John Gordon’s English Weblog

When I was home over the Spring Festival holiday, I saw a copy of The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, sitting around my parent’s house. I read the introduction on a trip to the bathroom (I can’t seem to get off this bathroom theme), and packed the book in my bag when we left to head back to China towards the end of February. I probably should have asked before taking it.

My interpretation of Tolle’s basic premise is that “the Now” is really all that we live in. The future and the past exist only in our minds, so they are not real. The Now is also our point of access to Being, which Tolle equates with concepts such as God and the Dao in other spiritual traditions. According to Tolle, enlightenment is achieved by accepting, or surrendering, to the Now, which is done by separating ourselves from our mind by observing our thoughts and feelings. He claims that the thoughts in our mind are separate from who we really are.

Reading the book was a powerful experience for me. I read it in short bits–in the car between filming locations, before I went to bed–and found the practice of observing my thoughts, particularly my negative thought patterns, to be very freeing. I’m not sure if everyone else is like this, but I tend to go off unconsciously on little thought journeys thinking about the future or the past, and sometimes the thoughts tend to spiral out of control. I’ll start to think about house payments, then children, then work, then retirement, then what I really want to do with my life, and on and on. To be honest, I’d never really thought about whether or not these thought patterns were productive. They just sort of were for me, and I let them go, perhaps hoping that they might lead somewhere productive. Tolle’s claim is that these thought patterns are unconscious, lead to negativity, and keep us out of the present moment. He says that observing thoughts can keep them under control. I was amazed at the peace that observing/noticing these thought patterns brought about for me. Because I read the book over a period of about ten days or so, such moments of peace came quite often, as I was reminded to be “conscious” simply by the fact that I was reading the book. I’m curious to see if I’ll be able to keep a similar level of presence now that I’m done with the book.

The book includes a lot more detail about Tolle’s philosophy, and I’m not ready to accept all of it. There is a lot of talk about how the Now is the gateway between the “Manifested” and the “Unmanifested”, about huge coming shifts in human consciousness, and about vibrational frequencies that I tend to find hokey, but am not ready to make a judgment on. I will say, however, that I am very grateful for the enhanced feeling of peace and joy that reading Tolle’s book brought to my life. (I should also say that I’m afraid that the last sentence sounds a little bit hokey, but it’s true for me.)

A disclaimer: It’s quite likely that I’m misinterpreting or misrepresenting some of Tolle’s ideas and concepts. I haven’t looked at the book since reading it, and my interpretations are based on my own experience reading the book.

I have no idea why I’m still stuck on bathrooms, but…

If I were to teach a course on male bathroom design, the first principle I would teach would be:

If you are going to build a bathroom without a door, the urinal should not be visible to people standing outside.

I was reminded of one of my favorite bathroom naming conventions in China today when I went to relieve myself today. The men’s room was named “The Pavilion of Watching the Waterfall” (观瀑亭), and the women’s room was called “The Room of Listening to the Rain” (听雨轩).

Met a Chinese guy today who was in the US on 9/11. He was in Washington and was scheduled head to NY and visit the World Trade Center Towers on September 12th. His friend had tickets to visit the towers on the 11th. After the attacks there was the option to return the tickets for a refund, but he chose to keep them.

Would that be a collector’s item now?

Partly inspired by this guy, I deleted the CSS file for this blog and replaced it with only the most basic formatting. I say this was only partly inspired, because I’d initially wanted to start with a blank slate, but had been too lazy to get rid of the default template. I’m not a design guy at all, but I don’t like using the default, and I like to tinker with the HTML and CSS.

Sorry if it looks terrible right now. I’ll adjust and add things over time, and would appreciate suggestions and comments anywhere along the way.

I first learned about Robert Cialdini’s work on the “psychology of persuasion” from Mike when he brought copies of an article by Cialdini to our super-secret Tuesday discussion group. The article outlined Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion and intrigued me enough that I did some searching online and downloaded a talk of Cialdini’s from Audible. The talk covered the same principles and contained many of the same examples, but Cialdini’s engaging speaking style made it worth the price of the download. I actually incorporated some of his speaking style into the lectures I give to students.

That was well over a year ago, and since then I’ve often found myself thinking about Cialdini’s work and noticing his principles in action. When I was back in the US over spring festival, I decided to pick up a copy of his book Influence: Science and Practice.

Here are Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion, with a simple example of each in action:

1. Reciprocation
-We feel compelled to return favors. If someone sends us a holiday SMS, we feel compelled to respond.

2. Commitment and Consistency
-We feel compelled to keep our commitments and be consistent. A restaurant was able to greatly reduce no-shows by adding one word to a sentence in phone conversations with guests making reservations. Instead of “Please call us if you won’t be able to make it”, employees were instructed to ask, “Would you please call us if you won’t be able to make it?” Getting people to make the commitment made the difference.

3. Social Proof
-”We view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it” (p. 100). When watching TV, people are more likely to laugh and laugh for longer when there is a laugh track, even thought the laughter is obviously canned.

4. Liking
-We’re more likely to say yes to people that we know and like. Also, we’re more likely to like people who are attractive, who are similar to us, who we have had positive contact with, and who are associated with things we like. For example, people are significantly more likely to respond to a mailed survey if the person mailing the survey has a name similar to theirs.

5. Authority
-People are likely to be influenced by people who are or appear to be in positions of authority, or who are associated with authority. A crowd at a crosswalk is much more likely to follow a man with a suit as he jaywalks through a red light than a main wearing a shirt and khakis.

6. Scarcity
-Things seem more valuable to us when they are or seem scarce, exclusive, or forbidden. Subjects in a test who were given a jar with two cookies rated the cookies as more valuable than subjects given a jar containing ten of the same cookies.

Cialdini describes scores of studies that illustrate his principles, and goes to great lengths to describe how “compliance professionals” such as car salesmen use the various principles to make us say yes. His examples are fascinating, and more often than not a lot of fun.

I found the weakest parts of the book to be the “Defense” sections at the end of each chapter, in which Cialdini describes how to defend oneself against professionals using each principle. While he has evidence to back up the rest of the material presented in the book, the “Defense” ideas seem to be just suggestions, with no research to back up whether they work or not. That said, most of the suggestions probably work.

I was also a bit turned off by his militant attitude towards compliance professionals who use the principles to “trick” us into saying yes. He even suggested not tipping bartenders who make use of the “Social Proof” principle by stuffing a couple of dollar bills into the tip jar before a shift. My opinion is that, as long as they are not outright dishonest, people have the right to make use of these principles to try and get others to comply.

Overall, I loved the book. It’s an engaging read about a topic that affects our daily lives. I’ve enjoyed reading it so much and found the principles so important that I recently purchased several copies of the Chinese version of the book to give to colleagues at New Channel.

Some people don’t like him, but I’ve always been a fan of Thomas Friedman. Like Andrew Sullivan, he’s someone with whom I don’t always agree, but I admire for being willing to explore (and sometimes change) his opinion in a public forum.

Friedman has become very well-known in China with the discussion surrounding his book The World is Flat. The concept seems to resonate with people here, and makes good dinner table conversation.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was in the bookstore the other day and noticed that the Chinese edition of his The Lexus and the Olive Tree has been renamed The World is Flat: The Perspective of the Lexus and the Olive Tree. Never mind that the whole concept of “the world is flat” came to him after he published “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”. I wonder if he knows about the new title.