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Even the illusion of progress causes an accelerating effect.

Take time to reflect on and acknowledge how your work has progressed. All it takes is a pause to get the satisfying sight of all your own kind of accumulating Bionicles rather than letting them slip past you, unrecognized sources of fuel.

Your motivation surges the closer you are to reaching your goal. Something about seeing the finish line lights a fire, even when you’re not always on the right track.

Addictive technology creates “internal triggers” which cue users without the need for marketing, messaging or any other external stimuli.  It becomes a user’s own intrinsic desire. Creating internal triggers comes from mastering the “desire engine” and its four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and commitment.

A company that forms strong user habits enjoys several benefits to its bottom line. For one, this type of company creates “internal triggers” in users. That is to say, users come to the site without any external prompting. Instead of relying on expensive marketing or worrying about differentiation, habit-forming companies get users to “self trigger” by attaching their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions. A cemented habit is when users subconsciously think, “I’m bored,” and instantly Facebook comes to mind. They think, “I wonder what’s going on in the world?” and before rationale thought occurs, Twitter is the answer. The first-to-mind solution wins.

A multi-screen world, with ad-wary consumers and a lack of ROI metrics, has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands. Instead, startups manufacture desire by guiding users through a series of experiences designed to create habits

now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.

how game mechanics would solve global warming.

"The last decade was the decade of social. The framework for the social layer is now built," declared Priebatsch. "It's called Facebook."

"The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling 'targeted killings' of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false," the report, entitled Living Under Drones, states.

The "best available information", they say, is that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September this year – of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children. The figures have been assembled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimated that a further 1,300 individuals were injured in drone strikes over that period.

US drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in north-west Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning," the American law schools report says

In his classic article, "Small Wins," psychologist Karl Weick argued that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems. He advocated recasting larger problems into smaller, tractable challenges that produce visible results, and maintained that the strategy of "small wins" can often generate more action and more complete solutions to major problems because it enables people to make slow, steady progress.

Ever wonder why people will so often write down an item they've already completed on their to-do list? It's so that they can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing it off and experiencing the sense of progress.

Stretch goals have a dangerous tendency to foster unethical behavior. In the early 1990s, Sears gave a sales quota of $147 per hour to its auto repair staff. Faced with this target, the staff overcharged for work and performed unnecessary repairs. Sears' Chairman at the time, Ed Brennan, acknowledged that the stretch goal gave employees a powerful incentive to deceive customers.

What are the key steps of the invention process? I describe it with my model, the Innovation Engine. First, there's an internal part. People normally start with imagination, being able to conjure ideas up in your mind. You need a base of knowledge with which you can work; if you don't have a base of knowledge, then you don't have a toolbox for your imagination. You also have to have the motivation and drive to solve the problem, because getting beyond the obvious answers requires a tremendous amount of activation energy.You need the imagination, you need the knowledge, and you need the attitude, which is the spark for this process, but there are also a lot of external factors that people do not take into account. What are these external factors?You need an environment where creativity is supported: everything from the physical space you're in, to the people you're with, the rules, the rewards, the constraints, the culture, and the resources present. All of these things have a huge impact on how an individual, a team, or an organization functions from a creative perspective.

How can managers create an environment nourishing to creativity? I've talked to some executives about this question, and they say, "My job as a manager is to create a habitat that fosters innovation." The innovation engine can get sparked anywhere--it's a kind of Möbius cube--there's no beginning and no end. If you're a manager, your job is to create a habitat that stimulates the imagination of your team, of your employees, of your colleagues.

I'll come into class with a suitcase and say, "I travel a lot and I really don't like my suitcase. It causes a lot of problems: I'm traveling and it doesn't fit into the overhead bin, I'm always running through crowds and its getting in the way, it's really annoying. Could you design a new suitcase for me?" And the students go off and design a new suitcase. Then I come back and say, "Okay, why do we use a suitcase in the first place?" We use a suitcase to have the things we need when we're traveling at our destination. Solve that problem. Once you take the suitcase out of the equation and open up the frame of possibilities, then there's some really interesting solutions. What if I didn't have to bring my suitcase at all? Maybe it's spray-on clothes. Maybe I have a suitcase that I pack once and then it travels around the world, wherever I'm going to be.Once you open up the frame of possibility, really interesting ideas come forward. One thing I try to do with my students is to try to help them understand how to frame a problem.

online, feedback loops aren’t cutting it. Users are increasingly inundated with distractions, and companies find they need to hook users quickly if they want to stay in business. Today, companies are using more than feedback loops. They are deploying desire engines.

Desire engines go beyond reinforcing behavior; they create habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. Desire engines are at the heart of many of today’s most habit-forming technologies. Social media, online games, and even good ol’ email utilize desire engines to compel us to use them.

At the heart of the desire engine is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards. Skinner observed that lab mice responded most voraciously to random rewards.

A new study says the need to be entertained may be the biggest driver of activity on the social network

The desire to be entertained predicts the amount of time users spend on Facebook, according to an academic study published this month in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. The study also suggests that the reasons for using Facebook change over time: You sign up for interpersonal communications, but you end up staying for the boredom-busting factors.

Researchers have long known that five broad categories drive online activity: information seeking, interpersonal communication, self-expression, passing time and entertainment.

Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they're operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.

First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the "buyer's decision journey," traditional marketing communications just aren't relevant. Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.

Second, CEOs have lost all patience. In a devastating 2011 study of 600 CEOs and decision makers by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group, 73% of them said that CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can't be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.

Several emerging countries are rallying behind a campaign to have the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N.'s global standards body for telecommunications, declare the Internet a global telecommunications system, U.S. officials testified on Thursday before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Led by China, Russia, India and now Egypt, which recently launched its own proposal, such a move would allow state-owned telephone networks to expand into VoIP. It would also give them the opportunity to charge fees for Internet service - and put the Internet at the mercy of international politics.

"[Russia and China] have a concept that they call 'information security,' the ambassador told Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass.). "Their concept of information security is both what we would call 'cybersecurity' - the physical protection of their networks - but it goes beyond that to address content that they regard as unwanted. I think as much as anything else, the base motivations that Russia and China have involve regime stability, regime preservation, which for them involves preventing unwanted content from being made widely available in their countries."

ICANN Vice President and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Congress he's concerned about any number of efforts by international bodies - the ITU being just one of several - to seize control of the world's Internet policy agenda.

"kaleidoscope thinking," a mental process of shaking up the pieces and reassembling them to form a new pattern, the way a kaleidoscope creates endless patterns. This metaphor suggests that reality is not necessarily fixed. The stories we tell ourselves — our cultural assumptions — are the limiting factor.

Narratives should be rewritten when they inhibit rather than inspire. Individuals and institutions can get bogged down by narratives that suggest inevitability — "it has always been this way, it was meant to be this way, and it couldn't possibly change."

Even in companies doing well, narratives prevent change if the stories are ones of destiny, and eventually entitlement

Subjects were asked to report when they could explain why they favored one deck over another. It required about 50 cards before a participant began to change their behavior and favor a certain deck, and about 80 cards before they became aware of why they did it. Rationality is a relatively slow process.

Damasio formulated the landmark somatic marker hypothesis. This model of decision making shows how our decisions often depend upon access to what he calls somatic markers, feelings that are tagged and stored in the body and our unconscious minds. As Damasio states, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent literally in the flesh.”

The topline reports skim the surface because we’re asking consumers and ourselves to explain primarily intuitive purchase decisions. Intuition by definition is “something that is known or understood without proof or evidence.” The primacy of rational analysis is reflected in the abysmal failure rates of these tests. Most ideas that pass, go on to fail in market--about 80% of the new products launched in the US.