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Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Health (Summary)
2 min readDec 25, 2022
The book in 3 lines:
- The “Elephant vs Rider” analogy suggests that everyone has two sides — the rational thinker (rider — the head) running on analysis and evidence, and the emotional player (elephant) based on feeling and instincts.
- The elephant is often on automatic pilot. It is the part of the brain that tells us to go ahead and eat the ice cream, after the rider has decided to put us on a diet.
1/ Shape the path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
- Simply by shrinking movie popcorn buckets, people eat less popcorn. When you change the path, change is more likely no matter what’s going on with the elephant and rider.
- (Here, environmental design / tweaks are essential to behavior change, similar to what we’ve learnt about personal habit building.)
2/ Motivate the elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
- It is critical to engage emotional side rather than relying on discipline or self control.
- Shrink the Change — our elephant is easily demoralised. Help them feel the sense of…
