Five Stars by Gallo
Ref: Carmine Gallo (2019). Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great. Oxford University Press.
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Summary
“You see that guy? He’s the smartest guy in the room. He should be leading his division, but he’s been stuck in the same position for years.” “Why?” I asked. “He’s a terrible communicator. He takes too long to get to the point. He can’t deliver a clear and compelling presentation. He’s not inspiring.”
This book evolved from conversations with people who are stars in their fields, and who credit superior communication skills for much of their success.
Ideas move the world forward and we need people with good ideas. But ideas alone are not enough. The ability to sell those ideas persuasively is the single greatest skill that gives individuals a competitive advantage.
If you can persuade, inspire, and ignite the imagination of others, you will be unstoppable, irresistible, and irreplaceable.
Mastering the art of public speaking is the single greatest skill a person can acquire today to boost their career in the future.
Trust is our primary currency and how we win trust is through communication that’s accessible, simple, and familiar.
Great communicators are made, not born. Many of the world’s most inspiring speakers—from historical figures to today’s business leaders—have overcome anxiety, nerves, and stage fright. You can, too.
I believe that communication is the most important skill any entrepreneur can possess.-Richard Branson.
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Artificial Intelligence
In a detailed analysis of >700 occupations, Oxford researchers concluded that automation will eliminate 47% of jobs that humans do today: ~50% of all jobs done by humans are on the road to elimination in the next decade. Skills that give humans an edge are those that no robot or machine can currently replace: critical thinking, creativity, and communication.
People who do not develop emotional and social skills quickly will never be high performers, especially those in more complex roles.
Machines are fast; humans are creative. Machines glean insights from data; humans shed light on what the data means. Machines teach us about the past; humans build the future. Machines make us more productive; humans improve the world in imaginative, unexpected ways.
Those who want to stay relevant in their professions will need to focus on skills and capabilities that artificial intelligence has trouble replicating—understanding, motivating, and interacting with human beings.
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Persuasion
Persuasion (‘Sweet Talk’): Combining words and ideas to move people to action; the fundamental skill to get from good to great in the age of ideas. The ability to convince others to change the way they think, believe or behave—to recruit a team or get buy-in from investors and stakeholders. Persuasion requires Logos (Logic), Ethos, and Pathos (Emotion).
Logos (Logic): The evidence supporting an argument.
Ethos (Credibility): The character of the speaker.
Pathos (Emotion): The act of persuading an audience by appealing to its emotions.
Emotion helps us to remember things, but a “little stress” can sear the memory into our brains.
By including tension, conflict, and hurdles within a story, you’ll add a little stress that keeps your listeners glued. Stories are irresistible because we’re wired to think in story, process our world in story, and share ideas in story.
One of the most effective tools of persuasion is to use the classic narrative structure of dividing the story into three parts or “acts”: the set-up describes the current situation; the conflict highlights the problem your customer faces; and the resolution proposes your idea or solution.
The most persuasive individuals pepper their speech with metaphors and analogies.-Aristotle (Rhetoric).
Techniques used by great persuaders:
Antithesis: Juxtaposing two contrasting ideas; “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even its best state, is a necessary evil.”
Anaphora: Repetition of the same word or words in successive sentences or within clauses; “Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent. Tis not…”
Alliteration: The repetition of similar letter sounds in two or more words in a group; “By referring the matter from argument to arms, a new area for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.”
Parallelism: Several parts of a sentence are expressed in a similar way to show the ideas are equally important, adding balance and rhythm to a speech; “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.”
“Sellers persuade buyers, politicians persuade voters, and lobbyists persuade politicians.”
Persuasion is responsible for generating one-quarter of America’s national income (McCloskey study).
The human brain cannot be persuaded if it has to work too hard to understand the information.
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Storytelling
Stories are the single best linguistic tool we have to persuade.
Classic Three-Act Storytelling: Set-up, conflict, and resolution.
To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what the story is about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.
Signature Story: Stories used to gain awareness, communicate, persuade, change behavior, and precipitate discussion. Everyone has a signature story. Includes 7 elements:
It’s a story- a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end (a resolution).
It’s intriguing- thought-provoking, novel, informative, interesting, entertaining.
It’s authentic- the characters, settings, and challenges must feel real. A story that doesn’t ring true will be perceived as fiction and may harm the speaker’s credibility.
It includes details- small, vivid, or important details enhance the authenticity of the story.
It reveals a surprise- in a movie, this is the twist.
It introduces empathetic characters- the listeners should be able to see themselves in the shoes—or context—of the hero.
It has conflict and tension- if there’s no tension, struggle or conflict, it makes for an uninteresting story. An empathetic hero overcoming a meaningful hurdle—and succeeding in the end—is irresistible.
Use analogies and metaphors to give you story “verbal beauty.”
Stories that highlight the common ground between two people trigger more alignment in brain activity between speaker and listener. If I can find common ground with you, my listener, I’ll have more success at persuading you to see the world from my point of view.
Stories about personal experiences including humble origins, adverse events, triumph over tragedy, etc are powerful and make for good stories. Using struggle and success as rhetorical tools allows us to make deeper, more meaningful connections with each other.
Try framing your personal story as a Hero’s Journey—a time-tested formula in which you were inspired to try something difficult, struggled for a while, and then finally succeeded.”
Movies
Movie Structure: The script for a standard two-hour movie runs about 110 pages. The first 10 pages set up the film. Act two begins around page 25, and act three starts around page 85 and runs through the end.
The catalyst appears near the end of act one and triggers the hero’s adventure. This is the point at which the hero decides that the status quo cannot continue.
Within act two, around page 75, there’s a scene when all seems lost.
Romantic Comedies: Follow structure to the letter: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl are reunited after a madcap chase and live happily ever after.
Hero Story: A hero goes on a journey, survives key trials, and emerges better than before—the hero is transformed.
2016: Human behavior expert run a massive experiment on 495 pitches from Sharktanks first 7 seasons; 253 entrepreneurs won deals and 242 did not. The difference between the two, according to Vanessa Van Edwards, is that captivating entrepreneurs included “conversational sparks” in their pitches. A spark is often a story. 58% of successful pitches had a story. About 30% of successful pitches specifically followed the three-act Hero’s Journey.
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Presenting
Public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.
Communicators need to ask themselves the following questions: What do you want your audience to know, what do you want them to feel, and what do you want them to do?
When planning a presentation to deliver your original ideas, don’t start with the slides. Put yourself in a creative space and think through the elements of the narrative before creating slides or documents.
If you sound complicated you will be complicated.
Long-winded monologues do not strike the target in the way that brief talks relaying precise and concise instructions do.
Presentation Design: Analyze a potential threat, develop a short presentation, deliver three possible plans of action, and make an argument for the best one. Condense the argument into 10min to make it tighter, stronger, and easier for the listener to absorb.
Always start with a statement of the main issue before fully stating the facts.
Be selective about the words you use. If they don’t advance the story, remove them. Condense, simplify, and speak as briefly as possible. Speak in grade-school language. Big words aren’t better; they’re confusing.
Five Presentation Habits
Replace Bullet Points with Pictures: There are no bullet points allowed on a TED slide. Ever.
Charts, tables, and graphs on a slide do not elicit a lean-in moment. Stories do because stories are emotional and trigger neurochemicals in the human brain.
Bullet points are the easiest design to create on a PowerPoint slide, and the least effective.
Make the Audience Laugh.
Share Personal Stories: The stories that can generate the best connection are stories about you personally or about people close to you. Tales of failure, awkwardness, misfortune, danger or disaster, told authentically, hasten deep engagement.
People aren’t moved by slides; they’re moved by the emotional components of your story.
Make Presentations Easy to Follow: Think of your slides as billboards. If viewers do not understand the gist of your slide in three seconds, it’s too complicated (Nancy Duarte).
State 1 Headline: Design presentations around a central theme and repeat the theme throughout the talk. Introduce your headline within 15 sec of starting your presentation.
Great presentations have one theme. Everything else supports that key message.
TED conference organizers tell their speakers: pick one idea and make it as clear, concrete, and vivid as possible.
Rule of Three: Separate your theme into three nested parts.
Promise your audience that they will learn something new
Where we go wrong: “Instead of telling people what they should know, we like to tell people what we did.”
“Your mission in any presentation is to inform, educate, and inspire. You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.”-Ballard.
Audience
Your audience will tune out after ~10-15 min; get to the point quickly.
Audiences will find a speaker to be trustworthy if the speaker has three characteristics: wisdom, virtue, and goodwill (Aristotle).
Several studies have shown people will make up their minds about a speaker’s message within 7-15 sec of beginning to watch a pitch or presentation.
Pressure Techniques
Reappraisal: Turning thoughts from negative to positive (reframing) is the key to winning.
Repetition: Repeating a presentation over and over will boost your confidence for the big day.
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Leadership
Leader: Somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. A real leader’s “authority” comes from the power we give that leader, and we give them power because of the way they make us feel. We like the way we feel in the presence of a great leader. We like the way they persuade us to work harder, to push ourselves, and to dream bigger than we ever imagined.-David Foster Wallace.
Leadership: Creating an idea and convincing others that it matters and that it will solve a challenge. To do that you have to communicate the challenge, why it matters and a coherent way to address it.
Leaders command respect, inspire teamwork, and attract attention for their ideas and projects. Leaders:
Persuade people to support their ideas.
Help launch creative innovations that further the goals of the organization.
Attract resources, funding, and support.
Elevate their status and reputation.
The cycle repeats itself again, and again, and again.
Great leaders combine great ideas and the ability to communicate those ideas effectively.
A leader’s first task is to form a mental image of what he or she wants the company or division to look like. The picture must be followed by a crisp communication of the vision and the ability to show individuals how their contributions help the team achieve its success.
Leaders who clearly communicate goals and roadmaps enjoy the confidence of the team. And leaders who show individuals why their roles matter and how they connect to the big picture inspire people to do their best work.
Speaking in shorter sentences is the sign of a more mature leader.
Heap praise on those you want to influence—genuine and specific praise.
The challenge of a leader is to look around the corner and make changes before it’s too late to make changes.
Leaders who stand out distill complexity into simple words, directions, and instructions.
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Teams
Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact with one another. Not surprisingly, a leader who makes an emotional connection with his or her team is the catalyst to successful interactions. The researchers concluded that successful teams have the following traits (Project Aristotle).
Psychological Safety: The team members feel confident taking risks. They are secure in speaking up and comfortable being vulnerable in front of one another (the most important quality found in winning teams).
Clarity: The team members have clear goals and roles.
It’s easier to rally a team around one common goal than to divide their attention.
Impact of Work: Team members know their work matters and can see how it supports the greater good.
People can get a salary, status, and promotions, but if they don’t care—really care—about the domain, then they won’t tweak, learn, and find better ways of solving problems.
When I was a kid, there was a widowed man who lived up the street. I got to know him a little bit. One day he invited me into the garage and pulled out a dusty old rock tumbler. It had a motor and a can. We got some old, ugly rocks from the backyard. We put them in the can with a little liquid and powder and turned the motor on. I came back the next day and we took out these amazingly, beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other, creating a little friction, a little noise, had come out beautiful, polished rocks. That’s my metaphor for a team working hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s through the team of incredibly talented people bumping up against each, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise. Working together, they polish their ideas and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
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Interviewing
“What’s your story?”
The storytellers stand out. Condense a lengthy career history and wrap it in an engaging narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. There should be inflection points, characters, and easy-to-understand motivations. Keep it short, all the while connecting experience with the business’ ultimate goals.
“Tell me the story of your life, the decisions you made along the way and why you made them (Musk’s favorite interview question).” Clearly articulate problems you’ve faced and how you’ve solved them.
“Tell us about a challenge you faced and how you solved it?”
Tell a story.” Practice the stories you will tell, over and over again. Record yourself telling the narrative and ask friends for feedback. Adapt the Hero’s Journey to frame your experience around a character who faced a technical problem and used the challenge to better themselves.
“Why do you want become an astronaut?”
A skilled communicator will offer 3-5 specific reasons. An unskilled communicator will recite a long list of accomplishments and provide a confusing, convoluted answer.
In a job interview, if you only show you can solve technical problems and you have no communication skills, you are a much worse candidate than someone with good communication skills and pretty good technical skills.
Don’t just rattle off facts learned from a company website, craft a narrative around an experience.
Clearly explain the value you bring to the company, as well as how your experience will benefit the customer and help advance the company’s position in the market.
Hiring managers are increasingly saving time by asking for short 90-second videos of prospective candidates. They often use these videos to decide whether a candidate deserves an in-person interview. If a candidate cannot speak well or enunciate clearly, dresses too casually, or records the video with an unprofessional background, it could prevent a follow-up interview, even if the candidate looks good on paper.
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Business
Research finds that highly skilled workers command higher incomes because of three capabilities:
Ability to perform rote tasks quickly.
Experience in evaluating data to determine a COA.
Their savviness in helping clients navigate the course.
If you want to do business in the Middle East, start your conversation with a story. If your host starts with a story, listen to them intently and don’t switch the topic abruptly.
The Top Success Factors: A clear mission, vision and values, and strong and visible leadership.
The ability to publicly articulate a company’s strategy is a highly valued—and highly compensated—skill.
Planning Teams: Set a clear theme and agenda at the beginning, focus on three ideas, circle back to the main point, and closed with a strong statement.
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Entrepreneurs
Every year in the USA alone, entrepreneurs start 600K businesses. Only 5% receive venture capital funding.
Venture capitalists are highly selective with checks averaging $2.6M to seed-stage companies.
If a young professional cannot explain their business or idea in one sentence, it’s too complicated (Moritz).
Your idea must be memorable, clear, vivid, and have an element of emotion associated with it.
The best hook for a startup is a very quick way of articulating why what you do matters.
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Breakthroughs
When people were too familiar with a specific domain, it blocked their creativity, because they stop looking outside of their area of expertise for ideas (2015 Austria-Denmark Study).
Researchers conducted 306 interviews. The participants were asked for their best ideas on the following topic: improving safety gear for the market they are experts in and for the other two categories. A panel of safety gear experts evaluated the responses. The findings were extraordinary: the more distant the field, the more novel the solution the participants came up with. In other words, members of each group were better at coming up with an innovative solution for a field other than their own.
Breakthroughs in perception do not come from simply staring at an object and thinking harder about it. Breakthroughs come from a perceptual system that is confronted with something that it doesn’t know how to interpret. Unfamiliarity forces the brain to discard its usual categories of perception and create new ones.
Kick-start your brain by connecting ideas from different fields, listening to film scores, reading books, or taking a walk. Better yet, do it while on a trip to a totally new location.
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Brain
In the presence of emotionally competent stimuli, norepinephrine is released from neurons that arise from the lateral brain stem tegmentum and the locus caeruleus. This is a big deal. Neurons that originate from these areas project to an astonishingly wide variety of regions in the brain, including the hippocampus and the amygdala. After norepinephrine arrives at its target cells, the hormone binds to β-adrenergic receptors.
Anthropologists believe that when our ancestors gained control of fire, it was a major milestone in human development. Fire cooked food, which gave us protein to build larger brains.
“Reading increases the quality of white matter, the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of gray matter, where information is processed.”-Journal Neuron.
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People
Max Martin (1971- Present): Swedish Record producer.
If you’ve ever hummed Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” or Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” then you can thank (or blame) Swedish producer Max Martin. Martin has more top 10 singles than Madonna, Elvis, or The Beatles. According to John Seabrook in The Song Machine, “90% of the revenues in the record business come from 10% of the songs,” and most of the 10% are written by Martin and a handful of others. Martin’s songs are irresistible because they follow a structure Seabrook calls “track-and-hook.” A producer starts the process by laying down some tracks—chords, beats, instruments. The producer then sends the track to “hook writers” who add the earworms, the short melodies that get stuck in your head. The hooks follow a structure. Seabrook calls it melodic math. Max Martin’s collaboration with Katy Perry is a great example of how this formula turns songs into hits. For example, many of the lines in Perry’s hit albums have two parts and each half has the same number of syllables. In “Chained to the Rhythm,” Perry sings: “Turn it up, it’s your fav-rite song/Dance, dance, dance to the dis-tor-tion.” The way Perry sings it, each half has eight syllables.
Jack Ma (1964- Present): Chinese business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Co-founder and former chairman of Alibaba Group.
Jack was influenced by watching his parents master the craft of Pingtan in China. He fell in love with the art of storytelling and pursued a career as an English teacher. In China, Jack was only earning $12 a month. Although the meager salary was his only means of paying the rent on his 1BR apartment, Jack left his teaching job and started Alibaba, an online commerce company, that connects businesses to customers around the world. Today, Alibaba, is the world’s largest virtual shopping mall and Jack Ma is the richest person in China and one of the 30 wealthiest people on the planet.
Ma says he got his story, his dream, from the movie Forrest Gump. Every time Ma got frustrated, he would watch the film. It taught him to never give up.
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Disease
Diabetes: ~9% of the U.S. population has diabetes and nearly 1.5M new cases appear every year.
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Misc Quotes
“The link between excellence and passion is the ability to innovate.”-Smith.
“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.”-Jack Ma (Alibaba Founder).
“People with the best ideas are often terrible communicators.”-Alda.
“One of the greatest deficits in western society is a deficit of meaning.”-Wall.
“Simple can be harder than complex, but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”-Steve Jobs.
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”-Daniel Kahneman.
“The mark of an educated person in a free society is the ability to persuade others.”-Aristotle.
“A persuasive argument requires a logical structure, known as a syllogism: ‘All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’”
“To establish trust, ask about family, background, hopes, and dreams.”
“It’s rare that a fresh idea comes up out of nowhere. More often we put together disparate ideas that nobody has put together.”-James Patterson.
“In order to have a eureka breakthrough, you have to be deeply immersed in a problem. But then you have to let go of it.”-Olivia Fox Cabane (The Net and the Butterfly).
“A common mistake is to communicate too much information at once.”-Medina.
“The secret to communicating science and other complex topics is not to translate the content—which only serves to oversimplify and dumb it down—but to explain with enthusiasm and, where and when necessary, link the concept to something embedded in pop culture, where we all have active receptors.”-Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
“As humans, we are constantly assessing how social encounters either enhance or diminish our status.”-Rock.
“The cognitive need for fairness generates a strong response in the limbic system, stirring hostility and undermining trust.”-Lieberman.
“We are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place … We’ve made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labor, and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history … a child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday.”-Swedish Historian Johan Norberg.
“In a free society, ideas have sex, and when they do, they multiply.”
“Democracy is one of our most potent weapons against famine, because a free press and the free flow of ideas make people aware of problems, and people are then free to implement ideas to solve them.”-Swedish Historian Johan Norberg.
“Without human connection, we have no community. Without community, there can be no happiness. And if we’re not happy, we will fail to flourish.”-Aristotle.
“If all other circumstances are equal yet truth, or justice is less persuasive than falsity and injustice, the fault must be in the theater, the audience, or both.”-Crider.
“Emotion should guide our decisions, as long as the emotion we experience is the appropriate one.”-Aristotle.
“To come up with a star rating, inspectors anonymously spend two nights at a hotel and evaluate the property on 800 objective standards.”
“When a hotel’s guests rave about the place, it’s rarely to say how much they enjoyed the soft sheets or the delicious food. It’s nearly always about how a particular employee made them feel.”
“Each of my posted tweets is an attempt at humor, communication, learning, enlightenment, etc. The instant response of followers serves as a kind of neurosynaptic snapshot of the public’s response to my thoughts. This helps me tune in to what I say and how I say it for maximum effectiveness.”-Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
“Dreaming is one of humanity’s greatest gifts; it champions aspiration, spurs innovation, leads to change, and propels the world forward.”-Richard Branson.
“Some studies have found that students will form an impression of a teacher within two seconds of meeting that teacher—and the snap judgment lasts throughout the semester.”
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Resources
Collective Health (https://collectivehealth.com/): A company that takes the complexity out of employee healthcare plans.
Hewlett Foundation (https://hewlett.org/): A philanthropy dedicated to providing America’s public-school students with the skills they need to excel in the 21c.
Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) (https://hcahealthcare.com/): One of the largest for-profit healthcare providers in the world. It operates 170 hospitals in the USA and generates $40B in annual revenue.
Researchers Grand Prix (https://www.ntnu.edu/researchers-grand-prix): An Annual American-Idol style event for scientists. In nine regional events at universities and science centers, scientists get 4min to present their research to a panel of experts, journalists, and a general audience. Finalists are invited to the main event in Stockholm.
WeSeeHope (https://www.weseehopeusa.org/): Supports 150K children per year and has raised >$20M.
Y Combinator (https://www.ycombinator.com/): Invests $120K in ~100 startups annually (~3% of the founders who apply) in exchange for roughly 7% of the company’s equity. Successful companies and entrepreneurs create a narrative around their products, services, and brand.
After backing more than 3,200 founders, Altman has arrived at a series of questions he asks himself about the opportunity: • Will the company build something lots of people LOVE? • Will the company be easy to copy? • Are the founders “forces of nature”? • Does the company have a clear and important mission?
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Terminology
Analogy: A comparison of two different things to show how they’re similar.
Metaphor: A literary device through which we describe one thing in terms of another (replacing the meaning of one word with another).
Anaphora: A popular rhetorical device where successive sentences begin with the same word or phrase. These structures give speech their rhythm.
Antithesis: Juxtaposing two opposing ideas in the same sentence while keeping the number of syllables roughly in balance.
Chief Experience Officer: Improves patient engagement by marrying digital technology with human warmth.
Cognitive Backlog: When short-term memory is full.
Cognitive Reappraisal: The act of reinterpreting emotional information in such a way that the emotional component is diminished (Gregory Berns).
Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Coding (4 C’s).
Deductible: The amount you’ll pay up-front for care until your insurance kicks in.
Embodied Concept: Binds a concrete event (landing on the moon) with an abstract aspiration (advancing science).
Functional Near-IR Spectroscopy (fNIRS): Uses light to measure neural activity in order to give researchers a view of blood flow to different parts of the brain.
Google I/O: Google’s Annual Developers Conference.
Habitable zones (‘Goldilocks Zones’): Regions of the solar system where liquid water could exist.
Homiletics: The art of preaching.
Iconoclast: A person who does something that others say can’t be done. Most people will never be iconoclasts because they cannot overcome two fears: (1) the fear of uncertainty (iconoclasts take risks that challenge the status quo) and (2) the fear of speaking up and selling novel ideas (Berns).
Logline: Conveys a main character, the characters goals, and a conflict.
Machine Learning: The technology that allows machines to learn from data and, in some cases, mimic things humans can do. Machines learn from crunching large amounts.
Minimally Viable Product (MVP): A product that has just enough core features to be functional and to prove that it works. With feedback and cash, the MVP might become the next big thing.
Moonshot Challenge: An extraordinary challenge with clear, measurable objectives that captures the imagination of the nation and fundamentally changes how we view what’s possible.
NASAs Space Program
Mercury: Send an astronaut into orbit.
Gemini: Conduct a spacewalk and connect two spacecrafts together.
Apollo: Put a man on the moon.
Original: A person who champions a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately makes things better (Adam Grant).
Originals run up against a common hurdle: the human bias to remain in the status quo.
Oxytocin: A neuromodulator that increases social bonds and builds trusts.
Pingtan: A 400yo performance arts that combines music and storytelling; a verbal art form in which artists use vivid words and images to evoke emotion from the audience.
Readability Index: An algorithm that textbook publishers in the USA use to evaluate the grade level of content.
Studies have shown the average American reads and understands content best when it is written at a 10th grade level, or slightly lower.
Hemingway: An app for measuring the readability of text.
Reinforcement Learning: A form of AI which uses extreme trial and error to make strategic decisions based on the probabilities of a particular outcome.
Rhetoric: The art of using written and oral language to persuade people to better their lives (Aristotle).
Situation, Complication, Resolution (SCR): The McKinsey storytelling structure.
Strategic Inflection Point: The point at which the fundamentals of a business or career are about to change. The change brings an opportunity to rise to new heights or “signals the beginning of the end.”
Upstart: A newly successful person or company that bucks the established way of doing things.
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Chronology
May, 2017: AlphaGo, built in the Googles Deep Mind Lab, defeats Jie, the worlds #1 Go player.-Five Stars by Gallo.
21 Oct, 2015: SanDisk is purchased by Western Digital.-Five Stars by Gallo.
2004: Kayak is launched by Paul English.-Five Stars by Gallo.
2004: Yelp is launched. The Average rating on Yelp is 3.8 out of 5 stars (2022) .-Five Stars by Gallo.
2001: Apple opens its first store.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1997: IBM’s Super Computer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, the world’s top ranked chess player.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1994: Forrest Gump played by Tom Hanks is released to theaters. Gump never lets his low IQ stop him from chasing dreams or accepting challenges. He is the perennial optimist.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1990: The “Pale Blue Dot” picture is taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. Convinced by astronomer Carl Sagan, the photo was taken from 4B miles away as an almost imperceptible dot of light measuring .12 pixels in size.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1988: SanDisk Corporation is started by Eli Harari.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1984: The Macintosh Computer hits the market.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1980: Nike corporation goes public, led by Phil Knight.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1979: “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting”, considered the Bible of screenwriting, is written by Syd Field.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1972: Bill Bowerman introduces the Nike Cortez running shoe, created in his garage using a waffle iron and sheets of stainless steel with punched holes to gain traction on the U or Oregon’ new Polyurethane track that had been donated by a wealthy alum for $1M.-Five Stars by Gallo.
25 May, 1961: POTUS JFK Kennedy tells USC: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”-Five Stars by Gallo.
1958: Oil is discovered in the UAE.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1930s: MIT graduate student Claude Shannon applies Boole’s algebra to electrical circuits, laying the groundwork for modern computers.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1847: The proto-Digital Revolution first begins when mathematician George Boole introduces an obscure discipline called mathematical logic.-Five Stars by Gallo.
Boole built on Aristotle’s syllogism concept, replacing the words with a mathematical formula: x = x * y (Everything in the set x is also in the set y).-Five Stars by Gallo.
1840: ~70% of the U.S. labor force works on farms.-Five Stars by Gallo.
1780: Economist Thomas Robert Malthus pessimistically argues that humanity will always suffer from famine and poverty.-Five Stars by Gallo.
500 BCE: Invention of Go.-Five Stars by Gallo.
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