Synopsia Reads: Book Summaries

A deep dive into Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

Only three paths lead to lasting change: having an epiphany, changing your environment, or changing your habits in small steps. The first cannot be summoned, nobody decides to have a revelation. The second depends on means and circumstances that no decision can produce: moving house takes money and an available place, changing jobs takes someone willing to hire you, rebuilding the people around you takes time and chance encounters. That leaves the third, the only one available at will, on any given day. A widespread mistake among the very people whose job is to change behavior, in prevention,…

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A deep dive into The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.

Life is difficult. Once that sentence is accepted, it stops weighing on us: what makes existence unbearable is not the difficulty but the secret conviction that it should not have fallen to us. Complaint, the "why me?", adds to legitimate pain a surplus suffering that leads nowhere. Suffering is the condition of existence, not an accident of it. From there, a single question arises, and everything else follows from it: with what tools does one face this difficulty? Problems are not obstacles to growth, they are its instrument. It is by solving them that the mind is formed, and there is no othe…

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A deep dive into The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

More than 40% of the actions we perform each day are not decisions at all but habits: the figure comes from a 2006 paper by a Duke University researcher who logged, one by one, the actions of an ordinary day. Most of what we do, then, was never chosen that morning. The mechanism is a three-part loop: a cue, a routine, a reward. The cue tells the brain to switch to automatic mode and which habit to use. The routine is the behaviour itself, physical, mental or emotional. The reward tells the brain whether the loop is worth remembering. Ann Graybiel and her team at MIT observed it in rats placed…

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A deep dive into A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young.

Where the charts showed nothing but deep sea, an islet rises, which had the air of magic for sailors of old, when in fact the atoll is the work of countless coral builders laboring beneath the surface. Ideas appear in the same way above the surface of the mind: what shows is the emergence alone, and the work that produces it was done elsewhere, out of sight. An idea is nothing other than a new combination of old elements. The definition comes from Pareto's division of society into two types. The speculator is the one whose income depends on what he combines: constantly preoccupied with the pos…

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A deep dive into Getting More by Stuart Diamond.

Negotiation is not a specialist's affair, confined to boardrooms and salary talks. Every time people interact there is negotiation, spoken or unspoken, conscious or not: driving, talking to your children, doing the shopping. What decides the outcome is almost never the strength of your case, but what the person across from you perceives and feels. Collaboration, attention to perceptions and emotional intelligence produce four times more value than power, leverage and logic, and twice as many deals closed: twice as many transactions, each one twice as large. The opening move is to go looking fo…

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A deep dive into Originals by Adam Grant.

Some 30,000 call center agents at banks, airlines and mobile carriers were studied by the economist Michael Housman for Cornerstone OnDemand, with one variable nobody had thought to look at: the web browser installed on their workstation. Those who used Firefox or Chrome stayed in the job 15% longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari, sold more and kept their calls shorter. The browser makes nobody more competent. It records an act: some accepted what was installed on the machine, others downloaded something else. And those who accept the browser also accept the scripts, the proce…

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A deep dive into Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull.

Hand a good idea to a mediocre team and the result is spoiled; hand a mediocre idea to a brilliant team and they will either fix it or throw it out and come back with something better. The usual order, in which a strong idea goes on to attract the right people, is reversed: the group comes first, the idea after. The hiring rule that follows is to take on people who are better than the person doing the hiring. At the computer graphics laboratory of the New York Institute of Technology, in the 1970s, that rule brought in Alvy Ray Smith, and it was from that team that the alpha channel emerged, w…

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A deep dive into How to Talk So Kids Will Listen by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish.

What a child feels and what a child does are directly connected. A child who feels right behaves right, and the first thing most of us do when a child misbehaves is deny what they feel. "Mom, I'm tired." "You can't be tired, you just had a nap." "Mom, I'm hot." "It's cold out, keep your sweater on." Said often enough, these lines produce two things: the conversation turns into an argument, and the child learns to distrust their own perception in favour of the adult's. You can feel it from the inside by imagining yourself humiliated at work, then telling a friend about it. Let them answer that…

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A deep dive into The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane.

Charisma passes for a gift, received at birth or never. Summer 1955, Grand Central Terminal in New York: Marilyn Monroe crosses the concourse and goes down to the subway platform beside the photographer Eve Arnold without anyone recognising her. She is Norma Jeane, hair pulled back, walk unremarkable. Back up on the pavement, she offers to let Eve Arnold see Marilyn reappear, tousles her hair, shifts her posture and strikes a pose: a crowd forms within seconds and it takes several minutes to clear it. Same body, same face, same clothes. What changed comes down to a set of identifiable non-verb…

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A deep dive into Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath.

An idea that sticks is one that is understood, remembered, and able to change the way people think or act. Urban legends manage it with no budget and no special talent: the kidney-theft story has circulated for decades, keeping the same three elements everywhere, the drugged drink offered by a stranger, waking up in a bathtub full of ice, the punchline of the stolen kidney. The same assembly turns up in a piece of true information. On September 27, 1992, the Center for Science in the Public Interest had bags of popcorn analyzed from a dozen theaters in three major cities: an average bag contai…

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