They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?
Robert Pozen writes an interesting piece in the New York Times on what happens when you value busyness over achievement. It’s 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for …
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The Velocity of Skill Development: Quickly Closing the Gap
We are remarkably inefficient at skill development. Understanding the nuances of how repetitions, situations, and feedback interconnect offers us a few small changes that lead to remarkable …
May The Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, Will Bonner writes: …you don’t win by predicting the future; you win by getting the odds right. You …
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin has mastered the game of Chess — winning his first National Championship at the age of nine — and the physical challenge of martial arts, becoming a World Champion of Tai Chi Chuan. One …
When it comes to learning depth beats breadth
When it comes to learning something new, depth beats breadth. In both fields, players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much …
Why We Overpay at Auctions
Tom Stafford discusses a lot of the psychological principles that make rational bidding hard. Auctions also hit on many psychological persuasion techniques: First, auctions use the principle of …
What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?
What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill? Is it listening to a lecture? Reading a book? Just doing it? According to Daniel Coyle in The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your …
Kurt Vonnegut: How To Write With Style
Kurt Vonnegut on writing with style. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you …
Scientism
William Deresiewicz with an insightful article in The American Scholar arguing that we’ve fallen into the trap of scientism: the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Reading …
The challenge with history
There is a lot of wisdom in this: The challenge with history, however, is that it’s a very fickle teacher. Which is a lot of the key to understanding history is what the circumstances were. And …
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Words, Names, and Labels matter
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why words, names, and labels matter. The lesson? Choose your words carefully. The universe is hard enough. The last thing the universe needs is a complex lexicon laid down …
What makes predictions succeed or fail?
That’s the ambitious question that Nate Silver tries to answer in The Signal and the Noise. The book appeals to me because it “takes a comprehensive look at prediction across 13 fields, …
An Introduction to Creativity
Professor Sanjay Bakshi teaches MBA students “Behavioral Finance & Business Valuation (BFBV)” and “Financial Shenanigans & Governance” at MDI, Gurgaon. He was kind enough to put together a …
Stretching yourself to learn new things
Carol Dweck, Daniel Coyle, and Noel Tichy all point out that you need to stretch to learn new things. First, this from Carol Dweck … My colleagues and I have conducted interventions with …
Michael Mauboussin: Two Tips to Improve The Quality of Your Decisions
Michael Mauboussin, chief investment strategist at Legg Mason and our first interview on the podcast, offers two simple techniques to improve the quality of your decision making: a decision journal …
The evolutionary roots of human behaviour
Anthony Gottlieb writing in the New Yorker: Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from …