Mental Models For a Pandemic
Mental models help us understand the world better, something which is especially valuable during times of confusion, like a pandemic. Here’s how to apply mental models to gain a more accurate picture …
Feedback Loops
Homeostasis and Why We Backslide
At some time or another, we’ve all sought to make big changes. And almost of all of us have, after making grand plans, discovered that changing some aspect of our lives or organizations, whether …
There Are No Called Strikes and Other Lessons You Learn in Business School
Matthew Frederick teams up with Michael Preis to offer some important learnings from the world of business — which isn’t really a discipline in and of itself but rather, as they write in the …
The Best way to Improve Your Performance at Almost Anything
Here are some easy tips to improve your performance at almost anything. How you practice makes a big difference. You need to think about feedback loops, deliberate practice, and working in chunks. The …
Creating a Decision Journal: Template And Example Included
We all make decisions. And yet few of us think about what we can learn from our past decisions to make smarter decisions in the future. A decision journal helps you learn from past decisions, think …
The Secrets of Happy Families
Bruce Feiler’s book — The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More — explores the hidden secrets of improving your …
The Science of High Performance
Research shows that knowing what you want to accomplish is more important than performance … at least at the start. But once you know where you’re going, you can accelerate progress by …
Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity
“Decision makers,” write Stefan Trautmann and Richard Zeckhauser in their paper Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity, “often prove to be blind to the learning opportunities offered …
What is Deliberate Practice?
Deliberate practice is a method for improving your performance at anything, based on constant feedback and working at the edge of your abilities. Elite people in every field use it to build up their …
Mental Model: Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are created when reactions affect themselves and can be positive or negative. Consider a thermostat regulating room temperature. This is an example of a negative feedback loop. As the …
James March: On Leadership
After reading The Ambiguities of Experience, I set out to read another book by James March: On Leadership. The genius of March takes a while to appreciate. I assure you, however, this …
Problem Solving Tools
When you’re faced with problems, do you have the right tools to handle them? I didn’t use to. My approach consisted mostly of guesswork and dumb luck. It worked sometimes. But I wanted to improve my …
What Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. Here is a wonderful excerpt from Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else: The …