TOP 13 LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE BOOK “BLINK”

1. The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.

2. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

3. Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the “truth” of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled.

4. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments.

5. One of Gottman’s findings is that for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter.

6. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other.

7. Gottman…has found that he can find out how much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

8. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.

9. In the military, brilliant generals are said to possess ‘coup d’oeil’ – which, translated from the French, means ‘power of the glance’: the ability to immediately see and make sense of the battlefie.

10. Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature.

11. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

12. Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improve. It enables rapid cognition.

13. We like market research because it provides certainty – a score, a prediction; if someone asks us why we made the decision we did, we can point to a number. But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty.