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

your willingness to decide in advance on the time and location for when you’ll take others’ perspectives will largely determine whether you take advantage of this opportunity.

When the facts change, so should our decisions. We should be willing to contradict ourselves and to cut and run when it’s the superior course of action. If our leaders can only do things that they have previously committed to, we’re pointlessly constraining them for the sake of a principle—consistency—to which slavish obedience is in no one’s best

We do need to fight against external pressures at times. There is perhaps no better example than entrepreneurship. It’s common knowledge that an overwhelming majority of businesses fail. Even with the best, most profitable idea, the pressure to fold—from family, friends, critics, and investors—is often extraordinary. Every entrepreneur who has beco

Anxiety is a highly aversive state—in other words, it doesn’t feel very good—and so it’s much more tempting to eliminate it as quickly and mindlessly as possible rather than to consciously, reflectively confront the source of the anxiety.

associated with them, then we can welcome new evidence as an opportunity to get closer to seeing the world the way it actually is.

Anytime you feel yourself getting passionate in response to information, it’s possible you’re being led astray by the confirmation bias. That is the time to intentionally consider the opposite. Wait until the emotion dies down if you have to.

“I believe X because my kind of people believe X.”

Any Bayesian analysis begins with an initial belief, aka a prior. In our case, the prior was the initial guess we had about the location of the target ball. Then we encounter objective information, which in our case was whether the new ball landed to the left or the right of the target ball. When you combine the two it gives you the improved belief

“automatic irrational thoughts.”

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