Learning from the masters
Last week, I talked about Shane Parrish and clear thinking, which draws heavily from behavioral psychology.
I will title-drop several books in this article beyond the main one on Judgment and Decision-making because they all play off each other and support the same central idea.
I was fortunate enough to attend several classes Nick Epley and Richard Thaler taught while attending the University of Chicago.
Rather than using his own book, Nudge, Thaler used Krakauer’s Into Thin Air as a teaching tool to discuss overconfidence and the irrationality of decision-making. A prime example of this phenomenon is that the most experienced mountain climbers will go against their training and make ego-based decisions.
Thaler’s book Nudge delves into the concept of irrational behavior, focusing on how ego and irrationality can be leveraged to incentivize actions, like increasing organ donation commitments. He emphasized a program that boosted organ donations by telling people they would receive priority if they ever needed an organ, a significant point considering the scarcity of organ transplants.
Epley introduced me to Cialdini’s Influence, as well as an even more powerful and lesser-known book called Judgment in Managerial Decision Making by Max Bazerman. The third book for that class was an anthology of research essays edited by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who won the Nobel Prize for Prospect Theory and their research in heuristics and biases, an even more dense and heady read.
Cialdini’s oft-quoted Influence has become the bible of digital marketers. His book explored ideas around social proof and urgency as reliable methods for persuading others.
While Influence is the easy entry point into these ideas, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making is the tome of more advanced theory.
Those books made me a devotee of behavioral psychology.
In these articles, I share how to actively use these behavioral psychology methods to design a marketing system that leverages bias and heuristics to get people to feel positive about the experience you deliver.
At Author Nation, we recently launched one of our “big ideas” with The Signing Store. This concept addresses numerous pain points, including the hassle of collecting sales tax at shows. Instead of merely eliminating these pain points, we applied principles from behavioral economics to create a holistic system that enhances the overall experience. By understanding and leveraging biases and heuristics, we designed an experience that not only solves practical issues but also engages and delights users in a way that aligns with their subconscious decision-making processes.
This is what I believe will differentiate success from failure in the future: Those who still focus on tactical behavior triggers like social proof, urgency, and reciprocity will be seen as gimmick users versus systems applications users where there is more focus on the feelings and the integration with meeting emotional needs, like the Human Givens (next week’s article).
Challenging your decision-making
This idea goes back to earlier articles in this series, which challenged you to consider whether you are imitating others or educating yourself.
This all brings me to a touchy subject.
What if everything you’re doing now and ever did was never your choice and almost never rationally thought out?
What if most of your career “choices” happened at an unconscious level driven by biology, fear, and ego? What if you then just applied reason to justify that you made a decision rather than had a reaction?
Part of becoming a clear thinker is understanding how biased we are as humans. The fact you may be saying, “Well, I’m not,” proves you are because if you have any chance of not being biased, you have to accept that 90% of our decisions form in the fast-thinking part of our brain, and then our logical thinking is putting the story around what happened.
What makes matters even worse in the publishing industry is if you are following someone else’s path based on how you perceive their success. You assume they are successful, know what is driving their success, and have things under control. If any one of those is incorrect, your entire imitative strategy is out of control. It’s easy to think (heuristic) that that other person has it figured out. Instead, start with an intense criticism of your perceptions of publishing. Before you even begin to think about what you should explore and learn, tear at your own foundations; as Becca Symes has said for years, “Question the premise.”
If you are tangled up in your own biases about the industry, you’ll never be able to be a leader; you’ll continue to be looking to others for the answers.
Take some author you admire and analyze their business. Then, take everything that looks to be driving it and explore if you did the exact opposite. See where that takes you. It may just lead to a blue ocean strategy that sets you apart from others. More than anything, embrace the process of challenging your own thinking.
You’ll need to have high conviction when you decide to venture into the blue ocean. When you become a disruptor, your peers will push back out of their own biases and fear. Knowing that you have been even more critical in your thinking than they ever could be will leave you with certainty. You can go headstrong into uncharted territory knowing that you actually made a decision and didn’t let an unconscious fear-based reaction make you.