40 Books that Improve your Ability to Make Decisions
Who can you ask for book recommendations on decision making? At Re:Think Decision Making, I asked a crowd that one former ivy league professor called “the best public crowd he’s ever …
Books
The Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer
Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while longer than last year’s, it’s a great place to kick off your summer reading. “Each of these books,” Gates writes, …
A Brief History of the To-Do List
To-do lists are evil from a productivity perspective, it’s much more effective to schedule time. This is something New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister …
Happiness: A Philosopher’s Guide
Happiness: A Philosopher’s Guide is worth reading. Frederic Lenoir explores what the greatest thinkers — Aristotle, Plato, Chuang Tzu, Voltaire, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Freud — have to …
Exercise as a Tool to Manage Stress
For any of you who have experienced a ‘runner’s high’ or endorphin rush while exercising you know how powerful the feeling can be. But there are many more chemicals at play than just endorphins and …
The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us
The Lucretius Problem is a mental defect where we assume the worst-case event that has happened is the worst-case event that can happen. In so doing, we fail to understand that the worst event that …
Stephen King Shares His (Long) Reading List
At any question and answer session, a reader inevitably asks Stephen King what he reads. Everyone, myself included, wants to know what’s on Stephen King’s reading list. Now we know. In On …
The Last Thing We Need Right Now is a Vision Statement
In this excerpt from Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. says something I wish tech companies would heed. I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the …
David Foster Wallace: The Mortality Paradox
David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, found in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, comments on our dread of both relationships and loneliness. It’s always tempting to …
Miracle Grow for Your Brain
Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading and how much of it you soak up has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors …
David Foster Wallace on The Moral Clarity of the Immature
David Foster Wallace, who brought us gems such as This is Water and insights into ambition and perfectionism, was the guest editor of the 2007 edition of Best American Essays. His introduction …
Six Common Strategy Traps
Strategy could be the most over-used word since leadership. How many strategies can one organization have? A lot of people say “strategy” when they really mean a goal or objective. This is …
Bruce Lee: The Four Basic Philosophical Approaches
As found in Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, which provides unique insight into the mind of Bruce Lee through his private letters and writing. 1. Aboutism keeps out any emotional responses or other genuine …
Wired for Culture
What makes us human? In part, argues evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel in Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind, language is one of the keys to our evolutionary success, especially in …
Vincent van Gogh on Color
In a letter to his brother Theo, dated July 1882, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, Vincent van Gogh describes how the simple few fundamentals combine into nearly endless permutations. …
Produce More by Removing More: The Disciplined Pursuit of Essentialism
Aristotle talked about three kinds of work: theoretical, practical, and poetical. The first searches for truth. The second is practical with an objective around action. The third, however, is lost in …