Value Process Before Results
More insight from The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance: The issue is fundamental to the pursuit of excellence in all fields. If a young basketball player is taught that winning …
Books
Imitation Without Understanding Does Not Work
Don’t imitate large firms, just because they are large. Large, prestigious, and successful firms are chosen not only on the assumption that following them will produce better results but also as …
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Why Sites Like Gawker Manipulate You
“A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. …” — The Long Goodbye, …
The Human Mind has a Shut-Off Device
Once you’ve formed a belief, adding exceptions and justifications becomes easier than updating it. Ryan Holiday writes about this in Trust Me, I’m Lying: Once the mind has accepted a …
None of us really likes honesty
None of us really likes honesty. We prefer deception —but only when it is unabashedly flattering or artfully camouflaged. Groups seem to need to believe that they are superior to others and that they …
Josh Waitzkin on Mastering the Fundamentals
Some excerpts from Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. The best way to launch into the learning process is by breaking down what you are learning into …
The Limits of Crowd Wisdom
Jaron Lanier in You Are Not A Gadget commenting on the limits of crowd wisdom: There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a …
The Velocity of Skill Development: Quickly Closing the Gap
We are remarkably inefficient at skill development. Understanding the nuances of how repetitions, situations, and feedback interconnect offers us a few small changes that lead to remarkable …
May The Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, Will Bonner writes: …you don’t win by predicting the future; you win by getting the odds right. You …
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin has mastered the game of Chess — winning his first National Championship at the age of nine — and the physical challenge of martial arts, becoming a World Champion of Tai Chi Chuan. One …
What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?
What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill? Is it listening to a lecture? Reading a book? Just doing it? According to Daniel Coyle in The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your …
What makes predictions succeed or fail?
That’s the ambitious question that Nate Silver tries to answer in The Signal and the Noise. The book appeals to me because it “takes a comprehensive look at prediction across 13 fields, …
The evolutionary function of religion
Excerpts from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal on the evolutionary function of religion. In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that …
Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies
Robert Gula in Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies: Let’s not call them laws; and, since they’re not particularly original, I won’t attach my name to them. They are merely a …
Insanely Simple
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 …
Michael Mauboussin’s Behavioral Economics Reading List
Michael Mauboussin is one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. Need proof? Just listen to this podcast interview we did. If you’re looking to learn about behavioral economics, he …