Robert Cialdini is the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, and his 1984 book “Influence” is the foundational text on persuasion. He wrote it after spending three years undercover in sales and fundraising training programmes to see what practitioners had learned that academics hadn’t. He identified six universal principles —…
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Attention residue is the reason you can leave a meeting, sit down at your desk, and get almost nothing done for the next twenty minutes. Coined by Sophie Leroy in 2009, it describes what happens when you switch tasks before the first one reaches a natural stopping point: part of your attention stays stuck on…
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Rambam is the acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, also known as Moses Maimonides. He was a 12th-century Jewish philosopher, physician, and Torah scholar who lived in Spain, Morocco, and Egypt. He is considered one of the most important figures in Jewish history, and his works are considered some of the most important in Jewish…
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BJ Fogg founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford and has spent decades studying what actually causes behaviour. His model is elegantly compact: B = MAP. Behaviour happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt converge at the same moment. Remove any one and nothing happens. The strategic consequence, laid out in “Tiny Habits,” is that…
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Benjamin Graham is the father of value investing, author of “Security Analysis” and “The Intelligent Investor,” and the Columbia professor who taught Warren Buffett. Buffett has described the latter book as the best thing ever written about investing, and his own approach as largely Graham’s with modifications. Graham’s two central ideas have aged beautifully. The…
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Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown who writes about attention as the scarce resource of the knowledge economy. “Deep Work” is his central argument: the ability to concentrate without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming simultaneously more valuable and more rare, which makes it an enormous competitive advantage. His prescriptions are…
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Sophie Leroy is a management professor whose 2009 paper gave us one of the most useful concepts in modern productivity research: attention residue. Her question was simple. Why is it so hard to perform well on a task immediately after switching from a different one? Her experiments showed that when people switch away from an…
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Chris Bailey spent a year running productivity experiments on himself — working 90-hour weeks, then 20-hour weeks, waking at 5:30am, meditating 35 hours in a week, living in total isolation — and wrote up the results in “The Productivity Project.” The methodology was unorthodox; the conclusions were sensible. His framing is that productivity has three…
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The avocado earns its reputation. It’s a nutrient-dense fruit built mostly of monounsaturated fat — primarily oleic acid, the same fat that makes olive oil interesting — along with roughly 7g of fibre per fruit, more potassium than a banana, plus vitamin K, folate, vitamin E, and the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin. The research is…
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