Books for Schools That Need Them
This might surprise you but I was never a big reader as a kid. In fact, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a book. This lasted all the way to university. While never lazy, I was ignorant to the …
Books
Building a Business and Making Your Mark
Building the perfect business is about finding the balance between what you have to offer and what the world wants. In this post, we hear from Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity, about some of the …
Charles Dickens to The Times — I Stand Astounded and Appalled
On November 13, 1849 a crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside a prison in South London to witness the public execution of Marie and Frederick Manning. Marie and Frederick, a married couple, had …
Elon Musk Recommends 12 Books that Changed his Life
Elon Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, is often praised for his brilliance, bold vision, and problem-solving approach. After meeting him, people often say, “He’s the smartest …
Andy Warhol on Loneliness
In his pseudo-memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), which is more a collection of his thoughts on various subjects, Andy Warhol writes about the paradox of getting what …
Tiny Beautiful Things
On March 11, 2010, a new writer took over “Dear Sugar,” an advice column on the Web site the Rumpus. Things would never be the same. Slowly over the next two years, we learned a little more about her …
Peter Thiel Recommends 7 Reads
Eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel’s book Zero To One should be required reading for Farnam Street readers. Like The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it’s nice to see another business leader …
How to be 10% Happier
Think you had a bad day? Dan Harris had a panic attack on live TV in front of millions of people. Something had to change. He knew it. Almost immediately after the panic attack on the air he was …
No Risky Chances: The Conversation That Matters Most
[quote]Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to the very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by medicine, technology, and strangers.[/quote] Atul …
To Give or Take? The Surprising Science Behind Success
“The principle of give and take; that is diplomacy—give one and take ten” — Mark Twain Was Twain right? It certainly seems so. The world is full of people who operate with that fuel. For them …
What Book has the Most Page-for-Page Wisdom?
Here is what happened when I asked twenty-seven thousand people “What is page for page the book with the most wisdom you’ve ever read?” My thinking was, and still is, that you need …
Google and Combinatorial Innovation
In his new book, How Google Works, Eric Schmidt argues that “we are entering … a new period of combinatorial innovation.” This happens, he says, when “there is a great availability of different …
E.B. White’s Beautiful Letter to Someone Who Lost Faith in Humanity
In March of 1973, a person sent a letter to E. B. White, the author of greats such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, expressing his bleak hope for humanity. White’s beautiful reply, …
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, has written a book: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Here are a few questions, which I loved, that are sure to spark your …
Summary: Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, also …
The History of Cognitive Overload
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, a book by Daniel Levitin, has an interesting section on cognitive overload. Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably …