psychology

This post is for those of you afflicted with the desire to write. Maybe you’ve tried all the right medications, maybe you’ve gone through rehab and gotten clean a few times, maybe you’ve even been through conversion therapy and pretended to be a happy human being who enjoys getting up and going to a job. Yet, for some reason your mind keeps coming back to an empty page.

If this is you, and if you’ve been at it long enough to write what you consider to be a large document — maybe fifty pages, maybe five hundred; it doesn’t matter — I’d like to pass along a little psychological survival tip that has kept me from doing something foolish over the years, either to myself or the project I’m working on.

While any first draft has its agonies, the fact that you don’t know how long your work will eventually be prevents you from thinking about your percentage of completion — assuming you’re not one of those numerologists who believes documents for certain mediums should always conform to specific page counts. Once your first draft is finished, however, you know exactly how much work you have to do to get through the next pass, and that in itself can prove daunting.

For example, if you’ve written a three hundred page novel, you know going in that you’re going to have to gut through a hundred and fifty pages just to reach the halfway point of the next revision. No matter how much you love writing that’s nobody’s idea of fun, and the more passes you have to make the more such awareness can take a toll, turning each draft into its own little death march.

Well, here’s the good news. When you’re revising a long document all you need to do is make it to 60%. If you can get there, if you can hang on that long, finishing the other 40% is easy precisely because of the math involved. (You may think, based on your prior history with math, that you’re not the kind of person who pays attention to percentages, but there is a primal part of your brain called the percental cortex that is solely devoted to doing exactly that.) [ Read more ]

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

When the stock market (meaning of course the industrial segment of the Dow Jones averages) passes through a big round number like 1,000 points, or 5,000 points, or, more recently (and repeatedly, in both directions) 10,000 points, everybody pays close attention. Why? Because people are stupid.

Okay…maybe that’s a little harsh. Better would be to say that people are conditioned to pay attention to such numbers. For example:

4,294? That’s just a number.
4,444? Wow!
9,303? Nothing.
9,000? Wow!
10,605? ZZZZzzzzzzz…..
10101? Spooky! Digital! Buy tech!!!

Numbers in and of themselves usually have no meaning. They quantify, but they do not evoke. Precisely because of the abstract relationship between our numbering system and the way we usually employ it (to count things) the door is left wide open for extraneous associations to creep in, even if we are guarded against them.

As you can see from the above examples, our psychological make-up affects how we view numbers in a variety of ways. Some of these misplaced associations may be obvious, some may be obscure, but it should be quite clear that none of them have anything to do with what the numbers actually mean.

The people who sell you products know all about these extraneous associations and routinely use them to advantage. Some of this is simple deception. When you buy gas at $2.82 per gallon, you do know from previous experience that there’s an itty-bitty, ninety-nine-hundredths-of-one-cent hiding at the end of that price, but because it’s such a pitifully small number it doesn’t seem important. Which is why the gas industry adds that almost-penny. The big sign says $2.82 per gallon, but the other signs at the pump remind you that the actual price is $2.8299, meaning the seller is making almost a full cent more than the stated price. Why do gas sellers do this? Because it works.

But it’s not just the fact that the amount is small that convinces you it isn’t important. It’s the number itself. Anything ending in ’99’ is considered a de facto savings, because ’99’ so immediately evokes ‘100’. Not only is that ‘100’ a big round number, but it include an entirely new digit. ’99’ is a miserly two-digit number, whereas ‘100’ is a budget-wrecking three-digit number. The actual difference between the two numbers for any unit is 1%, but the psychological difference is closer to 100%.

And you know this. It’s why the couch you just bought was selling for $999 instead of $1,002. It’s why the car you’re thinking of buying costs #29,860, instead of $30,081. It’s why the bottled water you grabbed is selling for $0.99 — even though it’s going over $1.00 with tax. As a consumer you see these numbers everywhere, you figured them out a long time ago, you know what the pricing elves are up to, and yet it still works. [ Read more ]

The Sixty Percent Solution

Paying a Psychological Price