Decisive

A couple of year's ago I purchased Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. This is an excellent book that I wrote about previously.

After reading Made to Stick, I subscribed to the authors' newsletter. It was in this newsletter that I was offered a download of the first chapter for Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work. Embedded in the text of the PDF was an offer to request a copy of the entire book. As with the first chapter, I was expecting a PDF, and was quite surprised to receive a paperback copy of the book in the mail. The book should be available for purchase in March, 2013.

Widen your options

• Avoid a narrow frame
• Multitrack
• Find someone who's solved your problem

Reality-test your assumptions

• Consider the opposite
• Zoom in, zoom out
• Ooch (the Heaths' word for conducting a test or trial)

Attain distance before deciding

• Overcome short-term emotion
• Honor your core priorities

Prepare to be wrong

• Bookend the future
• Set a tripwire

As with Made to Stick, this is an great book that I encourage you to purchase from Amazon.com or whatever bookseller you use. If reading it doesn't help your decision making, at least you will be aware of your thought processes when making choices.

What Story Does to Your Brain

I subscribe to the weekly newsletter for Robert McKee, a Hollywood veteran who conducts a 4-day seminar on writing for movies, television, and theater.

In this week's "Byline" newsletter, he featured a blog post by Leo Widrich entitled "What Listening to a story does to our brains."

In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards.

So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented “sandwich”, the name for 2 slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world.

You can read the rest of the post at http://blog.bufferapp.com/science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains

Douglas G Pratt, 2013