Miguel
Díaz Zamacona.

Psychologist. Specialist in negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution. Founder and director of a technology company I've run for almost thirty years. Trained in programs on neuroscience, human behavior, high-performance psychology and strategy at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Cambridge. Author of The Mind Revealed and The Architecture of Manipulation.

But that's the part that fits on a book flap. The real one is different.

The long way round

I came to psychology by the long road. As a child I was fascinated by how the human mind works, but adolescent rebellion, life, responsibilities and years running technology companies across European markets put that dream off for a long time. I began studying psychology after turning forty.

Those years in business, though, were not wasted time. They were training. So many years deciding with people and money on the line, watching people in the moments when judgment shuts off: you learn something there about human behavior that no textbook gives you. Seen from the inside, not from the outside. That's the gaze I later used in the books, because it was the only one I had.

Alongside it, I kept studying where the people who know most were: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge. Programs in neuroscience, behavior, high-performance psychology and strategy. Not to collect logos, but to understand better what I was already seeing every day.

What it turns into: two books

The Mind Revealed was born from an episode that changed everything. During my psychology studies I had to go through a long, complicated series of eye operations. I spent a month completely blind, with the daily uncertainty of whether I'd get my sight back. The loss was permanent in one eye. And during those days in the most absolute physical and emotional darkness, the anxiety and stress that had marked my life for years slowly began to disappear.

Out of that revealing point came a book — about the mind, psychology and artificial intelligence. A way of putting in order what I'd learned.

The Architecture of Manipulation comes from somewhere else. It isn't born from training, or from the consulting room. It's born from having been inside. After living through personal and professional conflicts that included emotional manipulation, legal pressure, and a period of severe crisis followed by a complete rebuilding, I did what those who survive and understand do: I turned the experience into a transferable system. It's the book I would have needed when I was inside.

Why I write here

Because when something becomes clear to you, the decent next step is to tell it. Because there are too many people alone with big questions and too little company that helps. Because the noise of this field — the five-letter methods, the six-week promises, the certainties sold in private messages — strikes me as so obscene that writing the opposite is almost an obligation.

And because writing also clarifies the one who writes. I take advantage of that.

What you'll read here

About what comes back. The conversations that don't get had and settle inside instead. The patterns that repeat without our knowing why. How the head reacts when something presses on it. Why we make decisions we know are bad while we're making them. And the shift that artificial intelligence is forcing on work and on identity.

Notes that take a while to write and read in ten minutes. Books — mine and the ones I cite inside — that have changed something and are worth naming. A letter a month, if you'd like to receive it. For now, most of that lives in Spanish, at vidha.eu; the English house is growing, piece by piece, with the care it deserves.