How Not to Be Stupid
After a four-hour conversation on The Knowledge Project (Part 1, Part 2), Adam Robinson (@IAmAdamRobinson) and I shared another 10-minutes that shouldn’t be missed on how not to be stupid. Shane …
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The Best of Farnam Street 2018
We read for the same reasons we have conversations — to enrich our lives. Reading helps us to think, feel, and reflect — not only upon ourselves and others but upon our ideas, and our relationship …
The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention
We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against …
Farnam Street’s 2018 Annual Letter to Readers
Most public companies issue an annual letter to shareholders. These letters present an opportunity for the people entrusted to run the company to communicate with the people who own the company, the …
Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference
James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones explores an interesting subject, on the compounding nature of the long game. While everyone …
Entropy: The Hidden Force Making Life Complicated
Entropy seems complicated, but it’s simple: it measures disorder in a system. Picture your bedroom. Neat and organized? That’s low entropy. But leave it alone, and chaos creeps in – …
There’s Seldom Any Traffic on the High Road
We’ve all been there: someone says something rude to us and our instinct is to strike back with a quick-witted comeback. That’s what many people do. It’s also a big reason that many people don’t get …
Defensive Decision Making: What IS Best vs. What LOOKS Best
“It wasn’t the best decision we could make,” said one of my old bosses, “but it was the most defensible.” What she meant was that she wanted to choose option A but ended up choosing option B because …
The Magic Behind Bezos and Buffett: Things That Don’t Change
Our desire to know the future leads us to speculate on questions unanswerable questions. Everyone, in nearly every industry, ponders, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” …
The Surprising Power of The Long Game
In a world where most people play the short game, playing the long game offers a huge advantage. There is an old saying that I think of often, passed to me by my friend Peter Kaufman, “If you do …
Hemingway, a Lost Suitcase, and the Recipe for Stupidity
The best intentions are no match for the havoc caused by stress, tiredness, and unusual circumstances. Even though we know these things can negatively impact our decision-making abilities, we override …
How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape our Reality
“We can select truths that engage people and inspire action, or we can deploy truths that deliberately mislead. Truth comes in many forms, and experienced communicators can exploit its variability to …
Sex on the Beach with Montaigne and Descartes
In the second installment of our FS Bar series (see here for the first), philosophers Montaigne and Descartes discuss the utility of experience, what kind of knowledge we should seek, and sex on the …
Winner Takes it All: How Markets Favor the Few at the Expense of the Many
Markets tend to favor unequal distributions of market share and profits, with a few leaders emerging in any industry. Winner-take-all markets are hard to disrupt and suppress the entry of new players …
The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters
The decisions we spend the most time on are rarely the most important ones. Not all decisions need the same process. Sometimes, trying to impose the same process on all decisions leads to difficulty …
The Disproportional Power of Anecdotes
Anecdotes tend to not be statistically significant, but their added emotional significance leads us to place additional weight on them. *** Humans, it seems, have an innate tendency to overgeneralize …