Thank you for giving me control of your brain!

Compelling and Devastating.

"The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" by Michael Moss will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Not that there'd be anything wrong with that...

My talk at the upcoming Applied Brilliance Conference will be nothing like this:

Some good advice from Karen Amstrong.

"There are times when you have to speak out against injustice or cruelty. But if you speak — and this is what Gandhi said — in order to punish or wound, you will do more harm than good. The Dalai Lama said that to condemn injustice with hatred in your voice will make the injustice worse. ... So it does no good to attack viciously. The thing to do is not to rise to the bait."

-from an interview with Karen Armstrong in the June issue of the Believer magazine.

A modest proposal...

Now that it has been reported that "... greater liberalism [is] associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism [is] associated with increased volume of the right amygdala", we have no doubt that candidates for high political office in the USA will soon be expected to disclose not just their tax returns and medical evaluations, but also their brain scans.

Confidence in efficient communication is power.

I don't know how long it took them in the studio to make, but Jerry Lee Lewis's great 1958 Sun Records recording of "Wild One (Real Wild Child)" is just one minute and fifty-three seconds long.

Like Speaking Another Language

I greatly enjoyed working with my Chilean client, and recently delivering two programs in Chile. One of the great pleasures was the difference in language: rather than "persuasion", my client referred to "seduction". Instead of talking about the "framework" of the program, we discussed the "journey" of the day.

Although there were interpreters at each of the two programs, I was careful not to fall back on American English idioms. I avoided saying things like "fall back" and instead choose "revert". Instead of "come back", I would say "return". Instead of "want", I speak to "desire" and "intent". I looked to the Latin rhetorical roots so as to be better understood and to present information more efficiently and respectfully. Conversing became both more intentional and more surprising, and I cherished in the poetry of our interactions.

A colleague's son was recently studying vocabulary, in preparation for his middle school entrance exam. He remarked that it was "like speaking another language". Indeed!

Human word, syllable, combination
of spread light and the find art of the silversmith,
hereditary goblet which gathers
the communications of the blood --
here is where silence came together with
the wholeness of the human word,
and, for human beings, not to speak is to die --
language extends even to the hair,
the mouth speaks without the lips moving --
all of a sudden the eyes are words.

I take the word and go over it
as though it were nothing more than a human shape,
its arrangements awe me and I find my way
through each variation in the spoken word --
I utter and I am and without speaking I approach
the limit of words and the silence.

I drink to the word, raising
a word or a shining cup,
in it I drink
the pure wine of language
or inexhaustible water,
maternal source of words,
and cup and water and wine
give rise to my song
because the verb is the source
and vivid life -- it is blood,
blood which expresses its substance
and so implies its own unwinding --
words give glass-quality to glass, blood to blood,
and life to life itself.

Excerpt from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's "The Word"

A metacognitive approach to problem-solving.

"You're a pretty smart fella."

"Not that smart."

"If you're not that smart, how'd you figure it out?"

"I tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, 'what would he do?' "

- from Heist (2001) by David Mamet

"What is it that most people need, but don't know that they need?"

We were talking about Google's six billion dollar bid for Groupon, and she suggested that I think up an online business idea that would make us rich.

"What is it," she asked, "that most people need, but don't know that they need?"

"That's easy," I said, "What most people need is to be slapped upside the head. The hard part is getting them to pay."

Spare a(nother) penny? Or two?

Just one sentence from "The Age of Alzheimer's" by the Hon. Sandra Day O'Connor, Dr. Stanley Prusiner, and Dr. Ken Dychtwald, from the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times:

"As things stand today, for each penny the National Institutes of Health spends on Alzheimer’s research, we spend more than $3.50 on caring for people with the condition."

"To move forward..."

Last night we braved the downpour (sans umbrellas, per Secret Service) to attend a very special evening event at Constitution Hall. The featured musical guest was B.o.B:

And the featured speaker was President Obama:

The President's speech is available on C-SPAN.

"To move forward, you put the car in D – To move backwards, you put the car in R."

[Photos are our own (more here), taken with a Ricoh GX100. Because the invitation said "small cameras okay", we did not want to risk bringing a camera that might not be considered "small".]

Heart, Head & Hand: An Advanced Approach to Persuasive Communication

For the past three years, I've been coaching smart leaders and training whole organizations in persuasive communication, using an approach I call Heart, Head & HandTM. I've just published a short essay outlining the approach. I invite and welcome your thoughts.