Think Like a Freak

The first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat? This question led him to experiment and gather the feedback that changed the game

At university, he had been learning about game theory and now it came in handy.

The second lesson to be drawn from Kobayashi’s success has to do with the limits that we accept, or refuse to. Over dinner that night at Cafe Luxembourg, Kobayashi said that when he started training, he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the existing Coney Island record of 25⅛ HDB. Why? He reasoned that the record didn’t stand for much since

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

When asked to name the attributes of someone who is particularly bad at predicting, Tetlock needed just one word. “Dogmatism,” he says. That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don’t.

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

is, if you could learn how you might fail without going to the trouble of actually failing? That’s the idea behind a “premortem,” as the psychologist Gary Klein calls it. The idea is simple. Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go

the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame. It is most powerful when least expected, like when things have gone wrong. Some

a good start would be to assess the core of the problem as shrewdly as Kobayashi did with his.