Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, frequently tells the story below to illustrate how to distinguish between the two types of knowledge: real knowledge and pretend …
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) remains best-known for Civil Disobedience and for Walden, a beautiful ode to simplicity and self-sufficiency. Thoreau moved into a cabin he built by Walden Pond to …
Meditation can seem like a lot of time and work for no obvious pay-off. Yet the benefits are dramatic. Meditation can help us truly experience life, rather than just letting it pass us by. Here’s a …
We automatically connect a stimulus (thing/person) with pain (fear) or pleasure (hope). As pleasure seeking animals, we seek out positive associations and attempt to remove negative ones. This happens …
In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Mauboussin does a good job adding to the work we’ve already done on complex adaptive systems: You can think of a complex adaptive system …
Human history is a fragment of biological history. If we are to learn enduring lessons it is best to go back in time Our view of the world is fairly shallow. We look backward but rarely to a time …
We live in a world scarce of understanding and abundant with information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. …
No skill is more valuable or harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. Thinking better than others means you’ll have more free time and fewer problems. If you …
One of the most timeless and beautiful meditations on reading comes from the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). For me, reading has always been about our tagline: …
We expect the immediate outcome of events to represent the broader outcomes expected from a large number of trials. We believe that chance events will immediately self-correct and that small sample …
Out of the 44 books I read from January to June, here are the 7 that resonated with me the most. (For the curious see the 2012, 2013, I can’t find the 2014 edition.) Pebbles of Perception: How a …
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (around 4 B.C.—A.D. 65) was an insightful lawyer, senator, philosopher, and playwright best known for his pithy wisdom that still helps understand how to deal with anger, …
Despite my experiments with meditation, I have difficulty focusing on my breath if I take a few days off meditating or yoga. The world is distracting, there are texts coming in, fire trucks going by, …
Earlier this year, a prominent friend of mine was tasked with coming up with a list of behavioral economics book recommendations for the military leaders of a G7 country and I was on the limited email …
How many of today’s problems are the result of leadership? What’s lacking, the author of The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership argues, is the lack of real leadership. Here the problem may lie …
I asked Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman: Ogilvy & Mather) what books stood out for him last year. I’ve had the privilege of chatting with Rory a few times now and I think you’ll agree, …