Why You Should Practice Failure
We learn valuable lessons when we experience failure and setbacks. Most of us wait for those failures to happen to us, however, instead of seeking them out. But deliberately making mistakes can give …
Failure
Turning Towards Failure
Our resistance to thinking about failure is especially curious in light of the fact that failure is so ubiquitous. ‘Failure is the distinguishing feature of corporate life,’ writes the economist Paul …
How Complex Systems Fail
A bit of a preface to this post. Please read the definition of Antifragile first. While the article below is interesting, the reader should read with a critical mind. Complexity ‘solved’ …
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
“It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.” — Molière *** “Why is it so fun to be right?” That’s the opening line from Kathryn Schulz’ excellent book …
Goal Induced Blindness
In 1996 a disaster of historic proportions happened at the peak of Mount Everest. In the entire climbing season of 1996, fifteen climbers died. Eight of those deaths took place on a single day. …
Atul Gawande: Why We Fail
“Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the …
Robert Greene: The Two Kinds of Failure and Why They Matter
“It is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck.” *** This excellent passage from Robert Greene‘s book Mastery …
Daniel Dennett: How to Make Mistakes
In Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett, one of the world’s leading philosophers offers a trove of mind-stretching thought experiments, which he calls …
10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart
“States don’t fail overnight. The seeds of of their destruction are sown deep within their political institutions.” Is it culture, weather, or Geography? What about war or some …
The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas
You’d be hard-pressed to find a person or organization who says they’re opposed to creativity. It’s seen as an unequivocally good thing. Everyone wants to have creative ideas. But we don’t always …
17 Management Lessons from Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, offers the following management advice. Dalio says “Taken together, these principles are meant to …
An Introduction to the Mental Model of Redundancy (with examples)
“The reliability that matters is not the simple reliability of one component of a system, but the final reliability of the total control system.” — Garrett Hardin *** We learn from …
Seth Klarman: The Forgotten Lessons of 2008
In this excerpt from his annual letter, investing great Seth Klarman describes 20 lessons from the financial crisis which, he says, “were either never learned or else were immediately forgotten by …