Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World

“automatic irrational thoughts.”

It’s a simplifying assumption that means to change your mind and get rid of any particular belief that you have confidence in, it’ll take three strikes.

One: we are all self-contained geniuses. Every one of us innately has greatness inside of us, or, as Emerson puts it, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

there is one simple technique that can vastly improve the probability (sometimes double or even triple) that we will follow through on simple tasks.15 All it takes is this: ask yourself a single question, “When and where will I do X?” When you answer this question, you are essentially forming what Peter Gollwitzer calls “an implementation intention

Abraham Lincoln, admired his always developing, flexible brand of leadership: Lincoln “was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century.” He was to be admired “not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet he triumphed. . . . Out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacles of the earth and his f

This increases your likelihood of adopting the belief yourself. Whether you like it or not, your beliefs are socially contagious.

2012 movie Lincoln

Meetings can be what I call a weapon of mass interruption.

one of the ways to access the predictions that underlie your opinions is to ask yourself a simple question: what evidence would convince you that you were wrong?

humans are plagued by what psychologists call a status quo bias, meaning that we often have a strong preference for the current state of affairs over some alternative.