psychology

The Audience Shortcut says:

You don’t need to know how to achieve your dreams.

You need to know who to create value for along the way.

Here are the four simple steps to implement the Audience Shortcut:

1. Choose your big dream. What goal feels just out of reach?


2. Identify your audience. Who could reduce your risk or accelerate your journey? (Hint:

Endorphins and anandamide, our final two pleasure chemicals, are pain-killing bliss producers. They’re both heavy-duty stress relievers, replacing the weight of the everyday with a euphoric sense of relaxed happiness.

feeling stupid for not having understood something before just shows that you are now cleverer than you were then.

Category design involves educating the market about a new, often-ignored problem as well as a solution that you can provide.

Harari posits that our ancestors’ capacity to imagine nonexistent things was the key to everything, for it allowed them to communicate better.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s anti-entitlement.

If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return—if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.

Think of imagination as a kind of essential mental space in your attic, where you have the freedom to work with various contents but don’t yet have to commit to any storage or organizational system, where you can shift and combine and recombine and mess around at will and not be afraid of disturbing the main attic’s order or cleanliness in any way.