I often find myself wishing to learn something great. I fantasize about it and how my life would change for good. But then, I forget about it, and that thought occasionally crosses my mind just to make me suffer in my fantasies. It is a vicious cycle that repeats itself day in, day out. I never learn that skill.

If that sounds familiar, maybe “WOOP” is what you’re looking for. WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Objective, and Plan. WOOP is also known as Mental Contrasting with Implementational Intentions (MCII). This technique was created by the social psychologist Gabrielle Oettingen.

Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale taught this technique in her course, “Psychology and the Good Life.” In 2018, 1,200 students attended this class. It is the highest number of students in Yale’s history to take a single class. …

Nicolas Bourbaki made exceptional contributions to mathematics — except he never existed.

In the 1930s, the world of mathematics was shattered due to the deaths of so many mathematicians in the First World War. Many mathematicians had died in that time, and it was hard for one mathematician to even find another mathematician who worked in the same field as them.

On December 10, 1934, in France, Nicolas Bourbaki was born who would later go on to become one of the greatest in the field, a Russian genius who wouldn’t appear publicly. But there is a slight problem. …

In 2007, Radiohead’s contract with their record label, Capitol EMI, had expired. They were releasing an album, In Rainbows, independently, without a record label. But that was not the unique part about that album.

They put their entire album on their website and gave people the option to pay whatever amount they liked, even $0. You could pay anything you like, and you’d get the album.

People had varying opinions about it. Some people hailed it as a great way to sell albums, and some called it flat-out dumb. Fortune magazine listed this experiment in "101 Dumbest Moments in Business."

How It Performed

Even if people could just go to Radiohead’s website and download the album for free, two million people pirated the album in the first month. …

United Airlines is not the best when it comes to customer service and public relations. It is remarkable how they seem to not care about their customers. It seems that they’re fond of breaking things. Sometimes, passengers and sometimes… guitars.

The Incident

In 2008, Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician was flying on a United Airlines flight. From the window, he saw some baggage handlers throwing guitars. He asked the flight attendants about it, but they told him that there was nothing that could be done.

After he got off the flight, he saw that the guitar was broken. It took him $1,200 to fix it. United didn’t compensate him at all. …

We’ve all seen how most products have a price ending with a 99. It has been going for over a century now. This tactic is frequently used in advertisements everywhere around the world. Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the world of psychological pricing.

The Psychology Behind It

This tactic is based on the fact that, as we read things from left to right, the first number we see has a greater impact on us. So if something has a price of $19.99, instead of $20, you might be influenced by the “1” at the beginning, and pay for it as it’s lesser than “2.” It is called the left-digit effect. Prices ending in 9 or 5 tend to attract more people towards a product than other numbers. …

In a study, participants were told to sit in a room doing nothing for 15 minutes. In that room, there was also a button which would electrically shock them. They could choose to click that button at their own will. 67% of men and 25% of women pressed that button. It goes to show how much we hate boredom. We hate it so much that we can choose pain over boredom.

So, we try to avoid it as much as we can. Avoiding boredom has never been easier because we’ve got so many things to do. We try to keep doing something in our free time, whether it is scrolling through social media, watching a badass movie, or binge-watching shows on Netflix. …