Farnam Street
Play is an essential way of learning about the world. Doing things we enjoy without a goal in mind leads us to find new information, better understand our own capabilities, and find unexpected beauty around us. Arithmetic is one example of …
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was one of the bestselling authors of all time. In Confessions of a Young Novelist, he shares some unique advice for writing fiction. Umberto Eco wrote Confessions of a Young Novelist in his late seventies. But …
There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time …
Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Performance at Anything—For Beginners and Experts Deliberate practice is the best technique for achieving expert performance in every field—including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, …
We learn valuable lessons when we experience failure and setbacks. Most of us wait for those failures to happen to us, however, instead of seeking them out. But deliberately making mistakes can give us the knowledge we need to more easily …
Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula, involving what researcher Douglas Hofstadter calls “jootsing.” Here’s how …
Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to escape from that and encourage creativity? …
Innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Doers and thinkers from Shakespeare to Jobs, liberally “stole” inspiration from the doers and thinkers who came before. Here’s how to do it right. *** “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a …
“We often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.” — Tim Harford *** The breadth and depth of products and services that promise to help us stay organized …
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” — Charles “Boss” Kettering *** The whole scientific method is built on a very simple structure: If I do this, then what will happen? That’s the basic question …
“It’s good to understand that it’s all a process and it’s going to take you to a new place. And I try to remind myself … to enjoy the process.” *** In this short video, Tiffany Shlain, founder of the …
Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, is about building companies that create new things. But more than that, there is a lot of wisdom in this book. We look to models of success — be they …
This beautiful excerpt from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention beautifully illustrates why it’s so hard to pin down creativity and creative people. His book passes the Lindy …
“Play doesn’t just help us to explore what is essential. It is essential in and of itself.” — Greg McKeown *** The value of playing cannot be over-stated. From Einstein and Seneca to Steve Jobs and Google. “Bob Fagan, a …
“Any year that passes in which you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is a wasted year,” says Charlie Munger. If only it were that easy. It’s mentally hard to come to an opinion and even harder to give up that attachment and …
Innovation isn’t a single act, it’s an ongoing process of battling against what’s already established. Change is often not noticeable until it’s too late. The attacker’s advantage is the ability to blindside incumbents. *** If you believe …
In a previously unpublished 1959 essay, Isaac Asimov explores how people find new ideas. Echoing Einstein and Seneca, Asimov believes that new ideas come from combining things together. Steve Jobs thought the same thing. What if the same …
Building the perfect business is about finding the balance between what you have to offer and what the world wants. In this post, we hear from Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity, about some of the lessons he’s learned about making your …
In isolation, good ideas alone are not enough to produce something great. The right people are what make ideas work. Read on to learn about how Pixar used that principle as the basis of its amazing creative culture. *** “If you give a …
In his new book, How Google Works, Eric Schmidt argues that “we are entering … a new period of combinatorial innovation.” This happens, he says, when “there is a great availability of different component parts that can be combined or …
“Originality depends on new and striking combinations of ideas.” — Rosamund Harding In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes: [C]reative people …
Iconic typography designer Paula Scher discusses her creative process, including the famous Citi logo. Interestingly, the idea came to her in seconds and that presented a problem for the client. They wanted to buy a process not an outcome. …
Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Jennifer Mueller and Shankar Vedantam, author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. While this is an argument …
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 core belief that innovation is …