Daniel Pink Recommends These 5 Books To Improve Your Thinking

In Daniel Pink's book, "To Sell Is Human," he lists five books to help you frame arguments, identify problems, and curate information.

They are:

1. "Influence: Science and Practice"

Cialdini has done more to advance the scholarship of persuasion than anyone in the world. This book is his classic. You need to read it. Seriously. Go get it now.

2. "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die"

The Heath brothers are worthy successors to Cialdini. Their first book, which came out in 2007, is a gem. It will teach you how to create messages that stick, through the principles of simplicity, unexpectedness, credibility, emotions, and stories.

3. "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard"

Three years after Made to Stick the Heath brothers came out with another book that's equally good. This one is about change - which they'll tell you depends on the emotional elephant and the rational rider working in concert. (Trust me - it makes sense.)

4. "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think"

The opposite of clarity is murkiness. And murkiness's close cousin is mindlessness - the state of being unaware. Wansink shows you mindlessness allows us to fall prey to hidden persuaders that make us overeat without even knowing it.

5. "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness"

Two professors harvest the field of behavioral economics to reveal how altering "choice architecture" can nudge people to make better decisions about their lives.

I'll have more to say about "To Sell Is Human" shortly.