Get More Done By Working Less
In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not opposed but rather complementary to each other. “When we define ourselves by our work, …
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The Science of Sleep: Regulating Emotions and the 24 Hour Mind
Even if we often think of sleeping as ‘switching off’, it’s a complex state during which a lot of important things occur in our bodies. In particular, dreams are vital for helping our brains to …
The Metagame: Think One Step Ahead
“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” — Sun Tzu The metagame is about understanding the bigger picture and outsmarting the competition by doing something they can’t or won’t …
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
We think that we’re in control. We believe that our conscious mind directs our thoughts and somehow controls our subconscious mind. We’re wrong. In Richard Restak’s The Brain Has a …
Do Algorithms Beat Us at Complex Decision Making?
Decision-making algorithms are undoubtedly controversial. If a decision is being made that will have a major influence on your life, most people would prefer a human make it. But what if algorithms …
Rich Thinking Versus Poor Thinking: Why it Matters
“Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.” —Claude M. Bristol *** One of the most …
Competition, Cooperation, and the Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins has one of the best-selling books of all time for a serious piece of scientific writing. Often labeled “pop science”, The Selfish Gene pulls together the “gene-centered” view of …
Scientific Concepts We All Ought To Know
John Brockman’s online scientific roundtable Edge.org does something fantastic every year: It asks all of its contributors (hundreds of them) to answer one meaningful question. …
Friedrich Nietzsche on Making Something Worthwhile of Ourselves
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) explored many subjects, perhaps the most important was himself. A Farnam Street member directed me to the passage below, written by Richard Schacht in the introduction …
The Shortness of Time
If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time. …
Why the Printing Press and the Telegraph Were as Impactful as the Internet
What makes a communications technology revolutionary? One answer to this is to ask whether it fundamentally changes the way society is organized. This can be a very hard question to answer, because …
Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Why The Best Thing To Give is Yourself
In 1923 the Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, which endures as a timeless classic meditation on living. While …
Richard Restak: Mozart’s Memorization of Miserere and Improving your Memory with Visual Chess
In 1956 George Miller, a Princeton University psychologist, set out an important principle that you’ve probably heard of in a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller revived …
Blog Posts, Book Reviews, and Abstracts: On Shallowness
We’re quite glad that you read Farnam Street, and we hope we’re always offering you a massive amount of value. (If not, email us and tell us what we can do more effectively.) But there’s a message all …
Tyranny, Democracy, and the Polity: Aristotle’s Politics
We’ve written before about why Plato matters. What about Aristotle? The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that questions of the state, how it should be organized, and how it should pursue its …
Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More
“In the chronicles of American financial history,” writes David Clark in The Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman on Life, Business, …