Trump

For example, when Trump says he is worth $10 billion, which causes his critics to say he is worth far less (but still billions) he is making all of us “think past the sale.” The sale he wants to make is “Remember that Donald Trump is a successful business person managing a vast empire mostly of his own making.” The exact amount of his wealth is irrelevant. 
 
When a car salesperson trained in persuasion asks if you prefer the red Honda Civic or the Blue one, that is a trick called making you “think past the sale” and the idea is to make you engage on the question of color as if you have already decided to buy the car. That is Persuasion 101 and I have seen no one in the media point it out when Trump does it.
 
The $10 billion estimate Trump uses for his own net worth is also an “anchor” in your mind. That’s another classic negotiation/persuasion method. I remember the $10 billion estimate because it is big and round and a bit outrageous. And he keeps repeating it because repetition is persuasion too. 
 
I don’t remember the smaller estimates of Trump’s wealth that critics provided. But I certainly remember the $10 billion estimate from Trump himself. Thanks to this disparity in my memory, my mind automatically floats toward Trump’s anchor of $10 billion being my reality. That is classic persuasion. And I would be amazed if any of this is an accident. Remember, Trump literally wrote the book on this stuff.
 

From Scott Adams (yes, of Dilbert fame) on the clown genius Donald Trump and how he's quite cleverly using verbal jiu-jitsu to turn his critics' attacks to his favor. A Republican card of Trump and Mark Cuban would be like something out of a satire novel and cause the media to swallow itself. Adams think it would win the election.

James Surowiecki on Trump and why he's won over working-class Republican voters:

Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Why on earth would they support a billionaire?
 
Part of the answer is Trump’s nativist and populist rhetoric. But his wealth is giving him a boost, too. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who’s published reams of work on white working-class attitudes, told me, “There is no bigger problem for these voters than the corruption of the political system. They think big companies are buying influence, while average people are blocked out.” Trump’s riches allow him to portray himself as someone who can’t be bought, and his competitors as slaves to their donors. (Ross Perot pioneered this tactic during the 1992 campaign.) “I don’t give a shit about lobbyists,” Trump proclaimed at an event in May. And his willingness to talk about issues that other candidates are shying away from, like immigration and trade, reinforces the message that money makes him free.
 
Trump has also succeeded in presenting himself as a self-made man, who has flourished thanks to deal-making savvy. In fact, Trump was born into money, and his first great real-estate success—the transformation of New York’s Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt—was enabled by a tax abatement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet many voters see Trump as someone who embodies the American dream of making your own fortune. And that dream remains surprisingly potent: in a 2011 Pew survey, hard work and personal drive (not luck or family connections) were the factors respondents cited most frequently to explain why people got ahead. Even Trump’s unabashed revelling in his wealth works to his benefit, since it makes him seem like an ordinary guy who can’t get over how cool it is to be rich.

New Balance Mid-Century Modern Collection

I'm a big fan of New Balance sneakers, they fit my particular foot shape—really wide forefoot, narrow heel, collapsed arch—comfortably in a way that brands like Nike and Adidas just don't. Their new Mid-Century Modern Collection is really striking in that somewhat muted New Balance way. No fluorescent colors, New Balance shoes typically use the darker shades of any color it employs, with everything else from shape to material somewhat restrained.

The 998 Distinct Mid-Century Modern, one of four shoe models and five colorways available in the collection.

Sante Fe Institute Operating Principles

Linked to from my earlier piece on how greatness cannot be planned, the Sante Fe Institute Operating Principles (PDF) by Cormac McCarthy are short and great. Even if you don't like PDFs, this is just one page, and it's fun to see the inline corrections and to read the note in its typewriter-like typeface.

I like the ending line.

Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we're on the right track.

Why greatness cannot be planned

After months of dissecting research papers, interviewing experts, stumbling down “dabbit holes” (as we call them here at FiveThirtyEight1) and not writing a single draft, my editor gave me a non-negotiable deadline, and I spiraled into a well of despair. I had a desk cluttered with scientific papers, a hard drive stuffed with gigabytes of research and three chalkboards covered in illegible notes, yet still no tangible form for my obsession. Only in the final hours, with the deadline closing in, did something resembling a story emerge. The first draft that I puked out was no masterpiece, but it was finally something. All those scribbles and stacks of paper were necessary steps, but only in retrospect can I see where they were pointing me.
 
When I told this story to University of Central Florida computer scientist Kenneth Stanley, he nodded in recognition. I met Stanley, a mild-mannered artificial intelligence researcher, without intending to. We were at the Santa Fe Institute, where he was spending a sabbatical and I was in residence as a journalism fellow. Stanley had stumbled upon an algorithmic principle that pointed the way to creativity in science, art, culture and life, a principle he outlines in a new book, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.” He told me that a computer algorithm he’d created suggested that my chaotic, unstructured writing process was the ideal way to produce creative work.
 

Interesting. I need to pick up that book. Stanley built an algorithm that allowed users to evolve photos from simple blobs like this...

...to more recognizable images like these:

What's interesting is thinking about whether this idea applies to other forms of creative work and research.

The same sort of blind process happened in another series of experimentswhere Stanley and Joel Lehman instructed robots to work toward defined objectives. In one experiment a bipedal robot programmed to walk farther and farther actually ended up walking less far than one that simply was programmed to do something novel again and again, Stanley writes. Falling on the ground and flailing your legs doesn’t look much like walking, but it’s a good way to learn to oscillate, and oscillation is the most effective motion for walking. If you lock your objectives strictly on walking, you won’t hit that oscillation stepping stone. Stanley calls this the “objective paradox” — as soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it.
 

And does this thinking apply to teams as well? If you are a company that needs a creative breakthrough, might that require a mental shift from a world of deterministic results, in which deliberate practice is the best process, to one that is more probabilistic, open, exploratory?

I suspect the answer is some mix of patience, novelty-seeking, and persistence. You have to be okay with a high failure rate, and a lot of iteration, but that by its very nature requires a lot of repeated, sustained effort. Thus, much like being an entrepreneur.

This week in NBA Twitter

That should be a television show. It's too bad Twitter wasn't around when Michael Jordan was at the height of his basketball powers because his homicidal competitive streak would have had him up all night looking for any perceived slight on Twitter and then responding in some terrifyingly inappropriate manner.

Having MJ-wannabe Kobe actively tweeting is a solid consolation prize, though.