Year Two in Review

Another year, a fur­ther 445 posts and an addi­tional 17,790 spam com­ments have passed (and 453 legit­i­mate com­ments, for which I am eter­nally grateful–thanks!) and Lone Gun­man is now two years old.

Some­what delayed since I’ve recently moved to the Nether­lands, here are the best things I’ve read on the Inter­net and posted here over the past twelve months… it’s Year Two in Review.

Visu­al­i­sa­tion of the 50 most fre­quently used key­words on Lone Gun­man in year two.

Items def­i­nitely not to miss are high­lighted (prob­a­bly not through an RSS feed reader). [LG] denotes my orig­i­nal post.

First, the most pop­u­lar posts of the past year: The Seven Psy­cho­log­i­cal Prin­ci­ples Con Artists Exploit, A His­tory of the 160 Char­ac­ter Text Mes­sage and The Basic Laws of Human Stu­pid­ity.

Busi­ness and Entrepreneurship

• Before you do any­thing, you may need a busi­ness plan. Inspired by the sim­plic­ity and suc­cess of the Cre­ative Com­mons licens­ing icons, here’s a novel, icon-based busi­ness plan kit [LG].
• Think­ing about what to sell? Here’s what peo­ple are will­ing to pay for [LG] (scarcity, esteem and belong­ing, among others).
• Wor­ried about your chances of suc­cess? Keep this in mind:
  • That uni­ver­sity pres­tige was not cor­re­lated to entre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess [LG] (and that the time entre­pre­neurs wait to start their ven­tures is likely longer than you imagine).
  • That a study of entre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess and fail­ure rates shows that entre­pre­neurs don’t learn from their mis­takes and past suc­cess was the only indi­ca­tor of future suc­cess [LG].
• Need a com­pany name? Check out the founder of Kodak’s three rules for an effec­tive com­pany name [LG].
• Cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity? Richard Millington’s best 100 posts [LG] will be worth perusing.
• But don’t for­get what Gel con­fer­ence host Mark Hurst calls the expe­ri­ence response [LG].

Per­sua­sion (In Busi­ness and Life)

• If you’re sell­ing pre­mium prod­ucts, lis­ten to a ‘lux­ury sales con­sul­tant’ explain­ing how to sell lux­ury goods [LG] (sell a story and do not dis­count are just two tips).
• Why no dis­counts? In a review of ‘sales psy­chol­ogy’ [LG] we hear that the placebo effect is at work with goods just as much as with medicine.
• Other psy­cho­log­i­cal tricks to get peo­ple buy­ing [LG] include the 99-pence/cent effect, own­er­ship imagery and roman­tic priming.
• In a com­pre­hen­sive review of Robert Cial­dini, Noah Gold­stein and Steve Martin’s book Yes! we are treated to fifty sci­en­tif­i­cally proven ways to be per­sua­sive [LG].
• I then sum­marised two arti­cles that use Dan Ariely’s Pre­dictably Irra­tional to describe how to manip­u­late or avoid manip­u­la­tion using his find­ings.
• These eleven ways to per­suade peo­ple online [LG] may be help­ful, too.
• If all else fails, pre­tend to share their name or birth­day: we are more likely to com­ply with requests from strangers if we believe we share seem­ingly uncom­mon, inci­den­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics [LG].
• And finally: Urgency, Cer­tainty and Tar­geted Infor­ma­tion… three of the five ele­ments of effec­tive and per­sua­sive mes­sages.

Health, Food and Exercise

• While we’re dis­cussing the topic, how to per­suade peo­ple to eat healthier:
  • Post­ing calo­rie counts doesn’t help [LG], and the pro­vi­sion of a salad option in a restau­rant actu­ally increases the chances of unhealthy pur­chases [LG] (because we con­sid­ered the healthy option, we ‘reward’ our­selves with the unhealthy choice.
  • Taxes? Sub­si­dies? Sub­sid­ing health foods wors­ens food choices, tax­ing unhealthy food improves them [LG].
  • To suc­ceed, utilise some of the aes­thetic and lan­guage tricks that entice din­ers to buy (‘menu psy­chol­ogy’) [LG].
  • Posi­tion­ing choices is also impor­tant: I sum­marise two stud­ies show­ing how mak­ing healthy food eas­ier to choose increases the con­sump­tion of healthy food.
• But what is health­ier food? Maybe not organic pro­duce, as the UK FSA’s Chief Sci­en­tist says that there is lit­tle to no nutri­tional ben­e­fits to eat­ing organic over con­ven­tion­ally pro­duced food [LG].
• Once again, I look at the psy­chol­ogy of wine.
• Jamie Oliver inad­ver­tently shows the cog­ni­tive and edu­ca­tional advan­tages of a healthy diet [LG].
• And Dr Shock dis­cusses the neu­ro­science of exer­cise and sum­marises some of the vast cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits thereof [LG].

Metacog­ni­tion (Cre­ativ­ity, Learn­ing and Thinking)

• The most impor­tant thing to do: sleep, as it can take over a week to recover cog­ni­tively from just a few days of poor sleep [LG] (and you’ll get sick).
• Want to improve creativity?
  • Man­u­fac­ture an ideal cre­ative work­space [LG]: a blue or red room (depend­ing on your goal) and elicit psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance (pic­tures of far-away places).
  • Live abroad [LG] (“turn cul­tural bewil­der­ment into con­crete understanding”).
  • Be sur­rounded by nature [LG] (real or not).
• Be aware of ‘cog­ni­tive com­plex­ity’ (how ‘easy’ some­thing is to understand):
  • Every­thing from the typog­ra­phy on the pack­ag­ing, the ver­bosity of the man­ual and the length and com­plex­ity of ingre­di­ent names affects how we per­ceive an item’s truth, safety and ease of use [LG].
  • It also affects how suc­cess­ful we’ll be with a diet [LG].

Typog­ra­phy and Design

• Some the­ory in the form of the ten design com­mand­ments of Dieter Rams [LG] and a five-part type ter­mi­nol­ogy primer [LG].
• Some resources in the form of a ‘peri­odic table’ of type­faces [LG] and a sum­mary of Edward Tufte’s design prin­ci­ples [LG].
• And the appli­ca­tion: a few sim­ple rules for good typog­ra­phy [LG] and a sum­mary of the find­ings from a num­ber of com­pre­hen­sive web design stud­ies (typog­ra­phy usage and gen­eral web design deci­sions).

Rela­tion­ships and Marriage

• Like last year, one of the most inter­est­ing things I read on this topic was on dia­monds: this time, a 1982 arti­cle detail­ing how De Beers ‘cre­ated’ the dia­mond mar­ket as we know it [LG].
• Think­ing of mar­riage? Read these two com­ple­men­tary pieces: Dr Rob Dobren­ski on the rea­sons mar­riages fail [LG] and The Last Psy­chi­a­trist on how to destroy a mar­riage [LG] (the for­mer on why they fail from the out­set (mis­aligned goals, etc.) and the lat­ter on more ‘organic’, after-the-fact reasons).
• After that, it’s par­ent­hood. Men: have them sooner rather than later. Advanced pater­nal age neg­a­tively impacts a child’s neu­rocogini­tive devel­op­ment [LG] (the oppo­site was found for advanced mater­nal age).
• Once they’ve arrived, remem­ber that expo­sure to dirt helps cre­ate a health­ier immune sys­tem [LG] and that “Don’t talk to strangers” isn’t strictly the best advice [LG].

Per­sonal Development

• Sim­ple inspi­ra­tion from The Cult of Done’s man­i­festo [LG], and Jonathan Har­ris on being known for doing what we do and the longevity of our work [LG].
• A more sci­en­tific approach comes in the form of the four prin­ci­ples to cre­at­ing luck [LG], dis­cov­er­ing that it takes around 66 days to form a habit [LG] and how set­ting goals could be detri­men­tal to achiev­ing our tar­gets (and how to pre­vent that from hap­pen­ing) [LG].
• How to be inter­est­ing [LG] explains fairly suc­cinctly why I write here (be inter­ested and be good at sharing).
• After grokking the painfully accu­rate con­ver­sa­tional man­ner­isms of geeks [LG] I sought improve­ment. That came in the form of a list of the twelve core human skills [LG] (most are things I’m inter­ested in and write about here: my way of learning).
• Thirty Days to a Bet­ter Man Per­son [LG] offered advice on health, careers and gen­eral well-being and I sum­marised a series of posts offer­ing advice (and elicit more in the com­ments… nudge).
• One of my favourite arti­cles was on the quar­ter­life cri­sis [LG]: that time of exis­ten­tial angst we go through in our mid twen­ties wor­ry­ing about accep­tance and the abun­dance of choice. At that same age, this post detail­ing some eti­quette for those aged 25+ [LG] was handy.
• A cou­ple of quick ones worth revis­it­ing: twelve easy tips for avoid­ing an early death [LG], as writ­ten by an emer­gency physi­cian, and a short tuto­r­ial on how to dis­agree more effi­ciently [LG].

Hap­pi­ness

• Bud Caddell’s sim­ple and effec­tive How To Be Happy in Busi­ness Venn dia­gram [LG] reminded me of another favourite from last year: per­sonal love–growth–cash tri­an­gles.
• If you seek hap­pi­ness, a com­mute might be a bad idea: the unpre­dictable nature of traf­fic leads us to despise it, vastly decreas­ing hap­pi­ness [LG] (enough to negate the ben­e­fits of liv­ing in the suburbs–you’ll need to earn 40% more to compensate).
• Money might help, but make sure you’re clever about it: buy mem­o­ries, not objects [LG]. In fact, just read this list on what you can buy that will and won’t increase hap­pi­ness [LG] (in short: meals, books, music, pets, bicy­cles and for­eign travel all con­tribute to an increased sense of happiness).

Mis­cel­la­neous

• The two most com­pre­hen­sive and com­pelling pop­u­lar sci­ence arti­cles I read all year came from Wired:
  • The full story (past, present and future) of the increas­ingly odd placebo effect [LG].
  • A wor­ry­ing look at the grow­ing anti-vaccine move­ment and the dan­gers it poses to all chil­dren [LG].
• In macro­eco­nom­ics I learnt:
  • That the oft-quoted poverty thresh­old of $1.25 is rel­a­tive and adjusted.
  • That many promi­nent econ­o­mists are call­ing for an end to for­eign aid to Africa as it is linked as a direct cause of increas­ing poverty rates [LG] (“when emo­tion over­rules evidence”).
• On the micro scale, I was fas­ci­nated by a roundup of sur­pris­ing find­ings in the field of ‘finance psy­chol­ogy’.
• On the other side, this arti­cle on con­sumer pro­fil­ing by credit card com­pa­nies [LG] is worth a read.
• While look­ing at why open source soft­ware often fails, the rea­son we love-to-hate those self-service super­mar­ket check­outs is explained [LG] and then we’re told that at the super­mar­ket check­out, we should pre­fer 17 extra items over an extra per­son to max­imise effi­ciency [LG] (due to the additional’tender time’).
• After read­ing Dan Gardner’s excel­lent Risk, I list and describe the eigh­teen fac­tors of risk per­cep­tion (includ­ing famil­iar­ity, cat­a­strophic poten­tial, vic­tim iden­tity and media attention).
• For those who write (or want to), Ben­jamin Kunkel lists five truths about blog­ging [LG], while Hugo-award win­ner John Scalzi offers ten writ­ing tips for non-writers [LG].

Ear­lier this year I went trav­el­ling for a cou­ple of months and handed the blog over to three very capa­ble peo­ple. Alex J. Mann, Dan Zam­bonini and Andrew Simone.

Alex’s posts, Dan’s posts and Andrew’s posts are def­i­nitely worth a look.

Thanks!