موضوعات
آموزش و پرورش
ادبیات و زبان
پزشکی، دندانپزشکی و داروسازی
تاریخ و جغرافیا
داستان و رمان
دیگر
دین و فلسفه
روانشناسی
ریاضیات و آمار
سلامتی، تناسب اندام و رژیم غذایی
شیمی و پلیمر
علوم اجتماعی و حقوق
علوم زیستی و بیوتکنولوژی
فیزیک و نجوم
کامپیوتر و اینترنت
کتابهای کودکان و داستان
کسب و کار و اقتصاد
کشاورزی و دامپزشکی و غذا
معماری
مهندسی و فناوری
هنر و تئاتر
محصولات
Killing Hope_ US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Part 1-Zed Books Ltd (2003) - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Introduction A Brief History of the Cold War and Anti-communism Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has. —Michael Parenti1 It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was "to be as rich and as wise as an American". What happened?"2 An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country-by-country, intervention-by-intervention. The opportunity to build the war- ravaged world anew, to lay the foundations for peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight of anti-communism. The weight had been accumulating for some time; indeed, since Day One of the Russian Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some 13,000 American troops could be found in the newly-born Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Two years and thousands of casualties later, the American troops left, having failed in their mission to "strangle at its birth" the Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill put it.3 The young Churchill was Great Britain's Minister for War and Air during this period. Increasingly, it was he who directed the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Allies (Great Britain, the US, France, Japan and several other nations) on the side of the counter-revolutionary "White Army". Years later, Churchill the historian was to record his views of this singular affair for posterity: Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war—shocking! Interference—shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial—Bang!4 What was there about this Bolshevik Revolution that so alarmed the most powerful nations in the world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had recently fought alongside them for over three years and suffered more casualties than any other country on either side of the World War? The Bolsheviks had had the audacity to make a separate peace with Germany in order to take leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any way their war, and to try and rebuild a terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater audacity of overthrowing a capitalist- feudal system and proclaiming the first socialist state in the history of the world. This was uppityness writ incredibly large. This was the crime the Allies had to punish, the virus which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their own people. 6 The invasion did not achieve its immediate purpose, but its consequences were nonetheless profound and persist to the present day. Professor D.F. Fleming, the Vanderbilt University historian of the Cold War, has noted: For the American people the cosmic tragedy of the interventions in Russia does not exist, or it was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But for the Soviet peoples and their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of looting and rapine, of plague and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions— an experience burned into the very soul of a nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also for many years the harsh Soviet regimentations could all be justified by fear that the capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that in his address in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the interventions, "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution", as he put it.5 In what could be taken as a portent of superpower insensitivity, a 1920 Pentagon report on the intervention reads: "This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings ... under very difficult circumstances to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty."6 History does not tell us what a Soviet Union, allowed to develop in a "normal" way of its own choosing, would look like today. We do know, however, the nature of a Soviet Union attacked in its cradle, raised alone in an extremely hostile world, and, when it managed to survive to adulthood, overrun by the Nazi war machine with the blessings of the Western powers. The resulting insecurities and fears have inevitably led to deformities of character not unlike that found in an individual raised in a similar life- threatening manner. We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and bogus) of the Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. The anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of "Red Peril", "the Bolshevik assault on civilization", and "menace to world by Reds is seen" had become commonplace in the pages of the New York Times. During February and March 1919, a US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held heatings before which many "Bolshevik horror stories" were presented. The character of some of the testimony can be gauged by the headline in the usually sedate Times of 12 February 1919: DESCRIBE HORRORS UNDER RED RULE. R.E. SIMONS AND W.W. WELSH TELL SENATORS OF BRUTALITIES OF BOLSHEV1KI— STRIP WOMEN IN STREETS—PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY MOBS
Global perspectives on the biology and life history of the white shark - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: With this book comes a historic change in the context of White Shark research. The relatively low abundance of this species, combined with its exceptional size and predatory nature, equated to a fish that was very hard to study. The introduction of White Shark research papers always included an obligatory statement that this species is rarely the focus of comprehensive studies and little is known of its basic biology and life history
168hours : you have more time than y ou think - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Keep track of your time, hour by hour, for a week or two so you can see how you’re actually spending your time. One woman called it “one mortifying experience” when she realized how much time she was actually spending checking Facebook while at work and how often it derailed her from getting actual things done. Figure out what your core competencies are and spend your time doing those. What are you best at? Writing? Cooking? Nurturing relationships with our significant others and children (hopefully no one is better at that than you are . . . ). Maximize your time doing those things and minimize how much time you spend doing other things. Stop doing pretend work. Lots of us spend a lot of time being busy but doing things that aren’t actually that valuable. Are you spending a lot of time doing meaningless housework, or setting up elaborate organizational systems or having long conference calls that could be finished in ten minutes if you got right on task? Whether this is in your home life or your work life, you could probably get the “have to” things done a lot faster and more efficiently than you do. I basically always spend the entire two hours of nap and quiet time at my desk, but I often end up wasting so much time trying to multi-task between screens, doing fairly unimportant busy work (spending the last $15 on a gift card or trying to clear my inbox) that I end up having to work in the evenings too and then I feel like I spend all my time “working.” Since I finished this book, I’ve made a list each day of what I needed to get done and then I just put my head down and work, not getting distracted by the other maybe-should be things that don’t matter nearly so much or could get done later at a less focused time. Decide what you can off-load. She’s an enormous fan of outsourcing as much as possible, whether it’s laundry, grocery shopping, house cleaning, lawn care, etc. She argues that Pick 2-4 hobbies or activities you want in your life. You may be saying you want to sew more or read more books or volunteer with an organization you care about or run a marathon, but then you end up squandering your free time doing really low-investment things like watching TV (which is draining and not nearly as fun as you think it is). Figure out what you want to do and then when you can fit them in and make the happen. You’ll be rejuvenated by doing the things you’ve always meant to do and the lure of the Internet and TV will be reduced. She also says one of your hobbies really should/must be exercise. When you consider doing 30 minutes, 5 days a week, that’s only 3 hours out of your entire 168 a week. You can probably (almost certainly) fit it in. I love that she doesn’t argue that it’s easy to make it happen. It takes a lot of planning and discipline to make your life look like you want it to, instead of just piddling your life away running errands, checking email, and watching TV. And she has such an engaging writing style – I think she’s somewhat similar to Gretchen Rubin, with a lot of anecdotes, discussions about what she does well herself and also where she falls short, and an ability to make all sorts of data and statistics really engaging. There are certainly things I don’t agree with her on. I’m not willing to let my housekeeping slip to barely passable to get back a small chunk of time; I’m not the world’s best housekeeper by any means and the time I spend cleaning is fairly minimal, but I don’t keep things tidy because I care what other people think – I keep the clutter to a minimum because it makes ME crazy when there are piles of things on every surface. And she doesn’t seem to enjoy cooking like I do – yes, I could probably reduce the time I spend cooking by making easier meals or doing grocery delivery, but I’m not looking to outsource those things and I like to cook. And having been in schools, I totally disagree with her hypothesis that school lunches are way improved from days of old and that it’s well-worth having your kids just buy a lunch for a few bucks (also, having just read Slim by Design, I know that people who pack their lunches tend to eat more healthily than those who buy because you pack your lunch when you’re usually not terribly hungry (after dinner or breakfast) and so you make fairly good choices, whereas if you buy lunch when you’re starving, guess what you buy? Not salad).
It Runs In My Family - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: ABSTRACT This volume offers therapists effective, practical strategies for helping patients overcome the psychological impact of a history of serious illness in the family. Using illustrative case material, the author discusses the feelings of powerlessness that family illness can produce in an individual, and describes techniques for fostering a healthier, more empowered attitude. She shows how various assessment exercises and validation techniques can help the person distinguish between reality and the myths that evolved as a result of the family illness.
Understanding Autistic Relationships Across the Lifespan: Family, Friends, Lovers and Others - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Autism, and autistic people, have been around as long as humans have. It is likely there were ancient humans with behaviours, cognitive patterns, and sensory sen- sitivities that would meet clinical diagnostic criteria (though that would be taking the game of historical diagnoses too far!). Autism, and other neurodevelopmen- tal conditions, are part of the natural range of human biodiversity. This belief is known as the neurodiversity paradigm, and it is the framework within which we are writing this book. We take the approach that autistic people (see the language note that follows) are valid in their way of being in, experiencing, and relating to the world, and hope to help them and others understand some of these differences, rather than arguing that they are somehow ‘wrong’ or need changing to be more like non-autistic people. This book is not about the definitions or evolution of neurodiversity, but if you would like some further reading on the topic, we would recommend looking at the book list we provide at the back! Throughout the book, we will be using the terms ‘autistic people’ and ‘non- autistic people’. This is known as identity-first language, and has been shown to be the preference of the majority of autistic people who take part in research on the topic (Kenny et al., 2016). This is different to the way a lot of clinicians, pro- fessionals, and researchers have historically talked about autistic people, as they have tended to use ‘people with autism’ or say someone ‘has autism’ – known as person-first language. Originally this was used because it was thought to empha- sise the person rather than the condition (Kenny et al., 2016), and in some cases it is the preferred language of people affected themselves (e.g. in eating disorder research, people are described as ‘having anorexia’). However, recent research in the autism field has shown that person-first language can increase the stigma against autistic people and has a dehumanising rather than humanising effect on how oth- ers think about them (Cage et al., 2022). Combined with the stated preference of many autistic people, therefore, we use identity-first language in our writing, INTRODUCTION DOI: 10.4324/9781003044536-1 2 Introduction whilst recognising that a proportion of autistic people prefer person-first language. We have no wish to intimidate a minority within a minority and are following majority preference for simplicity. Autism has both a very complex and a very simple history, depending on how you look at it. The simple version is that two psychologists in the 1940s, Kanner in the United States and Asperger in Austria, independently noticed that they were seeing children who had a shared set of characteristics – difficulties with social interaction (to varying degrees), a preference for routine and sameness, and chal- lenges with everyday living skills. Kanner called this ‘autism’ (a preference for one- self or being alone), and Asperger called it ‘Aspergers’ (a preference for showing off his ego). The two did not know about each other’s work, and autism became the dominant diagnosis as Kanner published in English, whereas Asperger published in German (which was not the way to make your work popular in 1940s Europe, for obvious reasons. It may also have had something to do with the fact that Asperger worked with the Nazis in highly problematic ways.). These diagnoses were unchanged over the next 40 years or so, until Lorna Wing and Judy Gould, in 1980s South London, did a large-scale population level study and realised that the children with these two diagnoses were actually part of the same spectrum, as were lots of children who had not been given a formal diagnosis of either. This is where the term ‘the autism spectrum’ comes from, and it was designed to create a broader and more inclusive sense of what being autis- tic meant and could look like. This pair of researchers also invented ‘the triad of impairments’, which, while not the terminology we use today, revolutionised how autistic people were recognised and opened up diagnosis and support for more of those who needed it. This triad was made up of difficulties with: • Imagination and executive function (things like guessing what other people were thinking, or being able to make a plan based on imagining what will happen next) • Social communication (things like being non-verbal, not following standard ‘rules’ of communication like turn taking in conversation, or struggling with eye contact) • Repetitive behaviours and restricted interests (things like repeated physical move- ments such as hand flapping, or having intense special interests) The rise in autism diagnoses following this expansion of the diagnostic criteria from the strict ones set out earlier, especially removing the need for co-occurring learning difficulties Kanner used, was significant. This coincided with the rolling out of the MMR vaccine; and a highly questionable researcher called Andrew Wakefield used this correlation to publish his idea that the vaccine was causing autism in children. What he did not publish was that he was paid by the rival vaccine company, had faked his results, and the blood samples he ‘used’ had been collected without parental consent from children at a birthday party. If you want a Introduction 3 fuller idea of just how wrong his work was, there are literally thousands of academic papers proving it – but these tend not to make such good Facebook memes, and hence we have the anti-vaxxer movement. Regardless of that particular issue, autism diagnoses have generally continued to rise. This is because we are getting better at spotting when someone is autistic, our diagnostic tools have improved, and we are starting to recognise that autism can present in an even wider variety of ways than we thought in the 1980s. It is also because there is now a recognition that we can – and should – diagnose adults who were missed in childhood, for a variety of reasons. For a long time, if someone was not diagnosed before the age of about 14, they were highly unlikely to get a diagnosis at all, because autism was thought to be a ‘childhood condition’. The fact that autistic children grow into autistic adults was somehow lost on a lot of the early researchers. In 2013, on the basis of evidence from autistic people and clinicians, sensory sensitivities (being under/hypo- or over/hyper-sensitive on one of the five senses) were added to the diagnostic criteria. Similarly, there is growing research into and awareness of how autism can look different in those who internalise a lot of their experiences and those who externalise them – which is more what is considered ‘classically autistic’. A lot of these more nuanced ideas about what autism is have come from the autism community itself, with autistic advocates and academics driving change and increasing societal awareness. There is still plenty of work to do, but the direction of movement seems positive. There is also, as we said, a much more complex story which can be told about autism and how autism research has developed over time. That isn’t the focus of this book (though it is the focus of Neurotribes, by Steve Silberman), and so we won’t try to tell it all here. What is relevant for the current book is the focus on social dif- ficulties, which have characterised autism research and stereotypes from the earliest days, back in the 1940s, and the assumptions this led people to make about autistic relationships until very recently. Most autism research, researchers, and parents of autistic people, for most of the last 80 years, have functioned based on the assumption that because autistic people had difficulties with making and maintaining friendships and relationships, had dif- ferent social interaction patterns, and did not show distress about these things in the ways they expected . . . that autistic people did not want friends or romantic relationships . . . that these were just things autistic people were hardwired not to value, or be interested in at all. Avoiding eye contact was seen as a sign of not wanting to engage with the person who was speaking; not inferring someone’s true intentions was seen as a failure to understand that other people have minds (yes, really); and not making friends at school was assumed to be because the child did not want friends and was happier on their own. A whole academic discipline of autism studies, with corresponding theories, was built upon the basis of these observations of social difficulty (along with the other two parts of the triad). A few examples of these theories follow
Medicinal Plants of the Asteraceae Family: Traditional Uses, Phytochemistry and Pharmacological Activities - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: .1 Introduction Medicinal plants have been an important source of the primary healthcare for prevention and treatment of diseases. Many of these plant species are also used as components of foods, nutraceuticals, functional foods, beverages, cosmetics, dyes, and many other purposes (Khanal et al. 2021). Medicinal plants are one of the important sources of modern drug discovery and development and more than 30% of the drugs currently marketed are derived from natural products (Newman and Cragg 2016; Atanasov et al. 2021).
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: This is a crash course on how to make your ideas understood and remembered by other people. Whether you want to write a book, sell a product, or become a better storyteller, you’ll learn a useful playbook for understanding what makes an idea good and how to cement it into the mind of others. Key Takeaways Making ideas stick To make ideas stick, you can leverage the SUCCESs framework: Simplicity – makes something understandable Unexpectedness – makes people pay attention Concreteness – makes people understand and remember Credibility – makes people agree and believe Emotional – Makes people care Story – Inspires people to act The book is organized around understanding each of these six pillars of making ideas stick. 1. Simplicity Find the core idea Sticky ideas must be simple. Simplicity means you have found the core of the idea. You have stripped an idea down to its critical essence. For example, Southwest Airlines prioritizes one mission above all else: “We are the low-fare airline.” The mission is clear and simple enough to guide employee decisions. Don’t bury the lead Start with the most important idea. Journalists are taught early on not to “bury the lead.” The same is true for conveying your core idea. Whether you’re giving a talk, writing copy for a landing page, or sharing a story, start with the lead. That means getting rid of the fluff and centralizing around the core idea. What’s a simple idea? “Short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core). We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading—they’re compact without being core. But the Simple we’re chasing isn’t a sound bite, it’s a proverb: compact and core.” Say one thing instead of three “When you say three things, you say nothing. When your remote control has fifty buttons, you can’t change the channel anymore.” Even if you have four good points, it’s better to focus on the one that matters most. Cutting the fat sometimes means cutting good ideas. Use familiar concepts and schemas Describe something in terms of a concept that’s already familiar. For example, imagine you wanted to explain what a pomelo was to someone who didn’t know. “Explanation 1: A pomelo is the largest citrus fruit. The rind is very thick but soft and easy to peel away. The resulting fruit has a light yellow to coral pink flesh and can vary from juicy to slightly dry and from seductively spicy-sweet to tangy and tart.” “Explanation 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind.” Explanation 2 wins because most people are familiar with a grapefruit, and that familiarity can allow them to more easily grasp what a pomelo is. Great teachers use schemas that people are familiar with: “Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas. Economics teachers, for instance, start with compact, stripped-down examples that can be understood by students who have no preexisting economics schemas. “Let’s say that you grow apples and I grow oranges. We’re the only two people around. Let’s also say that we’d prefer to eat some of both fruits rather than all of either. Should we trade? If so, how do we go about doing it?” Avoid the curse of knowledge “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.” You know you’re suffering from the curse of knowledge when you want to be accurate to the point where most people don’t understand. It’s better to break down things into simple terms so that more people can grasp what you’re saying than to get all of the precise details correct for someone who is not an expert. How to pitch It’s more effective to use things people are already familiar with. For example, you’re new company is the “Uber for x” or your new movie is “Jaws on a spaceship.” People can quickly grasp what it is you’re trying to do and not be bogged down by all the nuances of the project. 2. Unexpectedness A core challenge of communicating your ideas is getting people’s attention, especially if you’re not already famous or known as a highly credible source in a particular field. Unexpectedness can help. Break a pattern “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out.” For example, think about how you feel when airlines begin reviewing safety information about life jackets, oxygen masks, and so on. You probably tune out because it’s boring and familiar. But if a safety instructor started making jokes and broke the script, that might actually get your attention. It’s unexpected, and all of a sudden you’re listening to something that you would have otherwise ignored. Power of surprise “So if emotions have biological purposes, then what is the biological purpose of surprise? Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred.” Breaking a pattern can help get people’s attention by surprising them, but you also need to figure out how to keep their attention. For example, a clickbait headline may be useful in getting people to view your article, but it won’t ensure that people read the full piece. If they don’t read the piece, then what’s the point? You may increase your pageviews, but you don’t increase your influence. Power of mystery “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” A mystery story draws people in. It incites curiosity and gets them wondering about the answer. Beginning with a mystery story can get the audience bought into the puzzle that you’d like to solve with them. People want to know: “What will happen next? How will it turn out?” That’s what keeps them invested in the story. You create a mystery by first opening gaps. Those gaps should make the audience want to know what happens next. A good mystery is only useful if the person reading about it wants to know what happens next. You can then close the gaps via the story. An important part of closing the gap is how you sequence information. A good story drops clues incrementally, keeping the reader hooked. 3. Concreteness Telling concrete stories that reveal deep truths is a more powerful way to share a message than listing out an abstracted truth. A good example is “The Fox and the Grapes” by Aesop. One hot summer day a Fox was strolling through an orchard. He saw a bunch of Grapes ripening high on a grape vine. “Just the thing to quench my thirst,” he said. Backing up a few paces, he took a run and jumped at the grapes, just missing. Turning around again, he ran faster and jumped again. Still a miss. Again and again he jumped, until at last he gave up out of exhaustion. Walking away with his nose in the air, he said: “I am sure they are sour.” It is easy to despise what you can’t get. We can all relate to and remember this story, and it has more meaning than if someone just said, “It is easy to despise what you can’t get.” The concrete details of the fable bring meaning to a common blunder of the human psyche. Abstraction “Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.” Experts often share ideas in complicated terms that only fellow experts can understand. They are plagued by the Curse of Knowledge and want to show how informed they are about a topic. But this type of abstraction is unhelpful to a novice. It clouds the message that is being shared to the point that it is never understood. Concrete language, including vivid and digestible details, can help bridge this gap. In part, that’s because concrete words are more memorable than abstracted ones. If I wanted to teach you about accounting, for example, I could talk about income statements, balance sheets, and accounts receivable. Or, I could ask you to help figure out if two students selling a product online have a feasible business idea. The specific example of students (who are like you) can help you put the abstracted concepts into practice in a way that can make them tangible and digestible. The result is that you learn about the core concepts of accounting without having to study a dictionary of confusing terms. 4. Credibility Credibility is an important part of making an idea stick, but how do you establish credibility? There are a few ways – statistics are one of them. Using statistics effectively “Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.” Let’s say you wanted to talk about the importance of employee dissatisfaction in your workforce. You could site a number of statistics: Only 25% of people say they have a clear understanding of their job Only 15% of people were enthusiastic about their job Only 30% of people say they have enough resources to execute key goals These statistics are helpful, but they are still very abstract. You might come away feeling that there is a lot of dissatisfaction at the company, but no idea of how serious this issue may be. A more useful way to describe what’s going on is to compare the numbers to something people have a grasp of. Drawing from an example in Steven Covey’s book, you could say something like: “If your workforce was a soccer team, only 4 out of 11 players would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 out of 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but two players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.” By humanizing the statistics in this way, it’s easy to understand that something needs to be fixed. In fact, it would seem ridiculous if an organization didn’t figure out how to change things quickly. Another example is evaluating whether or not you should make an investment. You could say, “The cost of making this investment would be about $500 per employee annually.” In these terms, you need to figure out if the benefit of the investment is more than $500. One way that you can frame the “Is it worth it?” question is to say: “If you believe you can increase an employee’s productivity by one to two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of the investment.” That makes the investment a no-brainer, versus an abstracted cost/benefit calculation does not. Sinatra Test One way to establish credibility is to leverage the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. This is particularly useful for small or unproven businesses. The idea is that you prove yourself with a big and important customer under difficult circumstances, and that action alone gives people confidence that you can do that for many more people. “We made sure that all Amazon deliveries arrived on time during Christmas” is a much more powerful signal to other potential customers than “98% of our deliveries arrive on time.” 5. Emotional “If I look at a mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” – Mother Teresa If I tell you that 5 million African children die of malaria every year, you will likely feel bad about the problem. But how motivated will you be to act? It’s hard to conceptualize 5 million people in suffering, and you may feel like whatever you do will be an unhelpful drop in the bucket. If, on the other hand, I tell you that Rhonda, a young girl in Africa may die from a preventable disease, and all you need to do is donate $50 annually to save her life, that’s a no-brainer. You’re going to be much more likely to donate to the cause and feel. like you’re doing something really meaningful. Charities have tapped into this quirk of human psychology by sharing the stories of individual people who are suffering from things that impact large numbers of people. The individual story taps into our emotions in ways that large and scary numbers don’t. Creating an emotional response inspires people to act. In the case of charities, sharing single detailed stories of specific individuals leads to more donations and impact. Semantic stretch When we overuse a term that generates an emotional response, it leads to a dampening of the emotional response. For example, let’s say we see artsy people that like to buck societal norms and call them “hipsters.” That word has meaning and gives us the feeling of what a hipster is and represents. But as the term gets adopted more widely, we start calling more and more things “hipster.” Suddenly, all modern designs or people wearing specific types of clothing are hipster. Or maybe even bucking a societal trend in and of itself is “hipster.” Over time, as the word expands to describe many more things than the original meaning, it loses its emotional resonance because it’s been overused. This concept is caused semantic stretch. Leveraging self-interest People care about themselves and what they want. So if you’re writing copy, it can be useful to put it in terms that highlight the ways in which an individual may benefit. Often, it’s helpful to give people a way to visualize the value of what you’re offering. The tangibility of your visualization, rather than the magnitude of the change you’re promising, can lead to the most action. Maslow’s Pyramid Tapping into people’s self-interest is useful, but people have a wide range of needs. Depending on what you’re offering, you may want to tap into the wider set of their needs. Maslow’s Pyramid is a good framework for understanding the full range of what people may care about: Transcendence: help others realize their potential Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance Learning: know, understand, mentally connect Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status Belonging: love, family, friends, affection Security: protection, safety, stability Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort To create an emotional response, you can convey value in terms of some of these needs. 6. Story Mental simulation If you ask someone to think about a certain future to simulate a problem they need to solve, they will often come up with a more vivid and accurate understanding of the situation. They will see things that they otherwise ignored in an abstracted planning process. For example, imagine you quit drinking, and you were worried about a party with friends coming up. Instead of arriving at the party sober and hoping that your self-control could win out, you could visualize the event. Visualize the subtle peer pressures you might face and what you could do in that situation. If you do that, you’re more likely to be prepared and comfortable with this potentially challenging social situation. Jared at Subway The story of Jared, the guy who lost hundreds of pounds eating Subway sandwiches, lead to massive growth for the Subway chain. It took a savvy and persistent group of people who first spotted and then believed in the story before the company decided to feature it, but it ended up being one of the most successful stories for fast-food sales growth than any other. Instead of “Subway has low-fat sandwiches,” people saw that “Jared, an everyday guy, lost a ton of weight by eating Subway every day.” That story had a lot more staying power than a description of the nutritional properties of the sandwiches. Common story plots You can leverage various types of common stories. Challenge Plot: Someone overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds (e.g., David and Goliath). Connection Plot: People who develop a relationship that bridges a gap – racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, etc. (e.g., everyone drinks Coca Cola) Creativity Plot: Someone makes a mental breakthrough, solving a hard puzzle, or finding an innovative solution to a problem . Stories are particularly effective in dismantling the Curse of Knowledge. By sharing a simple and concrete story that people can relate to, you can move away from abstracted lessons and move toward a narrative that people can follow and take away something valuable.آیا کتاب مورد نظر هنوز بر روی سایت قرار نگرفته است؟ جای نگرانی نیست! کافی است بر روی گزینه سفارش کتاب کلیک کرده و درخواست خود را ثبت کنید. در کمتر از چند ساعت کتاب شما را آماده خواهیم کرد.