Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman No matter what you do for a living, …
[quote]”Knowing one’s limits is more important than it used to be.”[/quote] “Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy,” Cowen writes in his latest book Average Is Over. This is an …
“We like to equate leaders with values we admire, but the two can be separate and distinct.” *** Say what you want about General Stanley McChrystal and the Rolling Stone article that led …
The arrogance of limited knowledge results in foolishness. This is an excerpt from Plato’s Apology, from Plato: Complete Works (an excellent edition that is part of the Great Books program). To …
I’m a big David Foster Wallace fan. His 2005 commencement speech will go down as one of the best ever. If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently …
“These three laws, simple as they are, form much of the basis of probability theory. Properly applied, they can give us much insight into the workings of nature and the everyday world.” …
Paul Baltes once described wisdom as “a topic at the interface between several disciplines: philosophy, sociology, theology, psychology, political science, and literature, to name a few.” …
Most of the time we devise strategies in the default mode of problem-solving, prioritizing maximum growth and profit through rational and logical analysis. But we already know that rational and …
Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead with an excellent talk on how we should think about critics. I love that …
“If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.” *** Two excerpts from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell found in The Essential Blake. The Voice of the Devil …
Max Bazerman, the author of the best book on general decision making that I’ve ever read, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, came out with 7 book recommendations1. I hadn’t heard of …
“Grit is passion and perseverance for extremely long intervals.” *** Last month I hi-lighted the research of Angela Duckworth on why grit can matter more than IQ in determining success in …
[quote]”The main problem is that we think we understand the minds of others, and even our own mind, better than we actually do.”[/quote] Despite the fact I do it countless times a day, …
We see what’s visible and available. Often this is nothing more than randomness and yet we wrap a narrative around it. The trader who is rich must know what he is doing. A good outcome means we …
How do companies create habit-forming products? It’s simple: They manufacture them. In 2008 Nir Eyal was part of a team of Stanford MBAs starting a company backed by “some of the brightest …
Why did you click? Was is for the promise of being awesome? Was it the ten ways to get smarter? Was it for the image that has nothing to do with the post? Why do you want things to be so simple and …