Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Suzanne McConnell writes an essay on what Kurt Vonnegut was like as a teacher at the Writers’ Workshop: He told us in workshop classes, “You’re in the entertainment business.” He impressed this upon us over and over again. Therefore, …
It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way. Nature gave us pain as a …
Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment, co-authors an interesting article in foreign policy. Academic research suggests that predicting events five years into the future is so difficult that most experts perform only marginally …
Carlo Cipolla, a former Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, lists the basic laws of human stupidity: The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of …
From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along with workable solutions. In the way …
I learned quite a lot about organizational culture while reading Ken Segall’s Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success. Segall worked closely with Steve Jobs as an ad agency creative director for NeXT and Apple and …
What are the most important ideas ever put forward in social science? I’m not asking what are the best ideas, so the truth of them is only obliquely relevant: a very important idea may be largely false. (I think it still must contain some …
In The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Christopher Maurer translates this gem from Baltasar Gracián y Morales: Know how to sell your wares, intrinsic quality isn’t enough. Not everyone bites at substance or looks for inner value. People like …
Richard Dawkins’s wide-ranging interview with Playboy Magazine. PLAYBOY: So you aren’t taking Pascal up on his wager. He was the 17th century philosopher who argued it’s a smarter bet to believe in God, because if you’re wrong—— …
Italo Calvino argues that we should dedicate part of our adult life to re-reading the classics that shaped us as children. In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s …
Some interesting thoughts from James Gray on whether all good arguments are logically sound. Understanding why helps us appreciate good arguments. Proof that not all arguments are logically sound An argument against the belief that all good …
An insightful piece by Oliver Burkeman on the folly of the all-positive thinking movement and its rejection of the possibility of failure. “The psychological evidence, backed by ancient wisdom, certainly suggests that it is not the …
Greg McKeown explains why successful people don’t become very successful in The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to …
We all know that sports records keep getting broken, but we generally don’t appreciate just how dramatic the progress has been, or the reasons for it. For example, the Olympic records of a hundred years ago—representing the best …
More brains don’t necessarily lead to better ideas. When it came to leading meetings, Steve Jobs had no qualms about tossing the least necessary person out of the room. An excerpt from Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives …
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 dependent upon science and technology. The …
“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 singular event that re-writes history? In …
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 Heller (1961) “Obviously, a lot people …
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 systems are designed to steer investments to …
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 large or very small numbers. It would be …
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 Friends and Influence People but omitted …
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: …Rationally, then, this standoff …
One of the theories is cognitive dissonance—we find it difficult to hold contradictory ideas in our head at the same time. Cognitive dissonance predicts that given the choice between our emotional ties and facts, we’ll pick emotional …
You probably don’t know as much as you think you do. When put to the test, most people find they can’t explain the workings of everyday things they think they understand. Don’t believe me? Find an object you use daily (a …