Neil Patel's Digital Marketing Blog

Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.

Empathy is a skill. Here's how to cultivate it

"Empathy is something like a muscle: left unused, it atrophies; put to work, it grows."

Military reading lists

U.S. Army Engineer School Commandant’s Reading List

Managing Two People Who Hate Each Other

How to minimize the drama and keep your team on track.

Willful Disobedience: Character Traits of Independent Thinkers in the Military - Modern War Institute

In a speech on October 4 at the Association of the United States Army’s 2016 Annual Meeting, Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley shared a vision of […]

Book Summary: Spark by Dr. Jeremy Dean | Sam Thomas Davies

This is a book summary of Spark by Dr. Jeremy Dean. Read this Spark summary to review key takeaways and lessons from the book.

50+ examples of Robert Cialdini's 6 Principles Of Influence in marketing

76 votes, 15 comments. Some context: At marketing meetups, we've always heard people namedropping Dr. Robert Cialdini's 6 Principles Of Influence…

How to Uncover Your Creative Talent by Using the "Equal Odds Rule"

You can't predict your own success, but the Equal Odds Rule tells us something important about uncovering creative talent. Read the article to learn more.

Most Common Cognitive Biases Visualised & Explained

There used to be a generic belief that humans are completely rational. It is easily understandable why a belief like this was popular…

‘I’ll have what she’s having’ – how and why we copy the choices of others

New research on consumer behavior shows that we tend to match some types of choices the people around us make, but not others.

8 common traits of uncommon product leaders

I’ve found the following to be common (and not easily taught) in people whose product skills I admire.

Take Your Team From Worst To First: Leadership Lessons From The Boston Red Sox

John Farrell took his team from the bottom of their division last year to the 2013 World Series with a set of tactics every manager should learn.

A Navy SEAL Explains 8 Secrets To Grit And Resilience - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Navy SEAL platoon leader James Waters explains what keeps elite operators going and how you can apply this type of grit to your own challenges.

The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

What makes things cool?

http://www.growhack.com/2013/10/how-artificial-scarcity-can-boost-desire/

A Story from Google Shows You Don’t Need Power to Drive Strategy

Five things you need instead.

Have the Courage to Be Direct

It’s time to get past the human tendency to avoid conflict-causing topics.

You’re Already More Persuasive than You Think

Simple, direct requests get better results.

The Overkill Backfire Effect: On The Danger of Presenting Too Much Evidence

21st-Century Propaganda: A Guide to Interpreting and Confronting the Dark Arts of Persuasion

In the West, “rational propaganda” has become the primary form of political discourse.

Mentors Are The Secret Weapons Of Successful Startups | TechCrunch

“I’ve probably revised this investor pitch deck 200 times,” a founder told me recently. She’d met with more than 50 potential investors before closing a seed round last month. This might sound excessive to some, but her experience is not unusual. Entrepreneurs often spend…

To Fight Polarization, Ask, “How Does That Policy Work?” - Behavioral Scientist

When people discover that they don’t know as much as they thought they did, something interesting happens: their political attitudes become less extreme.

Book Review: Turn the Ship Around! How to Create Leadership at Every Level

I just had the pleasure of reading David Marquet's book, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders*, and I have been encouraging everyone I see

8 Ways to be UBER Charismatic | HighExistence

What did JFK, Marilyn Monroe and Hitler all have in common?They were all renowned charismatics that lit up every room they entered. You’ve most likely met one of these kinds before. The guy/girl at the party. They possess some strange quality that causes them to be liked

Beautiful People Don’t Always Win in the Workplace

Research shows how attractive employees can rub some customers the wrong way.

The Principle of Charity: Assume the Best Interpretation of People’s Arguments

20 Rules for a Knight: A Timeless Guide from 1483

“Often we imagine that we will work hard until we arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is a delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose. Happiness is not an objective. It is the movement of life itself, a process, and an activity. It…

Basic Social Skills Guide - Improve Your Social Skills

Free online social skills guide. Contains information on understanding body language, making conversation, and setting good social skills goals.

Play May Be a Deeper Part of Human Nature Than We Thought

An animal study brings us closer to understanding our own behavior

How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations

Thoughtful, empathetic language can make or break your business relationships

The art of memory: mnemonic techniques

Nowadays, when we want to remember something, we mostly use our phone to take a quick note, create a reminder, message ourselves on Slack, or just add it to our calendar. Granted, having a good memory may not be as useful as it used to be, but there’s lots of research showing…

Todoist Inspiration

Productivity inspiration and tactical advice that’s actually useful.

People Literally Don't Know When to Shut Up--or Keep Talking--Science Confirms

We are really bad at navigating a key transition point during one of the most basic social interactions

The Anatomy of Charisma

What makes a person magnetic and why we should be wary.

The Master of Spin

Michael Sitrick will fuck with your moral compass

Cavemen, Samurais and Fight Club on breaking through failure | Spikelab.org - Mentoring social entrepreneurs for impact

There's an increasing amount of talk around failure and the fear of it, but it's largely missing the point. Here's why

The Way Humans Point Isn’t as Universal as You Might Think

It was long thought that humans everywhere favor pointing with the index finger. But some fieldwork out of Papua New Guinea identified a group of people who prefer to scrunch their noses.

Why Is Art Expensive? - Priceonomics

How do you sell a six-figure painting? Branding and a heavily "curated" marketplace.

Mental models

These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition…

8 body-language tricks that are hard to master but will pay off forever

Good body language is a crucial part of making an excellent first impression.

LappleApple/awesome-leading-and-managing: Awesome List of resources on leading people and being a manager. Geared toward tech, but…

Awesome List of resources on leading people and being a manager. Geared toward tech, but potentially useful to anyone. - LappleApple/awesome-leading-and-managing

A Look Back at the Package Under the Golden Arches

Early Happy Meals promoted the McDonaldland characters, which were introduced in 1971.

Identify Leaders By Giving People Assignments - Brad Feld

As the Boulder Startup Community evolved, I started to become inundated with people who wanted to get involved. Some of these were locals while others where people looking to move to Boulder, or who had recently moved here. Some where people known to me while others were new…

8,760 Hours: How to get the most out of next year

Update (December 2016): Version 2 of this guide is now available! Announcement post here. Links in this post are updated to send you to the latest and greatest version. Click here to download 8,760 Hours v2 The end of a year […]

4 Leadership Types That Can Destroy a Perfectly Good Strategy

The home of Process Excellence covers topics from Business Process Management (BPM) to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI, Lean Six Sigma and more. Latest news, freshest insight and upcoming events and webinars.

Why Being Bored Is Good | The Walrus

Technology keeps us constantly stimulated. What do we lose when we no longer have nothing to do?

Real Leaders Don’t Do Focus Groups

Apple is famous for not engaging in the focus-grouping that defines most business product and marketing strategy. Which is partly why Apples products and advertising are so insanely great. They have the courage of their own convictions, instead of the opinions of everyone else’s…

Cherry Picking: When People Ignore Evidence that They Dislike

Bad at public speaking? The trick is to distill your message to these 15 words, says speech trainer

Mastering the art of public speaking has nothing to do with your personality, with overcoming shyness or learning to act confident. It's a technical skill that nearly anyone can acquire — just like cooking.

How a Preview Image Increased a Landing Page's Conversion Rate by 359% - Search Engine Watch

Using Google’s new “Google Experiments” for A/B testing confirmed a hypothesis that a landing page with a preview image will have a higher conversion rate than a landing page without the preview image. Here’s how you can conduct your own test.