<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Brands and creators want customers to be active, engaged fans - and to spend more money. Community connect seems like a natural endeavour.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">From a business standpoint, community is a means to harness customer loyalty.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Communities naturally drum up hype for a brand and its products.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Companies are under pressure to simulate authenticity by leaning into more personalized forms of communication.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Digital ad prices are on the rise, incentivizing businesses to double down on their existing community of buyers.</li></ul>

The Allure Of Building A Community

Brands and creators want customers to be active, engaged fans — and to spend more money.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Brands want to be more than your friend. They want community.

While it is easy to show up to appointments we make with other people … I’ve noticed that most people struggle with commitments they make with themselves.
If you say you’re going to exercise, meditate, write, journal, work on a project … but then you don’t stick to that commitment … it can feel like you’re letting yourself down.
We start to form the mental habit of letting ourselves off the hook, so that we don’t trust ourselves to stick to our own commitments, if other people aren’t involved. This creates a belief that we aren’t as important to ourselves as other people are.

Self-Commitment

Before we try to shift anything, it’s important to really get curious about what’s there. We try to change things about ourselves from a place of judgment, wanting to get rid of what’s bad, rather than really trying to understand ourselves.So start by noticing, when you don’t show up for yourself, what’s going on? What are you feeling at that moment? What are your thoughts? Instead of judging and turning away from all of this, can you turn towards it and try to really see yourself?From this place of acceptance and love, we can start to explore other possibilities.

Get Curious About What’s Going On

<ul><li>Make a date with yourself. </li><li>Ask yourself if you really want to. </li><li>Treat your self-commitment as sacred. Don’t treat it lightly</li><li>Honor what shows up, and honor yourself.</li><li>Bring a sense of curiosity, play, appreciation.</li></ul>

Some Steps to Start to Get More Committed to Yourself

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

How to Get More Committed to Yourself - zen habits

Thanks to scientists, we know how important the first five years are for your health, development, and brain. After the first year, the babies brain is almost double in volume. By age seven, it's nearly 90 percent the volume of an adult brain. Young brains can create practically one million neural connections every second. Healthy development depends on these five things:<ol><li>Connection</li><li>Talking</li><li>Playing</li><li>A healthy home</li><li>Community</li></ol>

A child's most important needs 

Adults can make a huge difference by connecting, talking and playing with children early and often. Every time you talk to children, play with them, make them laugh, you teach and build their relationship skills and mental health. <ul><li>Copycat games build imagination and empathy.</li><li>Naming games build vocabulary and attention.</li><li>Games like peekaboo build memory and trust.</li></ul>

Make a difference with serve-and-return

"What if I was to tell you that a game of peek-a-boo could change the world?" asks seven-year-old Molly Wright, one of the youngest-ever TED speakers. Breaking down the research-backed ways parents and caregivers can support children's healthy brain development, Wright highlights the benefits of play on lifelong learning, behavior and well-being, sharing effective strategies to help all kids thrive by the age of five. She's joined onstage by one-year-old Ari and his dad, Amarjot, who help illustrate her big ideas about brain science. (This TED Talk was produced in collaboration with Minderoo Foundation as an educational tool for parents and caregivers around the world and is supported by UNICEF.)

parenting

Parenting

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

How every child can thrive by five

When we make bad decisions is usually because of these 4:
<ul>
<li>Narrow framing: the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.</li>
<li>Confirmation bias: we are more likely to select the information that supports our preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.</li>
<li>Short-term emotion: when we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn.</li>
<li>Over-confidence: we think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.</li>
</ul>

The Four Villains Of Decision Making

It describes the process that “wraps” around your usual way of making decisions, helping to protect you from some of the villains and biases related to decision making:<ul><li>Widen your options.</li><li>Reality-test your assumptions.</li><li>Attain distance before deciding.</li><li>Prepare to be wrong.</li></ul>

The WRAP Model for Better Decision Making

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. When we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision.Multitracking involves considering several options simultaneously. Multitracking has another advantage too, one that is more unexpected. It feels better.When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the shape of the problem. To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct.

Wide your Options withe Multitracking

<ul><li>Studies found that the confirmation bias was stronger in emotion-laden domains such as religion or politics and also when people had a strong underlying motive to believe one way or the other.</li><li>Confirmation bias increases when people have previously invested a lot of time or effort in a given issue.</li><li>Confirmation bias doesn’t just affect what information we seek, but also what we notice in the first place.</li></ul>Reality-test the assumptions you’re making by developing the discipline to consider the opposite of our initial instincts. It begins with a willingness to spark constructive disagreement.

Consider the Opposite

We sometimes make bad decisions because we are too much into the weeds in our head. There are 2 main views we hold:<ul><li>The inside view - our evaluation of our specific situation.</li><li>The outside view - how things generally unfold in situations like ours.</li></ul>The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate toward the inside view.

The Inside and Outside View

Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support.

To use 10/10/10, think about your decisions on three different time frames: How will I feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?Conducting a 10/10/10 analysis doesn’t presuppose that the long-term perspective is the right one. It simply ensures that short-term emotion isn’t the only voice at the table.

The 10/10/10 Technique

Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions:<ol><li>mere exposure to things we are used to: we like what’s familiar to us</li><li>loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.</li></ol>Loosing sucks and we subconsciously make decisions to avoid losses on the short term, even when we amplify losses on the long term.

Emotional decision failure

The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.

A good decision-maker chooses actions that give the best outcome for themselves and others. Here's how to become one.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

health

Health

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

How To Become a Better Decision-Maker

Explains how to overcome natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions in work and life, drawing on extensive studies and research to outline specific strategies for enabling clear-headed thinking.

productivity

Productivity

books

Books

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions. 　    Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?    In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.    Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?　    Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

Chip Heath is the professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.He received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.He co-wrote a book titled Switch How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Dan Heath.

Chip Heath

Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center. Dan has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. from the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.He co-wrote a book titled Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Chip Heath.

Dan Heath

Decisive

... is a faulty assumption that becomes the basis of an argument and makes it logically unsound. For example, all birds can fly. Penguins can't fly. Therefore, penguins aren't birds. The premise that all birds can fly is false since some birds can't fly.
A false premise underpins many logical fallacies, making it essential to understand them.

A false premise

A logical fallacy is reasoning that contains a flaw.
Many logical fallacies rely on false premises:
<ul>
<li>Appeal to nature - claiming something is good because it is "natural". Some natural things, like cyanide, is very bad for you.</li>
<li>False dilemma - a limited number of options are presented as mutually exclusive or as the only options.</li>
<li>The appeal to novelty - when something is assumed good because it is new.</li>
<li>The argument from incredulity - someone concludes that because they can't believe something is true, then it must be false.</li>
</ul>

False premises and logical fallacies

<ul>
<li>An explicit premise is when a premise is mentioned directly as part of an argument. </li>
<li>An implicit premise means that the premise is hinted at and used as part of the argument.</li>
</ul>
Someone might choose to rely on a particular implicit premise because it is evident to all participants. Or, someone might decide to rely on an implicit false premise while giving a speech because it will be harder for listeners to notice problems with it.

Explicit and implicit premises

When you respond to the use of false premises, you should generally call them out as false, explain why they're false, and how them being false invalidates the argument.
<ul>
<li>False premises can be implicit rather than explicit.</li>
<li>It can also be helpful to ask the person who relied on the false premise to support it.</li>
<li>However, remember that a false premise that makes an argument logically unsound doesn't mean its conclusion is wrong.</li>
</ul>

How to respond to false premises

<ul>
<li>Ensure that you're aware of all the premises your argument is based on and that you know that your premises are true.</li>
<li>You can engage in self-distancing by treating your arguments as if they're presented by someone else. This can help you rationally consider your views.</li>
<li>If you make an argument, the proof is on you to support your premises.</li>
<li>Learn about common fallacies associated with false premises. Then you are more sure to avoid them.</li>
</ul>

How to avoid using false premises

philosophy

Philosophy

communication

Communication

False Premise: When Arguments Are Built on Bad Foundations - Effectiviology

Self-sabotage occurs when your logical, conscious mind (the side of you that says you need to eat healthily and save money) is at odds with your subconscious mind (the side of you that stress-eats chocolate and goes on online shopping binges).Self-sabotage involves behaviors or thoughts that keep you away from what you desire most in life. It’s that internal sentiment gnawing at us, saying “you can’t do this.”

Self-sabotage

Self-destructive behaviors can become habits and can continually undermine your success and happiness.Self-sabotage is when we want something, but somehow we never accomplish it, because somewhere deep in our subconscious we’re fighting against that goal:<ul><li>Our disorganization distracts us.</li><li>We’re constantly overthinking all of our decisions.</li></ul>

Understand self-sabotage

<ul><li>Procrastination. Start setting deadlines and mini-deadlines to work toward your objective.</li><li>Negative self-talk/negative thinking. Be patient with yourself; be kind to yourself. Work to build yourself up.</li><li>Perfectionism. It is an impossible standard that keeps you from moving forward.</li></ul>

Recognize self-sabotaging habits

Self-destructive habits are often rooted in our feelings of self-worth.Work on identifying and acknowledging what is causing you to sabotage yourself, and then start making changes to stop those behaviors.

Identify root causes

The most successful people are those who take the time to think through their choices, decisions and actions. Successful people learn from what worked or failed to work. They then adjust their course of action by taking a different approach.

Take time for self-reflection

Put aside those harsh inner voices of "I can’t" or "I’m a failure."That negative internal dialogue is a pattern of self-limiting thoughts. Start replacing that critical inner voice with positive, encouraging thoughts.

Find your inner positive voice

In every moment, we’re taking action that either moves us toward or away from the person we want to be and the life we want to have.Consider how the actions you’re taking and the thoughts you’re thinking conflict with your happiness and hold you back from your true potential. Then look for ways to replace old patterns with new ones that are more helpful in achieving your goals.

Change your pattern of behavior

Once you’ve identified the changes you want to make, pick just one thing that you want to work on.If you’re disorganized or constantly getting off track from what you should be doing, take five minutes every morning to tidy your desk and write a to-do list.

Make small, meaningful changes

By having firm, thoughtful plans for each step we take, we will feel more confident about our intentions and what we’re doing. You can do this on a daily level -- thinking through how you’ll respond to situations, people and circumstances.

Set goals and make plans

8 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Self-sabotage occurs when your logical, conscious mind (the side of you that says you need to eat healthily and save money) is at odds with your subconscious mind (the side of you that stress-eats chocolate and goes on online shopping binges).

habits

Habits

mentalhealth

Mental Health

8 Ways to Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Success

Learning new skills increases your motivation, makes you more adaptable, relatable, interesting and helps you get better jobs and earn more money.
And today, learning anything new isn’t as hard as it used to be. Start by understanding how your brain truly works.

Learning to Learn

Like any skill, you learn by doing. And make a commitment to write publicly.You learn better when people can actually see your work. It forces you to do your very best. It gives you accountability. You get feedback from others and improved based on it.

Writing

Nothing builds confidence more than doing a successful public speech. So seek** opportunities to speak in front of groups.**
<ul>
<li>Start with people you’re comfortable with (friends and family). </li>
<li>Talk about subjects you’re passionate about. </li>
<li>Be aware of people's reactions and interest levels and adapt accordingly. You'll get better in time.</li>
</ul>

Public Speaking

First, learn how habits form and how they work, to better control what habits you set up and get rid of habits that are detrimental to you.The best way to keep your habits in check is to be accountable for your good or bad habits. Find one or multiple people that you report to on a regular basis.

Forming Good Habits

By practicing this skill:
<ul>
<li>You'll improve your confidence.</li>
<li>You'll be able to negotiate a better salary and benefits and even work on more interesting projects.</li>
<li>If you are trying to find a job, you’ll know better what they are looking for and adapt to your interviewer.</li>
<li>In your romantic life, you’ll handle conflicts better, and likely have fewer of them too.</li>
</ul>

Negotiating

It helps you to think more logically (it will increase your analytical and reasoning skills) and make better-informed decisions. And you'll be more productive simply by knowing how to better analyze your time.
Practice sample problems, without the pressure you probably felt in school, and with the awareness of the real-life benefits of doing it.

Mathematical Thinking

Having coordination and flexibility is one of the most important parts of living a healthy life.
And without being healthy, it’s hard to even think about developing any other skill.

Coordination and Flexibility

Start with guided meditations. They teach you that it’s okay to have thoughts and guide you through clarity of mind.
Commit to it. Don’t try once and leave. The more hours of practice you put it, the easier it gets. You'll have more clarity on your emotions, body, and mind, and you'll make better decisions.

Meditating

8 hours? Are you kidding me? It takes 10,000 hours to learn a new skill! Wrong! 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the amount of time it takes to be a top performer in a highly competitive field, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers.

timemanagement

Time Management

8 Timeless Skills to Learn Now in Under 8 Hours to Change your Life Forever

Working on a project with no visible end in sight is like running a race without knowing where the finish line is.
Even if one can pick off small tasks, one can still feel weary. However, we can build resilience in progressing on these projects by following the principles of mise-en-place or translated "put in place."

Overcoming project fatigue on long projects

From early on, chefs and cooks are trained in the art of mise-en-place. In preparation for a particular dish, every single item needed is in front of them before they even turn the water to a boil. They know what ingredients need to be added first and which utensil to use. They always know what step they're working on and never confused about what comes next.
We can make projects feel like a recipe where we move through the work step-by-step, starting with the end in sight.

Learning from the culinary world

At a start of a big project, it can be difficult to split up the work. You may not have all the information you need to define the steps. 
How to get the necessary information to break down a big project:
<ul>
<li>Call on colleagues who have worked on a similar project, and ask for their advice.</li>
<li>Revisit previous projects. How did you break up the project?</li>
<li>Ask your manager if you're feeling stuck.</li>
<li>Look to templates. Sometimes the recipe already exists.</li>
</ul>

How to break down a big project

A reader asks how to overcome project fatigue when "break it down into smaller tasks" just isn't cutting it...

How Do I Stay Motivated on a Project That Never Seems to End?

Intelligence is likely associated with a better generalised working memory.
A working memory is the ability to hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time. Those who are smarter have a bigger capacity to hold multiple ideas.

Being smart changes how you learn things

Intelligence is partly heritable, but there are ways to improve it in a general capacity. The best way to improve your working memory is to simply learn a lot. Learning creates chunks, which allows you to deal with more complex ideas.
The downside of learning is that it tends to be narrow, while intelligence is general.

Intelligence is different from knowledge

Some subjects feel like they require more intelligence. If understanding an idea requires you to take different ideas into account, it may be more challenging to keep track with a lower working memory. e.g. mathematical proofs.
Conversely, if a subject requires a large volume of memory, but each fact or idea is separate, it may require lots of practice and less working memory. E.g. history or law.

Why some subject are harder to learn

Because we can increase our working memory within a subject, we can create new chunks and master very complicated ideas. The perceived difficulty is often the way subjects are taught. Only the smarter students will remain, the higher you go in maths or science. This leads teachers to skip over "trivial" steps, leading you feeling like you can't master it.
Solutions are for teachers to slow down the class or for the student to slow down the class using, for example, the Feynman Technique.

The problem with how a subject is taught

Any subject can be learned with some practice and patience. Some subjects may appear harder because of the speed at which they are taught. 
To fix this problem, you may need to put in more work. If you can't see everything at once, it just means you need to practice more of the pieces, so your mind does not have to juggle so many ideas simultaneously.

You can learn anything

Are some subjects just so hard that you need to be really smart to learn them? If not, why does it often feel that way. Here's the science behind why.

strategy

Strategy

education

Learning & Education

Do You Need to Be Smart to Learn Certain Subjects?

Note-taking will always be at the core of learning and education. We are often encouraged to take notes during lectures to have a record of the knowledge being shared by our teachers and gain a sense of familiarity with the subject.
There are many note-taking systems such as outlining, guided notes, and the famous Cornell notes. However, they do not result well when being recalled. No studies suggest that Cornell note-taking improves a student's performance better than free-flow writing.

Note-Taking

Note-taking:
<ul>
<li>Usually done while listening</li>
<li>Fast-paced</li>
<li>Uses the author's original language</li>
</ul>
Note-making:
<ul>
<li>Commonly done while reading</li>
<li>Self-paced</li>
<li>Uses our own language and understanding of the material</li>
</ul>

Note-Taking Vs. Note-Making

The biggest difference between the two is that the former is easier to forget than the latter.
With note-making, it is easier to understand and remember because of the generation effect - the phenomenon wherein information is better remembered if it is actively created from your own mind rather than simple read in a passive way.

The Difference Between Note-Making And Note-Taking

To make good notes, you must take note of these three things:
<ul>
<li>Rephrase the original idea and translate it into your own. Use your own words to distill it in your mind better.</li>
<li>Connect ideas together. Create links between your ideas for better understanding and recall.</li>
<li>Build upon the ideas. Add your own examples, own questions, and other ideas related to it.</li>
</ul>
In summary, actively engage with your notes. There are great methods such as mind mapping, digital gardening, and the Zettelkasten method.

Key Principles Of Making Notes

Note-taking is fast, uses the original author's language, and feels easier. Note-making is slower, more involved, and uses your own language.

Brands want to be more than your friend. They want community.

How to Get More Committed to Yourself - zen habits

How every child can thrive by five

Decisive

False Premise: When Arguments Are Built on Bad Foundations - Effectiviology

Evan Y.