Highly recommend: Predictably irrational

Highly recommend reading "Predictably irrational".

Some random notes I made while reading the book

• Influencing choice: A and B being arbitrary options, creating and providing an additional option A' which is closer but inferior to A, influences people to chose A more often.
  
• First impression: First impressions count, initial anchors are persistent.
• Endowment effect: People value what they have more while selling, they focus on loosing ownership rather than gaining cash.
• Power of free: Free has great power and appeal. Free falls in a different mental account and is an order of magnitude more powerful than giving away something for cents.

E.g. iPhone Application store: Releasing lite/paid app pair results in higher revenue via paid app download and conversion from free to paid over revenue generated from releasing only paid application.

• Market vs. Social norms: Social norms and market norms often collide, market norm wins.

• Social norms: Social norms are very powerful and can be used instead of market norms in many situations to much better effect in less costly way.

E.g. Motivating employees bonus versus promoting culture of hard work by giving plaques to most hardworking employee.

The Art Of Possibility

The Art Of Possibility on the practice of enrollment:

The practice of enrollment is about giving yourself as a possibility to others and being ready, in turn, to catch their spark. It is about playing together as partners in a field of light. And the steps to the practice are:

1. Imagine that people are an invitation for enrollment

2. Stand ready to participate, willing to be moved and inspired

3. Offer that which lights you up

4. Have no doubt that others are eager to catch the spark.

A "no" can so often dampen our fire the world of the 'downward spiral'. It can seem like permanent, implacable barrier that presents us with limited choices: to attack, to manipulate our way around it, or to bow to it in defeat. In other words, a "no" can seem like door slamming instead of merely an instance of the way things are. Yet, we were to take a "no" less personally, and ourselves less seriously, we might hear something else. We might hear someone saying, "I don't see any new possibility here, so I think I'll stick with my usual way of doing things". We might here withing the word "no" an invitation for enrollment.