Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, has written a book: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Here are a few questions, which I loved, that are sure to spark your …
Harper Lee, author of the much-loved novel To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote the following letter to Oprah Winfrey, May 7, 2006 Dear Oprah, Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not …
Sometimes we lose our way. We all make mistakes. We focus on the wrong things. We pursue goals at all costs. We teeter on ethical and moral cliffs. We get too far down a slippery slope. We steal. We …
In The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and The Common Good Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, takes on the debate of who was a …
Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, also …
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, a book by Daniel Levitin, has an interesting section on cognitive overload. Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably …
In this TED talk, Brené Brown, who studies vulnerability, brings us into how we can live a more meaningful life. Brown went back to the research and spent years trying to understand what choices …
In The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See, Harvard Professor Max Bazerman, opines about how the failure to notice things leads to “poor personal decisions, organizational crises, and …
I read Guy Spier’s book, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment, in a single sitting. The section of the book I was most interested in …
“Resist the temptation to say yes too often.” *** Everyone wants a part of your time. Even me. The problem is we don’t really understand the nature of time. And so we waste it. We …
“There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.” — Michael Friendly *** It’s tempting to consider information …
The Roman philosopher Seneca weaved beautiful and timeless insights into his letters. Luckily a lot of those letters survived. While old, there is a reason we still read them today. While the language …
I’ve been slowly working my way through some of Maya Angelou’s material. Notably, Conversations with Maya Angelou, Letters to my Daughter, and What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self. …
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, a book by Daniel Levitin, explores “how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of …
I’ve been putting this off for years. Now is a perfect time. Meditation offers a path toward increased happiness, creativity and mindfulness. Steve Jobs was a lifelong practitioner, reading …
“All you can do is sit back and bask in your relevance to the cosmos.” In this short video, theoretical physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson puts our ego into the perspective of the enormous universe. …