Marshall McLuhan: The Here And Now
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the …
Culture
Roald Dahl’s Heartbreaking Letter About Losing his Daughter in 1962
Roald Dahl, the beloved author of my personal favorites Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG, lost his eldest daughter, Olivia, to measles in the early 60s. It wasn’t until 1988, …
Elon Musk on How to Tell if People Are Lying
Elon Musk shares a valuable insight on evaluating job applicants: asking them to explain their thinking at multiple levels helps him determine if they worked on the problem themselves or they’re …
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 …
How Warren Buffett Keeps up with a Torrent of Information
A telling excerpt from an interview of Warren Buffett (below) on the value of reading. Seems like he’s taking the opposite approach to Nassim Taleb in some ways. Interviewer: How do you keep up …
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 …
Nassim Taleb: How to Not be a Sucker From the Past
The fact that new information exists about the past in general means that we have an incomplete roadmap about history. There is a necessary fallibility … if you will. In The Black Swan, Nassim …
Kyle Bass: How Freediving Enables Better Decision Making
Below find an excerpt taken from an interview between Raoul Pal and Kyle Bass (a hedge fund manager based out of Texas.) What resonates with me here is the need to find a way out of a world where we …
A Successful Businessperson Has to Learn to Say No
“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It’s very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair Tony Blair isn’t the only one who thinks that. So does Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. …
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 Reasons We Deny Luck
One of the reasons that we deny the role of luck is that it acts as a cold counterbalance to the notion of hard work. At every stage in our lives, we are taught that the best way to make our way in …
How Successful People Increase Productivity
People ask me about productivity habits all the time. I’ve packaged most of that advice in a productivity webinar available to members but I wanted to tell you one counter-intuitive strategy …
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 …
Andy Warhol: Don’t Make a Problem of your Problems, How a Person Gets Disciplined, and The Value of Time on Values
In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Warhol advises us not to make a problem of our problems. Everybody has problems, but the thing is to not make a problem about your …
When Things Go Wrong: The Warren Buffett Way to Handle Problems
“Get it right, get it fast, get it out, get it over.” *** In an interview with Jeff Cunningham, Warren Buffett hits on two principles that elude most of us. Interviewer: I was reading a …
Elon Musk: A Framework for Thinking
Elon Musk has two frameworks I use all the time. The first is the algorithm, which helps you solve problems. The second is his framework for thinking, which he outlines below: I do think there is a …