book / recommends
Never Split the Difference
“Well, the obvious first one is Never Split the Difference. I recommend that book to everybody in the universe. I think if you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't get your driver's license. For those who don't know, it was written by Chris Voss, he was an FBI hostage negotiator. And it explores how to negotiate with people, and not just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. And there's some very surprising technique in there that is unexpected, not trying to get people to agree with you, but getting them to say no, more often. Instead of saying, "Hey, Lenny, are you willing to do this?" Say, "Hey, Lenny, are you opposed to doing this?" And it's just this reversal. And "I'm giving you the out," is the way he explains it. There's a whole bunch of other technique, but the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That's a no-brainer. The second one I would say, since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about habitat today. If you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals, but you're better off because you read them, there's a book called Never... not Never Split the Difference, there's a book called The Person and the Situation. It was written by some researchers, some psychological researchers. And what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior, and how the situation you're in, or like we talked about, the habitat you're in, influences your behavior. And if you're not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, "Oh, it doesn't. I'll do what I do regardless of the habitat, or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am," that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively. It's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences a person, and how the personality influences the person. And then I guess the last, maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a choose your own adventure. If you're a real student of the game, and you want go 10,000 leagues under the sea on this stuff, there's a series of books called the Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience. You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them, you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the library-decorating version of it, but that is bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It's incredible knowledge. If you instead want to keep it more in the part of the world you experience and can see and not the brain. Thaler wrote a book called Misbehaving. It was kind of the major book about behavioral economics. And again, we spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act, instead of the way people do act. And behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics that's about how people do act, not how people should act. So I think that's a great field of study.”