Particularly in America, we think that influence is bad. It’s not a four letter word but it’s pretty close. There’s this myth of the non-conformist. We’re all different. We’re all separate. We’re all completely original and different from everybody else. And that’s not true at the end of the day. Not only is that not true,influence just isn’t as bad as we think. Imagine for a moment that you couldn’t pick a car mechanic or a restaurant to try or what movie to see by talking to anybody, if you had to figure out yourself, every restaurant you’d ever try, every book you’d ever read, every movie to ever see. You had to do all the work to figure it out yourself. You had to read all the reviews and the information and sift through it. Life would be really difficult. So many times others help us make better decisions and also faster decisions. We read online reviews to help us pick something. We talk to our friends to help us figure out what to do. That’s influence. And that’s definitely not a bad thing. – Jonah Berger

Key Takeaways

• The power of learning from people without comparing yourself to them
• Creating the time and space to ask interesting questions
• Insights into the future of education
• How influences shape our lives
• The one trick that causes a negotiation 5x more successful
• Implications of social influence on the 2016 selection

Books and Resources

• The Tipping Point
• Made to Stick
• Decisive
• Contagious
• Invisible Influence
• A Matter of Taste

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of Contagious: Why Things Catch on, and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior

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