This is a book about building rapport on your first impression. As the author stated, you have roughly 90 seconds to make a first impression – making the best impression during these 90 seconds makes a whole world of difference. My main take-aways:

1. Be congruent of your body language (3 V’s: visual constitute 55% of communication, vocal (tone) 38%, and verbal words only 7%) from your head to toe: in your eye contacts, smile/”beaming,” head tilt (like a model would do), unbuttoned coats, open hand pointing to the heart, a slight lean (this is the subtle one), handshake, and good posture.

2. Interesting conversation: start with current event or weather then ask open ended questions on things related to the person who may have dropped the hint or clues like where they work and etc.

3. KFC: Know what you want, Find (get the feedback) and Change.

4. Synchronize to the 3 dominant sensories: visual, auditory and kinesthetics (touchy and feeling). This is nothing new to me but the quizzes are very interesting and help you differentiate which of your sensories are strong. He also pointed out the long-lasting married spouses tend to have non-overlapping dominant senses, which make married lives more interesting and probably incurring more conflicts at times as well.

5. Mirroring people’s gesture, language, attitude and tone. I didn’t know there are so many aspects of the mirroring. The tough part is to do this without being noticed and to able to conduct a meaningful conversation at the same time.

6. Identify the eye cues: Based on people’s eye movement, you can tell which of the dominant sensory type he/she is. Looking up tends to be visual (and right – fetching visual memory, and left constructing visual image). Looking side ways tends to auditory (and right – fetching auditory memory, and left – constructing auditory sound). Looking down tends to be kinesthetic (touchy) (and right – fetching past feeling, and left – internal dialog).

7. Make a memorable impression – this is a challenging one. Sometimes a memorable impression does not make a good impression. Giving easy-to-remember tag (like a nick name, certain clothing pieces – a loud shirt) could be a good way to make people remember you.

8. I like you = I am like you. If people like you, they’ll see the best in you and help you succeed. To make people like you is to mimic/synchronize your body language, verbal cue, attitude with the person. In other words, to connect with them. Who wouldn’t like that?

The author spoke with a British accent but is general easy to understand. Oh yah, he just made a memorable impression on me – the smooth Brit 🙂 This books taught me a few things. Indeed, making first impression could sometimes make or break a person’s career and livelihood. Some may consider this book a used-care sales training, but I think it’s a must for a world that’s even more connected ever. I think I’ll listen to it again.

This book covers the easy-to-follow solutions to the top 100 manners/etiquettes dilemmas that we face in our life, mostly common senses. But there were times when I could use these tips. The basic principles I read from the book:
1) Be in control of your emotion – no screaming or yelling,
2) Be firm. If all fails, get away fast.
3) Be truthful. Don’t lie and don’t be brunt either. Better to say nothing or just state you’re not comfortable talking about it. A good tactic is ask the question back: “Why you asked?”
4) Be considerate of the other’s position,
5) Avoid surprises and embarrassing others,
6) Don’t say “I know how you feel” because we usually don’t.
7) Use hand written notes if at all possible to be personal (I think I’ll fax or email scanned copy of the notes, if that counts 🙂
8 ) Use common sense.

I didn’t care for the dining arrangement (like where to put the salad plate or the “charger” plate) – sounds too complicated and excessive. The tipping etiquettes also sounds too generous (constitutes nearly 15% of the annual spend for Xmas gift) – or I’m just cheap. The author really stretches the dilemmas to add to up 100. There are some obscure ones like how to deal with others’ happy and sad events at the same time, like a mother giving birth to a twin but loses a baby to stillborn. Wow, that’s a dilemma all right.

This is an easy listen (audio book). Having 100 distinctive chapters allows a few items to be missed without losing the continuity. This book epitomizes the “algorithm” of the Golden Rules in this book – a good bet that if you practice them, you won’t get yourselves in trouble – most of the time.

Anderson Cooper, the author, gave the personal perspectives, which he normally cannot do as a journalist, on the tragedies he reported from the edges of the world. He seemed to be running toward where the actions or disasters are happening. From the Somalia genocide, to Burma, Vietnam, and Tsunami in Sri Lanka and back in New Orleans after Katrina hit. In a way, he thrives on reporting those dangerous events and tragedies because in a way he’s running away from his personal tragedies, the death of his father during a heart bypass surgery when he was 8 and the suicide of his brother, Carter, when he was 20. Running toward tragedies allows him to see the worst that could happen, taking some pain from his own tragedies. Writing this book is probably very therapeutic for him.

As the son of Gloria Vanderbilt and Wyatt Cooper, he inherit some of the “star” quality. The reporting of the tragic events were dove-tailed with his personal life stories, keeping the event very personal and yet real. It’s like reading the journal of the journalism exhibited during the reporting of the events, which are normally fairly dry to avoid projecting the reporter’s perspectives. The stories were interesting. The Katrina story was very little close to home. Anderson showed very little respect for politicians that botched up the rescue mission.

I don’t remember ever listening to his reporting at CNN but his speech style reminds me of the Y generation people, who speak with little energy/emotion or perhaps his New York accent. I hope he speaks better than the narration of the audio book.

I enjoyed this book because Anderson Cooper was brutally honest about his own feelings – at times confusing, conflicting, but mostly sincere and honest. And I really empathize his personal struggle on his own tragedies. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have lots of pictures, video and personal journal to remind him constantly his state of mind and state of the event at the time of occurrence.

In light of recent subprime mortgage disaster that caused many hedge funds to lose lots of money, Taleb is right that most academia are locked into the Bell curve assumption, failing to see the outlier or Black Swan, in the author’s term. Indeed, most people or pundits would like to think that they’re more in control of the environment than they really are. There are simply many factors that can NOT be explained by the models they created. And if they’re successful, it may be due to their luck that a black swan is not lurking in the background.

This book gives me a lot of insight on how to manage the different kinds of risk. There are the Gaussian curve tolerances that we can model the risk on and then there are these outlier risks that seem to come from nowhere because we never expected it. We need to watch out and prepare for it and reduce our exposure to it.

Also, one must not fall into the narrative fallacies. Just because we have the leading story that lead to an event, it does not mean it’s the root cause. In other words, correlation does not mean causal. This is a common warning from well-intentioned statistician. Unfortunately, this is the trap lots of people fall into.

The book was difficult and too long to read for me. Too many references to some philosophical arguments that seems to reduce the impact of the message. There is a lot of self glorification and attacks on other fellow economists in this book. The guy is smart – no doubt about it. But the ideas were so much of a chop suey; it’s hard to follow.

It seems that the more you know about things, the more you know that you don’t know. I guess it’s the central theme of the book. Don’t limit or fool yourself into thinking that you can control the outcome.

At the end, the author really didn’t offer a solution how to overcome the “black swan” effect. Of course, the author would argue that it’s the whole idea – it’s a black swan because we cannot predict it. The author seems to leave the reader dangling for more insight.