Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” writes in to say:
“I do wanna say I really enjoyed your new book, while reading it on holiday. (Left you a review on Amazon.)”
… and sure enuff, Robin’s review is now showing up on the Amazon page for my new 10 Commandments book (“Great lil’ book with lots of funny, weird and most of all valuable principles of persuasion”).
Robin’s is the 10th 5-star review my new book has gotten in the couple of weeks since being published. It’s important to me to mark and celebrate the occasion.
But what about you? I make a habit of including some tidbit in each email which is either fun or valuable, whether you choose to buy or not.
So let me tell you something interesting but entirely unrelated, which might be valuable to you.
I’m reading a book about neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself. One story in that book is of a scientist named Edward Taub, who experimented on monkeys to simulate the effects of stroke.
The long and short of it is, Taub worked to get monkeys that were effectively paralyzed in say, their left arm, to regain use of that arm.
Taub tried giving the monkeys rewards for performing regular monkey actions with their left arm, such as reaching for food. Behaviorists call this approach conditioning. Conditioning didn’t work. Paralyzed monkeys stayed paralyzed.
But then Taub started a different approach known as shaping, which involved rewarding the monkeys for even very small steps along the way to the big movement. (I’m guessing here, but imagine rewarding the monkey for just wiggling his left pinky finger at first.)
The effect of shaping was the monkeys eventually regained full function of their previously paralyzed arms.
On the one hand, this is kind of Obvious Adams — of course you want to break up a big task into component pieces and master the component pieces one by one.
On the other hand, people have been having strokes for thousands of years, and many have been paralyzed for life as a result.
Taub translated this monkey shaping research into a simple and structured program for humans, which relies on no fancy modern equipment, that has allowed stroke victims to regain use of paralyzed limbs, often years after their stroke.
Obvious yes, but somehow nobody else thought to follow this basic idea to this powerful conclusion, for thousands of years, until a few decades ago.
This distinction of conditioning vs shaping is something to keep in mind whether you’re in the business of teaching people stuff, or encouraging behavior (eg. buying and consumption), or simply trying to manage the primate known as yourself better, so you can get yourself to accomplish stuff you cannot accomplish now.
Break up the big action into tiny component pieces, often so tiny as to seem useless or irrelevant to task at hand. Master each of those tiny components. Reward yourself for doing so.
And that, in a way, does tie into the top of my email, about celebrating my 10th testimonial. And now, if you haven’t yet read my “funny, weird, and most of all valuable” new book, you can find it here: