Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
If you haven’t read Freakonomics or SuperFreakonomics, you absolutely should. Right now. They’re some of my favorite books because they illustrate a counter-intuitive way to look at the world and data to learn things that would be difficult to find anywhere else.
This book, instead, attempts to illustrate the principles required to solve problems and think in the Freakonomics style. And there are more great stories included to illustrate the points. Lots of valuable ideas from how to decide whether to quit something, or how to pursuade someone that doesn’t want to be persuaded.
- The more complex the problem, the harder it is to get feedback.
- Discover a new set of solutions by redefining the problem.
- How people say they behave and what they actually do are rarely the same.
- If you resort to name calling to your opposition, your objective was never really persuade them but to prove your superiority.
- Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools of persuasion.
- Use a pre-mortem to discuss challenges and what might go wrong for any given project.
- You can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you’re not willing to let go of today’s.
I particularly enjoyed the section persuasion. Highly recommended for people who are interested in effecting social change.