Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Today we look at Chapter 14 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 14 is the sneakiest chapter we’ve seen so far, and perhaps the sneakiest in the book: It claims that a powerful persuasive technique is to get the other fellow to agree with you (say “yes”) on some point at the outset of your discussion. I think there’s a germ of a good idea here, but that vulgar applications of it are both distasteful and ineffective.

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Today we look at Chapter 13 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 13 sums itself up as: “Begin in a friendly way”. Aside from being good, practical advice, this suggestion clearly demonstrates that the two goals mentioned in the book’s title (”win friends” and “influence people”) aren’t really that different; indeed, they are almost the same thing.

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I was reading a piece about H. P. Lovecraft the other day, which revealed him to be another one of these impoverished-in-life-popular-in-death types. It seems to me that this sort of fellow pops up a lot: In addition to Lovecraft, you’ve got (off the top of my head) Poe, van Gogh, and (more or less) Dick. All these guys had reputations for being a little difficult to deal with, and I wonder if their greater success after their deaths was entirely coincidental.

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I like spiders. Unfortunately, sometimes they get trapped in sinks or bathtubs from which they cannot escape. Today, a simple tip for performing spider rescue.

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Today we look at Chapter 12 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 12 advises the reader to quickly and emphatically admit error when in the wrong.

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The Cocoa Core Data documentation makes frequent reference to the fact that Managed Object Contexts (MOCs) are “scratchpads“, in which objects can be moved around willy-nilly without affecting the permanent store. This is all well and good, but it leaves important questions unanswered, such as: “How do you use this fact to implement a ‘cancel’ button?” The answer turns out to be a little more complicated than you might suppose, but can be summed up in one word: Notifications.

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Okay, so Seth Godin’s Squidoo is launching a new venture: Brands in Public. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in Seth’s announcement. It contains some masterful spin, a brazen proposition, and some nice o plata o plomo persuasion. Seth’s a good marketer, so let’s look at his work.

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Today we look at Chapter 11 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 11 stresses the importance of never telling a man that he is wrong. This is in some ways a natural corollary to the last chapter (avoid argument), and in some ways a special case of the lesson of DC’s first chapter (criticism is pointless). It’s still an important idea, and one of my favorite chapters in the book.

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Today we look at Chapter 10 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 10 is the first in Section 3: “Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking”, and focuses on the (somewhat counterintuitive) importance of avoiding argument.

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Today I just want to take care of a little administrivia. I’ve piled up a fair number of posts related to Shiny Red Buttons, but they’re scattered a little randomly throughout the blog. Therefore, I pulled together a page devoted to the subject, from which you can find everything I’ve written. I hope you find it useful.