심층영어

Intensive English
Course Texts
Sookmyung Women’s University, Fall 2021

(01a) 21st Century Skills ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2

(02a) The Subject Matter of ELT ................................................................................................................................................................ 3
(03a) Song at Sunset ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 6
(04a) De-Constructing Racism One Headline at a Time ................................................................................................................ 12
(05a) Erasers are Wonderful (The Oatmeal on Creativity 1/8) ................................................................................................ 18
(05a alt) Do schools kill creativity? ....................................................................................................................................................... 26
(07a) A Portrait of the Author as a Learning Junkie ....................................................................................................................... 34
(08a) Selections from “This I Believe” .................................................................................................................................................. 41
(09a) The most important language you will EVER learn ............................................................................................................ 45
(10a) Are you a giver or a taker? ............................................................................................................................................................ 51
(11a) Ch. 1 - The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits – James Clear........................................................................................ 57
(11a alt) Ch. 2 - How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa) .............................................................................. 64
(13a) The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube ....................................................................................................................... 70
(14a) Introduction to Media Literacy: Crash Course Media Literacy #1 ............................................................................... 76
(alt01) 12 Cognitive Biases Explained .................................................................................................................................................. 79
(alt02) Michael Shermer - Baloney Detection Kit ............................................................................................................................ 83

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(01a) 21st Century Skills

What are 21st Century Skills?

As the title suggests, they are a collection of skills for living and working in the 21st century. In other words, each
individual person should develop these skills in order to survive (and hopefully thrive) in modern times. ‘The world’
(society) has always been changing, but in recent years it is changing faster for most people… and more people
overall are more aware of how fast certain aspects of society are changing. The bad news: this rate of change makes
many people feel stressed. The good news: this means there is a lot of opportunity as long as you develop essential
skills for living and working in these changing times. So, if you keep your mind open and focus skills that allow
growth then you can access more of these opportunities and reduce the amount unnecessary stress you feel.

There is no consensus on exactly which skills will be most important in the modern era. Therefore, I’ve chosen one
collection of well-established and universal 21st century skills to share that I believe will benefit you. That said, part
of being an active life-long learner is to be open to noticing and developing (other) new skills throughout your life.

Learning Skills Tools for acquiring and creating useful ideas

Communication – sharing ideas effectively through a variety of channels
Collaboration – working well with others to achieve mutually beneficial goals
Critical thinking & problem solving – finding solutions through deeper understanding
Creativity & innovation – discovering new ideas or changing how we understand old ideas

Life and Career Skills – Personal and professional growth

Initiative & self-direction – setting your own goals then moving towards them
Flexibility & adaptability – changing your roles and responsibilities as needed
Social & cross-cultural skills – respecting differences and interacting appropriate for mutual benefit
Leadership & responsibility – being a role model and guiding others towards greater achievements
Productivity & accountability – making progress consistently and reliably while maintaining high standards

Literacy Skills – ‘Reading’ the modern world

Information literacy – evaluating the quality and content of the information that can be accessed
Technology literacy – being aware of the tools, techniques, and ethical issues when using modern technology
Media literacy –noticing the extent and nature of media’s influence on our thoughts and actions

21st Century Skills, Intensive English, and YOU

I may be teaching this course, but you (the students) are the more important part of this course. Let me say that
slightly differently. I am teaching, but learning (not teaching) is the most important thing that happens in this class.

Every class I teach includes a focus on student self-efficacy – that is, on helping students to become more competent
and more capable. I don’t teach so that you get high scores (although that is, of course, acceptable). I teach a
specific way so that after the course finishes, you will take away skills that will help you in other courses, in your
career, and in other aspects of your life… for the rest of your life. This is a key theme of my teaching philosophy and
a key aspect in every course I design.

Another key theme in my courses is encouraging you to focus on your own personal growth during the semester
(rather than reinforcing the ‘study → grade → study → grade → study’ [repeat] mentality). So, I’ll introduce a key
skill each week, then teach a specific and language-related skill, then give you activities to help you develop your
skills. This is the focus: developing skills. If you don’t have a certain skill set yet, I want you to take your first steps. If
you have that skill set, I want you to work on improving it. Every one of you is a little bit different from everyone
else… and that’s awesome! This means that everyone in class will have a different collection of skills, and will have
different levels of ability in each individual skill. Tailor this class to suit your needs… always focus on improving!

Okay, summary time

The modern world is complex. On the other hand, riding the subway in Seoul is complex, too… if you don’t know
how to do it. We’re going to explore some skills necessary to be competent and happy in modern times.

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(02a) The Subject Matter of ELT
Source: Scrivener, J. (2015). Learning teaching: the essential guide to English language teaching. [Oxford]: Macmillan Education.

What exactly are we teaching? What is the subject matter of language teaching?

An outsider might imagine that the content would comprise two major elements, namely knowledge of the
language’s grammar and knowledge of lots of vocabulary. Of course, these do form an important part of what is
taught / learned, but it is important to realise that someone learning a language needs far more than ‘in-the-head’
knowledge of grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to use language successfully. In staff rooms, you’ll find
that teachers typically classify the key subject matter of language teaching into ‘language systems’ and ‘language
skills’. There are other important subject areas as well (including ‘learning better ways of learning’, ‘exam
techniques’, ‘working with and learning about other people’).

Language systems
We can analyse a sentence such as Pass me the book in different ways. We could consider:
• the sounds (phonology);
• the meaning of the individual words or groups of words (lexis or vocabulary);
• how the words interact with each other within the sentence (grammar);
• the use to which the words are put in particular situations (function).

If we extend our language sample into a complete (short) conversation, e.g.,

A: Pass me the book.
B: Mary put it in her bag.

then we have an additional area for analysis, namely the way that communication makes sense beyond the
individual phrase or sentence, analysing how the sentences relate (or don’t relate) to each other (known as
discourse). Figure 1.6 shows a brief analysis of the language sample from each of these viewpoints.

Phonological The stress is probably on book, but also possible (with different meanings) on Pass or
me. (If you stress one of those other words, you can change the sentence’s meaning.)
The words me and the probably have a weak vowel sound.
Pass = give; hand over; present me = reference to speaker
Lexical the book = object made of paper, containing words and/or pictures and conveying
information
Grammatical Verb (imperative) + first person object pronoun + definite article + noun
Functional A ‘request’ or ‘order’ (you are ‘requesting’ them do something: to pass the book
Although not a direct transparent answer to the request, we can still draw a meaning
from this reply. The word it, referring to the book, helps us to make a connection to
the request. Assuming that ‘Mary put it in her bag’ is intended as a genuine response
to the request, it may suggest a reason why the book cannot be passed (e.g. ‘I can’t
Discoursal
because Mary took the book with her’). In order to fully understand the meaning, we
would need to know more about the situational context (i.e. who is talking, where,
etc.) and more about the surrounding conversation (i.e. what knowledge is assumed
to be known or shared between the speakers).
Figure 1.6: Analysis of the language sample “Pass me the book” from the

So, we have five language systems, though all are simply different ways of looking at the same thing. If we are
considering teaching an item of language, one thing we need to decide is which system(s) we are going to offer our
learners information about. We might plan a lesson focused on only one area, e.g. grammar, or we might deal with
two, three or more. An example of a commonly combined systems focus in many language lessons would be:
grammar (the language structure) + pronunciation (how to say it) + function (how it is used)

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Task 1.8 Recognising language systems

Imagine that you intend to do some teaching using this piece of language: Can you play the guitar? Match some
points you might focus on with the correct system name:
1. the construction can + pronoun a) function
2. the meaning of play and guitar b) discourse
3. variations, eg strong /kaen ju:/vs weak /kan ja/, etc. c) lexis
4. asking about ability d) grammar
5. typical question-&-reply sequences containing this language e) pronunciation

Answers: 1d, 2c, 3e, 4a, 5b

Task 1.9 Distinguishing language systems

You want to teach a lesson contrasting two potentially confusing areas of language. Classify each of the following
teaching points as G for grammatical, L.for lexical, P for phonological, F for functional. (Example: a house compared
to a flat = L (lexical)

1. I went to Paris compared to I've been to Paris 5. Sorry compared to Excuse me

2. Lend us a fiver compared to Could you possibly lend me £5? 6. hut compared to hat
3. library compared to bookshop 7. impotent compared to important
4. woman compared to women 8. some compared to any

Answers: 1G, 2F, 3L, 4G/P, 5F, 6P (changing vowel sound), 7P (changing words stress)/L, 8G

Language Skills
As well as working with the language systems (which we can think of as what we know, i.e., ‘up-in-the-head’
knowledge), we also need to pay attention to what we do with language. These are the language skills. Teachers
normally think of there being four important macro language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Listening
and reading are called receptive skills (the reader or listener receives information but does not produce it); speaking
and writing, on the other hand, are the productive skills. Skills are commonly used interactively and in combination
rather than in isolation, especially speaking and listening. It’s arguable that other things (e.g. thinking, using memory
and mediating) are also language skills.

Language systems Language skills

knowing doing
Phonology Speaking
Productive
Lexis Writing
Grammar
Function Reading
Receptive
Discourse Listening
Figure 1.7 Language systems and skills

The main four skills are referred to as macro because any one of them could be analysed down to smaller
micro skills by defining more precisely what exactly is being done, how it is being done, the genre of material, etc.
For example:

Macro
Listening
skill
Some • Understanding the gist of what is heard, e.g. Who is talking? Where are they?
micro What are they doing? What is their relationship? How do they feel?
skills • Understanding precise information re quantity, reference numbers, prices,
etc. when listening to a business telephone call where a client wants to place
an order.
• Compensating for words and phrases not heard clearly in an informal pub
conversation by hypothesising what they are, based on understanding of the
content of the rest of a conversation and predictions of likely content.
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The importance of skills work
Don’t underestimate the importance of skills work. Not every lesson needs to teach new words or new
grammar. Lessons also need to be planned to give students opportunities to practise and improve their language
skills. Skills work is not something to add in at the end of a five-year course in English. There is no need to wait for
extensive knowledge before daring to embark on listening and speaking work. On the contrary, it is something so
essential that it needs to be at the heart of a course from the start. Even a beginner with one day’s English will be
able to practise speaking and listening usefully. For more on skills work see Chapter 9 Productive skills and Chapter
10 Receptive skills.

A purpose-based view of course content

Another way of looking at possible course content is to consider the communicative purposes that students
need language for. The Common European Framework (see page 147) focuses on what learners can do with
language. For example, can an individual learner successfully attend company planning meetings? Or take notes in
physics lectures at university? Or give unambiguous instructions to junior doctors on a ward? An analysis of such
can-do requirements suggests a different kind of course content, one based around students planning, undertaking
and reflecting on tasks that reflect these real-life purposes. This course content would clearly include systems and
skills work, but would be organised around this key idea of real-world uses.

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 (03a) Song at Sunset
By Walt Whitman originally from Leaves of Grass
Source: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/293

1 SPLENDOR of ended day floating and filling me,

2 Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past,
3 Inflating my throat, you divine average,
4 You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing.
5
6 Open mouth of my soul uttering gladness,
7 Eyes of my soul seeing perfection,
8 Natural life of me faithfully praising things,
9 Corroborating forever the triumph of things.
10
11 Illustrious every one!
12 Illustrious what we name space, sphere of unnumber'd spirits,
13 Illustrious the mystery of motion in all beings, even the tiniest
14 insect,
15 Illustrious the attribute of speech, the senses, the body,
16 Illustrious the passing light—illustrious the pale reflection on the
17 new moon in the western sky,
18 Illustrious whatever I see or hear or touch, to the last.
19
20 Good in all,
21 In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,
22
23 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 375] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
24
25 In the annual return of the seasons,
26 In the hilarity of youth,
27 In the strength and flush of manhood,
28 In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
29 In the superb vistas of death.
30
31 Wonderful to depart!
32 Wonderful to be here!
33 The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
34 To breathe the air, how delicious!

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35 To speak—to walk—to seize something by the hand!
36 To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color'd flesh!
37 To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
38 To be this incredible God I am!
39 To have gone forth among other Gods, these men and women I
40 love.
41
42 Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself!
43 How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around!
44 How the clouds pass silently overhead!
45 How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars,
46 dart on and on!
47 How the water sports and sings! (surely it is alive!)
48 How the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches
49 and leaves!
50 (Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living
51 soul.)
52
53 O amazement of things—even the least particle!
54 O spirituality of things!
55 O strain musical flowing through ages and continents, now reaching
56 me and America!
57 I take your strong chords, intersperse them, and cheerfully pass
58 them forward.
59
60 I too carol the sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting,
61 I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
62 growths of the earth,
63 I too have felt the resistless call of myself.
64
65 As I steam'd down the Mississippi,
66 As I wander'd over the prairies,
67 As I have lived, as I have look'd through my windows my eyes,
68 As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in
69 the east,
70
71 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 376] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
72
73

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74 As I bathed on the beach of the Eastern Sea, and again on the
75 beach of the Western Sea,
76 As I roam'd the streets of inland Chicago, whatever streets I have
77 roam'd,
78 Or cities or silent woods, or even amid the sights of war,
79 Wherever I have been I have charged myself with contentment
80 and triumph.
81
82 I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,
83 I sing the endless finalés of things,
84 I say Nature continues, glory continues,
85 I praise with electric voice,
86 For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
87 And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the
88 universe.
89
90 O setting sun! though the time has come,
91 I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.

Note: To Intensive English students – I’ve included scanned images from a printed version of Leaves of Grass so you
can see the authentic layout. These images can also be found on the website I included above.

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(04a) De-Constructing Racism One Headline at a Time
By: Baratunde Rafiq Thurston Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZgkjEdMbSw

Setting up the talk (1) - self introduction while outlining a topic

0:12 My parents gave me an extraordinary name:
0:17 Baratunde Rafiq Thurston.
0:23 Now, Baratunde is based on a Yoruba name from Nigeria,
0:26 but we're not Nigerian.
0:28 (Laughter)
0:29 That's just how black my mama was.
0:31 (Laughter)
0:32 Get this boy the blackest name possible. What does the book say?
0:35 (Laughter)
0:36 Rafiq is an Arabic name, but we are not Arabs.
0:40 My mom just wanted me to have difficulty boarding planes in the 21st century.
0:45 (Laughter)
0:46 She foresaw America's turn toward nativism.
0:48 She was a black futurist.
0:50 (Laughter)
0:52 Thurston is a British name, but we are not British.
0:57 Shoutout to the multigenerational, dehumanizing economic institution
1:00 of American chattel slavery, though.
1:03 Also, Thurston makes for a great Starbucks name.
1:05 Really expedites the process.
1:07 (Laughter)

Setting up the talk (2) - his mother, his inspiration

1:11 My mother was a renaissance woman.
1:14 Arnita Lorraine Thurston
1:17 was a computer programmer, former domestic worker,
1:20 survivor of sexual assault,
1:22 an artist and an activist.
1:24 She prepared me for this world with lessons in black history,
1:29 in martial arts, in urban farming,
1:31 and then she sent me in the seventh grade to the private Sidwell Friends School,
1:35 where US presidents send their daughters,
1:38 and where she sent me looking like this.
1:40 (Laughter)

Setting up the talk (3) - his earlier experiences

1:44 I had two key tasks going to that school:
1:47 don't lose your blackness and don't lose your glasses.
1:49 This accomplished both.
1:51 (Laughter)
1:55 Sidwell was a great place to learn the arts and the sciences,
1:58 but also the art of living amongst whiteness.
2:03 That would prepare me for life later at Harvard,
2:06 or doing corporate consulting,
2:07 or for my jobs at "The Daily Show" and "The Onion."
2:10 I would write down many of these lessons in my memoir, "How to Be Black,"
2:13 which if you haven't read yet, makes you a racist, because --
2:16 (Laughter)
2:18 you've had plenty of time to read the book.

Framing the talk: the US, race, and law enforcement

2:23 But America insists on reminding me
2:26 and teaching me
2:27 what it means to be black in America.

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 2:30 It's December 2018,
2:32 I'm with my fiancé in the suburbs of Wisconsin.
2:36 We are visiting her parents, both of whom are white,
2:39 which makes her white.
2:41 That's how it works. I don't make the rules.
2:43 (Laughter)
2:44 She's had some drinks, so I drive us in her parents' car,
2:48 and we get pulled over by the police.
2:51 I'm scared.
2:53 I turn on the flashing lights to indicate compliance.
2:56 I pull over slowly
2:58 under the brightest streetlight I can find
3:00 in case I need witnesses or dashcam footage.
3:05 We get out my identification, the car registration,
3:08 lay it out in the open, roll down the windows,
3:10 my hands are placed on the steering wheel,
3:13 all before the officer exits the vehicle.
3:17 This is how to stay alive.
3:21 As we wait, I think about these headlines --
3:24 Police shoot another unarmed black person --
3:28 and I don't want to join them.
3:31 The good news is, our officer was friendly.
3:34 She told us our tags were expired.
3:37 So to all the white parents out there,
3:39 if your child is involved with a person
3:41 whose skin tone is rated Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson or darker --
3:44 (Laughter)
3:47 you need to get that car inspected, update the paperwork every time we visit.
3:51 That's just common courtesy.
3:52 (Laughter)
3:53 (Applause)
3:57 I got lucky.
3:59 I got a law enforcement professional.
4:02 I survived something that should not require survival.

Focusing the talk: the US, race, and law enforcement AND news headlines
4:07 And I think about this series of stories --
4:10 Police shoot another unarmed black person --
4:13 and that season when those stories popped up everywhere.
4:17 I would scroll through my feed
4:19 and I would see a baby announcement photo.
4:22 I'd see an ad for a product
4:24 I had just whispered to a friend about yesterday.
4:27 I would see a video of a police officer gunning down someone
4:30 who looked just like me.
4:32 And I'd see a think piece
4:34 about how millennials have replaced sex with avocado toast.
4:37 (Laughter)
4:38 It was a confusing time.
4:41 Those stories kept popping up,
4:43 but in 2018, those stories got changed out for a different type of story,
4:49 stories like, "White Woman Calls Cops On Black Woman Waiting For An Uber."
4:54 That was Brooklyn Becky.
4:56 Then there was, "White Woman Calls Police
4:58 On Eight-Year-Old Black Girl Selling Water."
5:00 That was Permit Patty.
5:02 Then there was, "Woman Calls Police
5:03 On Black Family BBQing At Lake In Oakland."
5:06 That was now infamous BBQ Becky.
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 5:10 And I contend that these stories of living while black
5:13 are actually progress.
5:15 We used to find out after the extrajudicial police killings.
5:19 Now, we're getting video of people calling 911.
5:22 We're moving upstream,
5:23 closer to the problem and closer to the solution.
5:27 So I started a collection
5:30 of as many of these stories as I could find.
5:33 I built an evolving, still-growing database
5:35 at baratunde.com/livingwhileblack.

Discourse Analysis (DA): the portrayal of African-Americans in the language of the news headlines
5:38 Seeking understanding, I realized the process
5:41 was really diagramming sentences to understand these headlines.
5:46 And I want to thank my Sidwell English teacher Erica Berry
5:49 and all English teachers.
5:51 You have given us tools to fight for our own freedom.
5:55 What I found was a process to break down the headline
5:58 and understand the consistent layers
6:01 in each one:
6:02 a subject takes an action against a target engaged in some activity,
6:07 so that "White Woman Calls Police On Eight-Year-Old Black Girl"
6:11 is the same as "White Man Calls Police On Black Woman Using Neighborhood Pool"
6:16 is the same as "Woman Calls Cops On Black Oregon Lawmaker
6:19 Campaigning In Her District."
6:22 They're the same.
6:25 Diagramming the sentences allowed me to diagram the white supremacy
6:29 which allowed such sentences to be true,
6:31 and I will pause to define my terms.
6:34 When I say "white supremacy,"
6:35 I'm not just talking about Nazis
6:38 or white power activists,
6:40 and I'm definitely not saying that all white people are racist.
6:44 What I'm referring to
6:46 is a system of structural advantage that favors white people over others
6:51 in social, economic and political arenas.
6:54 It's what Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative
6:57 calls the narrative of racial difference,
7:00 the story we told ourselves to justify slavery and Jim Crow
7:05 and mass incarceration and beyond.

DA game level 0 - introduction and training: real or fake?

7:07 So when I saw this pattern repeating,
7:10 I got angry,
7:12 but I also got inspired
7:15 to create a game,
7:17 a game of words that would allow me to transform this traumatic exposure
7:22 into more of a healing experience.
7:25 I'm going to talk you through the game.
7:27 The first level is a training level, and I need your participation.
7:31 Our objective: to determine if this is real or fake.
7:35 Did this happen or not?
7:36 Here is the example:
7:38 Catholic University Law Librarian Calls Police On Student
7:42 For 'Being Argumentative.'
7:44 Clap your hands if you think this is real.
7:46 (Applause)
7:49 Clap your hands if you think this is fake.
7:52 (Applause)
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 7:55 The reals have it, unfortunately,
7:58 and a point of information,
8:00 being argumentative in a law library
8:02 is the exact right place to do that.
8:05 (Laughter)
8:06 This student should be promoted to professor.
8:09 Training level complete, so we move on to the real levels.

DA game level 1 - reversing the roles

8:12 Level one, our objective is simple:
8:15 reverse the roles.
8:17 That means "Woman Calls Cops On Black Oregon Lawmaker"
8:20 becomes "Black Oregon Lawmaker Calls Cops On Woman."
8:24 That means "White Man Calls Police On Black Woman
8:26 Using Neighborhood Pool"
8:28 becomes "Black Woman Calls Police On White Man Using Neighborhood Pool."
8:33 How do you like them reverse racist apples?
8:36 That's it, level one complete,

DA game level 2 - increasing the believability of the reversal

8:39 and so we level up to level two,
8:41 where our objective is to increase the believability of the reversal.
8:46 Let's face it, a black woman calling police on a white man using a pool
8:49 isn't absurd enough,
8:51 but what if that white man was trying to touch her hair without asking,
8:56 or maybe he was making oat milk while riding a unicycle,
9:02 or maybe he's just talking over everyone in a meeting.
9:05 (Laughter)
9:06 We've all been there, right?
9:08 Seriously, we've all been there.
9:11 So that's it, level two complete.
9:14 But it comes with a warning:
9:17 simply reversing the flow of injustice is not justice.
9:21 That is vengeance, that is not our mission,
9:24 that's a different game so we level up to level three,
9:28 where the objective is to change the action,
9:31 also known as "calling the police is not your only option
9:35 OMG, what is wrong with you people!"
9:36 (Applause)

"Pausing" the DA game - discourse analysis lesson; focusing on the key message
9:38 And I need to pause the game to remind us of the structure.
9:42 A subject takes an action against a target engaged in some activity.
9:47 White Woman Calls Police On Black Real Estate Investor Inspecting His Own Property.
9:52 California Safeway Calls Cops On Black Woman Donating Food To The Homeless.
9:57 Gold Club Twice Calls Cops On Black Women For Playing Too Slow.
10:03 In all these cases, the subject is usually white,
10:07 the target is usually black,
10:09 and the activities are anything,
10:11 from sitting in a Starbucks
10:14 to using the wrong type of barbecue
10:17 to napping
10:18 to walking "agitated" on the way to work,
10:21 which I just call "walking to work."
10:24 (Laughter)
10:25 And, my personal favorite,
10:27 not stopping his dog from humping her dog,
10:31 which is clearly a case for dog police,
10:34 not people police.
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10:36 All of these activities add up to living.
10:42 Our existence is being interpreted as crime.
10:47 Now, this is the obligatory moment in the presentation where I have to say,
10:50 not everything is about race.
10:53 Crime is a thing, should be reported,
10:55 but ask yourself, do we need armed men to show up and resolve this situation,
11:01 because when they show up for me,
11:04 it's different.
11:06 We know that police officers
11:08 use force more with black people than with white people,
11:13 and we are learning the role of 911 calls in this.
11:17 Thanks to preliminary research from the Center for Policing Equity,
11:20 we're learning that in some cities,
11:22 most of the interactions between cops and citizens
11:25 is due to 911 calls,
11:26 not officer-initiated stops,
11:28 and most of the violence, the use of force by police on citizens,
11:32 is in response to those calls.
11:35 Further, when those officers responding to calls use force,
11:39 that increases in areas
11:41 where the percentage of the white population
11:43 has also increased,
11:45 aka gentrification,
11:47 aka unicycles and oat milk,
11:50 aka when BBQ Becky feels threatened,
11:53 she becomes a threat to me in my own neighborhood,
11:57 which forces me and people like me
11:59 to police ourselves.
12:01 We quiet ourselves, we walk on eggshells,
12:04 we maybe pull over to the side of the road
12:07 under the brightest light we can find
12:09 so that our murder
12:11 might be caught cleanly on camera,
12:14 and we do this because we live in a system
12:17 in which white people can too easily call on deadly force
12:21 to ensure their comfort.
12:24 (Applause)
12:30 The California Safeway
12:31 didn't just call cops on black woman donating food to homeless.
12:36 They ordered armed, unaccountable men upon her.
12:39 They essentially called in a drone strike.
12:43 This is weaponized discomfort,
12:46 and it is not new.
12:48 From 1877 to 1950,
12:51 there were at least 4,400 documented racial terror lynchings of black people
12:56 in the United States.
12:58 They had headlines as well.
13:01 Rev. T.A. Allen was lynched in Hernando, Mississippi
13:04 for organizing local sharecroppers.
13:07 Oliver Moore was lynched in Edgecomb County, North Carolina,
13:10 for frightening a white girl.
13:12 Nathan Bird was lynched near Luling, Texas,
13:14 for refusing to turn his son over to a mob.
13:18 We need to change the action,
13:20 whether that action is "lynches"
13:22 or "calls police."
13:24 And now that I have shortened the distance between those two,
13:28 let's get back to our game, to our mission.

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DA game level 3 - change the actions (in headlines, but also in life)
13:31 Our objective in level three is to change the action.
13:34 So what if, instead of
13:35 Calls Cops On Black Woman Donating Food To Homeless,
13:38 that California Safeway simply thanks her.
13:42 Thanking is far cheaper than bringing law enforcement to the scene.
13:45 (Applause)
13:47 Or, instead,
13:49 they could give the food they would have wasted to her,
13:52 upped their civic cred.
13:54 Or, the white woman who called the police on the eight-year-old black girl,
13:58 she could have bought all the inventory from that little black girl,
14:01 support a small business.
14:03 And the white woman who called the police on the black real estate investor,
14:07 we would all be better off, the cops agree,
14:09 if she had simply ignored him and minded her own damn business.
14:12 (Laughter)
14:14 Minding one's own damn business is an excellent choice, excellent choice.
14:18 Choose it more often.

DA game bonus level - final theme of inclusion: looking for other systematic inequalities
14:20 Level three is complete, but there is a final bonus level,
14:25 where the objective is inclusion.
14:27 We have also seen headlines like this:
14:30 Powerful Man Masturbates In Front Of Young Women
14:33 Visiting His Office.
14:35 What an odd choice for powerful man to make.
14:39 So many other actions available to him.
14:42 (Laughter)
14:43 Like, such as, "listens to,"
14:46 mentors,
14:48 inspired by, starts joint venture, everybody rich now.
14:52 (Laughter)
14:53 I want to live in that world of everybody rich now,
14:56 but because of his poor choice, we are all in a poorer world.
15:01 Doesn't have to be this way.
15:03 This word game reminded me that there is a structure to white supremacy,
15:07 as there is to misogyny,
15:09 as there is to all systemic abuses of power.
15:12 Structure is what makes them systemic.
15:17 I'm asking people here
15:19 to see the structure,
15:21 where the power is in it,
15:23 and even more importantly to see the humanity
15:26 of those of us made targets by this structure.
15:31 I am here because I was loved and invested in and protected and lucky,
15:37 because I went to the right schools, I'm semifamous, mostly happy,
15:40 meditate twice a day,
15:42 and yet,
15:44 I walk around in fear,
15:46 because I know that someone seeing me as a threat
15:50 can become a threat to my life,
15:53 and I am tired.
15:56 I am tired of carrying
15:57 this invisible burden of other people's fears,
16:01 and many of us are,
16:03 and we shouldn't have to,
16:05 because we can change this,

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(05a) Erasers are Wonderful (The Oatmeal on Creativity 1/8)
The Oatmeal – Erasers are wonderful
source: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_erasers
note: The original source has foul language for the purpose of humor, I’ve censored it out in this
version. If you wish to see the original, follow the link above. (Also, there are 7 more chapters.)

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(05a alt) Do schools kill creativity?
By: Ken Robinson
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

0:27 Good morning. How are you?

0:29 (Audience) Good.
0:31 It's been great, hasn't it?
0:33 I've been blown away by the whole thing.
0:35 In fact, I'm leaving.
0:37 (Laughter)
0:43 There have been three themes running through the conference,
0:46 which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
0:48 One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity
0:53 in all of the presentations that we've had
0:55 and in all of the people here;
0:57 just the variety of it and the range of it.
1:01 The second is that it's put us in a place
1:03 where we have no idea what's going to happen
1:05 in terms of the future.
1:07 No idea how this may play out.
1:10 I have an interest in education.
1:11 Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education.
1:16 Don't you?
1:17 I find this very interesting.
1:19 If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education --
1:23 actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.
1:25 (Laughter)
1:29 If you work in education, you're not asked.
1:32 (Laughter)
1:35 And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me.
1:39 But if you are, and you say to somebody,
1:41 you know, they say, "What do you do?"
1:43 and you say you work in education,
1:45 you can see the blood run from their face.
1:47 They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?"
1:48 (Laughter)
1:51 My one night out all week.
1:52 (Laughter)
1:55 But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall,
1:58 because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?
2:02 Like religion and money and other things.
2:05 So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do.
2:10 We have a huge vested interest in it,
2:11 partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future
2:15 that we can't grasp.
2:16 If you think of it,
2:18 children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.
2:25 Nobody has a clue,
2:26 despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days,
2:30 what the world will look like in five years' time.
2:33 And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it.
2:35 So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
2:37 And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless,
2:41 on the really extraordinary capacities that children have --
2:46 their capacities for innovation.
2:49 I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she?
2:51 Just seeing what she could do.
2:53 And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak,
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2:59 exceptional in the whole of childhood.
3:02 What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication
3:04 who found a talent.
3:06 And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents,
3:08 and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
3:11 So I want to talk about education,
3:13 and I want to talk about creativity.
3:14 My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy,
3:21 and we should treat it with the same status.
3:23 (Applause)
3:24 Thank you.
3:26 (Applause)
3:30 That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.
3:32 (Laughter)
3:34 So, 15 minutes left.
3:36 (Laughter)
3:39 Well, I was born ...
3:41 (Laughter)
3:45 I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it --
3:47 of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.
3:50 She was six, and she was at the back, drawing,
3:52 and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention,
3:55 and in this drawing lesson, she did.
3:56 The teacher was fascinated.
3:58 She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?"
4:01 And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God."
4:04 And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like."
4:07 And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
4:10 (Laughter)
4:21 When my son was four in England --
4:24 actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.
4:26 (Laughter)
4:28 If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year.
4:31 He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?
4:34 (Laughter)
4:35 No, it was big, it was a big story.
4:37 Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.
4:39 (Laughter)
4:41 Nativity II.
4:42 But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.
4:46 We considered this to be one of the lead parts.
4:49 We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts:
4:52 James Robinson IS Joseph!
4:53 (Laughter)
4:54 He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in?
4:58 They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh.
5:00 This really happened.
5:02 We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence,
5:05 because we talked to the little boy afterward and said,
5:07 You OK with that? They said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?"
5:10 They just switched.
5:11 The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads.
5:15 They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold."
5:18 And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh."
5:20 And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
5:22 (Laughter)
5:35 What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.
5:38 If they don't know, they'll have a go.
5:42 Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
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5:45 I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.
5:49 What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong,
5:53 you'll never come up with anything original --
5:55 if you're not prepared to be wrong.
5:57 And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.
6:02 They have become frightened of being wrong.
6:04 And we run our companies like this.
6:06 We stigmatize mistakes.
6:08 And we're now running national education systems
6:10 where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
6:13 And the result is that we are educating people
6:16 out of their creative capacities.
6:19 Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists.
6:23 The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
6:26 I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity,
6:30 we grow out of it.
6:31 Or rather, we get educated out of it.
6:34 So why is this?
6:37 I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago.
6:39 In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.
6:42 So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was.
6:45 (Laughter)
6:47 Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield,
6:49 just outside Stratford,
6:50 which is where Shakespeare's father was born.
6:53 Are you struck by a new thought? I was.
6:55 You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you?
6:58 Do you?
6:59 Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?
7:02 Shakespeare being seven?
7:03 I never thought of it.
7:04 I mean, he was seven at some point.
7:06 He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?
7:08 (Laughter)
7:15 How annoying would that be?
7:17 (Laughter)
7:24 Must try harder.
7:26 (Laughter)
7:30 Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!"
7:33 To William Shakespeare.
7:34 And put the pencil down!
7:36 (Laughter)
7:37 And stop speaking like that.
7:38 (Laughter)
7:42 It's confusing everybody.
7:43 (Laughter)
7:48 Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles,
7:54 and I just want to say a word about the transition.
7:56 Actually, my son didn't want to come.
7:58 I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16.
8:00 He didn't want to come to Los Angeles.
8:03 He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England.
8:06 This was the love of his life, Sarah.
8:09 He'd known her for a month.
8:11 (Laughter)
8:12 Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary,
8:15 because it's a long time when you're 16.
8:17 He was really upset on the plane.
8:19 He said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah."
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 8:21 And we were rather pleased about that, frankly --
8:24 (Laughter)
8:32 because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
8:35 (Laughter)
8:41 But something strikes you when you move to America
8:43 and travel around the world:
8:44 every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.
8:48 Every one. Doesn't matter where you go.
8:50 You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.
8:52 At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities.
8:55 At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
8:58 And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts.
9:02 Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools
9:05 than drama and dance.
9:06 There isn't an education system on the planet
9:08 that teaches dance every day to children
9:10 the way we teach them mathematics.
9:12 Why?
9:13 Why not?
9:14 I think this is rather important.
9:16 I think math is very important, but so is dance.
9:18 Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do.
9:21 We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
9:24 (Laughter)
9:27 Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up,
9:29 we start to educate them progressively from the waist up.
9:32 And then we focus on their heads.
9:34 And slightly to one side.
9:37 If you were to visit education as an alien
9:39 and say "What's it for, public education?"
9:42 I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output,
9:44 who really succeeds by this,
9:46 who does everything they should,
9:48 who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners --
9:50 I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education
9:54 throughout the world
9:55 is to produce university professors.
9:57 Isn't it?
9:58 They're the people who come out the top.
10:00 And I used to be one, so there.
10:02 (Laughter)
10:06 And I like university professors,
10:08 but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up
10:10 as the high-water mark of all human achievement.
10:13 They're just a form of life.
10:15 Another form of life.
10:16 But they're rather curious.
10:18 And I say this out of affection for them:
10:19 there's something curious about professors.
10:22 In my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads.
10:25 They live up there and slightly to one side.
10:28 They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way.
10:31 They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
10:35 (Laughter)
10:41 Don't they?
10:42 It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
10:44 (Laughter)
10:50 If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way,
10:53 get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics
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10:57 and pop into the discotheque on the final night.
10:59 (Laughter)
11:02 And there, you will see it.
11:03 Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.
11:08 (Laughter)
11:10 Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it.
11:14 (Laughter)
11:16 Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.
11:20 And there's a reason.
11:21 Around the world, there were no public systems of education,
11:24 really, before the 19th century.
11:27 They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
11:30 So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
11:32 Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.
11:37 So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school
11:40 when you were a kid,
11:41 things you liked,
11:42 on the grounds you would never get a job doing that.
11:44 Is that right?
11:46 Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician;
11:48 don't do art, you won't be an artist.
11:50 Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken.
11:53 The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
11:55 And the second is academic ability,
11:57 which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence,
12:00 because the universities design the system in their image.
12:03 If you think of it,
12:04 the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process
12:07 of university entrance.
12:09 And the consequence is that many highly talented,
12:11 brilliant, creative people think they're not,
12:13 because the thing they were good at at school
12:16 wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
12:18 And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
12:20 In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO,
12:23 more people worldwide will be graduating through education
12:26 than since the beginning of history.
12:28 More people.
12:29 And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about:
12:32 technology and its transformational effect on work,
12:35 and demography and the huge explosion in population.
12:37 Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.
12:40 Isn't that true?
12:41 When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.
12:44 If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.
12:47 And I didn't want one, frankly.
12:50 (Laughter)
12:51 But now kids with degrees are often heading home
12:55 to carry on playing video games,
12:57 because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA,
13:00 and now you need a PhD for the other.
13:02 It's a process of academic inflation.
13:04 And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.
13:07 We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
13:10 We know three things about intelligence.
13:12 One, it's diverse.
13:13 We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it.
13:16 We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.
13:19 We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
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13:21 Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.
13:24 If you look at the interactions of a human brain,
13:27 as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations,
13:30 intelligence is wonderfully interactive.
13:32 The brain isn't divided into compartments.
13:34 In fact, creativity --
13:36 which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value --
13:40 more often than not comes about
13:42 through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
13:47 By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain,
13:51 called the corpus callosum.
13:52 It's thicker in women.
13:54 Following off from Helen yesterday,
13:56 this is probably why women are better at multitasking.
13:59 Because you are, aren't you?
14:01 There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
14:04 If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often ...
14:09 thankfully.
14:10 (Laughter)
14:13 No, she's good at some things.
14:14 But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone,
14:17 she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling --
14:20 (Laughter)
14:21 she's doing open-heart surgery over here.
14:23 If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out,
14:26 the phone's on the hook,
14:27 if she comes in, I get annoyed.
14:29 I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here."
14:32 (Laughter)
14:39 Give me a break.
14:40 (Laughter)
14:42 Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing,
14:44 If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?
14:48 Remember that old chestnut?
14:49 I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said,
14:52 If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him,
14:56 is he still wrong?
14:57 (Laughter)
15:05 And the third thing about intelligence is,
15:07 it's distinct.
15:09 I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany,"
15:11 which is based on a series of interviews with people
15:14 about how they discovered their talent.
15:15 I'm fascinated by how people got to be there.
15:18 It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman
15:21 who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne.
15:24 Have you heard of her? Some have.
15:25 She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work.
15:28 She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera."
15:30 She's wonderful.
15:31 I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.
15:34 (Laughter)
15:36 Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?"
15:39 It was interesting.
15:41 When she was at school, she was really hopeless.
15:43 And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said,
15:46 We think Gillian has a learning disorder.
15:48 She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting.
15:50 I think now they'd say she had ADHD.
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15:52 Wouldn't you?
15:53 But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point.
15:57 It wasn't an available condition.
15:59 (Laughter)
16:03 People weren't aware they could have that.
16:05 (Laughter)
16:07 Anyway, she went to see this specialist.
16:11 So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother,
16:15 and she was led and sat on this chair at the end,
16:17 and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes,
16:19 while this man talked to her mother
16:21 about all the problems Gillian was having at school,
16:23 because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on.
16:27 Little kid of eight.
16:28 In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said,
16:31 I've listened to all these things your mother's told me.
16:34 I need to speak to her privately.
16:36 Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long,
16:38 and they went and left her.
16:41 But as they went out of the room,
16:42 he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk.
16:45 And when they got out of the room,
16:47 he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her."
16:49 And the minute they left the room,
16:52 she was on her feet, moving to the music.
16:54 And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said,
16:58 Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick.
17:00 She's a dancer.
17:03 Take her to a dance school.
17:04 I said, "What happened?"
17:06 She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was.
17:09 We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me --
17:11 people who couldn't sit still,
17:14 people who had to move to think."
17:17 Who had to move to think.
17:18 They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary.
17:22 She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School.
17:25 She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.
17:28 She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School,
17:31 founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company,
17:33 met Andrew Lloyd Webber.
17:34 She's been responsible for
17:35 some of the most successful musical theater productions in history,
17:38 she's given pleasure to millions,
17:40 and she's a multimillionaire.
17:41 Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
17:45 (Applause)
17:53 What I think it comes to is this:
17:55 Al Gore spoke the other night
17:57 about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.
18:02 I believe our only hope for the future
18:04 is to adopt a new conception of human ecology,
18:08 one in which we start to reconstitute our conception
18:10 of the richness of human capacity.
18:13 Our education system has mined our minds
18:16 in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity.
18:20 And for the future, it won't serve us.
18:22 We have to rethink the fundamental principles
18:25 on which we're educating our children.
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18:27 There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said,
18:29 If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth,
18:34 within 50 years, all life on Earth would end.
18:38 If all human beings disappeared from the Earth,
18:41 within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish.
18:45 And he's right.
18:47 What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.
18:51 We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely,
18:55 and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about.
18:59 And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities
19:02 for the richness they are
19:04 and seeing our children for the hope that they are.
19:07 And our task is to educate their whole being,
19:10 so they can face this future.
19:11 By the way -- we may not see this future,
19:14 but they will.
19:15 And our job is to help them make something of it.
19:18 Thank you very much.
19:19 (Applause)

Page 33
(07a) A Portrait of the Author as a Learning Junkie
Adapted from: Kaufman, J. (2013). The first 20 hours: how to learn anything-- fast. Chapter 1.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes
planning my day difficult.
—E. B.WHITE, ESSAYIST AND AUTHOR OF CHARLOTTE’S WEB AND THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

Hi. My name is Josh Kaufman, and I’m a learning addict.

My home and office shelves are piled high with books, tools, and unused equipment of all sorts, most of
which are slowly accumulating dust.
I have a “to learn” list hundreds of items long. My Amazon.com shopping cart currently has 241 items in
it—all books I want to read. I can’t walk into a bookstore without leaving with three or four new books, to
be added to the 852 volumes I already own.
Every day, I come up an idea for another project or experiment, which I add to my ever-growing
“someday/maybe” list. Looking at everything I want to learn how to do feels overwhelming, so I don’t look
at the list very often.
I want to learn how to improve my publishing business. I want to learn how to shoot and edit videos. I
want to produce an audio program. I want to learn how to give better seminars and teach better courses.
I have ideas for a new product, but I don’t know how to build it. I have ideas for new computer programs,
but I don’t know how to create them. I have more potential writing project ideas in my head than the time
and energy to write them.
I want to learn how to draw. I want to learn how to white-water kayak. I want to learn fly fishing. I want
to learn rock climbing. I want to be able to play the guitar, the ukulele, the piano, and the electric violin.
There are games I’ve been interested in for years, like Go, but I haven’t learned how to play them. I have
games that I already know how to play, like chess, but I’m not very good at them, so they’re not much fun,
and I don’t play them very often.
I like the idea of playing golf, but every game I’ve played turned into a stoic exercise in laughing off
embarrassment. (I usually say I play marathon golf: by the end of eighteen holes, I’ve run a marathon.)
It seems as though every day I add some new skill to the list of things I want to be able to do, ad
infinitum. So much to learn, so little time.
By nature, I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy. If something needs to be done, I’d rather give it a go myself
than look for help. Even if someone else could do it faster or better, I’m reluctant to rob myself of the
learning experience.
To complicate matters, Kelsey, my wife, runs her own business, publishing continuing education courses
for yoga teachers. Business is good for both of us, so there’s always a lot to be done.
To make life even more interesting, we welcomed our daughter, Lela, into the world. Lela is nine months
old as I write this.

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 Before Lela was born, Kelsey and I decided that if we were going to have kids, we wanted to make raising
them ourselves a priority. One of the major reasons I quit my former management-track job at a Fortune 500
corporation was to have the flexibility to work from home, set my own schedule, and spend as much time as
possible with my family.
Kelsey and I share parenting responsibilities equally. Since we’re a two-business household, Kelsey
works in the morning, while I take care of Lela. In the afternoon, Kelsey takes care of Lela, and I work until
dinnertime. That gives me around twenty-five hours each week to work, plus whatever time I can snatch
while Lela is napping.
After Lela was born, I felt like I barely had enough time to get my work done, let alone acquire new skills.
For a learning addict, it was crazy-making.
I don’t want to give up on learning and growth completely, even with my new responsibilities. I don’t
have very much free time, but I’m willing to invest what I have as wisely as possible.
That’s what prompted my interest in what I call rapid skill acquisition: methods of learning new skills
quickly.
I want to continue to acquire new skills, but I don’t want the process to take forever. I want to pick up the
essentials quickly, so I can make noticeable progress without constantly feeling frustrated.
I’m sure you can relate. How much “free” time do you have each day, after all of your work and family
obligations are complete? Do you feel like you’d need thirty-six or forty-eight hours in a day to finally sit
down and learn something new?
There’s an old cliché: “work smarter, not harder.” As it turns out, the process of skill acquisition is not
really about the raw hours you put in … it’s what you put into those hours.

Damn You, Malcolm Gladwell

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book titled Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he set about
trying to explain what makes certain people more successful than others.
One of the ideas Gladwell mentions over and over again is what he calls the “10,000 hour rule.” Based on
research conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, expert-level performance takes,
on average, ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve.1
Ten thousand hours equals eight hours of deliberate practice every day for approximately three and a half
years, with no breaks, no weekends, and no vacations. Assuming a standard 260 working days a year with
no distractions, that’s a full-time job for almost five years, assuming you spend 100 percent of that time
exerting 100 percent of your energy and effort.
In practice, this level of focused attention is extremely taxing. Even world-class performers in
ultracompetitive fields (like music performance and professional sports) can only muster the energy for
approximately three and a half hours of deliberate practice every day. That means it can take a decade or
more to develop a skill to mastery.

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 In essence, if you want to master a new skill, Dr. Ericsson’s research indicates you’re in for a very long
haul. Being the best in the world at anything, even for a little while, requires years of relentless practice. If
you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, you’ll be overshadowed by those who do.
Outliers shot straight to the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists, and stayed there for three months.
Overnight, the “10,000 hour rule” was everywhere.
As if learning a new skill wasn’t hard enough. Not only do you have to make time for practice … but you
now also have to put in ten thousand hours? Most of us count ourselves lucky if we can set aside a few hours
a week. Why bother at all if it takes so long to be good at something?

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

Before you give up all hope, consider this.
There’s an element of Dr. Ericsson’s research that’s very easy to overlook: it’s a study of expert-level
performance. If you’re looking to become the next Tiger Woods, you’ll probably need to spend at least ten
thousand hours deliberately and systematically practicing every aspect of golf. Almost every single
professional golfer began playing at a very young age and has been practicing nonstop for at least seven
years. Developing world-class mastery takes time.
On the other hand, what if winning the PGA Tour isn’t your goal? What if you just want to be good
enough at golf that you’re able to play decently, not embarrass yourself, have a good time, and maybe have a
fighting chance to win your local country club tournament?
That’s another matter entirely. World-class mastery may take ten thousand hours of focused effort, but
developing the capacity to perform well enough for your own purposes usually requires far less of an
investment.
That’s not to discount the value of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice”: intentionally and
systematically practicing in order to improve a skill. Deliberate practice is the core of skill acquisition. The
question is how much deliberate practice is required to reach your goal. Usually, it’s much less than you
think.

Quality, Not Quantity

Embracing the idea of sufficiency is the key to rapid skill acquisition. In this book, we’re going to discuss
developing capacity, not world-class mastery. We’re going to tackle the steep part of the learning curve and
ascend it as quickly as possible.
Leave the ten thousand hours to the pros. We’re going to start with twenty hours of concentrated,
intelligent, focused effort.
We’re shooting for the results we value with a fraction of the effort. You may never win a gold medal, but
you’ll reap the rewards you care about in far less time.
If you ultimately decide to master the skill, you’ll have a better chance of success if you start with twenty
hours of rapid skill acquisition. By knowing what you’re getting into, learning the fundamentals, practicing

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intelligently, and developing a practice routine, you’ll make progress more quickly and consistently, and
you’ll achieve expert status in record time.

What Is Rapid Skill Acquisition?

Rapid skill acquisition is a process—a way of breaking down the skill you’re trying to acquire into the
smallest possible parts, identifying which of those parts are most important, then deliberately practicing
those elements first. It’s as simple as that.
Rapid skill acquisition has four major steps:

▪ Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills;

▪ Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice;
▪ Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice;
▪ Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.

That’s it. Rapid skill acquisition is not rocket science. You simply decide what to practice, figure out the
best way to practice, make time to practice, then practice until you reach your target level of performance.

There’s no magic to it—just smart, strategic effort invested in something you care about. With a little
preparation, you’ll acquire new skills rapidly, with less effort.
That’s not to say that the results will be instant. The desire for instant gratification is one of the primary
reasons people don’t acquire new skills very quickly.

The “Matrix” Misconception

Remember the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves opens his eyes, blinks a few times, and whispers “I
know kung fu”?
Sorry to break it to you: rapid skill acquisition isn’t that rapid.
Hollywood has done us a great disservice when it comes to skill acquisition. While it would certainly be
nice to be able to learn how to pilot a Bell 212 helicopter in five seconds by uploading software directly into
our brain, science is currently way behind science fiction.
Until brain uploads become a reality, “rapid” means taking considerably less time than it would typically
take to learn a skill if you went about the process as most people do: blindly, haphazardly, and
inconsistently.
The amount of time it will take you to acquire a new skill is largely a matter of how much concentrated
time you’re willing to invest in deliberate practice and smart experimentation and how good you need to
become to perform at the level you desire.
Don’t expect overnight results. Do expect that your total time invested will be much, much less than it
would otherwise be if you jumped into the process without a strategy.

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 Before we explore the method in detail, there’s something you should know: rapid skill acquisition has
nothing in common with how you “learned how to learn” in school. Academic learning and credentialing
have almost zero overlap with skill acquisition, let alone achieving it quickly.

Skill Acquisition vs. Learning

Like many high school students in the United States, I studied a foreign language. Every school day for four
years, I sat in a Spanish class. My marks were high: straight As.
Today, aside from saying hola, cómo estás, and muy bien, I can’t hold a conversation with a native
Spanish speaker to save my life. (I don’t even know what to say if I’m not having a good day.)
On the other side of the spectrum, my friend, Carlos Miceli, grew up speaking Spanish in Argentina. In
high school, Carlos decided he wanted to speak fluent English, so he made an effort to strike up as many
conversations as possible with native-English speakers. In the process, he discovered Skype and set up his
own website, so he could practice speaking and writing English regularly.
Carlos never took a class. He doesn’t know the formal rules of English grammar. He can’t even tell you
how he knows English. That isn’t really important. He can speak and write English fluently, which is what
really matters.
Dr. Stephen Krashen, of the University of Southern California, is an expert in the area of second-language
acquisition. One of Krashen’s primary insights is that language acquisition is different from language
learning.
In school, I learned a lot about Spanish. I learned thousands of vocabulary words, verb conjugation, and
the rules of grammar. I learned all of these things well enough to pass the tests with flying colors.
Those tests, however, had nothing to do with my ability to exercise the skills of speaking Spanish
intelligibly and understanding a native speaker talking at full speed. If my goal was to be able to speak
Spanish fluently, a few weeks of trying to converse with people in Spanish would’ve produced better results
than four years of schooling.
At that time, speaking Spanish fluently wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to ace the final exam. Carlos, on the
other hand, skipped the classroom and simply started practicing. Instead of doing verb conjugation drills,
Carlos was practicing what really mattered: communicating with other people in English.
In terms of effectiveness and long-term value, Carlos’s approach was far superior to mine. No contest.

The True Value of Learning

That’s not to say learning about the skill you’re acquiring isn’t important. Learning can be extremely
important, but not in the way you’d expect. Learning concepts related to a skill helps you self-edit or self-
correct as you’re practicing.
If you know how to conjugate verbs in Spanish, you’re better able to self-correct your speech while
talking to a native speaker. If you learn common vocabulary words, you’re better able to understand what a

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native speaker is saying, as well as remember an appropriate word or phrase to use when you get stuck while
speaking.
Dr. Krashen calls this the monitor hypothesis. Learning helps you plan, edit, and correct yourself as you
practice. That’s why learning is valuable. The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill
acquisition.
If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it
doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.

The Neurophysiology of Skill: Brain Plasticity and Muscle Memory

One last thing before we jump into the nuts and bolts of rapid skill acquisition: you must fully appreciate the
fact that you’re capable of acquiring new skills.
That seems like an odd thing to say, but it’s easy to believe your skills are fixed—that you’re either good
or talented or gifted at something … or you’re not.
In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007), psychologist Carol Dweck cites a wide body of
research that indicates individuals commonly hold one of two views of how their minds work.
According to Dr. Dweck, people with a “fixed” mind-set assume that skills and talents are innate, that
you’re born with certain abilities that are what they are. If a person with a fixed mind-set is “not good at
math,” then extra effort practicing math is a waste. Why bother if you’re never going to be good at it?
People with a “growth” mind-set, on the other hand, assume that skills and abilities grow with practice
and persistence. If a person with a growth mind-set gets a few math problems wrong, it’s not because they’re
not blessed with good-at-mathness; it’s because they haven’t practiced enough. With persistence and
practice, it’s only a matter of time before they will master the technique.
Here’s the good news if you find yourself falling into the fixed mindset trap: a wide (and growing) body
of research indicates that all brains are capable of improving skills and capabilities with practice. Genetic
predispositions exist, but they’re very minor compared to the power of focused, intelligent practice. You can
improve any skill, provided you’re willing to practice.
The human brain is plastic—a term neuroscientists use to indicate that your brain physically changes in
response to your environment, your actions, and the consequences of those actions. As you learn any new
skill, physical or mental, the neurological wiring of your brain changes as you practice it.
In the words of Dr. Jon Medina (Brain Rules, 2009) “neurons that fire together wire together,” forming
unique new patterns in the physical circuitry of your brain. Over time, your neurons begin to fire in more
efficient patterns in response to the feedback you receive from your environment as you practice.
If you’re working on a motor skill (that is, a skill that involves physical movement), you’re always
relatively awkward and slow at first. You have to think about everything you’re doing, and you often make
frustrating mistakes. Learning the basics is a constant struggle.

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 As you practice, your muscle coordination becomes more automatic and synchronized with your mental
processes. You gain the ability to pay more attention to the subtle elements of what you’re doing, and you
learn to adjust your approach to the feedback you get from the environment.
You start doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. Eventually, you’re able to perform without
conscious attention to every detail.
In academic literature, this general process is called the “three-stage model” of skill acquisition,4and it
applies to both physical and mental skills. The three stages are

1. Cognitive (Early) Stage—understanding what you’re trying to do, researching, thinking about the process,
and breaking the skill into manageable parts.
2. Associative (Intermediate) Stage—practicing the task, noticing environmental feedback, and adjusting
your approach based on that feedback.
3. Autonomous (Late) Stage—performing the skill effectively and efficiently without thinking about it or
paying unnecessary attention to the process.

This neurophysiological skill acquisition process is happening all the time, even while you’re reading this
sentence. There is no such thing as a mind in stasis. Your brain is learning, encoding, and consolidating new
skills all the time.
As Dr. Dweck says in Mindset: “Your mind is like a muscle: the more you use it, the more it grows.” The
more you practice, the more efficient, effective, and automatic the skill becomes.
That’s great news when it comes to rapid skill acquisition. If your mind and body are capable of learning
to perform in new and better ways, we can figure out how to make that process faster.

Page 40
(08a) Selections from “This I Believe”
Source: https://thisibelieve.org

Title: Good Can Be as Communicable as Evil

Author: Norman Corwin

Text link: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/12/

Audio Link: https://thisibelieve.org/audio/TIB_Corwin.mp3?_=1

Text (452 words)

Years ago, while watching a baseball game on television, I saw Orel Hershiser, pitching for the
Dodgers, throw a fastball that hit a batter. The camera was on a close-up of Hershiser, and I could read
his lips as he mouthed, “I’m sorry.” The batter, taking first base, nodded to the pitcher in a friendly
way and the game went on.

Just two words, and I felt good about Hershiser and the batter and the game all at once. It was only a
common courtesy but it made an impression striking enough for me to remember after many
summers.

The blood relatives of common courtesy are kindness, sympathy and consideration. And the reward
for exercising them is to feel good about having done so. When a motorist at an intersection signals to
another who’s waiting to join the flow of traffic, “Go ahead, it’s OK, move in,” and the recipient of the
favor smiles and makes a gesture of appreciation, the giver enjoys a glow of pleasure. It’s a very little
thing, but it represents something quite big. Ultimately it’s related to compassion, a quality in very
short supply lately, and getting scarcer.

But look, let’s not kid ourselves. It would be foolish to hope that kindness, consideration and
compassion will right wrongs, and heal wounds, and keep the peace and set the new century on a
course to recover from inherited ills. That would be asking a lot from even a heaven-sent
methodology, and heaven is not in that business.

It comes down to the value of examples, which can be either positive or negative, and it works like
this: Because of the principle that a calm sea and prosperous voyage do not make news but a
shipwreck does, most circulated news is bad news. The badness of it is publicized, and the negative
publicity attracts more of the same through repetition and imitation.

But good can be as communicable as evil, and that is where kindness and compassion come into play.
So long as conscionable and caring people are around, so long as they are not muted or exiled, so long
as they remain alert in thought and action, there is a chance for contagions of the right stuff, whereby
democracy becomes no longer a choice of lesser evils, whereby the right to vote is not betrayed by
staying away from the polls, whereby the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, and dissent are
never forsaken.

But why linger? Why wait to begin planting seeds, however long they take to germinate? It took us
200-plus years to get into the straits we now occupy, and it may take us as long again to get out, but
there must be a beginning.

Page 41
Title: Greetings
Author: Sefa Mawuli

Text link: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/148068/

Audio Link: https://thisibelieve.org/audio/essays/mp3/tib-muwalis-148068.mp3?_=1

Text (526 words)

When I was a little girl, I spent memorable school holidays with my grandmother, Mama Kali, who lived in a
small village in rural Ghana.

My Mama Kali was a yam farmer. She was petite and wiry, with a stooped back that made it seem like she
was always leaning forward to examine something. She had a peach fuzz of silver hair, brown distressed leather skin,
and laughing, deep chocolate eyes that creased at the corners and glistened with starry lights despite the smoky veil
of cataracts that hung over them. Early in the morning, she would tie a vibrantly dyed cloth around her waist, tie her
head with a matching scarf, then set out to the farm with her dry calloused feet clad in thin black thongs. I would
skip breathlessly alongside trying to keep up. On our way, along the dusty footpaths that meandered through the
village, Mama Kali would greet everyone we passed.

There were the standard greetings. “Did you wake up on the right foot this morning? Did you sleep well?”
Then, the more personalized greetings. To Patriarch Kosi who sat under the mango tree on a log outside his thatched
roof house, she would ask, “Are the grandchildren in good health? And what about their parents?” To the Bean Stew
Seller who was preparing to serve breakfast, she would inquire, “Are your boys well? Is your sick mother on the
upswing?” If she passed the same person upon our return later, she would greet her again. This time, remarking on
the Bean Stew Seller’s work ethic. “You’re still at it. You are doing good work.”

Sometimes the greetings were spoken soothingly. When we walked past the widow, Dada Mawusi, many
months after her husband’s death, Mama Kali would say, “How is your grieving?” Rather than beating around the
bush, it made more sense to her to acknowledge the woman’s suffering, and in doing so, empathize with her.

The people that Mama Kali greeted would respond similarly. “I see you have your granddaughter with you
today. How is her father?” or “I see you have woken up before the cock’s crow today. May it be a fruitful day at the
farm.” As a young girl, I found these greeting rituals humorously poetic and unnecessarily time-consuming. What I
now realize is that the greetings underscored the ties that bound the people in my grandmother’s village. They
reinforced a sense of belonging.

I believe in the gift of a deliberate greeting. I believe it is more than mere good manners. It is like pressing
the pause button amidst the white noise of our daily lives, as we rush from home to work, from one meeting to
another, to pick up and drop off the children. It is stopping to recognize the person in front of you as if to simply say,
“I see you.”

My Mama Kali taught me that there is always time to greet someone before getting down to business. I
believe you can always take a few extra seconds to tailor a greeting to a person. I believe we enrich our society when
we acknowledge the unique presence of one another.

Page 42
Title: A Life in Literature
Author: Sena Jeter Naslund

Text link: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/144207/

Audio Link: http://traffic.libsyn.com/thisibelieve/Sena_Jeter_Naslund__A_Life_in_Literature.mp3?_=1

Text (557 words)

Early on, by age nine perhaps, I discovered my passion for both reading and writing fiction. The discovery
was sudden and unbidden: one very hot summer day in Birmingham (no air conditioning), while reading, I realized I
was shivering with cold. I had become caught up in a Laura Ingalls Wilder description of a blizzard. How is this
possible? I asked myself, and the answer came immediately. It’s these words. Just these words have made me feel
cold. Full of wonder and admiration for Laura’s writing, I thought, I’d like to be able to do that someday.

Nonetheless, I found myself beginning college as a pre-med student with the intention of becoming a
medical missionary. You see, I wanted to do good, or to be a good person, one devoted to the welfare of others. And
what of my own love of reading and my interest in imaginative writing? Both still gave me immense pleasure, though
I was failing chemistry. But what good is literature? I asked myself. And I asked my serious-minded student friends
the same question. To spend my life merely doing what I loved seemed unacceptably self-indulgent.

One day in a literature class at my small, excellent liberal arts college, the erudite professor, who was also
dean of the college, posed a question that none of us could answer: “In what way are Huck of Huckleberry Finn and
Pip of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations alike?” While I did not know the answer, what I did know—in a strange
flash of intuition—was that whatever the answer, it would be of crucial importance to the young man sitting across
the aisle from me.

And who was he? A brilliant person, a troubled person for all his brilliance, someone I loved and admired.

The professor answered his own question. “Both are boys in search of a father.” And I knew my friend across
the aisle, through literature, suddenly understood his own confusion. He knew in a visceral way something of vital
importance. What was true of those fictive boys was also true of him: he needed to become a guiding father to
himself.

The class was over. As my friend Dwight and I walked out the door together into the hall, he said without
looking at me, “And how can you doubt, Sena, that literature can do good in the world?” Without looking at him, but
sure both his eyes and my eyes were glazed with tears, I replied, “I know. I know.” I knew that literature could and
does make ideas and feelings real, dramatic, and accessible in a way that enhances the quality of our lives.

And so I gave myself permission to embrace a literary life, both as reader and as writer. If something I might
come to write offered one wonderful person a new and needed perspective, then I could justify choosing a life for
myself in literature.

That was all a very long time ago, about half a century ago. My friend would die in an auto accident before
he was twenty-one. And I would live to be extraordinarily happy in my choice of professions.

This I believe: that the arts must be a part of education at all levels, that the arts can and do offer us not only
pleasure but also invaluable insights into ourselves and our world.

Page 43
Title: Always Go to the Funeral
Author: Deirdre Sullivan

Text link: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/8/

Audio Link: http://traffic.libsyn.com/thisibelieve/Deirdre_Sullivan_Podcast.mp3?_=1

Text (492 words)

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss
Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. “Dee,” he said, “you’re
going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there.
When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson’s shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, “Sorry
about all this,” and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss
Emerson’s mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling
hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things
from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, “You can’t come in
without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral.”

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do.
But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have
to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I definitely don’t want to.
I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know,
the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s
uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real
battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I’ve come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick
to the small inconveniences that let me share in life’s inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a
Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned
and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful
and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe
in going to the funeral.

Page 44
(09a) The most important language you will EVER learn
Presenter: Poet Ali
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=488ZBeaGo6s

Introduction Section
0:00 Translator: Alina Siluyanova Reviewer: Denise RQ
0:10 How many languages do you speak?
0:14 It's not a rhetorical question.
0:16 I'd like everyone to take a moment and get a number in your head.
0:19 How many languages do you speak?
0:20 Some of you are like, "That's easy. I'm done. It's one, you're talking it."
0:24 Others of you need a little more time, you're counting your languages,
0:27 maybe deciding whether that language your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend taught you
0:31 where you learned only curse words, whether it counts or not.
0:34 Go ahead and count it. (Laughter)
0:36 Be nice to yourself.
0:37 When I asked myself this question, I came up with four,
0:40 arguably five if I've been drinking.
0:42 (Laughter)
0:44 But then on closer...
0:45 (Laughter)
0:49 ...on closer examination, I realized that that number was closer to 83;
0:53 83 languages, at which point I just got tired and I stopped counting.
0:57 And it forced me to revisit that definition we have of "language."
1:01 We can scroll through this, but the first part says,
1:03 "The method of human communication, either spoken or written,
1:07 consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way."
1:10 At the bottom we see, "the phraseology and vocabulary of a certain profession."
1:14 We know that specialized field, like medicine, science.
1:17 But I'm most concerned with this secondary definition, number 2,
1:20 "The system of communication used by a particular community or country."
1:25 And I'm not interested in altering this definition.
1:28 I'm interested in applying it to everything we do,
1:31 because I believe we speak far more languages than we realize.
1:35 And for the rest of our time, I'm going to speak in one language
1:40 that is native to everyone here.
1:43 So if you came to see a TED Talk, I'm sorry to disappoint you,
1:46 TED is not here, it's me, and you're stuck with me.
1:48 And if you came to hear a talk, I'm sorry to disappoint you there too,
1:52 because we're going to have a conversation.
1:54 And as in any conversation,
1:55 it's not a real conversation unless there is an interaction.
1:59 At various points, I'm going to ask you to interact.
2:01 You can ask any woman on whether or not it's a real conversation:
2:05 if you're not interacting, it doesn't count.
2:07 And I agree with that definition.
2:08 (Laughter)
2:09 So before we can get started, I need to do a test to make sure
2:13 we're clear on what this participation, this conversation looks like.
2:16 If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.
2:19 (Applause)
2:20 Very good. We can proceed.
2:21 (Laughter)
Section 01
2:23 (Spanish) If you speak Spanish, please, stand up.
2:28 OK.
2:29 We're going to make a joke, an experiment, OK?
2:32 Please, look at the person on your right, at somebody who is sitting,
Page 45
2:36 and start laughing.
2:37 (Laughter)
2:39 Thank you so much.
2:40 (English) Go ahead and take a seat.
2:42 If you felt a little bit uncomfortable,
2:46 I can assure you there was no joke being made at your expense.
2:49 I simply asked the Spanish-speaking population to stand up,
2:52 look at the person to their right that was sitting, and to laugh.
2:55 And I know that wasn't nice, I'm sorry.
2:57 (Laughter)
2:59 But in that one moment,
3:02 you got to experience a part of language we're often unaware of.
3:05 We know when somebody speaks our language, it automatically connects us, it binds us.
3:09 But we often forget that if you don't speak that language,
3:13 what it does to isolate, and what it does to exclude?
3:16 It's a very important thing to remember as we go on in this journey of languages.
Section 02
3:21 (Farsi) For everybody who speaks Persian:
3:24 I'd like to explain the meaning of "t'aarof."
3:27 As you can see, the translation of this word is complicated.
3:30 (English) If you heard some chuckles,
3:32 that was the Farsi-speaking population laughing a little bit inside
3:36 because I'm going to attempt to explain the word "t'aarof" in our culture,
3:41 which has no equivalent in the English language.
3:45 The best way we can describe it is a combination of words,
3:48 things like an extreme humility, or an extreme grace, extreme politeness.
3:53 And really, the only way I can get you to understand how deep this goes
3:57 is to give you an example.
3:59 If two guys were to see each other in the street,
4:02 it'll be very common for one to walk up to the other one and say,
4:05 (Speaks in Farsi)
4:07 (English) That means, "I am indebted to you."
4:11 To which the second guy would respond back
4:13 (Speaks in Farsi)
4:15 (English) which means, "I tear my shirt open for you."
4:18 (Laughter)
4:19 To which the first guy would respond back
4:21 (Speaks in Farsi)
4:22 (English) which means, "I am your servant."
4:24 (Laughter)
4:25 The second guy would then respond back if it went that far
4:28 (Speaks in Farsi)
4:30 (English) which literally means, "I am the dirt beneath your feet."
4:34 (Laughter)
4:37 Exhibit A.
4:38 (Laughter)
4:40 This extreme humility has no parallel in the English lexicon.
4:45 And I share this example with you just for you to know
4:48 that merely speaking another language can introduce a new concept into our lives
4:53 that previously didn't exist.
4:55 And that's one example from one language.
Section 03
5:00 If I would have flashed this series of coded words on the screen,
5:03 some of you right away can recognize and know exactly what it is,
5:06 others of you would have no clue.
5:08 And I can probably make a pretty clear cut right around the age of 35 and younger
5:14 and 35 and older, unless you really hit 35.
5:17 But some of you who are maybe in that bracket that understand this,
5:21 you know exactly what this is.
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5:22 And others might be staring at the screen, like, "Wth?" - "What the heck?"
5:28 And, of course, for those of us that know, this is textspeak or SMS language;
5:32 it's a series of mobile phone text encoded words
5:35 that seek to use the least number of letters
5:39 to convey the most amount of meaning,
5:42 which sounds very similar to our definition of language.
5:46 And to show that applies even further,
5:48 what if I were to tell you this is, in fact, a modern day love letter?
5:53 Follow with me as I go through these letters.
5:55 "For the time being, I love you lots
5:58 because you positively bring out all the best in me, and I laugh out loud.
6:04 In other words, let me know what's up.
6:06 (Laughter)
6:08 You're a cutie, in my opinion.
6:10 (Laughter)
6:10 And as far as I know, to see you, if you're not seeing someone,
6:14 would make me happy.
6:15 For your information, I'll be right there forever.
6:19 In any case, keep in touch. No response necessary.
6:21 All my best wishes.
6:22 Don't know, don't care if anyone sees this, so don't go there.
6:25 See you later, bye for now. Hugs and kisses. You only live once.
6:29 (Laughter)
6:31 (Applause)
Section 04
6:34 If you've just laughed right now, you just spoke another universal language,
6:39 and that's laughter.
6:40 (Laughter)
6:41 It's an amazing thing.
6:42 We don't need to translate it, and we're born speaking it.
6:46 That's why things like music and comedy
6:50 [Stop, stop! I'm gonna pee]
6:51 are so prevalent in every single culture.
6:54 (Laughter)
6:55 You see, everything we do is a portal to another language,
6:59 and the more languages we speak, the more we can learn.
7:03 It's a very common thing we all do:
7:05 we take any new concept, and we compare it to the existing axis of reality within us,
7:11 by which we learn that new concept.
7:13 So the more languages that we have at our disposal,
7:16 the easier it becomes to learn these other languages.
Section 05
7:19 And despite all these languages that we've covered so far,
7:24 I still believe we haven't covered what I believe to be the most profound
7:28 and important language of all, which is the language of experience.
7:33 This is why you can get back from a trip, or you can have an amazing experience
7:38 and you come and see someone you know, your best friend,
7:41 and you sit down, and you go into detail about all these things, this experience
7:45 and they just give you this blank look, "I guess you had to be there."
7:49 (Laughter)
7:50 And that's why you can go up to a stranger,
7:53 and before you're even two words in, they start finishing your sentences
7:58 if they've had this experience, if they speak that language.
8:02 Because that language, that experience is the most binding one we have.
8:06 You don't need to tell them what languages you're speaking, they know.
8:10 Just like I am not going to tell you what language I'm going to be speaking.
8:14 I'm going to ask for the short amount of time we have left
8:17 that if I'm speaking your language - I am going to speak a few languages –
8:21 if I'm speaking your language, your experience,
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 8:24 I'm going to ask, for the sake and the spirit of what we're doing,
8:27 that you just merely stand and you stay standing.
Section 06
8:30 Do you speak this language?
8:33 I don't know about you, but I remember
8:36 in school, at the end of the year, we'd have these graduation parties.
8:41 And the whole student body would vote on where to have the party.
8:45 For me, I would hope that the party wasn't at the water park,
8:51 because then I'd have to be in a bathing suit,
8:53 and I didn't think anybody wanted to see me in a bathing suit.
8:56 Or maybe this: I don't know if you've ever been in a dressing room,
9:00 and you wanted to punch a hole through the door of that dressing room,
9:03 because the way things would fit on you didn't look the way as on that mannequin.
9:08 Or I remember our family gatherings, going to get seconds, or wanting to,
9:13 and that was a whole exercise in cost-benefit analysis for me,
9:17 because I knew I was hungry, but in family everyone is in your business,
9:22 so I knew that walk of and these looks of, "I don't know, do you really need that?"
9:28 And did my cheeks because they were rounded, big,
9:30 have a "Pinch Me" sign on them that no one told me about?
9:33 And for those of you who stand, or begin to stand or are standing,
9:37 you know, of course, I am speaking the language of growing up as a fat kid.
9:41 Any body image issue is a dialect of that language.
9:45 I'm going to ask you that you stay standing
9:47 and see about another language.
Section 07
9:49 Do you speak this language?
9:51 When we heard the diagnosis, I thought,
9:54 "Anything but that. Please not that. I hate that word."
10:00 And then you ask a series of questions, "Are you sure?
10:04 Is it removable? Has it spread?
10:08 How long, doctor, how long?"
10:11 And the pattern of those answers determines someone's life.
10:15 And I remember when he had an appetite, we would all rush to the table to eat,
10:19 because, as you know, this thing takes away your appetite,
10:23 and that wasn't very often that you felt hungry,
10:26 so we'd all rush because we always ate together, that's what we did.
10:30 And I was taught that if you fight something,
10:33 you're supposed to win if you have the right spirit.
10:36 And we had the right spirit, and I didn't understand why we're losing.
10:41 If you're standing, you know the language I'm speaking
10:43 is watching a loved one battle cancer.
10:46 And any terminal illness is a derivative or a dialect of that language.
10:51 I am going to ask you to stay standing.
Section 08
10:53 Do you speak this language?
10:56 When the buildings fell,
10:59 I wasn't in shock because I didn't really believe it.
11:04 I heard the news, but all the words, they were like white noise.
11:08 I couldn't make sense of it. And it was more of disbelief or denial.
11:14 And then I remember seeing the first plane
11:16 and the absolutely incomprehensible visual of what I was seeing.
11:22 And then I saw the second one, and all I could do was shake my head no,
11:26 like it wasn't really happening.
11:29 And then I saw the ground,
11:31 and I saw a city with more guts, courage than any city I've ever known in the world
11:37 and they were in total fear and in total panic.
11:40 And then a little bit of time after, I heard the stories:
11:44 the stories of bravery, the stories of courage,
11:46 the final minutes, the phone calls.
Page 48
11:48 And every year right around that time, I have this eerie sense of sadness
11:55 and this appreciation for those I love.
11:57 And for those of you standing, of course you know I'm speaking
12:00 the language of September 11, 2001.
12:04 Some of you stood within four words "When the buildings fell" –
12:07 that's all I said.
12:09 And the interesting thing about that language
12:12 is that's America's language.
12:14 And many cultures and communities have their own language,
12:17 and it's not what they're speaking.
12:19 We all speak that language, because it's a part of America's language.
Section 09
12:23 And if you're still not standing,
12:27 you probably know what it's like to be left out.
12:30 (Laughter)
12:32 You know what it's like that everyone is a part of something,
12:37 and you're not.
12:38 You know what it's like to be the outsider.
12:41 In fact, you know what it's like being the minority.
12:44 Now that we're all speaking the same language,
12:46 I'm going to ask you go ahead and stand,
12:48 because I believe this language, of being the minority,
12:51 is one of the most important languages you can ever learn.
12:54 At some point in our life, we'll all be in that position of compromise,
12:57 and at some point, we'll all be in that position of power.
13:00 And if you can tap into what you felt
13:03 when you were that minority, how you handled that power,
13:07 it will be an immense gift that you can give to the world.
13:11 Thank you for participating. Please, sit for a moment.
Section 10
13:14 I want to speak one last language. You don't need to stand.
13:17 I just want to see if you recognize it.
13:19 Most of the girls in the world are complaining about it.
13:24 Most of the poems in the world have been written about it.
13:27 Most of the music on the radio is kicking about it,
13:29 ripping about it, or spitting about it.
13:31 Most of the verses in the game people are talking about it.
13:34 Most of the broken hearts I know are walking without it,
13:37 started to doubt it, or lost without it.
13:41 Most of the shadows in the dark have forgotten about it.
13:43 Everybody in the world will be tripping without it.
13:46 Every boy and every girl will be dead without it,
13:48 struggle without it, nothing without it.
13:50 Most of the fingers that are drunk are dialing about it.
13:53 Most of the people that are in it are smiling about it.
13:56 Most of the people that have felt it are crying about it,
13:58 or trying to get it back, or lying about it.
14:01 Most of the pages that are filled are filled about it.
14:04 The tears that are spilled are spilled about it.
14:07 The people that have felt it are real about it.
14:11 A life without it. You'd be lost without it.
14:14 When I am in it, and I feel it, I'd be shouting about it.
14:17 Everybody in the whole world knowing about it.
14:19 I'm hurt and broke down, I'd be flowing about it,
14:21 going about it wrong, because I didn't allow it.
14:24 You see, cannot a wound or a scar heal without it,
14:26 can't the way that you feel be concealed about it.
14:28 Everybody has their own ideal about it, dream about it, appeal about it.
14:34 What's the deal about it?
Page 49
14:36 Are you bound about it to know that life is a trip and unreal without it?
14:39 Everything that you feel is surreal about it.
14:43 But I'm just a writer, so what can I reveal about it?
14:46 Why is it that the most spoken about language in the world
14:52 is the one we have the toughest time speaking?
14:55 No matter how many books, how many movies, how many seminars we go to,
14:59 we still can't get enough of it.
Closing Section
15:02 So I ask you, has that number that you had in your head at the beginning,
15:05 has that changed?
15:07 And I also ask you, next time you see someone to ask yourself,
15:11 "What languages do we share?"
15:14 And if don't see any, the second question is,
15:16 "What language could we share? Let's find out."
15:19 And if you still don't see any, this is the most important question,
15:23 "What languages can I learn?"
15:25 And no matter how irrelevant or inconsequential
15:30 learning that language may seem at that time,
15:35 I promise you it will work to your benefit at some time in the future.
15:40 My name is Poet Ali, and I believe that's an idea worth spreading.
15:44 (Applause)

Page 50
(10a) Are you a giver or a taker?
Presenter: Adam Grant
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyXRYgjQXX0

0:12 I want you to look around the room for a minute

0:15 and try to find the most paranoid person here --
0:17 (Laughter)
0:18 And then I want you to point at that person for me. (Laughter)
0:21 (Laughter)
0:22 OK, don't actually do it. (Laughter)
0:23 (Laughter)
0:25 But, as an organizational psychologist,
0:26 I spend a lot of time in workplaces,
0:28 and I find paranoia everywhere.
0:31 Paranoia is caused by people that I call "takers."
0:33 Takers are self-serving in their interactions.
0:36 It's all about what can you do for me.
0:38 The opposite is a giver.
0:40 It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking,
0:43 "What can I do for you?"
0:45 I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style.
0:48 We all have moments of giving and taking.
0:50 Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time,
0:53 your default.
0:54 I have a short test you can take
0:55 to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker,
0:58 and you can take it right now.
0:59 [The Narcissist Test]
1:01 [Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.]
1:03 (Laughter)
1:04 [Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.] (Laughter)
1:07 (Laughter)
1:10 This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it,
1:13 but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon,
1:17 the more worried we should be that you're a taker.
1:19 (Laughter)
1:20 Of course, not all takers are narcissists.
1:22 Some are just givers who got burned one too many times.
1:25 Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today,
1:29 and that's called a psychopath. (Laughter)
1:31 (Laughter)

1:32 I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are,
1:35 and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries
1:38 around the world's cultures.
1:39 And I found that most people are right in the middle
1:42 between giving and taking.
1:43 They choose this third style called "matching."
1:46 If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take:
1:49 quid pro quo -- I'll do something for you if you do something for me.
1:52 And that seems like a safe way to live your life.
1:55 But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life?
1:58 The answer to that question is a very definitive ...
2:00 maybe. (Laughter)
2:02 (Laughter)
2:03 I studied dozens of organizations,
2:05 thousands of people.
Page 51
2:06 I had engineers measuring their productivity. (Laughter)
2:10 (Laughter)
2:12 I looked at medical students' grades --
2:15 even salespeople's revenue. (Laughter)
2:17 (Laughter)
2:19 And, unexpectedly,
2:20 the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers.
2:24 The engineers who got the least work done
2:26 were the ones who did more favors than they got back.
2:29 They were so busy doing other people's jobs,
2:31 they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed.
2:35 In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students
2:37 who agree most strongly with statements like,
2:40 "I love helping others,"
2:43 which suggests the doctor you ought to trust
2:45 is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody. (Laughter)
2:49 And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued
2:51 in the most generous salespeople.
2:53 I actually reached out to one of those salespeople
2:56 who had a very high giver score.
2:57 And I asked him, "Why do you suck at your job --"
3:00 I didn't ask it that way, but -- (Laughter)
3:02 "What's the cost of generosity in sales?"
3:05 And he said, "Well, I just care so deeply about my customers
3:08 that I would never sell them one of our crappy products." (Laughter)
3:12 So just out of curiosity,
3:14 how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers?
3:17 Raise your hands.
3:18 OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data.
3:22 But actually, it turns out there's a twist here,
3:26 because givers are often sacrificing themselves,
3:29 but they make their organizations better.
3:32 We have a huge body of evidence --
3:35 many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior
3:38 that exists in a team or an organization --
3:41 and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge
3:44 and providing mentoring,
3:45 the better organizations do on every metric we can measure:
3:48 higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention --
3:50 even lower operating expenses.
3:53 So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people
3:56 and improve the team,
3:57 and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way.

4:00 I want to talk about what it takes

4:01 to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed.
4:05 So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers,
4:08 who are the best performers?
4:11 Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers.
4:14 Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs.
4:17 And they fall at the hands of matchers.
4:19 If you're a matcher, you believe in "An eye for an eye" -- a just world.
4:23 And so when you meet a taker,
4:24 you feel like it's your mission in life
4:26 to just punish the hell out of that person. (Laughter)
4:29 And that way justice gets served.
4:32 Well, most people are matchers.
4:34 And that means if you're a taker,
4:35 it tends to catch up with you eventually;
Page 52
4:37 what goes around will come around.
4:39 And so the logical conclusion is:
4:41 it must be the matchers who are the best performers.
4:43 But they're not.
4:45 In every job, in every organization I've ever studied,
4:48 the best results belong to the givers again.
4:51 Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople,
4:54 tracking their revenue.
4:56 What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes.
4:58 They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue,
5:01 but also the highest revenue.
5:03 The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity
5:06 and medical students' grades.
5:07 Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top
5:10 of every success metric that I can track.

5:12 Which raises the question:

5:13 How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel?
5:16 I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses,
5:19 but also in nonprofits, schools --
5:21 even governments.
5:22 Are you ready? (Laughter)
5:25 I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. (Laughter)
5:29 The first thing that's really critical
5:31 is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people,
5:34 but if they're not careful, they burn out.
5:36 So you have to protect the givers in your midst.
5:39 And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker.
5:44 It's the guy, not the cat. (Laughter)
5:47 His name is Adam Rifkin.
5:49 He's a very successful serial entrepreneur
5:51 who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people.
5:54 And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor.
5:57 Adam said, "You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi
5:59 to be a giver.
6:01 You just have to find small ways to add large value
6:03 to other people's lives."
6:05 That could be as simple as making an introduction
6:07 between two people who could benefit from knowing each other.
6:10 It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback.
6:13 Or It might be even something as basic as saying,
6:16 "You know,
6:17 I'm going to try and figure out
6:18 if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed."
6:22 And those five-minute favors are really critical
6:24 to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves.
6:27 The second thing that matters
6:29 if you want to build a culture where givers succeed,
6:31 is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm;
6:34 where people ask a lot.
6:36 This may hit a little too close to home for some of you.
6:39 [So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?] (Laughter)
6:43 What you see with successful givers
6:45 is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too.
6:48 If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier.
6:51 We can make it easier for people to ask for help.
6:53 A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals.
6:56 We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking,
6:59 and on other floors, they did very little of it.
Page 53
7:01 The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common,
7:04 where it was the norm,
7:06 was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was
7:08 to help other nurses on the unit.
7:10 When that role was available,
7:11 nurses said, "It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help --
7:15 it's actually encouraged."
7:18 Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success
7:21 and the well-being of givers.
7:22 It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers,
7:25 because the data say
7:26 that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations
7:30 starts with a request.
7:31 But a lot of people don't ask.
7:33 They don't want to look incompetent,
7:35 they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others.
7:38 Yet if nobody ever asks for help,
7:40 you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization
7:42 who would love to step up and contribute,
7:44 if they only knew who could benefit and how.
7:47 But I think the most important thing,
7:49 if you want to build a culture of successful givers,
7:51 is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team.
7:54 I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity,
7:57 you should hire a bunch of givers.
7:59 But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right --
8:03 that the negative impact of a taker on a culture
8:06 is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver.
8:09 Think about it this way:
8:10 one bad apple can spoil a barrel,
8:12 but one good egg just does not make a dozen.
8:15 I don't know what that means -- (Laughter)
8:18 But I hope you do.
8:20 No -- let even one taker into a team,
8:23 and you will see that the givers will stop helping.
8:26 They'll say, "I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks.
8:29 Why should I contribute?"
8:30 Whereas if you let one giver into a team,
8:32 you don't get an explosion of generosity.
8:35 More often, people are like,
8:36 "Great! That person can do all our work."
8:39 So, effective hiring and screening and team building
8:41 is not about bringing in the givers;
8:44 it's about weeding out the takers.
8:47 If you can do that well,
8:48 you'll be left with givers and matchers.
8:50 The givers will be generous
8:51 because they don't have to worry about the consequences.
8:54 And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm.

8:57 So how do you catch a taker before it's too late?

9:00 We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker,
9:03 especially on first impressions.
9:05 There's a personality trait that throws us off.
9:07 It's called agreeableness,
9:09 one the major dimensions of personality across cultures.
9:11 Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite.
9:15 You find a lot of them in Canada -- (Laughter)
9:18 Where there was actually a national contest
Page 54
 9:22 to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank,
9:25 "As Canadian as ..."
9:26 I thought the winning entry was going to be,
9:29 "As Canadian as maple syrup," or, "... ice hockey."
9:31 But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be --
9:34 I kid you not --
9:35 "As Canadian as possible under the circumstances." (Laughter)
9:42 Now for those of you who are highly agreeable,
9:44 or maybe slightly Canadian,
9:45 you get this right away.
9:47 How could I ever say I'm any one thing
9:49 when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people?
9:52 Disagreeable people do less of it.
9:54 They're more critical, skeptical, challenging,
9:57 and far more likely than their peers to go to law school. (Laughter)
10:01 That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact. (Laughter)
10:05 So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers
10:07 and disagreeable people were takers.
10:09 But then I gathered the data,
10:11 and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits,
10:14 because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness
10:17 is your outer veneer:
10:18 How pleasant is it to interact with you?
10:20 Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives:
10:22 What are your values? What are your intentions toward others?
10:25 If you really want to judge people accurately,
10:28 you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for,
10:31 and draw a two-by-two. (Laughter)
10:37 The agreeable givers are easy to spot:
10:39 they say yes to everything.
10:43 The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly,
10:46 although you might call them by a slightly different name.
10:53 We forget about the other two combinations.
10:55 There are disagreeable givers in our organizations.
10:59 There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface
11:01 but underneath have others' best interests at heart.
11:05 Or as an engineer put it,
11:06 "Oh, disagreeable givers --
11:08 like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system." (Laughter)
11:13 If that helps you. (Laughter)
11:16 Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations,
11:19 because they're the ones who give the critical feedback
11:22 that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.
11:25 We need to do a much better job valuing these people
11:27 as opposed to writing them off early,
11:29 and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly,
11:31 must be a selfish taker."
11:33 The other combination we forget about is the deadly one --
11:36 the agreeable taker, also known as the faker.
11:40 This is the person who's nice to your face,
11:42 and then will stab you right in the back.
11:46 And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process
11:49 is to ask the question,
11:51 "Can you give me the names of four people
11:53 whose careers you have fundamentally improved?"
11:56 The takers will give you four names,
11:58 and they will all be more influential than them,
12:01 because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down.
12:04 Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy,
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12:08 who don't have as much power,
12:09 who can do them no good.
12:11 And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character
12:14 by watching how someone treats their restaurant server
12:17 or their Uber driver.

12:19 So if we do all this well,

12:20 if we can weed takers out of organizations,
12:22 if we can make it safe to ask for help,
12:24 if we can protect givers from burnout
12:26 and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals
12:29 as well as trying to help other people,
12:32 we can actually change the way that people define success.
12:35 Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition,
12:38 people will realize success is really more about contribution.
12:42 I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed
12:45 is to help other people succeed.
12:47 And if we can spread that belief,
12:48 we can actually turn paranoia upside down.
12:51 There's a name for that.
12:52 It's called "pronoia."
12:55 Pronoia is the delusional belief
12:56 that other people are plotting your well-being.
13:02 That they're going around behind your back
13:05 and saying exceptionally glowing things about you.
13:09 The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion --
13:13 it's reality.
13:15 I want to live in a world where givers succeed,
13:18 and I hope you will help me create that world.
13:20 Thank you.
13:21 (Applause)

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(11a) Ch. 1 - The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits – James Clear
THE FATE OF British Cycling changed one day in 2003. The organization, which was the governing body for
professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time,
professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British riders
had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the
Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.

In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in
Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw
the Brits using their gear.

Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches
was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was
the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, “The whole
principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and
then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team.
They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip.
They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used
biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various
fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and
more aerodynamic.

But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and
unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery.
They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold.
They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted
the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed
but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.

As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have
imagined.

Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events at the
2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years
later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the Brits raised the bar as they set nine Olympic records and seven
world records.

That same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. The next year, his
teammate Chris Froome won the race, and he would go on to win again in 2015, 2016, and 2017, giving the British
team five Tour de France victories in six years.

During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and sixty-six Olympic or
Paralympic gold medals and captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful
run in cycling history.*

How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny
changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements
accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?

WHY SMALL HABITS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small
improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.

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Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal,
we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far
more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding.
Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven
times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline
nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

1% BETTER EVERY DAY

1% worse every day for one year. 0.99365 = 00.03

1% better every day for one year. 1.01365 = 37.78

FIGURE 1: The effects of small habits compound over time. For example, if you can get just 1 percent better each
day, you’ll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one year.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound
interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day
and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five,
or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to
matter very much in the moment. If you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym
three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the
language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our
previous routines.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy
meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If
you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later. A single
decision is easy to dismiss.

But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and
rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a
1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.

The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few
degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading
just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely
noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United
States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.*

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Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that
is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make
up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the
product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits
are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than
with your current results. If you’re a millionaire but you spend more than you earn each month, then you’re on a bad
trajectory. If your spending habits don’t change, it’s not going to end well. Conversely, if you’re broke, but you save a
little bit every month, then you’re on the path toward financial freedom—even if you’re moving slower than you’d
like.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits.
Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.
Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and
see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn
each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each
day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time
your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up, which
is why understanding the details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking,
so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.

YOUR HABITS CAN COMPOUND FOR YOU OR AGAINST YOU

Positive Compounding

Productivity compounds. Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over
an entire career. The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new skill can be even greater. The more tasks
you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.

Knowledge compounds. Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can
be transformative. Furthermore, each book you read not only teaches you something new but also opens up
different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffett says, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like
compound interest.”

Relationships compound. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others
want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections
over time.

Negative Compounding

Stress compounds. The frustration of a traffic jam. The weight of parenting responsibilities. The worry of making
ends meet. The strain of slightly high blood pressure. By themselves, these common causes of stress are
manageable. But when they persist for years, little stresses compound into serious health issues.

Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition
yourself to interpret life that way. You get trapped in a thought loop. The same is true for how you think about
others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kinds of people
everywhere.

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Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long
series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads
like wildfire.

WHAT PROGRESS IS REALLY LIKE

Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath.
It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up.

Twenty-six degrees.

Twenty-seven.

Twenty-eight.

The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you.

Twenty-nine degrees.

Thirty.

Thirty-one.

Still, nothing has happened.

Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature
increases before it, has unlocked a huge change.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to
unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then
takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems
underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of
performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to
make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks,
and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most
powerful outcomes are delayed.

This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see
a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any
change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in
order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call
the Plateau of Latent Potential.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to
improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not
achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from
twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-
two degrees.

When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside
world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did
long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.

It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of
years, the tension slowly building all the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion
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they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts. Change can take years—before it
happens all at once.

Mastery requires patience. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful teams in NBA history, have a quote
from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in their locker room: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a
stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at
the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone
before.”

THE PLATEAU OF LATENT POTENTIAL

FIGURE 2: We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results
of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous
work we have done. This can result in a “valley of disappointment” where people feel discouraged after putting in
weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply
being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is
repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a
bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate
flower one day at a time.

But what determines whether we stick with a habit long enough to survive the Plateau of Latent Potential and break
through to the other side? What is it that causes some people to slide into unwanted habits and enables others to
enjoy the compounding effects of good ones?

FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD

Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a
successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific,
actionable goals.

For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the
grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in
business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very
little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist
behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead
to those results.

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 • If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players,
manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice.
• If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test
product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
• If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you
break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you
still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and
focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at
the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner
Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then
forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but
systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about
your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—
the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people
who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful
people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the
goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had
wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there.
It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different
outcome.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will
have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the
first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left
chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without
addressing the cause.

Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We
think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the
systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In
order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix
themselves.

Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.

The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-
first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so
many times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy. I promised myself
that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could
finally relax.

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Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you
are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely
that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense
to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.

A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you
don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And
a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.

Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

Finally, a goal-oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as
they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard
work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people
find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.
True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of
endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will
determine your progress.

A SYSTEM OF ATOMIC HABITS

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat
themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for
change.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Focusing on the overall system, rather than a single goal, is one of the core themes of this book. It is also one of the
deeper meanings behind the word atomic. By now, you’ve probably realized that an atomic habit refers to a tiny
change, a marginal gain, a 1 percent improvement. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small.
They are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic
habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.

Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement.
At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that multiply to
a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment. They are both small and mighty. This is the meaning
of the phrase atomic habits—a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source
of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.

Chapter Summary
• Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in
the long-run.
• Habits are a double-edged sword. They can work for you or against you, which is why understanding the
details is essential.
• Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful
outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.
• An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of
molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

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(11a alt) Ch. 2 - How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones? Few things can have a more powerful impact
on your life than improving your daily habits. And yet it is likely that this time next year you’ll be doing the same
thing rather than something better.

It often feels difficult to keep good habits going for more than a few days, even with sincere effort and the
occasional burst of motivation. Habits like exercise, meditation, journaling, and cooking are reasonable for a day or
two and then become a hassle.

However, once your habits are established, they seem to stick around forever—especially the unwanted ones.
Despite our best intentions, unhealthy habits like eating junk food, watching too much television, procrastinating,
and smoking can feel impossible to break.

Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our
habits in the wrong way. In this chapter, I’ll address the first point. In the chapters that follow, I’ll answer the second.

Our first mistake is that we try to change the wrong thing. To understand what I mean, consider that there are three
levels at which change can occur. You can imagine them like the layers of an onion.

THREE LAYERS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE

FIGURE 3: There are three layers of behavior change: a change in your outcomes, a change in your processes, or a
change in your identity.

The first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results: losing weight,
publishing a book, winning a championship. Most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change.

The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with changing your habits and systems:
implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk for better workflow, developing a meditation
practice. Most of the habits you build are associated with this level.

The third and deepest layer is changing your identity. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs: your
worldview, your self-image, your judgments about yourself and others. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases
you hold are associated with this level.

Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe. When it
comes to building habits that last—when it comes to building a system of 1 percent improvements—the problem is
not that one level is “better” or “worse” than another. All levels of change are useful in their own way. The problem
is the direction of change.

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to
outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on
who we wish to become.

OUTCOME-BASED HABITS
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IDENTITY-BASED HABITS

FIGURE 4: With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the
focus is on who you wish to become.

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to
quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be
something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs.

The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement
signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as
someone who smokes.

Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve. They just think, “I want to be skinny
(outcome) and if I stick to this diet, then I’ll be skinny (process).” They set goals and determine the actions they
should take to achieve those goals without considering the beliefs that drive their actions. They never shift the way
they look at themselves, and they don’t realize that their old identity can sabotage their new plans for change.

Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs. The system of a democracy is founded on beliefs like
freedom, majority rule, and social equality. The system of a dictatorship has a very different set of beliefs like
absolute authority and strict obedience. You can imagine many ways to try to get more people to vote in a
democracy, but such behavior change would never get off the ground in a dictatorship. That’s not the identity of the
system. Voting is a behavior that is impossible under a certain set of beliefs.

A similar pattern exists whether we are discussing individuals, organizations, or societies. There are a set of beliefs
and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits.

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last. You may want more money, but if your identity is someone
who consumes rather than creates, then you’ll continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning. You may
want better health, but if you continue to prioritize comfort over accomplishment, you’ll be drawn to relaxing rather
than training. It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past
behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.

The story of Brian Clark, an entrepreneur from Boulder, Colorado, provides a good example. “For as long as I can
remember, I’ve chewed my fingernails,” Clark told me. “It started as a nervous habit when I was young, and then
morphed into an undesirable grooming ritual. One day, I resolved to stop chewing my nails until they grew out a bit.
Through mindful willpower alone, I managed to do it.”

Then, Clark did something surprising.

“I asked my wife to schedule my first-ever manicure,” he said. “My thought was that if I started paying to maintain
my nails, I wouldn’t chew them. And it worked, but not for the monetary reason. What happened was the manicure
made my fingers look really nice for the first time. The manicurist even said that—other than the chewing—I had
really healthy, attractive nails. Suddenly, I was proud of my fingernails. And even though that’s something I had

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never aspired to, it made all the difference. I’ve never chewed my nails since; not even a single close call. And it’s
because I now take pride in properly caring for them.”

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the
type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.

The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the
habits associated with it. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and
maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If
you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets
involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.

True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll
stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat
healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term
changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.

• The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.

• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
• The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you
believe that you are—either consciously or nonconsciously.* Research has shown that once a person believes in a
particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief. For example, people who
identified as “being a voter” were more likely to vote than those who simply claimed “voting” was an action they
wanted to perform. Similarly, the person who incorporates exercise into their identity doesn’t have to convince
themselves to train. Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned,
you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe
yourself to be.

Like all aspects of habit formation, this, too, is a double-edged sword. When working for you, identity change can be
a powerful force for self-improvement. When working against you, though, identity change can be a curse. Once you
have adopted an identity, it can be easy to let your allegiance to it impact your ability to change. Many people walk
through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.

• “I’m terrible with directions.”

• “I’m not a morning person.”
• “I’m bad at remembering people’s names.”
• “I’m always late.”
• “I’m not good with technology.”
• “I’m horrible at math.”

. . . and a thousand other variations.

When you have repeated a story to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them
as a fact. In time, you begin to resist certain actions because “that’s not who I am.” There is internal pressure to
maintain your self-image and behave in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. You find whatever way you can to
avoid contradicting yourself.

The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it. It can feel
comfortable to believe what your culture believes (group identity) or to do what upholds your self-image (personal
identity), even if it’s wrong. The biggest barrier to positive change at any level—individual, team, society—is identity
conflict. Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into
action.

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On any given day, you may struggle with your habits because you’re too busy or too tired or too overwhelmed or
hundreds of other reasons. Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-
image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires
unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and
expand your identity.

This brings us to an important question: If your beliefs and worldview play such an important role in your behavior,
where do they come from in the first place? How, exactly, is your identity formed? And how can you emphasize new
aspects of your identity that serve you and gradually erase the pieces that hinder you?

THE TWO-STEP PROCESS TO CHANGING YOUR IDENTITY

Your identity emerges out of your habits. You are not born with preset beliefs. Every belief, including those about
yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience.*

More precisely, your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the
identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you
train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.

The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. In fact, the word
identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means
repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

Whatever your identity is right now, you only believe it because you have proof of it. If you go to church every
Sunday for twenty years, you have evidence that you are religious. If you study biology for one hour every night, you
have evidence that you are studious. If you go to the gym even when it’s snowing, you have evidence that you are
committed to fitness. The more evidence you have for a belief, the more strongly you will believe it.

For most of my early life, I didn’t consider myself a writer. If you were to ask any of my high school teachers or
college professors, they would tell you I was an average writer at best: certainly not a standout. When I began my
writing career, I published a new article every Monday and Thursday for the first few years. As the evidence grew, so
did my identity as a writer. I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits.

Of course, your habits are not the only actions that influence your identity, but by virtue of their frequency they are
usually the most important ones. Each experience in life modifies your self-image, but it’s unlikely you would
consider yourself a soccer player because you kicked a ball once or an artist because you scribbled a picture. As you
repeat these actions, however, the evidence accumulates and your self-image begins to change. The effect of one-
off experiences tends to fade away while the effect of habits gets reinforced with time, which means your habits
contribute most of the evidence that shapes your identity. In this way, the process of building habits is actually the
process of becoming yourself.

This is a gradual evolution. We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We
change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.

Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.” If you finish a book, then perhaps you are the type of
person who likes reading. If you go to the gym, then perhaps you are the type of person who likes exercise. If you
practice playing the guitar, perhaps you are the type of person who likes music.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your
beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful
change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a
new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it actually is big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.

Putting this all together, you can see that habits are the path to changing your identity. The most practical way to
change who you are is to change what you do.

• Each time you write a page, you are a writer.

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 • Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician.
• Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete.
• Each time you encourage your employees, you are a leader.

Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to
believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the
story you tell yourself begins to change as well.

Of course, it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity.
The good news is that you don’t need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You
don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes
for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

New identities require new evidence. If you keep casting the same votes you’ve always cast, you’re going to get the
same results you’ve always had. If nothing changes, nothing is going to change.

It is a simple two-step process:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.

2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation.
What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?

These are big questions, and many people aren’t sure where to begin—but they do know what kind of results they
want: to get six-pack abs or to feel less anxious or to double their salary. That’s fine. Start there and work backward
from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results. Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person
that could get the outcome I want?” Who is the type of person that could lose forty pounds? Who is the type of
person that could learn a new language? Who is the type of person that could run a successful start-up?

For example, “Who is the type of person who could write a book?” It’s probably someone who is consistent and
reliable. Now your focus shifts from writing a book (outcome-based) to being the type of person who is consistent
and reliable (identity-based).

This process can lead to beliefs like:

• “I’m the kind of teacher who stands up for her students.”

• “I’m the kind of doctor who gives each patient the time and empathy they need.”
• “I’m the kind of manager who advocates for her employees.”

Once you have a handle on the type of person you want to be, you can begin taking small steps to reinforce your
desired identity. I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All
day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy
person order a burrito or a salad? She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would
become that person. She was right.

The concept of identity-based habits is our first introduction to another key theme in this book: feedback loops. Your
habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. It’s a two-way street. The formation of all habits is a
feedback loop (a concept we will explore in depth in the next chapter), but it’s important to let your values,
principles, and identity drive the loop rather than your results. The focus should always be on becoming that type of
person, not getting a particular outcome.

THE REAL REASON HABITS MATTER

Identity change is the North Star of habit change. The remainder of this book will provide you with step-by-step
instructions on how to build better habits in yourself, your family, your team, your company, and anywhere else you
wish. But the true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not
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what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be. Otherwise, your quest for change is like a boat
without a rudder. And that’s why we are starting here.

You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in
every moment. You can choose the identity you want to reinforce today with the habits you choose today. And this
brings us to the deeper purpose of this book and the real reason habits matter.

Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or
taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures
of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you achieve all of these things,
but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the
channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

Chapter Summary
• There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change.
• The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you
wish to become.
• Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
• Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and
expand your identity.

The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because
they can change your beliefs

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(13a) The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube
Presenter: James Bridle
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w

0:12 I'm James.

0:13 I'm a writer and artist,
0:15 and I make work about technology.
0:18 I do things like draw life-size outlines of military drones
0:22 in city streets around the world,
0:24 so that people can start to think and get their heads around
0:27 these really quite hard-to-see and hard-to-think-about technologies.
0:31 I make things like neural networks that predict the results of elections
0:35 based on weather reports,
0:37 because I'm intrigued about
0:38 what the actual possibilities of these weird new technologies are.
0:43 Last year, I built my own self-driving car.
0:45 But because I don't really trust technology,
0:48 I also designed a trap for it.
0:50 (Laughter)
0:51 And I do these things mostly because I find them completely fascinating,
0:56 but also because I think when we talk about technology,
0:58 we're largely talking about ourselves
1:01 and the way that we understand the world.
1:03 So here's a story about technology.
1:07 This is a "surprise egg" video.
1:10 It's basically a video of someone opening up loads of chocolate eggs
1:13 and showing the toys inside to the viewer.
1:16 That's it. That's all it does for seven long minutes.
1:19 And I want you to notice two things about this.
1:22 First of all, this video has 30 million views.
1:26 (Laughter)
1:28 And the other thing is,
1:29 it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers,
1:33 that has a total of eight billion views,
1:36 and it's all just more videos like this --
1:40 30 million people watching a guy opening up these eggs.
1:44 It sounds pretty weird, but if you search for "surprise eggs" on YouTube,
1:48 it'll tell you there's 10 million of these videos,
1:52 and I think that's an undercount.
1:53 I think there's way, way more of these.
1:55 If you keep searching, they're endless.
1:58 There's millions and millions of these videos
2:00 in increasingly baroque combinations of brands and materials,
2:03 and there's more and more of them being uploaded every single day.
2:07 Like, this is a strange world. Right?
2:11 But the thing is, it's not adults who are watching these videos.
2:14 It's kids, small children.
2:17 These videos are like crack for little kids.
2:19 There's something about the repetition,
2:21 the constant little dopamine hit of the reveal,
2:24 that completely hooks them in.
2:26 And little kids watch these videos over and over and over again,
2:31 and they do it for hours and hours and hours.
2:33 And if you try and take the screen away from them,
2:35 they'll scream and scream and scream.
2:37 If you don't believe me --
2:38 and I've already seen people in the audience nodding --
2:41 if you don't believe me, find someone with small children and ask them,
2:44 and they'll know about the surprise egg videos.
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2:47 So this is where we start.
2:49 It's 2018, and someone, or lots of people,
2:53 are using the same mechanism that, like, Facebook and Instagram are using
2:56 to get you to keep checking that app,
2:58 and they're using it on YouTube to hack the brains of very small children
3:02 in return for advertising revenue.
3:06 At least, I hope that's what they're doing.
3:08 I hope that's what they're doing it for,
3:10 because there's easier ways of making ad revenue on YouTube.
3:15 You can just make stuff up or steal stuff.
3:18 So if you search for really popular kids' cartoons
3:20 like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol,"
3:22 you'll find there's millions and millions of these online as well.
3:25 Of course, most of them aren't posted by the original content creators.
3:28 They come from loads and loads of different random accounts,
3:31 and it's impossible to know who's posting them
3:34 or what their motives might be.
3:36 Does that sound kind of familiar?
3:38 Because it's exactly the same mechanism
3:40 that's happening across most of our digital services,
3:43 where it's impossible to know where this information is coming from.
3:46 It's basically fake news for kids,
3:48 and we're training them from birth
3:50 to click on the very first link that comes along,
3:52 regardless of what the source is.
3:54 That's doesn't seem like a terribly good idea.
3:58 Here's another thing that's really big on kids' YouTube.
4:01 This is called the "Finger Family Song."
4:03 I just heard someone groan in the audience.
4:05 This is the "Finger Family Song."
4:06 This is the very first one I could find.
4:08 It's from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views,
4:11 which is, like, nothing in this game.
4:13 But it has this insanely earwormy tune,
4:16 which I'm not going to play to you,
4:18 because it will sear itself into your brain
4:20 in the same way that it seared itself into mine,
4:22 and I'm not going to do that to you.
4:24 But like the surprise eggs,
4:25 it's got inside kids' heads
4:27 and addicted them to it.
4:29 So within a few years, these finger family videos
4:32 start appearing everywhere,
4:33 and you get versions in different languages
4:35 with popular kids' cartoons using food
4:37 or, frankly, using whatever kind of animation elements
4:40 you seem to have lying around.
4:43 And once again, there are millions and millions and millions of these videos
4:48 available online in all of these kind of insane combinations.
4:51 And the more time you start to spend with them,
4:53 the crazier and crazier you start to feel that you might be.
4:57 And that's where I kind of launched into this,
5:01 that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of understanding
5:04 of how this thing was constructed that seems to be presented around me.
5:08 Because it's impossible to know where these things are coming from.
5:12 Like, who is making them?
5:13 Some of them appear to be made of teams of professional animators.
5:16 Some of them are just randomly assembled by software.
5:19 Some of them are quite wholesome-looking young kids' entertainers.
5:23 And some of them are from people
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5:25 who really clearly shouldn't be around children at all.
5:28 (Laughter)
5:30 And once again, this impossibility of figuring out who's making this stuff --
5:35 like, this is a bot?
5:36 Is this a person? Is this a troll?
5:39 What does it mean that we can't tell the difference
5:41 between these things anymore?
5:43 And again, doesn't that uncertainty feel kind of familiar right now?
5:50 So the main way people get views on their videos --
5:52 and remember, views mean money --
5:54 is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms.
5:59 So you take, like, "surprise eggs"
6:00 and then you add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg,"
6:03 or whatever these things are,
6:04 all of these words from other popular videos into your title,
6:07 until you end up with this kind of meaningless mash of language
6:10 that doesn't make sense to humans at all.
6:12 Because of course it's only really tiny kids who are watching your video,
6:16 and what the hell do they know?
6:18 Your real audience for this stuff is software.
6:21 It's the algorithms.
6:22 It's the software that YouTube uses
6:24 to select which videos are like other videos,
6:26 to make them popular, to make them recommended.
6:29 And that's why you end up with this kind of completely meaningless mash,
6:32 both of title and of content.
6:35 But the thing is, you have to remember,
6:37 there really are still people within this algorithmically optimized system,
6:42 people who are kind of increasingly forced to act out
6:45 these increasingly bizarre combinations of words,
6:48 like a desperate improvisation artist responding to the combined screams
6:53 of a million toddlers at once.
6:57 There are real people trapped within these systems,
6:59 and that's the other deeply strange thing about this algorithmically driven culture,
7:03 because even if you're human,
7:05 you have to end up behaving like a machine
7:07 just to survive.
7:09 And also, on the other side of the screen,
7:11 there still are these little kids watching this stuff,
7:14 stuck, their full attention grabbed by these weird mechanisms.
7:18 And most of these kids are too small to even use a website.
7:21 They're just kind of hammering on the screen with their little hands.
7:24 And so there's autoplay,
7:26 where it just keeps playing these videos over and over and over in a loop,
7:29 endlessly for hours and hours at a time.
7:31 And there's so much weirdness in the system now
7:34 that autoplay takes you to some pretty strange places.
7:37 This is how, within a dozen steps,
7:40 you can go from a cute video of a counting train
7:43 to masturbating Mickey Mouse.
7:46 Yeah. I'm sorry about that.
7:48 This does get worse.
7:50 This is what happens
7:51 when all of these different keywords,
7:54 all these different pieces of attention,
7:57 this desperate generation of content,
8:00 all comes together into a single place.
8:03 This is where all those deeply weird keywords come home to roost.
8:08 You cross-breed the finger family video
8:10 with some live-action superhero stuff,
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 8:12 you add in some weird, trollish in-jokes or something,
8:16 and suddenly, you come to a very weird place indeed.
8:19 The stuff that tends to upset parents
8:21 is the stuff that has kind of violent or sexual content, right?
8:25 Children's cartoons getting assaulted,
8:27 getting killed,
8:29 weird pranks that actually genuinely terrify children.
8:33 What you have is software pulling in all of these different influences
8:37 to automatically generate kids' worst nightmares.
8:39 And this stuff really, really does affect small children.
8:42 Parents report their children being traumatized,
8:45 becoming afraid of the dark,
8:47 becoming afraid of their favorite cartoon characters.
8:50 If you take one thing away from this, it's that if you have small children,
8:54 keep them the hell away from YouTube.
8:56 (Applause)
9:02 But the other thing, the thing that really gets to me about this,
9:05 is that I'm not sure we even really understand how we got to this point.
9:10 We've taken all of this influence, all of these things,
9:13 and munged them together in a way that no one really intended.
9:16 And yet, this is also the way that we're building the entire world.
9:20 We're taking all of this data,
9:21 a lot of it bad data,
9:23 a lot of historical data full of prejudice,
9:26 full of all of our worst impulses of history,
9:29 and we're building that into huge data sets
9:31 and then we're automating it.
9:32 And we're munging it together into things like credit reports,
9:36 into insurance premiums,
9:37 into things like predictive policing systems,
9:40 into sentencing guidelines.
9:42 This is the way we're actually constructing the world today
9:45 out of this data.
9:46 And I don't know what's worse,
9:48 that we built a system that seems to be entirely optimized
9:51 for the absolute worst aspects of human behavior,
9:54 or that we seem to have done it by accident,
9:56 without even realizing that we were doing it,
9:58 because we didn't really understand the systems that we were building,
10:02 and we didn't really understand how to do anything differently with it.
10:06 There's a couple of things I think that really seem to be driving this
10:10 most fully on YouTube,
10:11 and the first of those is advertising,
10:13 which is the monetization of attention
10:16 without any real other variables at work,
10:19 any care for the people who are actually developing this content,
10:23 the centralization of the power, the separation of those things.
10:26 And I think however you feel about the use of advertising
10:29 to kind of support stuff,
10:31 the sight of grown men in diapers rolling around in the sand
10:34 in the hope that an algorithm that they don't really understand
10:37 will give them money for it
10:38 suggests that this probably isn't the thing
10:40 that we should be basing our society and culture upon,
10:43 and the way in which we should be funding it.
10:45 And the other thing that's kind of the major driver of this is automation,
10:49 which is the deployment of all of this technology
10:51 as soon as it arrives, without any kind of oversight,
10:53 and then once it's out there,
10:55 kind of throwing up our hands and going, "Hey, it's not us, it's the technology."
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10:59 Like, "We're not involved in it."
11:00 That's not really good enough,
11:02 because this stuff isn't just algorithmically governed,
11:05 it's also algorithmically policed.
11:07 When YouTube first started to pay attention to this,
11:10 the first thing they said they'd do about it
11:12 was that they'd deploy better machine learning algorithms
11:15 to moderate the content.
11:17 Well, machine learning, as any expert in it will tell you,
11:20 is basically what we've started to call
11:22 software that we don't really understand how it works.
11:25 And I think we have enough of that already.
11:29 We shouldn't be leaving this stuff up to AI to decide
11:32 what's appropriate or not,
11:33 because we know what happens.
11:34 It'll start censoring other things.
11:36 It'll start censoring queer content.
11:38 It'll start censoring legitimate public speech.
11:40 What's allowed in these discourses,
11:42 it shouldn't be something that's left up to unaccountable systems.
11:45 It's part of a discussion all of us should be having.
11:48 But I'd leave a reminder
11:50 that the alternative isn't very pleasant, either.
11:52 YouTube also announced recently
11:54 that they're going to release a version of their kids' app
11:57 that would be entirely moderated by humans.
12:00 Facebook -- Zuckerberg said much the same thing at Congress,
12:03 when pressed about how they were going to moderate their stuff.
12:06 He said they'd have humans doing it.
12:08 And what that really means is,
12:10 instead of having toddlers being the first person to see this stuff,
12:13 you're going to have underpaid, precarious contract workers
12:16 without proper mental health support
12:17 being damaged by it as well.
12:19 (Laughter)
12:20 And I think we can all do quite a lot better than that.
12:22 (Applause)
12:26 The thought, I think, that brings those two things together, really, for me,
12:30 is agency.
12:32 It's like, how much do we really understand -- by agency, I mean:
12:35 how we know how to act in our own best interests.
12:39 Which -- it's almost impossible to do
12:41 in these systems that we don't really fully understand.
12:45 Inequality of power always leads to violence.
12:48 And we can see inside these systems
12:49 that inequality of understanding does the same thing.
12:52 If there's one thing that we can do to start to improve these systems,
12:56 it's to make them more legible to the people who use them,
12:59 so that all of us have a common understanding
13:01 of what's actually going on here.
13:03 The thing, though, I think most about these systems
13:06 is that this isn't, as I hope I've explained, really about YouTube.
13:10 It's about everything.
13:12 These issues of accountability and agency,
13:14 of opacity and complexity,
13:16 of the violence and exploitation that inherently results
13:20 from the concentration of power in a few hands --
13:22 these are much, much larger issues.
13:26 And they're issues not just of YouTube and not just of technology in general,
13:30 and they're not even new.
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13:31 They've been with us for ages.
13:32 But we finally built this system, this global system, the internet,
13:37 that's actually showing them to us in this extraordinary way,
13:40 making them undeniable.
13:41 Technology has this extraordinary capacity
13:44 to both instantiate and continue
13:48 all of our most extraordinary, often hidden desires and biases
13:53 and encoding them into the world,
13:54 but it also writes them down so that we can see them,
13:58 so that we can't pretend they don't exist anymore.
14:01 We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems,
14:06 but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are,
14:09 so we can start thinking about them properly
14:12 and start to address them.
14:13 Thank you very much.
14:15 (Applause)
14:21 Thank you.
14:22 (Applause)

14:28 Helen Walters (HW): James, thank you for coming and giving us that talk.
14:32 So it's interesting:
14:33 when you think about the films where the robotic overlords take over,
14:36 it's all a bit more glamorous than what you're describing.
14:40 But I wonder -- in those films, you have the resistance mounting.
14:43 Is there a resistance mounting towards this stuff?
14:47 Do you see any positive signs, green shoots of resistance?
14:52 James Bridle (JB): I don't know about direct resistance,
14:54 because I think this stuff is super long-term.
14:57 I think it's baked into culture in really deep ways.
14:59 A friend of mine, Eleanor Saitta, always says
15:01 that any technological problems of sufficient scale and scope
15:05 are political problems first of all.
15:07 So all of these things we're working to address within this
15:10 are not going to be addressed just by building the technology better,
15:13 but actually by changing the society that's producing these technologies.
15:17 So no, right now, I think we've got a hell of a long way to go.
15:20 But as I said, I think by unpacking them,
15:22 by explaining them, by talking about them super honestly,
15:25 we can actually start to at least begin that process.
15:27 HW: And so when you talk about legibility and digital literacy,
15:31 I find it difficult to imagine
15:32 that we need to place the burden of digital literacy on users themselves.
15:36 But whose responsibility is education in this new world?
15:41 JB: Again, I think this responsibility is kind of up to all of us,
15:44 that everything we do, everything we build, everything we make,
15:47 needs to be made in a consensual discussion
15:51 with everyone who's avoiding it;
15:53 that we're not building systems intended to trick and surprise people
15:57 into doing the right thing,
16:00 but that they're actually involved in every step in educating them,
16:03 because each of these systems is educational.
16:05 That's what I'm hopeful about, about even this really grim stuff,
16:08 that if you can take it and look at it properly,
16:11 it's actually in itself a piece of education
16:13 that allows you to start seeing how complex systems come together and work
16:17 and maybe be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere in the world.
16:20 HW: James, it's such an important discussion,
16:22 and I know many people here are really open and prepared to have it,
16:26 so thanks for starting off our morning.

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(14a) Introduction to Media Literacy: Crash Course Media Literacy #1
Presenter: Jay Smooth
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7N-1Mj-DU

0:05 Hey there everybody, I’m Jay Smooth and this is Crash Course Media Literacy.
For the next few weeks we’re going to take a deep dive into media – how we consume it, how we create it, and how
0:09 it impacts our everyday lives.
0:16 Before we get started, do me a favor and think: how many hours did you spend consuming media today?
0:22 Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
0:23 What’d you come up with? 2 hours? 3? 5?
If you’re the average U.S. adult, today you spent upwards of 10 hours watching TV, listening to the radio, surfing the
0:26 web, scrolling through your phone, or checking out awesome educational video series on YouTube.
0:37 That’s over 40% of your day!
0:39 If you’re a teen or tween, you spent a little less time – maybe 6 to 9 hours.
0:43 Never before in history have humans spent so many waking hours consuming media.
Since it’s taking up more and more of our time each year, it’s important that we understand its influence on
0:47 everything we do.
0:54 [Theme Music]
1:04 Now when I say “media” I’m talking about a couple different things.
1:08 The literal definition of “media” is the plural of medium, or multiple mediums, so to speak.
1:13 And a medium is a substance or a method in which something is communicated.
1:17 It’s the vehicle for a message.
Books, films, paintings, songs, TV shows, poems, video games, magazines, podcasts, music videos, newspapers, web
1:19 forums, coupons, email newsletters,
Tweets, straight-to-DVD sequels, receipts, traffic signs, both good and bad street art, Snapchat stories, those word of
1:29 the day calendars your aunt always buys you,
protest signs, embarrassing but cute childhood photos you post on #throwbackthursday, breaking news push
1:38 notifications that give you a mini heart attack,
sex ed pamphlets about your changing body, and my Bluray copy of the second highest grossing film of all time,
1:45 Titanic – those are all media.
1:54 When you think about it that way, it makes sense that we spend so much time consuming media.
Whether you’re at work or school or just hanging out, chances are you’re almost always interacting with some sort
1:58 of artifact of communication.
2:05 As a culture we often stick a “the” in front of “media” to refer collectively to mass communication.
2:11 It’s an umbrella term we use to talk about the widely distributed newspapers, TV channels,
2:15 websites, radio stations, movie studios, and more that create or distribute information
2:20 – like CNN, The New York Times, NPR, Disney, or YouTube.
Whether you’re talking about media as in multiple mediums or “the media,” and during this course we’ll be talking
2:24 about both,
2:31 the ability to navigate the media is a powerful and crucial skill.
2:35 Media scholars refer to this skill as media literacy.
As a field of study, media literacy comprises and overlaps many different theories and subjects, from critical thinking
2:38 and psychology to linguistics and ethics in technology.
In this series, we’ll be using the definition of media literacy that’s used by the National Association of Media Literacy
2:47 Educators.
And it describes media literacy as “the ability to Access, Analyze, Evaluate, Create and Act using all forms of
2:54 communication.”
3:02 Now, with this definition in mind, think back to the media you spent your time with today.
3:07 What kind of content were you absorbing, and how did you get to it?
3:10 Were you making sense of its messages?
3:12 Were you aware that each message was created by someone with their own goals and opinions?
3:17 When you create media, like a blog post or an Instagram, what is your responsibility to those who view it?
3:23 Finally, what do you do with all that info you just received?
With media literacy skills, you’ll have the power to think through each of these important questions every time you
3:27 pick up your phone or flip on the radio.

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3:34 It’ll be like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time: so eye opening you’ll never want to take them off.
3:40 Which is great, because you won’t actually be able to take them off – it’ll be hard to look at media the same way.
3:46 So, actually I guess media literacy is more like laser eye surgery.
3:50 But way cheaper.
3:51 OK. Media Literacy Lesson #1: understanding the difference between media messages and media effects.
3:57 Media messages are the values and ideas that are promoted by the media, the things that get put into them.
4:03 Media effects are their influences and consequences on audiences.
4:08 But talking about media in terms of these inputs and outputs is way, way too simple.
4:13 Media doesn’t just broadcast one easy to understand message straight into our brains.
4:18 And readers and viewers don’t just agree with whatever they say and move on with their lives.
4:22 The creator’s experiences and environment affect everything they create.
4:26 Their messages are filled with tons of baggage.
4:29 And we consumers have our own baggage, too, which determines how we react to and interpret messages.
Media scholars, cultural critics, and plenty of other very smart academic types have long understood that we need to
4:34 think about messages and effects in a far more nuanced way.
4:44 For instance, take British sociologist Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, popularized in 1973.
4:51 Hall wrote that before a message is distributed, it is “encoded” by the creator during its production.
4:57 The message the creator wants to send is written in a code of sorts,
using a host of pre-understood meanings, symbols, and definitions that they think or hope the recipient will
5:00 understand.
5:07 But the recipient (that’s you) has their own mental dictionary full of meanings, symbols, and definitions.
When someone interprets a message, they “decode” it by applying their knowledge and experience to decipher its
5:12 meaning.
5:18 When I say “encode” and “decode,” I don’t just mean a secret code you use to talk to your friends, or Morse code.
5:25 As Hall would say, all language is “coded.”
5:28 Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to break this down:
5:30 Say you’re texting your significant other about where to go for dinner.
5:33 You just heard about this fancy French restaurant that’s supposed to be super romantic and perfect for a date.
5:37 You’re doing a little encoding here.
5:38 So you say, Let’s do Maison de L’amour *kissy face emoji*
You use the restaurant’s name instead of “fancy French restaurant” because it sounds more impressive and makes
5:45 you look cool for knowing a little French.
5:52 You throw in a kissy face emoji to turn up the flirtatiousness.
But also notice, you say “do” instead of “go to” because, since you’re already talking about where to eat, the activity
5:55 you’re doing at Maison de L’amour is implied.
6:04 Done. Send.
6:06 They respond, Ok *crying laughing emoji*
6:10 Wait, what does that mean?!
6:11 Did you say something wrong? Do they not want to go?
6:14 Are they just so stoked for this restaurant that they’re...laughing maniacally?
6:18 Do they want to break up? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Here, you’re trying to decode this mysterious message using what you know about the English language, emoji, and
6:20 your significant other.
6:28 Maybe some social anxiety is working its way in, too.
6:30 Either way, you’re thinking that clearly your romantic gesture was poorly received.
But perhaps all they meant by the crying laughing emoji was they’d love to go, despite your super cheesy taste in
6:35 restaurants.
6:42 They encoded their message, too, but something got lost in the decoding.
6:46 Thanks Thought Bubble.
6:47 Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding is a rejection of what’s known as textual determinism,
6:52 or the idea that a message’s meaning is inevitably sent and received in its entirety, just as intended, every time.
Hall gave way more credit to the consumer than many theorists before him, who often thought of most
6:58 communication as a one-way street.

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 The significance of this theory is that, as a media consumer, you’re not just a helpless sponge, absorbing all kinds of
7:05 messages without a second thought.
You interpret messages in a unique way, which means you also have the ability to see what messages are being
7:13 thrown at you –
7:20 and decide whether you want to catch them, pass ‘em on, or drop them completely.
7:24 This also leaves plenty of room for miscommunication, and messages getting lost in translation.
Of course, scholars, educators, parents, and consumers have always debated to what degree media really affects its
7:29 consumers.
7:37 Questions of whether media can truly harm or benefit us has led to media literacy education in schools,
7:42 media regulations (like movie ratings and the labeling of advertisements), and tons of research into media effects.
Plus, these days, when two-thirds of U.S. adults get news from social media – and some of that can be “fake” news –
7:49 we constantly have to ask:
7:58 What information can I truly trust?
8:00 The answers to questions like these aren’t always obvious.
8:03 Luckily, media literacy gives you the tools you need to find the answers.
Whether you’re feeling skeptical of social media’s role in your political views, questioning the power of tech
8:07 companies to control your newsfeeds,
or just trying to get your message out into the world, learning how to navigate the media landscape is tough, but
8:15 possible with the right skill set.
8:22 Now, let’s be honest with each other.
8:24 If you’re watching this video, you’re probably already pretty media savvy, or at least very interested in being so.
8:30 You clearly love learning and found us here on the interwebs, so you’ve got some great skills already.
8:36 Critics might even say we’re just preaching to the choir.
8:38 Well, guess what? If you’re in the choir, we want you singing!
8:42 This is our official request that you sing to everyone you know about media literacy.
8:47 OK, maybe not literally sing. That might get annoying.
8:50 But in all seriousness, media literacy education is only effective when we’re all on the same page.
And those who need the most help learning how to swim in the media deep end are also the least likely to seek out
8:56 videos like this.
9:02 So we need you to pass along these skills to friends, family, high school acquaintances you only talk to on Facebook –
9:09 anyone who won’t come across these lessons themselves.
9:11 We’re all in this together.
9:13 As Academy Award-winning actress Kate Winslet says in 1997 hit film, Titanic: You jump, I jump, Jack.
9:19 Here’s how we’re going to help.
During the first half of this course, we’re going to dive into the history of the field (spoiler alert: media literacy is not
9:21 a new problem);
9:28 learn how to find trusty sources of information; discover how media and your mind interact;
9:33 and explore creating media and the responsibilities that come with it.
9:36 In the second half of the course we’ll use this theory to look at how media works in the world:
9:41 we’ll discover how it’s regulated (the policies and the economics of it all);
9:45 the dark side of the media, like propaganda and misinformation; the lure of advertising;
9:50 how the big tech companies are changing the media landscape; plus we’ll take a look at where the field is headed.
Throughout the course, we’ll return to the core principles of media literacy – to build a framework with which to
9:56 approach our everyday, media-filled lives.
10:04 I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
10:06 Until next time, I’m Jay Smooth for Crash Course.
10:08 We’ll see you next week!
10:10 Crash Course Media Literacy is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT,
10:14 It’s made with the help of all of these nice people and our animation team is Thought Cafe.
10:18 Crash Course is a Complexly production.
If you wanna keep imagining the world complexly with us, check out some of our other channels, like SciShow,
10:20 Animal Wonders, and The Art Assignment.
If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding
10:26 platform that allows you to support the content you love.
10:33 Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.

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(alt01) 12 Cognitive Biases Explained
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEwGBIr_RIw

Short summary:
1. Anchoring Bias
2. Availability Heuristic bias
3. Bandwagon Bias
4. Choice Supportive Bias
5. Confirmation Bias
6. Ostrich Bias
7. Outcome Bias
8. Overconfidence
9. Placebo bias
10. Survivorship Bias
11. Selective Perception Bias
12. Blind Spot Bias

0:00 hey guys practical psychology here and in 1:15 out of thin air instead of giving you an
0:05 this video we're going to be talking 1:17 anchor of 1,200 feet
0:05 about 12 cognitive biases most of these 1:18 the results are crazy. Number two:
0:08 were researched by is one off TV who has 1:20 availability heuristic bias. people
0:10 some great animations on topics like 1:23 overestimate the importance of
0:12 these and other self-development topics 1:24 information that they have let me give
0:14 so check them out in the description or 1:26 you an example here some people think
0:15 on the end screen now let's get into it. 1:28 that terrorism is the biggest threat to
0:17 Number one is anchoring bias we humans 1:30 the United States because that's what
0:19 usually completely rely on the first 1:31 they see on TV the news always talks
0:21 information that we received no matter 1:33 about it and because of that it inflates
0:23 how reliable that piece of information 1:35 the danger but if you look at the real
0:24 is when we take decisions the very first 1:37 perspectives televisions cause 55 times
0:27 information has tremendous effect on our 1:40 more deaths than terrorism
0:29 brain for instance i want to sell you a 1:42 yes TVs literally following people and
0:30 car and you are interested to buy it 1:44 kill them fifty-five more times than
0:33 let's say you ask me what the prices and 1:45 terrorism you're more likely to be
0:34 I tell you thirty thousand dollars now 1:47 killed by a cow than a terrorist
0:36 if you come back a week later and i say 1:49 according to the Consumer Product Safety
0:38 I’ll sell it to you for twenty thousand 1:50 Commission it's more likely to die from
0:39 dollars 1:52 a coconut falling on your head and
0:40 this seems like a new very cheap price 1:54 killing you than a terrorist attack
0:42 to you right because your judgment is 1:56 thank you Gary Vaynerchuk for that one
0:44 based on the initial information you got 1:58 even the police that are hired to
0:45 which was 30,000 you feel like you're 1:59 protect you from terrorists
0:47 getting a great deal but let's say the 2:00 it's estimated that you were a hundred
0:50 first time that you ask me and I say 2:02 thirty times more likely to be killed by
0:51 10,000 and then you come back the next 2:03 the police and by a terrorist
0:52 week and I tell you I’m gonna sell to 2:06 that's because people do not make the
0:54 you for 20,000 now it doesn't look like 2:07 decision based on facts and statistics
0:56 a very good deal because of the 2:08 but usually they make it on news and
0:57 anchoring bias this is just a very 2:11 stories and stuff they hear from other
0:59 generic use of the anchoring bias and I 2:12 people
1:01 don't want a bunch of comments about why 2:13 it's way scarier to die from a terrorist
1:03 thirty thousand dollar car should be 2:15 attack in a falling coconut and because
1:04 sold for ten thousand dollars but 2:17 of this usually the news won't cover it
1:05 another example is trees 2:19 because there's not much money in it.
1:07 what if I asked you if the tallest tree 2:20 Number three is the bandwagon effect.
1:08 in the world was higher or lower than 2:22 People do or believe in something not
1:10 1,200 feet and if so how tall the same 2:24 because they actually do believe it but
1:13 effect occurs if I asked you to guess 2:26 because that's what the rest of the
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2:27 world believes in 4:08 videos that confirmed that belief or
2:28 in other words, following the rest 4:09 read articles that support his argument
2:29 without thinking if you've ever heard 4:11 he doesn't go through and type positive
2:30 someone say well if your friends jump 4:13 health effects of increasing blood
2:32 off a bridge would you then that someone 4:14 glucose levels or positive effects of
2:35 is accusing you of the bandwagon effect 4:17 eating a bowl of ice cream
2:36 it happens a lot with us 4:18 no, he will instinctively go to google
2:38 I mean a lot of people vote for a 4:20 and type in how bad is sugar for you the
2:39 certain candidate in the election 4:22 confirmation bias is a very dangerous in
2:40 because he's the most popular or because 4:24 scientific situations and
2:42 they want to be part of the majority it 4:25 actually, one of the most widely
2:44 happens a lot in the stock market too if 4:26 committed cognitive biases. Number six:
2:45 someone starts buying a stock because 4:29 the ostrich bias. This is the decision or
2:47 they think it's going to rise then a lot 4:32 rather subconscious decision to ignore
2:48 of other people are going to start 4:33 the negative information it may also be
2:49 picking the stock as well it can also 4:35 an indication we only want to consider
2:51 happen during meetings if everyone 4:37 the positive aspects of something
2:52 agrees on something you are more likely 4:38 this goes beyond are only looking for
2:53 to agree with him on that object in 4:40 the positive information but this is
2:56 management the opposite of this is 4:42 when there is negative information and
2:57 called the group think and it's 4:44 we choose to ignore it as an outlier
2:59 something companies try very hard to 4:45 sometimes even when we have a problem, we
3:00 turn because if nine out of ten people 4:47 try to ignore it thinking it will go
3:02 agree on something for the last person 4:49 away
3:04 doesn't and won't speak up 4:49 let's say you have an assignment to do
3:06 it could squelch a great idea. Number 4:51 it's not something that you really want
3:08 four is choice supportive bias. So people 4:52 to do so you may just keep on
3:10 have the tendency to defend themselves 4:53 procrastinating with it because you're
3:11 because it was their choice 4:54 minding said it will go away or is
3:13 just because I made the choice it must 4:56 solved by ignoring it
3:15 be right for example let's say a person 4:58 smokers usually they know it's bad for
3:16 buys an apple product 4:59 their health but a lot of them keep
3:18 let's say it's a MacBook instead of a 5:01 ignoring the negative implications of
3:19 windows pc well he's more likely to 5:02 cigarettes thinking it will not damage
3:22 ignore the downsides or the faults of 5:04 them or might stop them before anything
3:24 the apple computer while pointing out 5:06 serious will happen because they
3:25 the downsides of the pc he's more likely 5:07 consider themselves in our wire to avoid
3:28 to notice the advantages of the apple 5:10 finding out negative information we just
3:30 computer not the windows computer i 5:11 stop looking for it
3:31 would someone point out that they made a 5:13 this could be a serious crime in many
3:33 bad decision 5:14 scientific research laboratories and
3:34 well let's say you have a dog you think 5:16 basically promotes ignorance. Number 7:
3:36 it's awesome because it's your dog 5:19 outcome bias we tend to judge the
3:37 although it might poop on the floor 5:21 efficacy of a decision based primarily
3:39 every now and then the same goes for 5:22 on how things turn out after decision is
3:40 political candidates not the pooping 5:25 made we rarely examine the conditions
3:42 part but they both may suck but one of 5:27 that existed at the time of the decision
3:45 the lesser of two evils maybe more right 5:28 choosing instead to evaluate performance
3:46 in your mind because you voted for them. 5:30 solely or mostly on whether the end
3:49 Number five: confirmation bias. We tend to 5:33 result was positive or not in other
3:51 listen to information that confirms what 5:34 words you decide whether an action is
3:53 we already know or even interpret the 5:36 right or wrong based on the outcome this
3:55 information that we receive in a way 5:37 goes a little bit into consequentialism
3:56 that confirms the current information 5:39 but it goes hand-in-hand with the
3:58 that we already have let's say that your 5:40 hindsight bias let's say there's a
3:59 friend believes that suites are 5:42 manager who wants to take the decision
4:01 unhealthy this is generally a pretty 5:44 his team and the data are telling him to
4:02 broad belief he will only focus on the 5:45 make one decision but his gut is telling
4:05 information that confirms what we 5:47 him to make another decision
4:06 already know is more likely to click on 5:48 well he goes ahead and makes the
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5:50 decision that has got told him to do and 7:31 powerful thing and this actually isn't
5:52 then in the end it was the right 7:33 always bad thinking in fact you can use
5:53 decision 7:35 a placebo effect in our advantage if we
5:53 does that mean it's actually better to 7:37 use it wisely
5:54 trust your gut rather than listen your 7:38 there's actually a reverse of this and
5:56 team who is advising you based on facts 7:39 it's called the nocebo and this is when
5:58 and statistics 7:41 it is native. Number ten: survivorship
5:59 well that's what the outcome biases you 7:43 Bias. This bias is when you are judging
6:01 take the decision and bass the 7:46 something based on the surviving
6:02 effectiveness of your decision on the 7:47 information let me give you an example
6:03 outcome even if it was luck 7:48 here there are a lot of articles titled
6:05 now this is bad logical thinking and 7:51 like five things millionaires do every
6:07 will actually lead you to ruin thinking 7:53 morning
6:09 and bad outcomes in the long run. Number 7:53 does that mean doing those things every
6:11 8: overconfidence sometimes you get too 7:55 morning will make you a millionaire know
6:13 confident and start taking decisions not 7:57 there are tons of people who did them
6:15 based on facts but based on your opinion 7:58 and didn't become a millionaire but
6:17 or gut because you have been correct so 7:59 there are also tons of people who did
6:19 many times in the past for example you 8:01 them and did become a millionaire
6:21 are a stock trader and you pick five 8:02 so these articles are primarily based on
6:23 stocks in a couple years all of them 8:05 the ones who survived and reject all
6:25 turn out to be successful and profitable 8:07 other people to do the same thing but
6:26 it increases your confidence to a point 8:08 did not become millionaires
6:28 where you can start believing that 8:10 another example is to say that buildings
6:29 whatever start you pick will be 8:12 in an ancient city were built using
6:31 successful it's quite dangerous because 8:13 extreme engineering because they lasted
6:33 you might stop looking at the facts and 8:15 so long
6:34 solely rely on your opinion 8:16 this is a bad conclusion because you
6:36 check out the gambler’s fallacy if you 8:17 aren't considering what ratio of
6:38 want more information on this just 8:19 buildings were built to how many that
6:40 because you flip the coin five times and 8:20 lasted
6:41 it landed on heads doesn't mean that the 8:21 you're only seeing the ones that lasted
6:43 next time there's more than fifty 8:23 thousands of years of weathering when
6:44 percent chance of it landing on ahead 8:24 the other ninety percent I've already
6:46 again, ego is the enemy is a great book 8:25 washed away it's hard to know what you
6:48 about this bias and I just made a book 8:28 don't know.
6:49 review on it. 8:29 Number 11: selective perception. I like
6:50 Number nine: placebo bias. When you 8:32 this one
6:53 believe something will have a certain 8:32 selective perception is a form of bias
6:54 effect on you then it will actually 8:34 that causes people to perceive messages
6:55 cause that effect for instance you are 8:36 and actions according to their frame of
6:58 sick and the doctor gives you a certain 8:37 reference using selective perception
6:59 medicine even if that medicine does not 8:39 people tend to overlook and forget that
7:01 actually, help you even if it's just made 8:42 contradicts our beliefs or expectations
7:03 of sugar you believe that it will help 8:44 let's say for example you're a smoker
7:05 you and it actually causes you to 8:45 and you're a big fan of soccer
7:07 recover quicker this might not sound 8:47 you're more likely to ignore
7:09 very logical but dozens of experiments 8:49 the negative advertisements about
7:11 have proven this 8:50 cigarettes because since you are already
7:12 that's why if you realize positive 8:51 smoking you have this perception that
7:14 people usually have positive life and 8:53 it's okay to smoke but there's an
7:15 vice-versa the way you think is super 8:55 advertisement about soccer you are more
7:17 important and we've hit on this in 8:57 likely to notice it because you have a
7:19 previous videos for the same reason a 8:58 very positive perception about it
7:21 lot of personal development books say 9:00 this is actually something really
7:22 that if you really believe something you 9:01 interesting and has to do with how you
7:24 will eventually achieve it or at least 9:02 perceive the world due to your
7:26 find a way to achieve it because the 9:03 subconscious mind and what it filters
7:28 placebo effect will give you the 9:05 out. The last one is called the blind
7:29 motivation that need the mind truly is a 9:07 spot bias. If I asked you how biased you
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9:09 are you would probably say that you are 9:34 marking my paper but if you ask her if
9:11 less biased than the average person and 9:36 other teachers are biased when students
9:13 you are more likely to base your 9:37 give them gifts she will say yes
9:14 judgment on facts and statistics and 9:39 in most cases and that's what the blind
9:16 that's what's known as a blind spot bias 9:41 spot biases i really enjoyed creating
9:18 or the bias bias your bias because you 9:43 this video but most of the content was
9:21 think that you are less biased than 9:45 curated by my friend is gone off he's
9:22 everyone else 9:47 got a channel similar to mine and I'd
9:23 for example I guess it's something to my 9:48 like you to check it out here or in the
9:26 teacher and the next week she gave me a 9:50 description i hope you guys enjoyed this
9:27 good grade on a test if you ask her 9:52 video and learn something if you want
9:29 whether she was biased when she gave me 9:53 more valuables like this check out my
9:30 that grade the answer will be that the 9:55 channel and subscribe thanks for
9:32 gift never affected her decision when 9:56 watching

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(alt02) Michael Shermer - Baloney Detection Kit
Presenter: Michael Shermer
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

Summary - 10 questions to ask:

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

0:10 when we're growing up we tend to be 1:43 this way this way this way the errors
0:12 be pretty credulous we just believe 1:44 are here and there and they kind of
0:13 almost anything that people tell us 1:46 cancel each other out if the errors are
0:15 especially authorities and adults and 1:48 all in one direction slanting toward a
0:17 textbooks and politicians and television 1:50 particular belief then that makes us
0:20 you to the Internet I mean there's just 1:53 suspicious that there's something else
0:23 this sort of sea of information coming 1:55 going on like the global warming
0:25 at us and how can you tell the 1:56 skeptics for example will often pick and
0:27 difference between you know it's right 1:59 choose data that always slants toward
0:30 or it's wrong you know how do you know 2:02 that particular belief or their errors
0:32 people believe weird things because our 2:04 always slant toward skepticism about
0:35 brains are wired up to find meaningful 2:07 global warming and that tells us there's
0:37 patterns you think if you see the face 2:09 something else going on there
0:39 in the cloud or the face on Mars or the 2:16 so a second question to ask is does the
0:42 Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich 2:18 source often make similar type claims
0:44 or on the side of a window many patterns 2:20 for example New Age people the people
0:46 are real and it's good to know what 2:22 that believe in spirituality and and
0:48 those patterns are and that's called 2:24 ghosts and haunted houses and UFOs and
0:50 learning we connect A to B and often a 2:27 all this they believe the whole thing
0:52 really is connected to B problem is a 2:30 they tend to be more susceptible to
0:55 lot of patterns or faults they're 2:33 magical thinking or maybe they're
2:35 heretics just for the sake of heresy
0:57 superstitious thinking they aren't real
2:37 rather than following the data to see if
1:00 I'm often asked when I give talks you
2:39 that is a heretical idea that's going to
1:03 know why should we believe you skeptics
2:41 overturn the mainstream maybe usually
1:04 and my answer is you shouldn't you
2:43 that doesn't happen though the point
1:07 shouldn't believe anybody based on
2:45 here is you want to have a mind open
1:08 Authority or whatever position they
2:48 enough to accept radical new ideas but
1:10 might have you should check it out
2:50 not so open that your brains fall out so
1:12 yourself and we call this generally our
2:57 the third point in our baloney detection
1:14 baloney detection kit sort of inspired
2:59 kit is have the claims been verified by
1:16 by Carl Sagan's idea that there's a lot
3:01 somebody else you make a bold claim
1:17 of baloney out there and we need a kit
3:04 somebody else has to be able to go out
1:19 to detect it that kid is called science
3:06 and test it so the classic case study on
1:21 and that's what science does best so the
3:08 this 1989 cold fusion claim pons and
1:29 first of our baloney detection questions
3:11 Fleischmann hold a press conference they
1:31 you should always ask when you hear some
3:12 announce look we can produce fusion in a
1:32 buddy make a claim is you know how
3:14 jar on a desktop this will solve our
1:34 reliable is the source of the claim you
3:17 energy crisis this will be energy too
1:37 do expect some errors to creep into data
3:20 cheap to meter this will change the
1:39 of course but the error should be
3:21 world everybody was all excited was in
1:41 scattershot they're randomly this way
3:23 the headlines front page news the whole
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3:25 thing until people went out and tried to 5:39 Glee in a published public forum you
3:27 replicate their experiment and nobody 5:42 really have to kind of think about what
3:29 could do it so that told us right away 5:45 your critics would say not because you
3:31 okay there's something else going on 5:47 care about your critics but because they
3:34 here it's a by-product or an artifact 5:49 may find something you're not thinking
3:35 the chemical reaction it's something 5:50 of so you got to think along those lines
3:37 other than what they claimed it was so 5:52 try to disprove your claim
3:40 when you make a claim if you don't have 5:58 so our sixth point in our baloney
3:42 the data that other people can then go 6:00 detection kit is to ask where the
3:44 to their labs and run the experiment 6:02 preponderance of evidence points to this
3:46 just like you did if they can't get the 6:05 theory or some other theory anybody can
3:48 same results there's something wrong 6:07 make a claim and then pile up a few
3:49 there and in science we require that 6:09 points in favor of it the question is
3:56 so our fourth point in our baloney 6:11 what about all the other evidence is it
3:58 detection kit is to ask does this really 6:13 also leaning toward this or is it
4:00 fit with the way the world works when 6:15 leaning toward that other theory that
4:03 you get one of those emails about the 6:16 you're trying to challenge so at all
4:05 Nigerian you know inheritance of twenty 6:18 times like in the theory of evolution
4:08 million dollars if you'll just send your 6:19 for example creationists will say well
4:10 money to them and then they'll send you 6:21 just you know what about this one little
4:12 the big pile of money really come on is 6:23 thing here well okay maybe there's a few
4:14 that really the way the world works I 6:25 gaps or we can't explain this or that
4:15 mean a pile of money for nothing 6:27 but what about the 10,000 other pieces
4:17 probably not for example in archaeology 6:30 of evidence that are explained by the
4:21 we often hear about you know the 6:32 theory of evolution how would you
4:22 pyramids the Ministry of the pyramids 6:34 explain those with your other theory in
4:25 who built the pyramids the Egyptians 6:36 a way science is a little bit like
4:27 built the mo no they couldn't have built 6:37 solving a crime you know the guy never
4:28 them you know because wow they're 6:39 confesses right so you have to like
4:30 incredibly complex and so on well you 6:42 piece together the evidence that's
4:32 know it's just a pile of rocks right I 6:43 available and you is it this guy or is
4:34 mean they had a lot of free time a lot 6:46 it that guy or did this happen or that
4:36 of cheap labor never rains sentries to 6:48 happen and and the way criminologists
4:39 build these big pile of rocks you know 6:50 work is they you know they try to look
4:40 come on it's not that complicated but 6:51 at a look at the mass of data and go you
4:42 even if it were true that somebody else 6:53 know what it's all kind of porting that
4:44 built the pyramids say maybe 20,000 6:55 guy did it and let's see if we can build
4:46 years ago this is one theory maybe the 6:58 our case and that's a little bit how
4:49 lost continent of Atlantis and the 6:59 scientists work there is always other
4:50 Atlanteans came over there and built the 7:02 ideas the question is what's the one
4:52 pyramids if that were true when you do 7:03 that the preponderance of evidence
4:55 the archeological dig you should find 7:05 points to
4:57 the tools the trash the junk of the 7:11 so our seventh point is to ask are the
4:59 people who live there the houses where 7:14 people making the claim playing by the
5:01 they lived and that is what you find 7:16 rules of science that is are they using
5:03 dated at the time of the Egyptians so if 7:17 the logic and reason and empirical
5:08 it was the aliens or the Atlanteans or 7:19 evidence and testing and corroboration
5:10 whatever you would find other artifacts 7:21 and and so forth or are they just trying
5:11 to support that 7:24 to make a case for their particular
5:16 it's our fifth question you always want 7:26 claim next or so for example a nice case
5:18 to ask has anyone tried to falsify this 7:29 study is the difference between UFO
5:20 or disprove the claim in other words 7:31 proponents and the members of the SETI
5:23 it's one thing to pile up a bunch of 7:34 community the search for
5:25 evidence go look I have this radical new 7:35 extraterrestrial intelligence they both
5:26 idea here's my arguments in support of 7:39 are interested in aliens but there's a
5:29 it okay interesting but what are the 7:41 radical difference in the two
5:30 counter arguments have you thought about 7:42 communities the one community the UFO
5:32 that if you thought what else could be 7:44 people they tend to not be scientists
5:34 explaining this because if you don't do 7:46 they have no training in science they
5:37 it somebody else will usually with great 7:48 don't do experiments they're not trying
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 7:49 to disprove their claim by looking for 10:05 detection kit is does the new theory
7:51 other explanations and yet the SETI 10:06 account for as many phenomena is the old
7:54 people by contrast 10:09 theory anybody can find a few anomalies
7:56 they're looking for ways to disconfirm 10:11 that the current prevailing theory
7:58 their idea they're running experiments 10:13 doesn't seem to account for in other
8:00 they're testing their hypotheses the 10:15 words in science it's okay to say I
8:02 trained professional scientists so even 10:16 don't know you have a few anomalies a
8:04 though they both have the same interest 10:18 few mysteries and so on and but what
8:06 are there aliens out there they come at 10:21 pseudo scientists tend to do is they
8:09 it at radically different perspectives 10:23 tend to take those few handful of
8:11 and that's why one we call science SETI 10:25 mysteries and say well that's my whole
8:13 and the other one we call pseudoscience 10:27 new theory at skeptic magazine we always
8:15 ufology 10:30 get these long single space type
8:19 so the eighth point in our baloney 10:32 manuscripts of a theory of everything
8:22 detection kit is to ask if the claimant 10:33 and it always starts off you know Newton
8:24 is providing a positive evidence in 10:35 was wrong and Einstein was wrong and
8:27 favor of their theory or just denying 10:37 Stephen Hawking is wrong but I I have
8:29 evidence for the other theory that is 10:39 worked out this new theory of physics
8:32 it's one thing to compile a list of 10:41 that explains the world but the question
8:34 problems with the other guy's theory so 10:44 is can this new theory explain all the
8:36 you have to actually have positive 10:46 other things that Newtonian gravity
8:38 evidence in favor of your contrary or 10:49 explains and Einstein's global general
8:41 heretical theory so for example you 10:51 relativity explains in quantum physics
8:43 often see the UFO people say well we 10:53 explains you know if they explain one
8:45 don't you know I'll ask him where's the 10:55 little thing that's really meaningless
8:47 eight where is the evidence where's the 10:57 unless they can explain all the other
8:48 UFO where's the alien body well you know 10:58 stuff that's currently explained so the
8:50 they covered it up they they've hidden 11:05 tempting we should always ask in our
8:51 it it's hidden in area 51 or they buried 11:06 baloney detection kit is do the personal
8:54 the bodies in Roswell or you know 11:09 beliefs and ideologies and worldview of
8:55 they're at some Air Force Base okay 11:11 the person making the claim is that
8:57 that's just negative evidence that's 11:13 what's driving their research or is it
8:59 saying I don't have positive evidence 11:16 the other way around in other words
9:01 all's I can say is that they concealed 11:17 science and everything else is really
9:04 the evidence okay that doesn't count I'm 11:20 it's done by people and people have
9:06 sorry they'll often hold up like these 11:22 biases confirmation bias we look for and
9:08 government documents with big block 11:24 find confirmatory evidence for what we
9:10 doubt type and go look at that the fact 11:26 already believe and we ignore the dis
9:14 that something is covered up for some 11:28 confirmatory evidence this is a classic
9:15 national security military reason that 11:30 case so for example we did a whole issue
9:17 doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial there 11:33 of skeptic magazine on a global warming
9:19 may be a terrestrial reason for that 11:35 and I had a left-wing scientist and a
9:22 so when Bigfoot people they say well 11:37 right-wing scientist and a scientist
9:25 Bigfoot's out there okay maybe you know 11:39 with no wings at all and I mean why
9:27 there could be a bipedal primate running 11:41 would there be scientist with wings you
9:29 around in Canada somewhere show me the 11:43 know political leanings well because
9:31 body oh well you know the bodies you 11:45 they're people and they vote and
9:34 they hide and they're very secretive and 11:47 something like global warming well you
9:37 there aren't that many of them and so on 11:49 can see util by just listening to talk
9:40 maybe but look you want to name a new 11:51 radio and so on this is very
9:43 species of biology you got to give us a 11:52 ideologically driven where people you
9:44 type specimen you know an actual body 11:54 know say well we've I'm pro-business I
9:47 that we can dissect and look at you 11:56 have to be skeptical of global warming
9:49 could look at and I can look at 11:58 wait how about just following the data
9:50 photograph put it in a museum take it to 12:00 shouldn't the data tell us whether the
9:52 the lab and so on it's not enough to 12:02 earth is getting warmer or not well it
9:54 have negative evidence against the other 12:03 is and should we be able to discern from
9:56 theory you got a positive evidence favor 12:06 the data whether the global warming is
9:58 of your theory 12:08 caused by human activity or not
10:02 so on our ninth question in the baloney 12:10 yes we can it appears that it is so
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12:12 what's all this politics stuff well 13:10 range of probably true to probably not
12:14 because we're people so in science at 13:12 true science is the best tool ever
12:16 some point you have to remove politics 13:14 devised for understanding how the world
12:19 and ideology and say what is the data 13:16 works and everybody knows that because
12:23 what the baloney detection kit does 13:19 they all go to doctors and if somebody's
12:25 there with our bill ten questions is it 13:22 flying at 30,000 feet in a plane they're
12:27 helps us when we encounter a claim think 13:24 not skeptical of math and engineering
12:31 about it in different ways what you're 13:26 they know this is the best design
12:34 going to find is that there's a range 13:28 possible and so on
12:36 some are just obviously bogus the earth 13:31 so most of us when we're playing with
12:39 is flat no it's not round you know the 13:33 our iPods or we're using our Google
12:42 earth is going around the Sun not 13:35 search engine and we're on the internet
12:43 vice-versa yes okay there's things that 13:36 we're watching our high-def televisions
12:45 we know for sure true evolution happens 13:38 and so on we love science we know
12:47 to be one of those maybe global warming 13:41 science works and we know the basis of
12:49 is sort of leaning toward that now but 13:44 it is sound and all that stuff it only
12:51 it's taken a while and there's other 13:46 comes to a few things like what comes to
12:53 things like maybe some radical new 13:49 what's the meaning of life or where did
12:55 theories about the cosmos whether 13:51 we come from what is it was all mean
12:57 there's multiple universes out there 13:53 what's the future you know there we
12:58 well that's sort of more in the 13:55 start to think well maybe I should be
13:00 uncertain range and then there's things 13:56 skeptical of science in fact really
13:02 that are almost surely not true like you 13:58 science is the best thing ever devised
13:05 know psychic telepathy where I can read 14:01 for understanding the world we should
13:06 your mind that sort of thing 14:02 love it
13:08 those are surely not true to get this

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