The Code of Hammurabi: The Best Rule To Manage Risk
Almost 4,000 years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylon, Mesopotamia, laid out one of the first sets of laws. Hammurabi’s Code is among the oldest translatable writings. It consists of 282 laws, most …
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The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Do you ever ask kids this question? Did adults ask you this when you were a kid? Even if you managed to escape this question until high school, then by the …
Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results
Defining A Power Law Consider a person who begins weightlifting for the first time. During their initial sessions, they can lift only a small amount of weight. But as they invest more time, they find …
The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness
The Basics If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like? How would you distribute wealth and power? Would you make everyone equal or not? How would you define fairness and …
How to Remember What You Read
Why is it that some people seem to be able to read a book once and remember every detail of it for life, while others struggle to recall even the title a few days after putting down a book? The answer …
The Art of Having an Informed Opinion
The first thing they always do is tell you what they think. When someone has an opinion about everything, they want to share it with you. They often tout stats and research as if they had an imaginary …
Finding Truth in History
If we are to learn from the past, does the account of it have to be true? One would like to think so. Otherwise you might be preparing for the wrong battle. There you are, geared up for mountains, and …
Loops of Progress, or How Modern Are You?
On your way to work, you grab breakfast from one of the dozen coffee shops you pass. Most of the goods you buy get delivered right to your door. If you live in a large city and have a car, you barely …
The Power of Incentives: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior
Incentives are what drive human behavior. Understanding incentives is the key to understanding people. Conversely, failing to recognize the importance of incentives often leads us to make major …
Maya Angelou on Living
Letters to My Daughter is both a simple and a complex read, which makes it at once engaging and thoughtful. Simple because we can see ourselves in the various stories it shares. Complex because it …
Why You Shouldn’t Slog Through Books
While our system for reading 25 pages a day has been adopted by many of our readers and members to great success, a couple points have been misinterpreted. Let’s clear them up. Reading opens …
The Difference Between Open-Minded and Closed-Minded People
Why do some people seem to make constant progress in their professional and personal lives while others repeat the same mistakes? I think part of the answer is how they approach problems. It comes …
Complex Adaptive Cities
Complex adaptive systems are hard to understand. Messy and complicated, they cannot be broken down into smaller bits. It would be easier to ignore them, or simply leave them as mysteries. But given …
Reciprocation Bias
“There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.” —Friedrich Nietzsche *** If you are like me, whenever …
The Wrong Side of Right
One big mistake people repeatedly make is focusing on proving themselves right, instead of focusing on achieving the best outcome. I call this the wrong side of right. People never work as hard as …
The Value of Play As a Driver of Innovation
Innovation does not always have to be the result of serious study and agonizing progress. As Steven Johnson so eloquently argues in Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, many of the activities …