Author: Daniel

• “When the people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside.”
• “Every single employee is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Like a parent, a leader of a company is responsible for their precious lives.”
• Chemicals in our body
  • Endorphins to mask pain, for a time
  • Dopamine to feel good, right now, and imagine things
  • Serotonin for contentment and pride
  • Oxytocin for lasting love and trust
  • Cortisol for Flight, Fight, or Freeze, and blocking oxytocin
• Faking status improvements lowers one’s morale
• We expect well-compensated leaders to offer good protection; we feel betrayed when they do not
• (It would behoove leaders to make sure we know they are sacrificing for us, how else would we know to trust them?)
• Abstracting people allows us to mistreat them (laying off “FTEs” is easier than laying off “people”)
• Customer testimonials can have a powerful boost in customer productivity, much more than telling employees how they will benefit from meeting a goal
• Abundance can lead to greed and the application of resource to tilt things in our favor

I had no idea the college selection process (student picking their colleges) was no messed up and arbitrary.

• The rich and famous do not come from top-tier universities
• You need to take time to recognize what you love and what you are good at
• Less prestigious school can afford that time
• College rankings are a racket
• Your major is far more important for your career than your college

• Humans make decisions by relativity
  • With three options, we tend to buy the middle options
  • We eschew difficult-to-compare options
  • For example, comparing a colonial house to a contemporary house is difficult; add a second colonial house that needs some TLC, and we are driven to embrace the better colonial house
• When exposed to a new product, the first price is anchored or imprinted on us
• Arbitrary Coherence: Once an arbitrary anchor price is established, related prices are effect coherence
  • We expect subsequent prices to file in alignment with the price; outliers are scrutinized or discarded
  • Anchors are set when we consider buying something at a certain price
• Money is a very expense motivator
• Highly emotional states dramatically change our reaction to choose
• We are bad at predicting how we will react in high-emotion situations
• Dictated schedules has better performance than self-imposed schedules which have better performance than no schedule
• Higher prices often adjust our experiences
• Shifting our focus from price to product, we can counter the perceptional shift
• We think of dishonesty in such grand terms that our super ego does not register the small stuff
• People tend to cheat, a little, when they can; but recalling honor at the time of temptation, curbs their inclination
• The further away from cash you get (tokens, shares, items, etc.), the more dishonest people get
• People have a need to be unique, even to the detriment of their pleasure

• Cognitive dissonance is often present in the speaker’s mind when you hear:
  • [A mocking word or acronym] + [an absurd absolute]
  • [A mocking word or acronym] + [a personal insult that is more aggressive than the situation seems to warrant]
• “Analogies are good for explaining concepts for the first time. But they have no value in debate. Analogies are not logic, and they are not relevant facts.”
• Some forms of mass-delusion are common in everyday life; just because everyone agrees with it does not make it so

• “If one acknowledges the credibility of the methodical work by countless geologists from around the world (many in the service of petroleum companies), and one believes in a God as creator, the choice is then whether to accept the idea of (1) an ancient and complex Earth with epic tales to tell, set in motion eons ago by a benevolent creator, or (2) a young Earth fabricated only a few thousand years ago by a devious and deceitful creator who planted specious evidence of an old planet in every nook and cranny–from fossil beds to zircon crystals–in anticipation of our explorations and laboratory analyses. Which is more heretical? A corollary of this argument, to be deployed with tact and care, is that compared with the deep, rich, grand geologic story of Earth, the Genesis version is an offensive dumbing-down, an oversimplification so extreme as to be disrespectful to the Creation.”
• Our “chronophobia” blinds us to the effects of time
• Apocalyptical thinking dooms us to consume more so nothing is wasted when the world ends
• Without a sense of “timefulness” (we have enough time), we cannot adequately plan for the future
  • Considering 2-year plans “long-term” should be a joke
• Lauding the “hard sciences” of physics and chemistry isolates themselves from the reality of time to stay pure
• Zircons are forever
• Humans move more dirt per year than all earth’s rivers combined
• Earth’s ancient oceans used to have more iron in them; early oxygen literally rusted it out
  • Ironically, early organism used iron to grow and depleted it with their own oxygen
• We need to develop a “memory of the present”: living in the moment from outside the current moment
• The knowledge that our species will continue provides powerful motivation for our actions today
• Collective decisions help moderate resource consumption