Delphi for authors

“I started studying influence because I noticed I was the classic patsy: I bought things I didn't want and gave to causes I'd never heard of, all because someone pulled a trigger I hadn't recognized.”

“Start by mapping your product against the four phases: what internal itch does it scratch, what external trigger cues the action, what is the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward, and what bit of work stores value and loads the next trigger. Then run Habit Testing, identify your devotees, codify the path they take, and modify the product so more users follow it.”

“I usually begin by naming what the conversation is for and what I want from it, because once I say those two things out loud, the rest feels less foggy. Then I ask the other person what they want, and I listen for whether this is about a decision, a feeling, or who we are to each other.”

“Stop trying to motivate them. Pay people fairly, then build conditions where they can motivate themselves: real autonomy over task, time, technique, and team; visible progress toward mastery; and a clear line to who the work serves.”

“As a solo, I’d win three clients with warm calls, not cold ones: get one specific introduction from three delighted customers, mail a short handwritten congrats or a clipped article, then ask for a 15 minute meeting to solve one researched, urgent issue.”

“Multipliers ask more and tell less, then create the stretch that makes people figure it out. Diminishers fill the room with their own answers and leave the team at half throttle.”

“A team is truly empowered when a leader creates the conditions for them to realize their own capacity and power. It is not a passive act of setting people free; it is a high-contact sport built on trust, speed, and relentless communication.”

“I wrote The Making of a Manager because I was thrown into management at Facebook with zero training and wished someone had handed me a book that said the fears were normal. It’s built around one idea: a manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together, through purpose, people, and process.”

“The costliest hiring mistake is keeping the wrong person too long, not hiring them in the first place. I have seen managers spend 17% of their time managing underperformers they should have released months ago, and our research shows 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, with attitude driving 89% of those failures. The real money burns in the delay.”

“Because every story is a transaction: the audience gives attention and belief, and in return the story promises a satisfying transformation of a character pursuing a goal against an obstacle.”

“The single biggest lesson I teach founders about growth is to stop obsessing over scale before they have real, paying, delighted customers. I watched too many startups burn through capital chasing hockey-stick projections while the actual product barely solved a problem for a handful of people.”

“I researched this across dozens of the biggest consumer and B2B companies. The most common path is the same almost every time: start with people you know, then work outward in concentric circles of decreasing trust. Friends, then friends of friends, then cold outreach done creatively, then communities, then content, then press. None of it scales, and that's the point.”

“I stumbled into it at Stanford. I was the guy writing the business plans and pricing models for our startup ideas, and a VC looked at my spreadsheet and said, You've labeled them correctly. Those are assumptions. That question haunted me. Within the same week, Matt Johnson at Simon-Kucher called, and I joined because I wanted to understand the science behind pricing, not just make things up.”

“Most people don't get the salary conversation wrong in the room. They get it wrong before they walk in, by carrying a number they decided was fair and treating it like a ceiling. I watched an executive anchor himself at $1.3M while the board had approved more than double. He didn't lose because they lowballed him. He lost because he never asked what problem he was actually being hired to solve.”

“I spent nineteen years in prison, seven in solitary, and the only way I kept my mind from breaking was journaling, meditating, and treating my healing like a daily experiment. Resilience isn't about being unbreakable; it's about leaning into the pain, asking what it can teach you, and choosing to keep moving forward one thought at a time.”

“One night at dinner, Johnny looked at me and said, You really need to pace yourself. I grabbed a napkin, wrote down PACE, and added the R. That napkin became PACER: Perspective, Acceptance, Community, Endurance, Rest.”

“The acute phase can last a few months, and early grief often averages around two years, but it is different for everyone. What I have seen is that the pain does not fully disappear; it becomes less frequent, and the edges soften over time.”

“I stopped being run by the mind when I saw a lifelong refrain, bad things always happen to me, as a thought, not me. Each time negativity arises, I take one conscious breath, feel the inner body, and the ego loosens.”

“I discovered my purpose late, after chasing golf, then sales and marketing, then an ad agency, until a 1994 collapse stripped everything away and forced me to ask what God actually made me for. Purpose begins with knowing Him, not with finding the one perfect job; He reveals it as you obey, and you can live it out in more ways than you think.”

“The work did not change psychiatry as much as it reopened a door that had been slammed shut. Before our 1990s DMT study, human psychedelic research in the US was essentially moribund for decades; 60 volunteers and 400 doses made it thinkable again.”

“Moving between seven foster homes before I was eight taught me that instability is more damaging than poverty. I watched my verbal IQ test at 86 when I was changing schools every few months, then saw how stability let me learn. That made me skeptical of anyone who treats family breakdown as just another lifestyle choice.”

“I tell them about Nancy and Danny, about the relief I felt when Nancy finally stopped trying, about the shame my father tried to bury. Once they see I am not there to judge, they usually exhale and start talking.”

“I start with one life, one suitcase, one photograph. My mother was twelve when she fled Germany alone, and when I tell students that, I watch them do the math on their own siblings.”

“I spend most of my time not in the archives themselves but fighting to open them. My four-year legal battle for the Mountbatten papers, which freed 99% of the diaries, taught me that the revealing material is usually the material someone has decided you should not see.”

“The main driver is economic misery: a collapsing rial, wages under $100 a month, and a dead-end society where people need three jobs to survive. That desperation mixes with political anger, especially among youth who see no path to reform inside the system.”

“I use agents mostly as a tighter feedback loop and a small team I can boss around. When I'm writing, I'll have one agent write a glowing review of a draft and another write a scathing takedown, then a third synthesize which points land. I've also built maybe 20 apps in the last six months using Claude Code, even though I don't really code, just by telling it what I want and watching it plan.”

“I don't call them fans, they're my friends. We interact, we share life together, and I try to give them community, a laugh, and hope in every story.”

“I used to think the mess meant I wasn't ready, but my first novel only moved when I stopped waiting for a clean idea and started treating the book like a project: outline, weekly word count, deadline, editor.”

“I start by asking what I actually want to eat when I’m tired and out of ideas, then strip the recipe down until it works on a real Tuesday. If it needs a special trip to the store or three pans, it doesn’t make the cut.”