Creativity might often be viewed more as an enjoyable jolt of insight than an effortful process, but, in fact, both insights and persistent effort can lead to good ideas.

If we prefer and expect easier insights, we will be less likely to struggle through an ideation process and discover our best ideas.  Thus, we will confuse difficulty for quality and stop when we should push on.

Conversational skills are essential for establishing connections, nurturing relationships, and achieving success at work.  In addition, good conversationalists show genuine concern for others through their tone of voice and body language.  

Learning to be a better conversationalist can help business leaders share information with colleagues, friends, and family members more effectively.

In the business world, manipulation is often referred to as a nudge. 

We all know that people are not fully rational.  Our physical or emotional environments influence people’s choices and behavior.  The arena of charity fundraising is a classic example of playing with our heartstrings to get us to donate more money than we might typically consider.  They use photos and graphic stories to “nudge” us to increase our giving.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs must apply nudges to get our customers to buy our products and services.  We need to use well-written ads, great graphics, and exceptional personal salesmanship to cause our potential buyers to select us over everyone else.

Most people tend to treat conversation like a competitive sport, in which the person who says the most, makes the cleverest point, persuades others of an opinion, or even speaks the longest and loudest is the winner. 

All of us fall into this trap.  We all find ourselves interrupting, speechifying, insisting, and coming up with witticisms – all to support our point of view or display our superior knowledge. 

If you stop and think about it, this approach is the opposite of the one we should take.  In most conversations, the person who speaks least benefits the most, and the person who speaks most benefits the least.