Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
At Farnam Street, we aim to master the best of what other people have figured out. Not surprisingly, it’s quite a lot. The past is full of useful lessons that have much to teach us. Sometimes, we just need to remember what we’re looking for …
When disaster strikes, people come together. During the worst times of our lives, we can end up experiencing the best mental health and relationships with others. Here’s why that happens and how we can bring the lessons we learn with us …
Do we dance simply for recreation? Or is there a primal urge that compels us to do it? Historian William McNeill claims it saved our species by creating community togetherness and transforming “me” into “we.” *** Why do we dance? To most, …
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 …
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface. *** Yuval Noah …
Few books have ever struck us as much as Will Durant’s 100-page masterpiece The Lessons of History, a collection of essays which sum up the lifelong thoughts of a brilliant historian. We recently dug up an interview with Durant and …
“Each of us human beings, for example, is the product of an enormously long sequence of accidents, any of which could have turned out differently.” — Murray Gell-Mann *** What parts of reality are the product of an accident? The …
Complex outcomes in human systems are a tough nut to crack when it comes to deciding what’s really true. Any phenomena we might try to explain will have a host of competing theories, many of them seemingly plausible. So how do we know …
“To describe a culture is to describe the structure of its institutions.” — Joseph Tussman *** In his book The Burden of Office, the educator and philosopher Joseph Tussman, who brought us profound wisdom, does a remarkable job, …
Incentives drive our behavior. Failing to consider incentives can lead to unintended consequences. In this post, we show you how incentives can go wrong and how we can use them to our advantage. *** There’s a great little story on …
Against the historical backdrop of nations, morals and religions that rise and fall, “the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape”, according to Will and Ariel Durant in their amazing book The Lessons of History. Allow me …
B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was many things, but above all, he was a military historian. He wrote tracts on Sherman, Scipio, Rommel, and on military strategy itself. His work influenced Neville Chamberlain and may have even (accidentally) …
“Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance …
Philosophy can be a little dry in concept. The word itself conjures up images of thinking about thought, why we exist, and other metaphysical ideas that seem a little divorced from the everyday world. One true philosopher who bucked the …
History is economics in action, at least according to Karl Marx. Whether in a group or as an individual, we vie for food, fuel, raw materials and our place in the hierarchy. Even art is often rooted in conflict. The remarkable book, The …
“The present is the past rolled up for action and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” — Will Durant *** In the audio version of The Lessons of History, you can find excerpts of interviews with the authors Will and Ariel …
“History,” write the Durants in The Lessons of History, “is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.” The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were …
Human history is a fragment of biological history. If we are to learn enduring lessons it is best to go back in time Our view of the world is fairly shallow. We look backward but rarely to a time before we were born let alone the 5,000 …
The fact that new information exists about the past in general means that we have an incomplete roadmap about history. There is a necessary fallibility … if you will. In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb writes: History is useful for the …
A few days before his assassination on April 15th, 1865 Abraham Lincoln gave his final public address. The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln does a good job setting the context. General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox on …
When he was seven years old, his family was forced out of their home and off their farm. Like other boys his age, he was expected to work to help support the family. When he was nine, his mother died. At the age of 22, the company he worked …
“Because an experience is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.” — Gadamer Hans-Georg Gadamer is associated in particular with one form of philosophy: “hermeneutics.” Derived from the Greek world …
An interesting opinion piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on the new book Why Nations Fail, co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson. The more you read it, the more …
In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of the most important person you’ve probably never heard of: Poggio Bracciolini. Although Bracciolini’s contribution to society can’t be …