Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
David Foster Wallace remains both loved and hated. His wisdom shows itself in argumentative writing, ambition, and perfectionism, and perhaps one of the best, most profound, commencement addresses …
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 …
St Augustine, the theologian, and philosopher, famously posed the question ‘What is time?’ in The Confessions. After waxing on for a bit about what he can say about time, he admits (that …
Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is best known as the author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but we can pull from his letters a mix of insight and language that rivals that of …
“Expectation is the grandfather of disappointment. The world can never own a man who wants nothing.” One hundred years after Confucius, came Wu Hsin. His name literally means …
“The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.” What if the formula for success is backwards. We’re told that if we work hard, …
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 …
Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She’s a researcher-storyteller and author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
In December 2004, Bryan A. Garner, who had already struck up a friendship with David Foster Wallace, started interviewing state and federal judges as well as a few key writers. With over a hundred …
It’s one thing to live and another to live your life in a way that is antifragile. What is Antifragility Author Nassim Taleb says defines the term antifragile this way: Some things benefit from …
Unlock the power of persuasion with these ten golden rules of argument. Arguments are deceptively difficult. We often believe that presenting facts will logically lead others to our conclusions. But …
This interview with Ed Hess is full of amazing insights but I don’t know if you’ll read it because a) it’s long and we live in a world of increasingly short attention spans and b) it’s an actual …