Jeff Bezos: ‘It’s harder to be kind than clever’

Below is the full transcript of Jeff Bezos’ commencement address to Princeton’s Class of 2010 (which struck a nerve with me) :

"As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. Every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car and off we’d go in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving and my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage or figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said “every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life.” I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened next and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

our smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans, plodding as we are, will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton, all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles, something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world, was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie, also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row, told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I was going to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing and I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life, the life you author from scratch on your own, begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck! "

Here is the video link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=371&v=vBmavNoChZc&feature=emb_logo

Salesmanship

90% of deals are lost due to poor follow-up

Anyone can send out an introductory email or make the first sales call. It takes discipline and a well thought-through sales process to stay focused, nurture prospective customers and close deals. Invest in technology that will keep you on track.

Millennials and Banking : An Indian Prespective

Millennials - the fastest growing customer base : A Banking PoV 

The fastest growing customer base is changing the way banks do business. Born between 1980 and 2000, Millennials are the largest generation in Indian history . 

It seems like every company is trying to tap into the Millennial market. And for good reason: this year, Pew is predicting they will overtake the Baby Boomers in number, with around 75 million people in the U.S. under 34. And they are reaching an age of independent consumption, starting to have children, and becoming a presence in the workforce.

By 2021, millennials will make up over 50% of the work force in India.  

But they don’t think banks have what they need. 

• 71% would rather go to the dentist than listen to what banks are saying .
• 53% don’t think that their bank offers anything unique
• 68% say that the way we access our money will be totally different in 5 years
• Nearly a quarter cite lack of a mobile app as the main barrier to bank engagement                        

Millennials want digital solutions to manage their money and help them build their finances. 

Digital Natives - 77% say their mobile phone is always with them . 

• 3x Three times more likely to open a new account with their phone vs. in person
• 61% say that mobile has made tracking and spending their money better
• 67% Vs. of millennials 50% of other customers want digital budgeting tools from their bank 

Banks that offer digital services are better positioned to engage Millennial customers which includes -

• Mobile Payments
• Budgeting tools 
• Mobile banking 
• Wealth Management 

Saturday Night Live recently featured a sketch poking fun at Millennials. It opens with a young woman frantically texting on her iPhone, approaching her boss and asking for a promotion. The boss asks how long she’s been with the company. She replies, “Three days.”

While pithy descriptions of what makes Millennials unique are presented as self-evident and seem to have a ring of truth to them, very few are supported with solid empirical research. On the contrary, a growing body of evidence suggests that employees of all ages are much more alike than different in their attitudes and values at work. To the extent that any gaps do exist, they amount to small differences that have always existed between younger and older workers throughout history and have little to do with the Millennial generation per se.

Everyone gets it. Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are entitled, easily distracted, impatient, self-absorbed, lazy, and unlikely to stay in any job for long. On the positive side, they’re also looking for purpose, feedback, and personal life balance in their work. Companies of all kinds are obsessed with understanding them better.

The fascination with Millennials has given rise to a new consulting industry. Hundreds of firms, speakers, authors and individual experts are vying for a share of the “Millennials are Different” segment of the $150 billion-a-year global HR consulting market. A dizzying array of books, seminars, and articles such as Ties to Tattoos and “Dude, What’s My Job? Managing Millennials in Today’s Workforce” promise to help turn generational differences into an asset. There’s even a consultancy that specializes in helping other consultants hone their message to tap into this lucrative market.

For millennials, pressing social problems are not just the preserve of philanthropists or governments. Millennials consistently cite social impact as one of the most important roles of business. Of all the generations alive today, millennials are the most willing to trade financial return for greater social impact, according to “Millennials and Money,” a 2014 study from Merrill Lynch’s Private Banking and Investment Group.

These opinions matter. Millennials are poised to share in the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history — one widely-cited estimate puts its value at $41 trillion in the United States alone by the year 2052.

If you reach Millennials now, they will likely stay as loyal customers as they become ready for traditional bank products and services.

Banking on Blockchain - Literally!

Blockchain has been a topic of discussion ever since its inception in 2009 as the underlying technology for Bitcoin. If market hype is any indication, blockchain — the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin — is poised to solve multiple challenges facing the banking industry by enabling faster, secure and more transparent transactions.

The disruptive potential of blockchain is widely claimed to equal that of the early commercial Internet. A crucial difference, however, is that while the Internet enables the exchange of data, blockchain could enable the exchange of value; that is, it could enable users to carry out trade and commerce across the globe without the need for payment processors, custodians and settlement and reconciliation entities. 

Ever since the first Bitcoin transaction was carried out in January 2009, the digital cryptocurrency has been a topic of debate. While banks and regulators have largely remained wary of Bitcoin, the underlying technology of blockchain and distributed ledger began attracting the attention of banks and startups by the end of 2015. 

When it came to investing in this technology, 50% of the banks surveyed have already invested in blockchain technology, or will do so in 2017. In terms of degrees of adoption of blockchain technology, 15% of the banks are innovators, 35% are early followers. The rest (50%) that are waiting for the technology to mature, are late adopters. While average investment in blockchain projects in 2017 is expected to be $1 million, the innovators have already invested funds over $10 million. These investments not only support blockchain initiatives, but also explore use cases beyond the traditional realm of cross-border remittances, clearing, and settlement.

There are three reasons why you need to know about Blockchain:

1. Blockchain technology doesn't have to exist publicly. It can also exist privately - where nodes are simply points in a private network and the Blockchain acts similarly to a distributed ledger. Financial institutions specifically are under tremendous pressure to demonstrate regulatory compliance and many are now moving ahead with Blockchain implementations. Secure solutions like Blockchain can be a crucial building block to reduce compliance costs.
2. Block-chain technology is broader than finance. It can be applied to any multi-step transaction where traceability and visibility is required. Supply chain is a notable use case where Blockchain can be leveraged to manage and sign contracts and audit product provenance. It could also be leveraged for votation platforms, titles and deed management - amongst myriad other uses. As the digital and physical worlds converge, the practical applications of Blockchain will only grow.
3. The exponential and disruptive growth of Blockchain will come from the convergence of public and private Blockchains to an ecosystem where firms, customers and suppliers can collaborate in a secure, auditable and virtual way.                                                                                                                                                                                         It is no longer a question of whether banks will adopt blockchain; but more of when and how they will implement it. Financial institutions and technology providers can feed off each other's ideas and experiments, while identifying areas of focus and avoidance. This will allow banks to identify and build key skill sets and use the collective knowledge to create a blueprint that will ease the seemingly inevitable transition to a blockchain-driven future.                                                                                                                                  My belief is that banks must experiment with the technology in a controlled environment to discover the value it can bring in their context and based on the outcomes of the experiments commit towards production deployments and slowly crafting their organization's blockchain adoption strategy.

Chatbots - The advantage

With the rise of the mobile, always-on consumer, it is easier than ever for customers to demand immediate responsiveness from brands. Companies are expected to deliver fast, reliable customer service across channels and are under pressure to incorporate new tools and processes to engage with customers wherever they are.

Fielding messages into traditional help desks has historically resulted in longer wait times and a disorganized messaging experience for support representatives. Enter the chatbots. Chatbots assist in solving simple, quick-response needs, leaving more time for customer service representatives to focus on complex customer demands and high-touch interactions.

In recent years, bot-enhanced customer support use has increased, due in part to new technology that allows businesses to easily identify and resolve customer problems through messaging services. As bots continue to grow in popularity, experts speculate whether the automated technology has arrived or still has a long journey ahead. While that debate will likely continue for some time, here are a few things companies should keep in mind as they invest in bot-enhanced support.

Bots are a-changin’

Bot development has changed a lot since the mid-2000s, when virtual assistants in Live Chat were all the rage. Back then, customer questions were answered by pulling from a predetermined directory of responses. Naturally, these responses were oftentimes unhelpful and out of context. Studying those first bot interactions has led to advancements in intelligent technology, making way for developments in natural language understanding (NLU) which seeks to understand the intent behind questions. Paired with advancements in artificial intelligence (A.I.), today’s technology is helping bots “think” rather than regurgitating pre-assigned answers. Furthermore, A.I. powers tools such as “deep learning,” which analyzes public customer information and helps customize bots for ultimate customer service.

Twitter was one of the first platforms to embrace social messaging for business-to-consumer (B2C) communication. Now we’ve seen companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft open their platforms to bot and app developers. With the public showing signs of “app fatigue,” the hope is that chatbots will provide a gateway for brands seeking to engage customers on a more personal level. While the technology is far from perfect, these are exciting advancements in customer services.

Bots and humans: the perfect relationship

The ideal customer service offering combines the power of bots and humans. The bottom line: When a customer reaches a point of frustration, an automated response just won’t do. There will inevitably be some situations that bots simply aren’t trained for. Businesses will have to choose the right use cases for automation and build in the right handovers, or escape hatches, to let customers talk to human operators when it’s sensible to do so.

Human responses are essential in training bots to answer the “tougher” questions. Interactions between representatives and customers provide a loop of responses for bots to learn from. The support products of the future will alert human operators when the A.I.’s confidence level is low. By taking over in those situations, the human agents will not just assist the customer, their responses will also help the A.I. learn. Over time, this knowledge will organically help to expand the bot’s capabilities.

Keep in mind, however, that bots are still just that… bots. Those with human-like personalities (e.g. Siri), while entertaining, can be downright frustrating if they deliver limited functionality. Leveraging bots as a means to enhance the customer experience could be the best way to manage customer expectations and ensure stronger customer relationships, but the key is designing a bot flow that gives customers the option to reach a real person, if that becomes necessary.

All bots are not created equal

When it comes to deploying the right chatbot for your business, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Companies have to ensure that the bots they integrate have the scale, technology, and intelligence to handle their specific tasks. As with all customer service interactions, it’s critical to understand the user’s intent to best support their needs. This may take more than the simple automated responses that a lower-tech bot can provide and may require a messaging platform that is integrated with customer records and leverages powerful automation, analytics, and integrations.

Messaging is viewed as the customer communication channel of the future because it’s more immediate than email, yet more convenient than calling a company or going to the website to live chat. Whether deploying tools to help streamline questions for a small business or providing around-the-clock service for an international corporation, bots must be able to deliver fast response times and manage high volumes of conversations.

Today, customers require increasing levels of personalization. For some companies, this first stage of bot-enhanced support has allowed them to reach customers where they are. Amex bot for Facebook Messenger, for example, lets consumers see real-time purchase alerts and key information about American Express benefits — bringing personalized and proactive support right to their devices.

While this phase of bot technology is certainly a step in the right direction, there is still so much more to learn. With an understanding of the rapidly changing technology, a focus on providing a human element, and a plan for deploying chats at scale, the future of chatbots for your business is bright.

Multi Channel Communication Strategy

“Technology has empowered the consumer, putting him in the driver’s seat 24/7. In other words it is the customer who decides when and how to interact during a business relationship. This could be with a bank, an insurance company, a telecommunications organization, a utilities group or any other entity. However if a consumer receives a message that is not relevant to him, or via the wrong media or at the wrong time, his customer experience will be far from optimal.

How can enterprises deal with this? I believe that multi-channel communications is a major part of the answer as it enables companies to reach out to customers via their preferred channel, whether it be on paper, a smartphone, laptop or other device. Companies need to move from simply sending information to actually interacting with customers. And they need to ensure their customers are motivated to interact with them.
Customer communications are evolving rapidly. New technologies are in the spotlight as organizations make the transition to a world in which social media, mobility, data analytics and cloud computing (known as SMAC) begin to take center World Wide Web. So if enterprises really want to maximize the impact of digital communications they need to acknowledge SMAC trends.

You may have already decided you need to invest in a multi-channel communications platform. Or maybe you are not so sure. Whatever questions you may have, this white paper will help you make the right choice for both your customers and your business. There is no single solution to suit every business. But I am convinced that if you make multi-channel communications part of your overall business strategy you will be able to ensure that all the necessary elements of your customer communications are adapted to suit your budget and expectations.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MULTICHANNEL AND OMNICHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS

Multichannel communications is all about using available technology to ensure your target audience is presented with information or the ability to react to information across multiple channels. Customers expect to receive personalized, relevant communications that capture their attention despite their busy schedule. And, they are more likely to react to your message if it is delivered via their preferred media. In practice this involves sending the right message, at the right time, via the right channel.

Multichannel communications is more of an operational approach, and enables customers to complete transactions using different channels. Omnichannel communications however, views the experience through the customers’ eyes and manages the customer experience across all channels so that it is seamless, integrated and consistent. This synchronized approach presents a single face to the customer and a consistent way of communicating. In other words Omnichannel is Multichannel done professionally.

CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT

Communicating with customers today is all about connecting, engaging and building sustainable, trustworthy relationships. A Customer Communications Management (CCM) strategy is therefore essential for businesses wishing to remain profitable in the digital era. A CCM program can offer you the following benefits:

• CUSTOMER RETENTION: Consumers do not think twice about unsubscribing from brand communications when the messages they receive are not relevant to them. Therefore you have got to have the ability to communicate appropriately across all channels in order to keep customers.
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• MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES: Transactional documents such as invoices and statements are opened and read more than any other type of documents. But they are generally sent out by Operations or Finance departments. If you allow your Marketing experts to leverage this type of customer communications, by addnig for example personalized promotional messages, you could transform your transactional mail into a valuable touch point, bringing in new orders.
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• IMPROVED CASH FLOW: Outstanding payment figures dramatically decrease when customers are offered a wider range of payment options. Expanding your payment options to include physical mail and a range of digital-based bill paying options not only improves your treasury performance, it also increases customer satisfaction.

EMBRACE DIGITAL & ENHANCE PHYSICAL MAIL
One of the fastest growing trends in customer communications today is the shift from physical to digital communications. InfoTrends (a market research and strategic consulting firm) is forecasting that 8.6 billion (35%) consumer bills and statements in the U.S. will be delivered as paperless in 2017. So although this represents a significant increase, compared to 18% in 2012, it still means that paper is here to stay for another while. The reason for this is that the consumers surveyed value receiving bills and statements by physical mail because it:

• Acts as a reminder for them to pay
• Can be archived as a hard copy
• Is their preferred way to receive communications

However in reality digital channels can also act as reminders to pay, while offering simple and secure archiving capabilities. Customers who prefer to receive their transactional communications by physical mail will most likely continue to do so. However they will expect high quality communications in the future. Other customers will prefer digital communication channels for payment including pdfs by email, web portals and e-invoicing service providers. Offering consistency across channels allows people to switch according to their needs at any moment. This may involve the use of a tablet one day and then moving to paper where prestige or attention grabbing may be more effective. If you would like to serve your customers better, it is probably the right time to carry out a survey to find out how your customers like to send and receive their business communications.

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF MULTICHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS
One single platform can be used to implement an integrated multichannel communications strategy across an entire enterprise. This empowers the organization to produce, optimize and deliver customer communications via both paper and digital channels, depending on customer preference.
A successful multichannel campaign enables you to:

• SPEED UP CUSTOMER ACQUISITION: by efficiently targeting individuals through their preferred channels
• GROW CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND LOYALTY: by providing clear, targeted and consistent customer communications via any channel
• CROSS SELL/UP SELL: by transforming regular transactional documents such as invoices or statements into relevant marketing tools containing personalized offers
• REDUCE OUTSOURCING COSTS: by bringing document creation in-house
• IMPROVE YOUR BRAND IMAGE: by reducing manual errors thanks to the automation of batch document creation
• BOOST OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: by merging data and streamlining business processes to create, produce, deliver and track customer communications
• ENSURE BRAND CONSISTENCY: by taking control of all of your document design and template management
• INCREASE TIME TO MARKET: by designing documents once, maintaining less templates and consolidating assets such as pdfs, Word documents and logos into one single controlled environment

EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS

There are four key foundations for effective communication:
CLARITY
This involves making sure we understand what customer needs are and ensuring content delivers these needs. For example not all customers want to see all the transactions on their bank statements. Effective communications is like having a conversation. It should only be about things the person you are talking to is interested in.
CONTEXT
We know all customers are different. But how do we know what to give them? We need to give them content that is relevant to their needs. For example if a bank notices that someone is saving a lot of money it could embed targeted promotions and new product offers on statements and bills.
CHOICE
Organizations drive choice, not consumers. For example banks often fail to give us a choice and simply inform us that statements will be sent in a digital format and if we prefer paper statements we have to pay for them. By giving people the opportunity to choose how they receive their communications means you can increase customer engagement.
CONSISTENCY
All of the benefits of multichannel communications are lost when there is no consistency. This means coherence when it comes to messages, images and colors. Multichannel communications platforms provide you with tools for creating consistency, in a sustainable compliant way. This ensures that people know who their message is coming from, whether it be in a paper or digital format.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DATA
Data silos exist in many organizations. And this can cause problems. For example if you have a customer who does not pay his bills, you should not be sending him new offers. Therefore someone needs to take ownership. A team needs to bring together data from different systems and merge it into both print and digital channels.
Many companies make the mistake of taking data from different sources. They do not realize that you need to merge data in order to create value. For example if a customer regularly buys clothes online, the financial platform used for payment will contain a lot of useful data on how the customer likes to pay. He may prefer to pay on receipt of goods or in advance. If the retailer in question has a separate database containing a complaint from this customer because his account was debited twice by mistake, this could be overlooked. Also if you have errors in your data systems you may have different entries for the same person in different formats and the same person may receive the same direct marketing campaign many times. “By merging all the data you have for the same customer you can create a Single Customer View. This enables you to provide customers with better service, create better customer relationships and more adapted communications campaigns” explains Esther Labrie, Marketing Specialist at Human Inference.
CONCLUSION
Businesses today are increasingly faced with having to manage separate projects in order to get a message out via web portals, consumer smart phones, tablet apps, email and print channels. Co-coordinating this is both difficult and complex . Even when it works, there are significant gaps between the different channels. The information available to the customer is not the same on every channel. This causes frustration which can lead to the customer leaving or contacting the call center to complain. Either way, the business is losing money.
As Scott Draeger, Customer Communication Strategist for GMC Software Technology, explains “Managing customer communications as a portfolio is a solution. This requires modern CCM technology that accesses data and content from many systems and assembles it into effective customer communications regardless of the channel. By connecting communications together early in the process, it becomes easier to manage complex communications. Effective CCM adopters can truly focus on their customers, instead of focusing on technology.”

Fighting Negativity

I thought I would write today about how people think. 


Why does the failure seem to stick in our mind so much longer than a success? 


I think genetically in our instincts evolution has made us remember the negative experiences more than the positive, successful experiences .  It was then when the situations we stayed in were different.  I believe it was then when the life of a living organism was more dependent on the external factors rather than his/her/its own.

Just imagine we are living in the forest and we tend to take a path which leads us to a lion den or a pond with snakes and crocodiles. the evolution through natural selection would only take those who would remember this negative path so as not to take it .  I believe with this the brain wiring for hard wired for us to take cognizance of negative thoughts more than the happy safer thoughts.

We all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things. The same glass, the saying goes can be seen as half full or half empty. And there’s a lot of research in the social sciences showing that depending on how you describe the glass to people as half full or half empty, it changes how they feel about it.

So if you describe the glass as half full, this is called gained brain because you’re focusing on what’s gained. Then people like it. But if you describe the same glass as half empty, a lost frame, then people don’t like it.

What I take away from this writing is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency to tilt towards the negative. It’s pretty easy to go from good to bad but far harder to shift from bad to good. We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things. And this matters.

On a more personal level what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the upside. Literally this takes work. This takes effort. And you can practice it. You can train your mind to do this better. There is research  showing that just writing for a few minutes each day about things that you’re grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well being and even your health.

We can also rehearse good news and share it with others. We tend to think great that misery loves company that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions, that we will feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was. And so we talk. And we talk. And we talk about the boss who’s driving us crazy and the friend who never called us back and meeting at work where every little thing that could go wrong did. But we forget to talk about the good stuff.

I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside. We can be more aware that bad tends to stick. One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even and bad times to propagate itself, right? Somebody snaps at you and you snap back and you snap at the next guy too. But what if the next time somebody snapped at you you forgave them. What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress who left her an extra large tip. Our minds may be built to look for negative information and to hold onto it. But we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it and start to see that the glass may be a little more full than we initially thought.