What Your Online Self Reveals About You

What is the key to accomplishing seemingly impossible goals? According to the authors of Influencer, it’s all about knowing how to change human behavior. Drawing on their background in social science and organizational change, Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler break down the complex task of influencing people into a simple three-step process: To get things done, you have to be able to set a clear goal, know what people need to change, and motivate them to make it happen. Armed with this advice, the authors say that you have everything you need to meet any goal.

In this guide, we’ll show how the authors’ arguments about influencing human behavior are rooted in psychology, touching on multiple theories of behavior change. We’ll also supplement the author’s recommendations with advice from other behavior change books like Atomic Habits by James Clear, Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins, and High Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard.

How can we live less stressfully in the modern world, where we have more demands on our attention than ever before? In his bestseller The Organized Mind, author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin suggests that the key lies in sorting and externally storing your thoughts and organizing the things around you, which means writing down your thoughts and arranging your physical environment so your brain has less information to manage. Levitin argues that doing so allows you to use your brain power more efficiently and make better decisions.

In this guide, we’ll explore how the modern world overwhelms us, why our current approach to dealing with it doesn’t work, and why you should sort and externalize your thoughts and things instead. Then, we’ll discuss strategies for sorting and externalizing your thoughts, things, and relationships—like how carrying a pack of notecards can help you focus. We’ll discuss other experts’ recommendations for dealing with overwhelm and their tips for sorting and externalizing information.

Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, wrote Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst to explore the myriad influences on human behavior.

As a child, Sapolsky became both fascinated and horrified with the atrocities of the Holocaust, and strove to understand the science behind how people could do such terrible things. That fascination grew into a lifelong study of science and people and led directly to this book.

In this guide, we’ve divided Sapolsky’s ideas along classic “nature versus nurture” lines—in other words, how much are we influenced by our own innate tendencies versus our surroundings and how we were raised? Our commentary will provide background information on Sapolsky’s ideas, explore interesting details to deepen your understanding of the subjects, and examine some scientific theories that conflict with Sapolsky’s.

We live in an age where sophisticated technologies are increasingly pervasive. User interfaces are so intuitive that we don’t need a manual to figure out how every mobile application works—but what is it about specific technologies that allows them to integrate seamlessly into our day-to-day lives, and how did user-friendliness become the bedrock of innovation?

In User Friendly, user experience designers Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant explore the evolution of user-friendly design—how the concept emerged from the feminist movement in the 1920s, how it has morphed into the often addictive forms of technology that we have today, and how it might be leveraged to improve human well-being in the future. The authors argue that we must shift how companies apply user-friendly design principles to ensure that technology reflects the values of consumers—and doesn’t just keep people glued to screens to their own detriment. In this guide, we’ll also incorporate research showing how technology impacts the social fabric of society as well as advice on mitigating technology’s harmful effects.

Many of us wish that we could become more productive, or increase the productivity of our organization. However, it’s not always clear how to do this. You may believe that you simply need to work longer hours or push yourself to work harder. But doing so won’t necessarily increase your productivity. Instead, you need to make smarter decisions about how you motivate yourself, focus, set goals, and use data effectively.

Smarter Faster Better explores the choices we can make to boost personal and organizational productivity. Learn how to build a productive team, how combining different types of goals can increase your productivity, and how the makers of Disney’s Frozen avoided box-office disaster by innovating productively.

Can Google help us understand sexual diversity, detect unreported child abuse, and prevent hate crimes? Data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz thinks so. In Everybody Lies, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that in daily life and traditional surveys, people tend to lie about their sexuality, prejudices, and emotional turmoil—but they willingly confess all of these secrets in their Google searches and other web activity.

Stephens-Davidowitz says this information can be used for the greater good—that it can inform better social policies, improve institutions like education and health care, promote social equity, and bring hidden injustice to light. But to do so, data researchers have to understand big data’s inherent strengths—and avoid its inherent weaknesses.

In this guide, we’ll explore the four benefits that Stephens-Davidowitz says give big data its power while balancing his optimistic viewpoint with recent analyses of big data’s potential for harm.

Can Google help us understand sexual diversity, detect unreported child abuse, and prevent hate crimes? Data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz thinks so. In Everybody Lies, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that in daily life and traditional surveys, people tend to lie about their sexuality, prejudices, and emotional turmoil—but they willingly confess all of these secrets in their Google searches and other web activity.

Stephens-Davidowitz says this information can be used for the greater good—that it can inform better social policies, improve institutions like education and health care, promote social equity, and bring hidden injustice to light. But to do so, data researchers have to understand big data’s inherent strengths—and avoid its inherent weaknesses.

In this guide, we’ll explore the four benefits that Stephens-Davidowitz says give big data its power while balancing his optimistic viewpoint with recent analyses of big data’s potential for harm.

Many of us wish that we could become more productive, or increase the productivity of our organization. However, it’s not always clear how to do this. You may believe that you simply need to work longer hours or push yourself to work harder. But doing so won’t necessarily increase your productivity. Instead, you need to make smarter decisions about how you motivate yourself, focus, set goals, and use data effectively.

Smarter Faster Better explores the choices we can make to boost personal and organizational productivity. Learn how to build a productive team, how combining different types of goals can increase your productivity, and how the makers of Disney’s Frozen avoided box-office disaster by innovating productively.

We live in an age where sophisticated technologies are increasingly pervasive. User interfaces are so intuitive that we don’t need a manual to figure out how every mobile application works—but what is it about specific technologies that allows them to integrate seamlessly into our day-to-day lives, and how did user-friendliness become the bedrock of innovation?

In User Friendly, user experience designers Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant explore the evolution of user-friendly design—how the concept emerged from the feminist movement in the 1920s, how it has morphed into the often addictive forms of technology that we have today, and how it might be leveraged to improve human well-being in the future. The authors argue that we must shift how companies apply user-friendly design principles to ensure that technology reflects the values of consumers—and doesn’t just keep people glued to screens to their own detriment. In this guide, we’ll also incorporate research showing how technology impacts the social fabric of society as well as advice on mitigating technology’s harmful effects.