A summary of things you should know about Selfish Scared and Stupid according to Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory: Introduction In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take aRead More
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]]>In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take a deep dive into their book, Selfish Scared and Stupid, where they demystify the behaviors behind the failure and success of business ideas.
In their book, Flanagan and Gregory will help you design your business effectively with strategies to understand why the public fails to engage with your brand and why your product is falling short. The goal of the book is to teach you product survival tactics, how to offer customer strategic reward programs, how to turn fear into action, and how to make products hard to resist.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to get their product or service engaged with the public and need a proven system to increase their customer reach and sales.
We have been told that it was funny which our intent wasn’t to be necessarily funny but human beings are funny by nature. It’s real and it’s not speaking to ideas but instead its dealing with what is true and real for human beings.
This book is a fairly easy read and written in the order that you would approach an engagement program. It probably works best read in order but I have had people say to me that they dip in and out as well.
We need to design for success rather than just hoping for the best and relying on short term strategies. It’s also about swimming with the current of human nature because if we don’t we get exhausted, we go nowhere and we often give up.
We start the book off explaining why we really need to be thinking selfish, scared and stupid. We make the distinction between acting selfish, scared and stupid which is human beings default position. It is why we survived, thrived and evolved as a species and ended up in this dominant position on the planet and it’s just that they don’t sounds like particularly good things. We tend to deny those things in our decision making but our primitive brains still drive a lot of our decision making. The survival thinking drives the fundamental thinking beneath our decision making.
From there we move on to how to do it. We section the book into think selfish, think scared, think stupid and dive into each of those points. Thinking selfish is fundamentally about coming from a place of what’s in it for them, and we need to move from what’s in it for me to what’s in it for them. So often in business we see that people are so caught up in what’s in it me. This section is about how to understand the extraordinary power of flipping your mindset to how you can filter the world constantly into what’s in it for someone else. And by doing that you can engage your staff with not only your goals but there’s as well.
In think scared the reality is that fear drives us a lot of the time. We look at how to flip that fear that has a stay in inaction to how to create a fear of not taking action. It’s about minimizing the fear of action and maximizing the fear of in action. So what we look to do is how to make change seem less fearful and part of the way we do it is by linking it to the known. Thinking scared isn’t about making people afraid, it’s about understanding how fear drives us and making sure that fear is on the appropriate side of the ledger in terms of stimulating action.
Then we look at thinking stupid and for a lot of people this is the most challenging one. Again it’s not about being stupid, it’s about thinking stupid and what that means is looking for the most easy way to achieve an outcome. It’s about making sure that our tasks are really easy and how to reduce resistance to those tasks. We spend a lot of time on why failure happens and how to make failure difficult. Instead of relying on these ideas, relying on short term strategies, the fundamental idea of the book is how we design for success.
“We are all selfish, scared and stupid.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
“Make failure difficult.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
We have a long history in advertising and spent a long part of our lives getting a better understanding of what drives human behavior. Most of our careers have been in entrepreneurial startups and our interests are in what drives human behavior. We have a business called The Impossible Institute which is a research, innovation, and think tank where we look at the gap in what people say they do and what they actually do. In that gap we find interesting stuff about how to motivate, how to get results, and how to help entrepreneurs.
We saw so much inspiration around what was driving human behavior and so much of it was based on ideas. What we wanted to do was step back and take a look at what was really driving human beings and generating results.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory on Amazon today
Visit TheImpossibleInstitute.com to learn more about the book
Follow Kieran Flanagan on Twitter and Facebook
Follow Dan Gregory on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014 The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authorsRead More
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014
The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authors are in line to share their insights with me. Stay tuned this month for the release of the interviews with these great books and the authors.
This provocative book is built on the idea that businesses must return to a more human engagement methodology in order to succeed. It is an informative read for anyone interested in improving influence, growing business reach, improving sales figures or understanding the complexities of human behavior.
Behavioral strategists Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan argue that if you want to increase your chances of success in business and life, you should design for reality. Offering real-world strategies with a healthy dose of wit and charm, Selfish, Scared & Stupid will help you design for success by aligning with natural human behaviors: selfishness, fear and stupidity.
Learn how the survival of the species plays into business, including delusional realities and the reasons ideas can fail. Discover how to offer customers strategic rewards, thereby making the buying process more attractive to selfish natures. Examine the link between fear and the unknown, including strategies for quelling fears and turning them into action.
“SSS is a triumph, a great read, stunning insights and the title had me laughing at myself and learning at the same time. It makes me want to be a better man–generous, courageous and intelligent!” – Matt Church, Founder of Though Leaders Global and author of Amplifiers
“Clever, rigorous and refreshingly real–this fad-free book shows modern-day realists how to unlock real results.” – Dr Jason Fox, Motivational Scientist and author of The Game Changer
Learn more about Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory | Buy Selfish, Scared, and Stupid on Amazon
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.
Hooked provides readers with:
Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
“A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement.” — Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” – Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
Learn more about Nir Eyal or listen to his own deep dive into the book | Buy Hooked on Amazon
Join double-decade, quarter-billion-dollar Couple CEO Heidi and Scott Shimberg, as they explore the intricacies and intimacies of living and loving life as an entrepreneurial couple.
Couple CEO addresses the specific challenges facing you as a team and as partners with actionable lifestyle advice, proven business management strategies, and colorful guidance that answer questions like: How can you put the spark back in your relationship and make sure it stays lit? How do you live a life where your business and relationship coexist and thrive?
The challenges as a couple are unique. Couple CEOs often struggle to create balance between growing their business, enjoying a happy family, and living a healthy lifestyle. This book is great for any couple engaged in growing a business together, but also a valuable read for any couple creating a life together.
Learn more about Heidi and Scott Shimberg or listen to their deep dive into the book | Buy Couple CEO on Amazon
Drawing on her experience of great adversity–and even greater success—Patricia Walsh shows you how to set realistic milestones and describes a simple and effective process for mapping these milestones to daily tasks that will help you achieve what you previously thought unachievable.
In Blind Ambition, Walsh both inspires and educates by relating her unforgettable personal story while detailing her proven Fuel / Fire / Blaze approach to achieving any goal:
“Patricia Walsh lays out an extremely effective framework for achieving your highest goals–in business and in life. I have personally seen Patricia apply this approach to great success at Microsoft. Anyone who reads this book will be that much closer to achieving their goals.” — Steven Sinofsky, former president of the Windows division at Microsoft Corporation
Learn more about Patricia Walsh | Buy Blind Ambition on Amazon
Whether you’re a recent college graduate faced with a difficult job market, an ambitious entrepreneur trying to anticipate the Next Big Thing, or a struggling executive weathering a storm of constant global change, this book will guide you through anything the world throws at you.
This powerful book by Drucker scholar and author Bruce Rosenstein incorporates the master’s time-tested principles into a step-by-step daily plan that will change your life forever. Starting right now, you can:
“Rosenstein has opened the door to an important and often misunderstood area of Drucker’s work–why an understanding of the future is so critical for our development as leaders. It confirms my belief of a bright future ahead.” — Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO, The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute
Learn more about Bruce Rosenstein | Buy Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way on Amazon
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