Alan Watts: Why Modern Civilization is a Vicious Circle
“When we compare human with animal desire,” writes philosopher Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, “we find many extraordinary …
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Two Forms of Human Motivation: Gain And Pain
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade …
Using Language to Change How We Think
What kind of thinking leads to better outcomes? That’s the question that Roger Martin addresses in his excellent book Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers. Changing how we …
Harold Macmillan: The Fragility of Memory
Harold Macmillan beautifully describes the fragility of human memory in the foreword to Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, an early 1980s commonplace book. Those of us who have reached extreme old age …
John Locke’s Method of Organizing Common Place Books
“You know that I voluntarily communicated this method to you, as I have done to many others, to whom I believed it would not be unacceptable.” In 1685 English physician and philosopher …
Paying for Outcomes
Iconic typography designer Paula Scher discusses her creative process, including the famous Citi logo. Interestingly, the idea came to her in seconds and that presented a problem for the client. They …
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is the founding father of modern behavioral economics. His work has influenced how we see thinking, decisions, risk, and even …
Michel Foucault on the Panopticon Effect
In his study of the origins of the prison, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault explored the invention of the Panopticon, a way for a guard to see others without being …
Commonplace Books: Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
Commonplace books are personal knowledge libraries; notebooks full of collected ideas and bits of wisdom all mixed up together. Here, we take a look at their history and benefits. *** There is an old …
The Notebooks of Paul Klee
“Ingres is said to have created an artistic order out of rest; I should like to create an order from feeling and, going still further, from motion.” *** Paul Klee was a painter who wrote …
Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology Hackers and Painters explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” …
The Six Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer
Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while shorter than last year’s, it’s nonetheless full of interesting reads. I ended up ordering two of them, one of which …
Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” If you were to make a list of the best commencement addresses ever, you’d find this one from Steve Jobs up there with the likes of David Foster Wallace, …
Seneca on Gathering Ideas And Combinatorial Creativity
“Combinatory play,” said Einstein, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” Ruminating on the necessity of both reading and writing, so as not to confine ourselves to …
Claude Shannon: The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — …
The Uses Of Being Wrong
Confessions of wrongness are the exception not the rule. Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, pointing to the …