Your Environment Shapes Your Decisions
When it comes to making decisions, your environment matters. Just as it’s hard to eat healthily if your kitchen is full of junk food, it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re too …
Explore Farnam Street Articles
Margin of Safety: Expect the Unexpected
An edited excerpt from The Great Mental Models v3: Systems and Mathematics When we interact with complex systems, we need to expect the unexpected. Systems do not always function as anticipated. They …
Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook
Keeping a notebook or diary is easy to dismiss. I often hear people tell me that it’s OK for other people, but it’s not for them. I always find this stance curious as the habit of keeping …
The Original Parkinson’s Law and The Law of Triviality
We’ve all heard of Parkinson’s Law — “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” I bet you’ve lived this. After all, who hasn’t sat in an …
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
“The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.” We’re busier than ever. The typical inbox is perpetually swelling with messages awaiting attention. …
Forbes Interview
I was recently interviewed in Forbes. Shane Parrish is on a mission to make you think, and think better. With over 30,000 subscribers — and that number growing quickly — Shane runs Farnam Street, an …
The 7 Myths of Innovation
In The Power of Why Amanda Lang argues that innovation is simpler than you think. One reason we’re endlessly focused on expert innovation, or as she calls it, innovation window dressing, is our …
The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen uncover the origins of “innovative-and often …
Antigone: Better Decisions Through Literature
I recently picked up Sophocles’s Antigone. Sophocles wrote more than 100 plays in his lifetime, but only seven complete tragedies remain. In Antigone, Polynices, son of Oedipus, went to war with …
The Economic Inefficiency of Gift Giving: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays
From Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania (now at Minnesota’s Carlson School of …
Edward Frenkel: Love and Math —The Heart of Hidden Reality
“The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.” — Galileo *** Most of us are unaware of the hidden world of mathematics. Actually, we’d rather avoid the subject entirely. …
The best non-fiction books of 2013
Economist Tyler Cowen, who was named one of the top 100 influential thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, offers some interesting picks: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschmann. A …
Avoiding Ignorance
This is a continuation of two types of ignorance. You can’t deal with ignorance if you can’t recognize its presence. If you’re suffering from primary ignorance, it means you probably …
Seven Books Everyone Should Read
Little differences over a long lifetime create big disparities. Making decisions slightly better than your cohort translates into a big difference over a long life. This is the nature of compounding. …
Mastering Success: Navigating Within Your Circle of Competence
Understanding where you have an edge and where you don’t can help you prevent problems, spot opportunities others miss, and rapidly learn. We all have a circle of competence – an area in …
The Two Types of Ignorance
The first category of ignorance is when we do not know we are ignorant. This is primary ignorance. The second category of ignorance is when we recognize our ignorance. *** This article builds on …