Tag: Best Of Farnam Street

The Best of Farnam Street 2018

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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 with the world. Reading deepens our understanding and helps us live consciously.

Of the 46 articles we published on FS this year, here are the top ten as measured by a combination of page views, responses, and feeling.

  1. Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work — We each have 96 energy blocks each day to spend however we’d like. Using this energy blocking system will ensure you’re spending each block wisely.
  2. Your First Thought Is Rarely Your Best Thought: Lessons on Thinking — Most people have no time to think. They schedule themselves like lawyers. They work in five- to eight-minute increments, scheduled back to back. They think only in first thoughts never in second thoughts.
  3. The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right — The Pygmalion Effect is a powerful secret weapon. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. In this article, discover how expectations can influence performance for better or worse.
  4. First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge — First Principles thinking breaks down true understanding into building blocks we can reassemble. It turns out most of us don’t know as much as we think we do.
  5. Understanding Speed and Velocity: Saying “NO” to the Non-Essential — It’s tempting to think that in order to be a valuable team player, you should say “yes” to every request and task that is asked of you. People who say yes to everything have a lot of speed. They’re always doing stuff but never getting anything done. Why? Because they don’t think in terms of velocity. Understanding the difference between speed and velocity will change how you work.
  6. The Surprising Power of The Long Game — In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here’s how to play the long game.
  7. Double Loop Learning: Download New Skills and Information into Your Brain — We’re taught single loop learning from the time we are in grade school, but there’s a better way. Double loop learning is the quickest and most efficient way to learn anything that you want to “stick.”
  8. Complexity Bias: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple — Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts. Faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one.
  9. Deductive vs Inductive Reasoning: Make Smarter Arguments, Better Decisions, and Stronger Conclusions — You can’t prove the truth, but using deductive and inductive reasoning, you can get close. Learn the difference between the two types of reasoning and how to use them when evaluating facts and arguments.
  10. The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters — The decision matrix is a powerful tool to help you prioritize which decisions deserve your attention as a leader, and which should be delegated. Here’s how you can start using it today.

More interesting things, you might have missed

Thank you

As we touched on in the annual letter, it’s been a wonderful year at FS. While the frequency of our articles decreased in 2018, the words published actually increased. As longtime readers know, we are not bound to frequency or length constraints, our only mission is quality. Next year will see a more eclectic mix of content as we get back to our roots.

Thank you for an amazing 2018 and I’m looking forward to learning new things with you in 2019.

Still curious? You can find the top five podcast episodes in 2018 here.

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The Best of Farnam Street 2016

Reading Time: 1 minute

After the publishing the 16 best books I read this year, it’s time to take a look at the best of Farnam Street this year. Of course, ‘best’ is an editorialized list from what you loved and shared and what I took the most pleasure in writing. Spanning everything from learning and thinking to mental models and history, here’s to an amazing year.

1. The Best Way to Learn Anything: The Feynman Technique

2. The Pot Belly of Ignorance

3. The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works

4. Books that Improve Your General Knowledge of the World

5. 20 Rules for a Knight

6. Joseph Tussman: Getting the World to Do the Work for You

7. Second-Level Order: What Smart People Use to Outperform

8. Ego is the Enemy: The Legend of Genghis Khan

9. The Four Tools of Discipline

10. At Some Point, You Have to Eat The Broccoli

11. Too Busy to Pay Attention to Life

12. The Value of Grey Thinking

13. A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman

14. Stop Crashing Planes: Charlie Munger’s Six-Element System

15. Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More

16. Get 5% Better

Still curious? Check out the Best of Farnam Street: 2015, and 2014

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The Best of Farnam Street 2015

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As the year heads toward an end, what better way to reflect than to look back on the pieces that moved you.

Find below the 15 most read and shared articles published on Farnam Street in 2015, spanning everything from philosophy and psychology to mental models and understanding. (The curious can also catch up on last year’s best reads here.)

Thank you for joining me for another year on our intellectual and philosophical journey of discovery.

Best of Farnam Street 2015

1. Carol Dweck: The Two Mindsets And The Power of Believing That You Can Improve
Looks at the role of mindset in motivation, learning, and self-regulation.

2. The Reasons We Work
It’s more complicated than money.

3. The Single Best Interview Question You Can Ask
“This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular.”

4. Albert Einstein on the Secret to Learning
“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

5. How To Think
This is the path, the rest is up to you.

6. Richard Feynman: The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something
Feynman articulates the difference between knowing the name of something and understanding it.

7. The Two Types of Knowledge
“In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression.”

8. William Deresiewicz: How To Learn How To Think
An argument to spend more time thinking.

9. How Successful People Increase Productivity
“One thing that successful people do to increase productivity is they avoid to-do lists. These lists are rarely as effective as scheduling time.”

10. Academic Economics — Strengths and Weaknesses, after Considering Interdisciplinary Needs
This is the full text of Charlie Munger’s Herb Kay Memorial Lecture, ‘Academic Economics: Strengths and Weaknesses, after Considering Interdisciplinary Needs,’ at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 2003.

11. The Peter Principle and the Law of Crappy People
If you’ve ever worked in an organization, you’ve no doubt come across someone in senior management and asked yourself how they ever got promoted.

12. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
The modern storm of bits and stimulation, relents only when we sleep.

13. The Nine Primary Tactics Used to Influence Others
The number one thing to understand about influence is that people make decisions for their reasons, not yours.

14. Summer Reads for the Curious Mind
Out of the 44 books I read from January to June, here are the 7 that resonated with me the most

15. The Power of Full Engagement — Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr argue that energy, not time, is the key to managing performance.

Time travel to the 2014 list here.

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The Best of Farnam Street 2014

Reading Time: 2 minutes

What better way to send off 2014 than a look back on the most read and shared articles on Farnam Street in 2014?

This list often surprises me — what I thought were the best and most insightful posts rarely make it into the top ten (see: Tiny Beautiful Things, Albert Einstein on Sifting the Essential from the Non-Essential, Adding Mental Models to Your Mind’s Toolbox, My Interview with Ed Hess, A Lesson in Friendship, etc. )

Ok, here’s the list of what you loved:

1. Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life — some of the most thoughtful and profound life advice I’ve ever come across.

2. The Buffett Formula — How To Get Smarter — Most people go through life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won’t do the work required.

3. How To Think — “Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.”

4. How To Read A Book — If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t given much thought to how you read since, errr second grade.

5. Eudora Welty to The New Yorker: The best job application ever — “It’s difficult,” writes Shaun Usher in his introduction to the letter in Letters of Note, “to imagine a more endearingly written introduction to one’s talents.”

6. Book Recommendations from Billionaire Charlie Munger That will Make you Smarter — “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time—none. Zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

7. Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport With Anyone — Warning: the content in this post is so effective that I encourage you to think carefully how it is used. I do not endorse or condone the use of these skills in malicious or deceptive ways.

8. Things You Need to Stop Doing — Rather than read all of these self-help books full of things you should start doing to be more productive, it’s often better to look at what you should stop doing that gets in the way of productivity.

9. What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast — Taking control of your mornings is very much like investing in yourself.

10. A Four Star General on Leadership — “We like to equate leaders with values we admire, but the two can be separate and distinct.”

#2 and #7 made the list two years in a row.

According to Google Analytics, people spent the most time reading: Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport With Anyone, The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, John Gottman on Why the Little Things Matter in Relationships, Dan Harris on being 10% Happier, and How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.

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