You Have More Influence Than You Think by Vanessa Bohns

ĭoes when we work matter for how engaging and fun our work is? Our research (jointly with Kaitlin Woolley) finds that working outside standard hours harms intrinsic motivation, and was recently featured in The Economist! Getting unstuck is less daunting if you treat received wisdom as mutable, open to revision just as children question everything and assume nothing. It pushes us to question what we don't know-and, as with Spurrier-helps us to show the unorthodox truths we DO know.Īn experimental mindset is one of the 100+ techniques I discuss in ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH. Spurrier, using an experimental mindset, changed the standing of much-maligned 'New World Wines' overnight.Įxperimentalism is unbelievably powerful.

In 1976 he ran a now-famous blind test-an experiment-showing that wine experts preferred a sample of U.S. wines were often superior to French wines. Berkoff was (and is!) a gifted experimentalist.īerkoff explained to me how he discovered a new technique that made him dramatically faster-so fast that other swimmers adopted the same approach just to remain competitive with Berkoff, and SO fast that the sport's governing body felt it had to change the rules.Īnother gifted experimentalist was the late Steven Spurrier, a wine expert who believed U.S. Olympian who set world records and won gold and bronze medals at the 19 Olympic Games. I interviewed some incredible experimentalists while writing the book. The solution, as I hinted earlier, is EXPERIMENTALISM: the philosophy of questioning everything, and running small experiments that test all sorts of assumed 'truths.' Most of the time, we're muddling through and hoping for the best. One is that it makes no room for the possibility that things might improve if we question them.Īnother problem with this approach is that it assumes the world is orderly-that things are the way they are because someone somewhere figured out they SHOULD be this way.

There are many problems with this model of the world. Our ideas about the world crystallize, and we assume that things are the way they are for a reason. In adulthood, though, we lose this taste for curiosity.

They question EVERYTHING, and take nothing for granted. Research suggests that children ask up to 25 questions per hour. The best habit you can develop is an EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET: the tendency to question everything (including whether the ideal workweek structure is 5 days x 8 hours per day). The final section of the book deals with HABIT: the actions that unstick us and lead to breakthroughs. My new book, ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH, is out next Tuesday, May 16th.

You Have More Influence Than You Think by Vanessa Bohns