What is Deliberate Practice?
Deliberate practice is a method for improving your performance at anything, based on constant feedback and working at the edge of your abilities. Elite people in every field use it to build up their …
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The Writer’s Role
E.B. White, noted author of Charlote’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, answers a question on the role of the writer in a society that has become increasingly enamored of and …
What Facts Do We Know About Food?
A summary of a recent talk by Michael Pollan about what we know about food. We are ignoring the elephant in the room when we only talk nutrients — this way of eating is killing us. For example by …
The Best Book On The Art Of Writing
Last year, literary critic Joseph Epstein wrote The best book on the art of writing that I know is F. L. Lucas’ Style: The Art of Writing Well. At the time of Epstein’s comments, the book …
10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart
“States don’t fail overnight. The seeds of of their destruction are sown deep within their political institutions.” Is it culture, weather, or Geography? What about war or some …
Smart People Are Reading These Books
Ok, so you’ve seen the nine books Bill Gates is reading this summer. Gates has some pretty smart friends and they were kind enough to share what they were reading this summer too. ****** Vinod …
The Best Of The Worst About The Best
What happens if you take Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present and look at some of the ‘best’ one-star reviews posted on Amazon.com? Catch-22 by Joseph …
Your Strategy Is Not What You Say It Is — Clayton Christensen
If you study the root causes of business disasters and management missteps, you’ll often find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. Many companies’ decision-making …
12 History Books to Read
A reddit reader posed the question “I want to read 12 history books in one year to know ‘all the things’, what should be on the list?” After much debate, the 12 below were …
Daniel Kahneman — What I Know
Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks with the Guardian about his pessimistic mother, the delusion of investment bankers and the need for irony. Human beings cannot comprehend very …
Dale Carnegie’s 7 Powerful Rules For Better Relationships
Dale Carnegie is known for his practical, no-nonsense approach to advice. Interestingly, a section on 7 rules for making your home life happier was included in the original 1936 edition of How to Win …
The Best Summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People
A brief, no fluff, summary of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you want to learn what people want and use that knowledge to build stronger relationships, this book …
The Pursuit of Fairness
As James Surowiecki illustrates in an excellent piece in the New Yorker, the pursuit of perfect fairness causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Surowiecki calls this The Fairness Trap: …
Susan Sontag: 3 Steps to Refuting Any Argument
Calling to mind Daniel Dennett’s advice on how to compose a successful critical commentary, Susan Sontag offers three steps to refuting any argument, from the newly released As Consciousness Is …
Daniel Kahneman Explains Multitasking
Can we do several things at once? You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. What happens when we’re trying to do things that are not so simple? It is the mark …
Nassim Taleb: The Winner-Take-All Effect In Longevity
Nassim Taleb elaborates on the Copernican Principle, a concept first introduced on Farnam Street in How To Predict Everything. For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a …