Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It’s a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change. The principle comes from a …
“The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character, and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best.” —William James …
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 …
The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. …
Sometimes success is just about avoiding failure. At FS, we help people make better decisions without needing to rely on getting lucky. One aspect of decision-making that’s rarely talked about is how to avoid making bad decisions. Here are …
You can’t force yourself to think faster. If you try, you’re likely to end up making much worse decisions. Here’s how to improve the actual quality of your decisions instead of chasing hacks to speed them up. If you’re a knowledge worker, …
Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. According to poet David Whyte, the key to taking initiative and being proactive is viewing yourself …
The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota spent much of his career at MIT, where students adored him for his engaging, passionate lectures. In 1996, Rota gave a talk entitled “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” which contains …
There’s nothing wrong with hoping for the best. But the best-case scenario is rarely the one that comes to pass. Being realistic about what is likely to happen positions you for a range of possible outcomes and gives you peace of mind. We …
We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what …
One big challenge we all face in life is knowing when to explore new opportunities, and when to double down on existing ones. Explore vs exploit algorithms – and poetry – teach us that it’s vital to consider how much time we …
Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models to make decisions we determine where we want to go and how to get there. The result is a change that aligns with the …
If you’re trying to gain a rapid understanding of a new area, one of the most important things you can do is to identify common mistakes people make, then avoid them. Here are some of the most predictable errors we tend to make when …
The growing influence of algorithms on our lives means we owe it to ourselves to better understand what they are and how they work. Understanding how the data we use to inform algorithms influences the results they give can help us avoid …
Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here’s why we do it, and how to stop. *** How can we stop wasting time on unimportant …
We’re often advised to excel at one thing. But as the future gets harder to predict, preserving optionality allows us to pivot when the road ahead crumbles. *** How do we prepare for a world that often changes drastically and rapidly? We …
No action exists in a vacuum. There are ripples that have consequences that we can and can’t see. Here are the three types of externalities that can help us guide our actions so they don’t come back to bite us. *** An externality affects …
Making better decisions is one of the best skills we can develop. Good decisions save time, money, and stress. Here, we break down what makes a good decision and what we can do to improve our decision-making processes. *** Improving our …
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 Parrish: Adam, you did a presentation …
“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 it was the defensible default. She …
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 the caution needed to combat them with …
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 identifying which ones are most …
In order to do anything meaningful, you have to know where you are going. Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, and are often used interchangeably in numerous contexts. But what exactly do they mean, what is the …
A vendor once tried to buy me a laptop. Not just any laptop but a very expensive laptop. The vendor claimed that there were no strings attached. And, as they pointed out, I was the only person in the meeting with them, so “no one would …