Quotes from Chip Heath

She said, "When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.…

Hydrogen 62% Oxygen 24% Carbon 13% Nitrogen 1.1% Other

For every 10 atoms in your body, 6 are hydrogen, 3 oxygen, 1 carbon. All the other elements are much less common.

To change yourself or other people, you've got to change habits

40% of U.S. adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.

It's rude to make people feel they're being excluded from a conversation.

As a result, choosing between Plan A and Plan B is not a close call. Here's the astonishing finding from the Forrester data: If you Elevate the Positives (Plan B), you'll earn about 9 times more revenue than if you Eliminate the Negatives (Plan A). (8.8 times, to be precise.) Yet most executives are pursuing Plan A. (See the footnote for more on the methodology and an anticipated quibble.)II

In this entire book, you might not find a single statement that is so rigorously supported by empirical research as this one: You are doing things because you see your peers do them.

2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.

The first thing to realize is that even small environmental tweaks can make a difference

The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.

making a gut-level emotional connection.

The discovery of Viagra was a similar story. Initially, the drug had been tested as a treatment for chest pain (angina), and for that purpose it was a failure. Then patients started reporting a curious side effect. (Imagine those awkward conversations: "Doc, my chest still hurts Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but, um, I've been noticing an effect somewhere else Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â)

It's realizing that I can do this. I'm in charge.

Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person's lifetime earnings don't vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you're smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn't really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. The

forming a habit isn't all environmental—it's also mental.

We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer's perspective.     ââ'¬Â¢  Andy Grove asked, "What would our successors do?"     ââ'¬Â¢  Adding distance highlights what is most important; it allows us to see the forest, not the trees.     7.

It seems some CEOs who pay extremely large acquisition premiums Ã¢â'¬Â¦ come to believe their own press.

When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It's Elephant fuel.

The Springboard. Denning

Once people are on the path and making progress, it's important to make their advances visible. With

Life is full of "form letter in an envelope" moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don't make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that's asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we'll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others

there's a good reason why change can be difficult: The world doesn't always want what you want.