and those interested in the dark art of politics. This revised edition of Mansfield's acclaimed translation features an updated bibliography, a substantial glossary, an analytic introduction, a chronology of Machiavelli's life, and a map of Italy in Machiavelli's time. "Of the other available [translations], that of Harvey C. Mansfield makes the necessary compromises between exactness and readability, as well as providing an excellent introduction and notes."—Clifford Orwin, The Wall Street Journal "Mansfield's work . . . is worth acquiring as the best combination of accuracy and readability."—Choice "There is good reason to assert that Machiavelli has met his match in Mansfield. . . . [He] is ready to read Machiavelli as he demands to be read—plainly and boldly, but also cautiously."—John Gueguen, The Sixteenth Century Journal

philosophy

Philosophy

writing

Reading & Writing

strategy

Strategy

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince

<ul><li>A scientist from outer space would immediately classify humans as a third species of chimpanzee.</li><li>Scientists right here on Earth know that we share more than 98 percent of our genetic makeup with the other two chimps. The difference between our genes and chimps’ genes is small. Yet that small difference must have been responsible for the things that make humans unique.</li></ul>

 WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

<ul><li>Human children took years to acquire the information and experience they needed to be efficient hunter-gatherers, just as today they take years to learn how to be farmers or computer programmers.</li><li>Human children depend on parents to bring food to them. This seems natural to us, but it is exceptional in the primate world. Baby apes gather food for themselves as soon as they are weaned.</li><li>That parental burden means that care by the father as well as the mother is important if the child is to survive.</li></ul>

A STRANGE LIFE CYCLE

<ul><li>For animals, copulation is a dangerous luxury. Animals in the act of mating burn energy and neglect opportunities to obtain food. </li><li>They are also vulnerable to predators who want to eat them or rivals who want to take over their territory. </li><li>Copulation is something to be accomplished in the minimum time needed for fertilization.</li><li>Sex is pleasurable, but evolution made it that way. If our species weren’t getting some evolutionary benefit from our sexual activities, the world would have been taken over by mutant humans who evolved not to enjoy sex.</li></ul>

Dangerous Luxury 

<ul><li>The answer must have to do with the cost of repair. Think again about car repairs. Suppose you buy an expensive car that you expect to last for a long time. It makes sense to invest in regular maintenance, which is cheaper than discarding your car and buying a new one every few years.</li><li>In the same way, how much energy an animal “should” invest in biological repairs depends on the cost of the repairs, and how long the animal can expect to live with and without them.</li></ul>

Why can’t we naturally repair or replace everything in our body?

<ul><li>People from sunny Africa have black skin. So do people from other sunny areas, such as southern India and New Guinea. Skin gets paler as you move north or south away from the equator, until you reach northern Europe, where you find the palest skin of all.</li><li>Obviously, dark skin evolved in people who were exposed to a lot of sunlight, because dark skin protects against sunburn.</li></ul>

Does Natural Selection Explain Skin Color?

<ul><li>Darwin had noticed that many animals have features with no obvious survival value, such as the long, colorful tails of male peacocks and the dark, shaggy manes of male lions.</li><li>These features do help animals get mates, however, either by attracting individuals of the opposite sex or by intimidating rivals. Their genes will get passed on, and those genes will spread through a population because of sexual selection, or mating preferences, not because of natural selection.</li></ul>

Sexual Selection and Physical Appearances

“In the framework of evolutionary biology, success is measured in terms of leaving more offspring.”

<ul><li>Agriculture brought great increases in the amount of food we were able to store. This meant that more people could survive. But agriculture also brought disease, inequality between the sexes and between social classes, and the tyranny of powerful rulers.</li><li>Agriculture began to appear only about ten thousand years ago.</li><li>For most of our history, all humans had to be hunter-gatherers, living by hunting wild animals and gathering wild food plants.</li><li>Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? They adopted it, of course, because it is an efficient way to get more food for less work.</li></ul>

AGRICULTURE, FOR BETTER AND WORSE

<ul><li>Nutrition is another difference. Farmers concentrate on crops such as rice and potatoes, which are high in carbohydrates.</li><li>Hunter-gatherers are healthy and suffer from little disease. They enjoy a varied diet, and they do not experience the food shortages and famines that can happen to farmers who are dependent on just a few crops.</li><li>t is almost unimaginable for Bushmen, who use 85 edible wild plants, to starve to death. In the 1840 s, however, about a million irish farmers and their families starved when a plant disease attacked potatoes, which they relied on as their staple crop and food.</li></ul>

The Lives of Hunter-Gatherers

Why would we do something that we know to be harmful or dangerous?<ul><li>They do so because our drugs of abuse are addictive—once you start, the chemistry of the drug affects the brain, making you want to continue.</li><li>Ten thousand years ago we “displayed” by challenging a lion or a tribal enemy. Today we do it in other dangerous ways, such as driving fast or consuming dangerous drugs.</li></ul>

WHY DO WE SMOKE, DRINK, AND USE DANGEROUS DRUGS?

<ul><li>It is the instinct to rely on handicap signals as a sign of strength. Whiskey and cigarette ads are cleverly directed at that old instinct, with their messages that smoking and drinking will bring status and make us attractive. </li><li>Drug addicts and alcoholics not only lead shorter lives, but they also become less attractive, not more, to possible mates. They also lose the ability to care properly for children.</li></ul>

False Messages

What would happen if we found alien —or it found us. Would we and the aliens sit down together for fascinating discussions? Would they share their advanced technology with us?<ul><li>Throughout history, human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans responded by shooting them, devastating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or seizing their territory. Any advanced terrestrials who found us would surely treat us the same way.</li><li>For all practical purposes, we’re alone in a crowded universe. Thank goodness!</li></ul>

The Silence Is Deafening—Thank Goodness

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">One cloud is the risk of a nuclear war that could destroy us all.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The second cloud is the risk of an environmental collapse. One potential cause of such a collapse is the gradual extinction of most of the world’s species.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Isn’t extinction a natural process? If so, why should we worry about the extinctions that are happening now? Yes, every species will eventually go extinct. But the current human-caused rate of extinction is much higher than the natural rate.</li></ul>

THE SECOND CLOUD

“We’re still more than 98 percent chimp in our genes.”

At some point during the last 100,000 years, humans began exhibiting traits and behavior that distinguished us from other animals, eventually creating language, art, religion, bicycles, spacecraft, and nuclear weapons—all within a heartbeat of evolutionary time….

The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.

history

History

education

Learning & Education

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Jared M. Diamond

The Third Chimpanzee

<ul><li>Most male mammals have no involvement with either their offspring or their offspring’s mother after inseminating her; they are too busy seeking other females to inseminate.</li><li>We're exceptional animals in that our fathers and mothers often remain together after copulating and are both involved in rearing the resulting child.</li></ul>

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

<ul><li>If fertilization is external, neither mother nor father is automatically committed to anything further, and both are theoretically free to seek another partner with whom to produce more fertilized embryos.</li><li>Yes, their just-fertilized embryos may need some care, but mother and father are equally able to try to bluff the other into providing that care.</li><li>But if fertilization is internal, the female is now pregnant and committed to nourishing the fertilized embryos until birth or laying.</li><li>If she is a mammal, she is committed for even longer, through the period of lactation.</li></ul>

External Vs Internal Fertilization 

<ul><li>But males of mammals and other internally fertilized animals have no corresponding confidence in their paternity.</li><li>Yes, the male knows that his sperm went into a female’s body. Sometime later, out of that female’s body, comes a baby. How does the male know whether the female copulated with other males while he wasn’t looking?</li><li>In the face of this uncertainty, the evolutionary conclusion reached by most male mammals is to walk off the job immediately after copulation, seek more females to impregnate, and leave those females to rear their offspring.</li></ul>

Uncertainty In Male's Paternity

<ul><li>Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes, which in humans are bundled together in each body cell in twenty-three pairs of microscopic packages called chromosomes.</li><li>One member of each of our twenty-three pairs was acquired from our mother, and the other member from our father.</li><li>Men, who have a big chromosome (termed an X chromosome) paired with a small one (a Y chromosome).</li><li>Women instead have two paired X chromosomes.</li></ul>

Sex Chromosome

<ul><li>Many X chromosome genes specify traits unrelated to sex, such as the ability to distinguish red and green colors.</li><li>However, the Y chromosome contains genes specifying the development of testes.</li><li>In the fifth week after fertilization human embryos of either sex develop a “bipotential” gonad that can become either a testis or an ovary.</li><li>If a Y chromosome is present, that bet-hedging gonad begins to commit itself in the seventh week to becoming a testis, but if there’s no Y chromosome, the gonad waits until the thirteenth week to develop as an ovary.</li></ul>

Bipotential Gonad

<ul><li>The evolutionary battle of the sexes has resulted in parental care being provided by the mother alone in about 90 percent of all mammal species.. Not only do males of those species have no need to lactate; they also don’t have to bring food, defend a family territory, defend or teach their offspring.</li><li>Only for those 10 percent of mammal species in which male parental care is necessary does the question of male lactation even deserve consideration.</li></ul>

WHY DON’T MEN BREAST-FEED THEIR BABIES?

Those minority species include lions, wolves, gibbons, marmosets— and humans. But even in those species requiring male parenting, lactation isn’t necessarily the most valuable form that the father’s contribution can take. What a big lion really must do is to drive off hyenas and other big lions bent on killing his cubs.

THE NON-EVOLUTION OF MALE LACTATION 

<ul><li>Human milk is more dilute in nutrients, sugary, and low in fat.</li><li>Breast-fed babies acquire stronger immune defenses and are less susceptible to numerous diseases, including diarrhea, ear infections, early-age-onset diabetes, influenza, necrotizing enterocolitis, and SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).</li><li>The helpless condition of human infants makes lots of parental care necessary for many years.</li></ul>

Importance Of Breastfeeding 

Why do most animals consider sex fun only when the female can be fertilized?<ul><li>There’s a simple reason why most other animals are sensibly stingy about copulatory effort: sex is costly in energy, time, and risk of injury or death.</li><li>Natural selection favors those individuals whose behavior lets them pass their genes to the most babies.</li></ul>

<ul><li>For the cavewoman, the male’s departure would expose her eventual child to the likelihood of starvation or murder.</li><li>What can she do to keep that man? Her brilliant solution: remain sexually receptive even after ovulating! Keep him satisfied by copulating whenever he wants! In that way, he’ll hang around, have no need to look for new sex partners, and will even share his daily hunting bag of meat.</li><li>Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF RECREATIONAL SEX

It arose at a time when our ancestors were still promiscuous or living in harems. At such times, concealed ovulation let the ancestral ape-woman distribute her sexual favors to many males, none of which could swear that he was the father of her child but each of which knew that he might be. As a result, none of those potentially murderous males wanted to harm the ape-woman’s baby, and some may actually have protected or helped feed it.

THE ANIMAL WITH THE WEIRDEST SEX LIFE

<ul><li>By the criterion of services offered to mates and children, males of most mammal species are good for nothing except injecting sperm.</li><li>The males of many territorial animal species, such as songbirds, lions, and chimpanzees, spend much time patrolling their territories.</li></ul>

WHAT ARE MEN GOOD FOR? 

<ul><li>The show-offs also gains some advantages apart from adultery, such as prestige in his tribe’s eyes. Others in the tribe want him as a neighbor because of his gifts of meat, and they may reward him with their daughters as mates. For the same reason, the tribe is likely to give favored treatment to the show-off’s children.</li><li>A woman is best off married to a provider, but a man is not best off being a provider.</li></ul>

Advantages Of Show-off

<ul><li class="ql-align-center">Parent’s interests may be better served by abandoning one offspring and devoting resources to other offspring, whereas the offspring’s interests may be best served by surviving at the expense of its parents.</li><li class="ql-align-center">Natural selection ensures that our body unconsciously maintains and repairs itself.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Menopause - a woman’s egg supply gets depleted or impaired by around the time she is fifty years old. The challenge is to understand why we evolved that seemingly self-defeating detail of reproductive physiology.</li><li>That one cruel fact underlying human female menopause: the birth of each child immediately jeopardizes a mother’s previous children because of the mother’s risk of death in childbirth.</li></ul>

MAKING MORE BY MAKING LESS - FEMALE MENOPAUSE 

<ul><li>Even in affluent, twentieth-century Western societies, the risk of dying in childbirth is seven times higher for a mother over the age of forty than for a twenty-year-old mother.</li><li>But each new child puts the mother’s life at risk not only because of the immediate risk of death in childbirth but also because of the delayed risk of death related to exhaustion by lactation, carrying a young child.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF FEMALE MENOPAUSE 

<ul><li>Animals whose lifestyles carry a high risk of accidental death are evolutionarily programmed to stint on repair and to age rapidly.</li><li>Turtles, protected in the wild by a shell, are programmed to age more slowly than other reptiles, while porcupines, protected by quills, age more slowly than mammals comparable in size.</li></ul>

Risk Of Accidental Death 

<ul><li>We too rely on signals as arbitrary as a widowbird’s tail and a bowerbird’s crest. Our signals include faces, smells, hair color, men’s beards, and women’s breasts.</li><li>Human females signal reproductive maturity by expansion of the breasts. Later in life, we signal our waning fertility and attainment of wise elder status by the whitening of our hair.</li></ul>

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING 

<ul><li>Muscles are a truthful signal of male quality, like a deer’s antlers.</li><li>One might reason that beauty says nothing about good genes, parenting qualities, or food-gathering skills. However, the face is the part of the body most sensitive to the ravages of age, disease, and injury.</li><li>Especially in traditional societies, individuals with scarred or misshapen faces may thereby be advertising their proneness to disfiguring infections, inability to take care of themselves, or burden of parasitic worms.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF BODY SIGNALS

<ul><li>Our remaining candidate for a truthful signal is women’s body fat.</li><li>Lactation and child care are a big energy drain on a mother, and lactation tends to fail in an undernourished mother.</li><li>Hence a woman’s body fat would be a truthful signal to a man that she was capable of rearing his child.</li><li>Women of all populations tend to accumulate fat in the breasts and hips, to a degree that varies geographically.</li><li>Men throughout the world tend to be interested in women’s breasts, hips, and buttocks.</li></ul>

DISTRIBUTION OF WOMEN'S BODY FAT 

<ul><li>Scientists have suggested that large fatty breasts are not only an honest signal of good overall nutrition but also a deceptive specific signal of high milk-producing ability (deceptive because milk is actually secreted by breast glandular tissue rather than by breast fat).</li><li>Similarly, it has been suggested that fat deposition in the hips of women is also both an honest signal of good health and a deceptive specific signal suggesting a wide birth canal (deceptive because a truly wide birth canal would minimize the risk of birth traumas but mere fat hips would not).</li></ul>

Deceptive Specific Signal 

<ul><li>The length of the erect penis is only about 1 ¼ inches in gorillas and 1 ½ inches in orangutans but 5 inches in humans, even though males of the two apes have much bigger bodies than men.</li><li>The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina.</li><li>Hence a large penis’s cost should be regarded as a lost-opportunity cost: the energy squandered on one structure comes at the expense of energy potentially available for another structure.</li></ul>

WHY MEN HAVE LARGE PENIS?

<ul><li>Almost anyone would assert that the functions of the penis are to eject urine, inject sperm, and stimulate women physically during intercourse.</li><li>But the comparative approach teaches us that those functions are accomplished elsewhere in the animal world by a relatively much smaller structure than the one with which we encumber ourselves.</li><li>Thus, even the most familiar and seemingly most transparent piece of human sexual equipment surprises us with unsolved evolutionary questions.</li></ul>

UNSOLVED EVOLUTIONARY QUESTION

"Our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

To us humans, the sex lives of animals seem weird. But it's our own sex lives that are truly bizarre. Stranger yet, we have sex at any time, even during periods of infertility, such as pregnancy or post-menopause. Why does the human female, virtually alone among mammals, go through menopause? Why does the human male stand out as one of the few mammals to stay with the female he impregnates, to help raise the children that he sired? Why is the human penis so unnecessarily large?

Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why do humans have sex any day of the month or year, including when the female is pregnant, beyond her reproductive years, or between her fertile cycles? Why are human females one of the few mammals to go through menopause? Human sexuality seems normal to us but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Jared Diamond argues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as were our large brains. He also describes the battle of the sexes in the human and animal world over parental care, and why sex differences in the genetic value of parental care provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar different attitudes of men and women towards extramarital sex.

parenting

Parenting

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

Jared Diamond

Why is Sex Fun?

<ul><li>The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.</li><li>Our brains were made for nexting, and that’s just what they’ll do.</li><li>Happiness is a word that we use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it.</li></ul>

The Joy Of Next 

“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”

“Imagination’s tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us.”<ul><li>No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.</li><li>Our experience is compressed as a summary phrase (“Dinner was disappointing”) or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter) in memory.</li></ul>

First Shortcoming Of Imagination 

“Imagination’s tendency to project the present onto the future.”<ul><li>When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.</li></ul>

Second Shortcoming Of Imagination

“Imagination’s failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen—in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better.”<ul><li>When we imagine losing a job, for instance, we imagine the painful experience (“The boss will march into my office, shut the door behind him . . .”) without also imagining how our psychological immune systems will transform its meaning (“I’ll come to realize that this was an opportunity to quit retail sales and follow my true calling as a sculptor”).</li></ul>

Third Shortcoming Of Imagination 

“The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.

“Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. You are a very fine person, I’m sure. But you are a very bad wizard.”

“The fact that the least likely experience is often the most likely memory can wreak havoc with our ability to predict future experiences.”

Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: “Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.”<ol><li>One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences (“Hey, honey, I have a kinky idea—let’s watch the sun set from the kitchen this time”).</li><li>Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience. </li></ol>

Next To Nothing

“If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers. We may see the world through rose-colored glasses, but rose-colored glasses are neither opaque nor clear.”

<ul><li>People tend to see what they want to see.</li><li>By controlling the sample of information to which they were exposed, these people indirectly controlled the conclusions they would draw.</li><li>To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.</li></ul>

Challenging Facts

“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

<ul><li>Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.</li><li>Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.</li><li>The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, is to stop thinking so much about the future.</li></ul>

Twisting Fate

“Instead of remembering our past experience in order to simulate our future experience, perhaps we should simply ask other people to introspect on their inner states. Perhaps we should give up on remembering and imagining entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future selves.”

“ One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance. “

"Every man is happy until happiness is suddenly a goal"

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you
anything useful about how to be happy. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy….

In this fascinating and often hilarious work – winner of the Royal Society of Science Prize 2007 – pre-eminent psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows how – and why – the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy. We all want to be happy, but do we know how? When it comes to improving tomorrow at the expense of today, we're terrible at predicting how to please our future selves. In ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ Professor Daniel Gilbert combines psychology, neuroscience, economics and philosophy with irrepressible wit to describe how the human brain imagines its future – and how well (or badly) it predicts what it will enjoy. Revealing some of the amazing secrets of human motivation, he also answers thought-provoking questions – why do dining companions order different meals instead of getting what they want? Why are shoppers happier when they can't get refunds? And why are couples less satisfied after having children while insisting that their kids are a source of joy?

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.

Daniel Gilbert is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Daniel Gilbert has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Daniel Gilbert's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness

"Virality isn’t born, it’s made."

The six principles or STEPPS, drive things to catch on.  <ol><li>Social Currency: We share things that make us look good. </li><li>Triggers: Top of mind = tip of tongue  </li><li>Emotion: When we care, we share. </li><li>Public: Built to show, built to grow. </li><li>Practical Value: News you can use. </li><li>Stories: Information travels under the guise of idle chatter. </li></ol>

STEPPS

Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way.There are three ways to do that:<ol><li>Find inner remarkability;</li><li>Leverage game mechanics; </li><li>Make people feel like insiders. </li></ol>

1. Social Currency

Sharing extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and entertaining.<ul><li>Can the product do something no one would have thought possible (such as blend iPhone like Blendtec)?</li><li>Are the consequences of the idea or issue more extreme than people ever could have imagined? </li></ul>

Find Inner Remarkability

<ul><li>Good game mechanics keep people engaged, motivated, and always wanting more. </li><li>We all enjoy achieving things. Tangible evidence of our progress makes us feel good.</li><li>So discrete markers motivate us to work harder, especially when we get close to achieving them. </li><li>Game mechanics also motivate us on an inter personal level by encouraging social comparison. </li><li>People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others. </li></ul>

Leverage Game Mechanics

<ul><li>Scarcity and exclusivity help products catch on by making them seem more desirable.</li><li>If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort.</li><li>If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. </li><li>If something is unavailable or sold out, people often infer that lots of other people must like it, and so it must be pretty good.</li></ul>

Make People Feel Like Insiders

<ul><li>Triggers not only get people talking, they keep them talking.</li><li>Think about whether the message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience. </li><li>Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. </li><li>The more something is triggered, the more it will be top of mind, and the more successful it will become. </li><li>Top of mind means tip of tongue. </li></ul>

2. Triggers 

<ul><li>Marketing messages tend to focus on information. </li><li>Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that motivate people to action. </li><li>More anger or more humor led to more sharing. </li><li>Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy. </li><li>But people are less likely to talk about or share things that make them content because contentment decreases arousal. </li></ul>

3. Emotion 

<ul><li>Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate.</li><li>The famous phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just the human tendency to imitate.</li><li>If something is built to show, it’s built to grow. </li><li>Television shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to laugh when they hear others laughing. </li><li>Behavior is public and Thoughts are private. </li></ul>

4. Public 

<ul><li>Setting a higher reference point made the first deal seem better even though the price was higher overall. </li><li>By mentioning $100 or $200 as the price you might expect to pay, the infomercial sets a high reference point, making the final price of $39.99 seem like a steal. </li><li>Deals seem more appealing when they highlight incredible value. </li><li>Restricting availability through scarcity and exclusivity makes things seem more valuable. </li></ul>

5. Practical Value 

<ol><li>If the product’s price is less than $100, percentage discounts will seem larger.</li><li>If the product’s price is more than $100, the opposite is true. Numerical discounts will seem larger.</li></ol>Take a $2,000 laptop. While a 10 percent discount may seem like a relatively small number, it immediately seems much bigger when translated into dollars ($200).

The Rule of 100 

<ul><li>People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. </li><li>Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember. </li><li>Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. </li><li>They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement. </li></ul>

6. Stories 

This book explains what makes content contagious. By “content,” I mean stories, news, information, Products, ideas, messages and videos. 

The New York Times bestseller that explains why certain products and ideas become popular. “Jonah Berger knows more about what makes information ‘go viral’ than anyone in the world.” —Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness What makes things popular? If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He’s studied why New York Times articles make the paper’s own Most E-mailed list, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In Contagious, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheesesteak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the most boring products there is: a blender. Contagious provides specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread—for designing messages, advertisements, and content that people will share. Whether you’re a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.

career

Career

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

Jonah Berger

Contagious

“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”

“As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.”

“My motto is, 'Never do anything if it means you can't sleep at night.' It's a good rule to follow.”

“We all need our own space and it's good to pause and do nothing. It gives us time to think. It recharges our bodies as well as our minds. “

“Fun is at the core of the way I do business. It has been the key to it all from the start. I see no reason to change it.”

“If you challenge yourself, you will grow. Your life will change. Your outlook will be positive. It’s not always easy to reach your goal but that’s no reason to stop. Say yourself ‘I can do it. I’ll keep on trying until I win.’”

'I know you've learned a lesson, Ricky. Don't cry over spilled milk. We've got to get on and deal with this head on.'

“Some you win and some you lose. Be glad when you win. Don’t have regrets when you lose. Never look back. You can’t change the past. I try to learn from it.”

“If you don't have the right experience to reach your goal, look for another way in.”

“Today nothing is sure and life is one long struggle.”

“You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”

“Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one coming.”

“If you opt for a safe life, you will never know what it's like to win.”

The Spanish painter, Salvador Dali, had a unique way to savour the moment. When he was bored with life, he would walk in his cliff-top garden. He would pick a perfect peach, and hold it in his hand to admire its golden skin. He would sniff it. The warm perfume would fill his senses. Then he would take a single bite. His mouth would fill with luscious juice. He would savour it slowly. Then he would spit out the mouthful and throw the peach into the sea below…..

Salvador Dalí’s Peach

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is a British business magnate and commercial astronaut. In the 1970s he founded the Virgin Group, which today controls more than 400 companies in various fields.

Throughout my life I have achieved many remarkable things. In Screw It, Let's Do It, I will share with you my ideas and the secrets of my success, but not simply because I hope they'll help you achieve your individual goals. Today we are increasingly aware of the effects of our actions on the environment, and I strongly believe that we each have a responsibility, as individuals and organisations, to do no harm. I will draw on Gaia Capitalism to explain why we need to take stock of how we may be damaging the environment, and why it is up to big companies like Virgin to lead the way in a more holistic approach to business. In Screw It, Let's Do It I'll be looking forwards to the future. A lot has changed since I founded Virgin in 1968, and I'll explain how I intend to take my business and my ideas to the next level and the new and exciting areas - such as launching Virgin Fuels - into which Virgin is currently moving. But I have also brought together all the important lessons, good advice and inspirational adages that have helped me along the road to success. Ironically, I have never been one to do things by the book, but I have been inspired and influenced by many remarkable people. I hope that you too might find a little inspiration between these pages.

The Prince

The Third Chimpanzee

Why is Sex Fun?

Stumbling on Happiness

Contagious

Prince Rahul