Flip the Frame Before Solving the Problem

““The unexamined life is not worth living,” the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates supposedly said. The truth is we don’t know if Socrates really said that. The great teacher didn’t write anything down. All we have to go by are the reports from Plato and other star students. But I’m inclined to believe what they say. I like examining things, my own life included. That’s how I improve myself. That’s what I’ve always done: look at the situation, whatever it is, turn my brainpower on it, and then try to solve the issues that I find. That’s how I built my businesses. That’s how I’ve run my life.”

“God knows my mind is constantly racing forward, always filled to the brim.”

“How do you use all of this insight in your day-to-day? The first rule is very simple. You go to people and say — and this, to be honest is the most basic crazy principle of the lot — “don’t look at it like this necessarily—try looking at it like that”. Treating the perception … ? Treating the perception, or the frame of reference. Frames of reference are interesting because it does our head in to look at 10 metrics at once, we don’t like making really complicated decisions.”

“It is a pretty weird way, but what else can you do? One thing you can do in marketing if you’re really, really clever, and maybe you don’t get the chance to do it more than once in your lifetime, is that you can just change the order in which people make a decision. There was an interesting estate agent called Stern Studios, do you remember that? Their whole gig was that they covered the whole of London but only sold studio and one bedroom flats. Oh yes, I remember that. Now that was interesting. What fascinated me about that was that it’s actually changing the order in which people decide. First they decide they’re going to buy a studio flat, and then what they’ll actually do is look at probably five or six postal districts. So that changed the fundamental order of decision making.”