Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini – This is a wonderful (and entertaining) book about different mechanisms that people use to influence others. There are chapters on stuff like reciprocity, scarcity-mentality and the ever important social proof. Excellent if you want to reduce the influence ads, salesmen and social programming might have over you. Or if you want to become a better salesman.
 
How to win friends and influence people (audio) by Dale Carnegie. A useful classic on how to do just what the title of the book says. The book includes: …

Changing a habit can be hard. To make the habit stick you have to keep going until it becomes not something you do through willpower but something you feel drawn to doing. This can take 30 days or more of taking action each day.
But we all have bad days. What do you do on such a day when you just feel like giving up on creating this new habit?
Here’s what I do.

1. If your memory is anything like mine it’s like a leaking bucket.
Since I’ve started to write things down more often I have also noticed when reviewing old notes how much my memory can leak. The memory isn’t very reliable. Every time we remember something we recreate what happened rather than just replay a film from our mental archives. The recreation is directed by a number of things such our beliefs, our emotional state at the time and our self-image.