The World's Best Book Summaries
Why is learning from failure beneficial? How can you develop by learning from failure? Black Box Thinking shows how learning from failure can benefit you personally and society as a whole. Without making mistakes and learning from failure, the world would be a very different place. Read on to explore why human development requires learning from failure.
When you need to make a difficult decision, can you trust your memory to guide you to the right choice? Will relying on past experiences help you make better choices in the future? According to Daniel Gilbert, a researcher in social psychology, you can’t trust your memories to help you make better decisions for the future. There are three reasons for this: you don’t remember common experiences, you tend to remember only how things end, and you remember how you should have felt rather than how you actually felt. Here’s an overview of how your memory misrepresents your past.
Is taking advice from others a good idea? Do you shrug off advice given to you by friends and family? Studies have shown that making decisions based on your own memories often leads to poor decision-making and unhappiness. However, social psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that taking advice from others can help you overcome your bias and faulty memories. Unfortunately, many ignore the advice of others for two main reasons. Here’s why people tend to ignore advice from others.
What are contrasting statements? How can you use them to build trust and mutual respect in a discussion? In the book Crucial Accountability, the authors talk about how contrasting statements can build mutual respect when the other person is feeling unsafe in a conversation. Contrasting statements are the building blocks of good discussions, whereas feeling a lack of mutual respect and having different motives ruins them. Keep reading to learn how to use contrasting statements to build mutual respect in a relationship.
Why does imagining the future increase happiness? Why do fabrications of the future tend to look more positive than the past or present? In his book Stumbling on Happiness, social psychologist Daniel Gilbert explores how and why your brain attempts to fabricate the future. He also discusses the limitations the brain encounters while trying to do so and how it overcomes them. Here’s how and why your brain imagines the future.
Do you ever make decisions on the fly, without taking the time to consider their potential consequences? Can snap decisions—decisions made by the unconscious mind—be better than decisions made with deliberation? Throughout our lives, we’ve been taught that our decisions are sounder if a lot of time and effort has gone into making them. But unconscious decisions can actually be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make by analyzing a situation carefully. Learn about the benefits of unconscious decision-making and how snap decisions work in the brain.
When you think about your future, do you assume that you’ll want lots of variety in life? Does variety make you happier? According to social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, variety is actually the opposite of what most people want. But many people fail to recognize that fact and end up forcing variety into their lives, ultimately making themselves unhappy. Here’s why you need less variety in life than you think.
Why do they say “trust your gut”? How do you know when your gut is right? Gut decisions can be advantageous in some circumstances, but they can lead you astray in others. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that you can make better instinctive decisions by providing the unconscious mind with structure. This involves rehearsing your desired spontaneous responses and developing rules that you can fall back on in times of stress. Here’s how you can “train your gut” to make better decisions, according to Gladwell.
How does the brain make decisions? Are decisions made through conscious deliberation always better than intuitive decisions made on the fly? Our brains use two broad strategies for making decisions: conscious or deliberate decision-making and unconscious or intuitive decision-making. We usually think that deliberate decisions should be the way to go. But according to Malcolm Gladwell, both logical, conscious decision-making and snap judgments have their time and place. Here’s why deliberate decisions aren’t necessarily the best decisions.
How do you approach decision-making? Is the right decision always the most informed decision? Most of us have been taught that to make good decisions, we need to consider as much information as possible. But sometimes the right decision is a less-informed decision. Too much information can overwhelm you with details and obscure the bigger picture. Here’s how to make the right decision by considering less information.