The Ingredients For Innovation
Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to …
History
Yuval Noah Harari: Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches …
The Disproportional Power of Anecdotes
Anecdotes tend to not be statistically significant, but their added emotional significance leads us to place additional weight on them. *** Humans, it seems, have an innate tendency to overgeneralize …
Why Honor Matters
Quick — who’s your favorite character in The Godfather? The most popular answer to this question surprised me. About half the people who are asked pick Sonny: Santino Corleone. “Everyone loves Sonny,” …
First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break …
The Terror of Totalitarianism Explained
We all hope totalitarianism — a form of government in which the state has no limits in authority and does whatever it wants — is a thing of the past. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia showed what the …
Pyrrhic Victory: Winning the Battle, Losing the War
The Basics In a classic American folktale, a stubborn railroad worker decides to prove his skill by competing with a drilling machine. John Henry, enraged to hear that machines might take his job, …
Making the Most of Second Chances
We all get lucky. Once in a while we do something really stupid that could have resulted in death, but didn’t. Just the other day, I saw someone who was texting walk out into oncoming traffic, …
The Narratives of History: Applying Lessons from the Past
“History is written by the winners” is the popular view. But your winner may not be my winner. A lot depends on the narrative you are trying to build. History is rewritten all the time. Sometimes it …
Finding Truth in History
If we are to learn from the past, does the account of it have to be true? One would like to think so. Otherwise you might be preparing for the wrong battle. There you are, geared up for mountains, and …
Loops of Progress, or How Modern Are You?
On your way to work, you grab breakfast from one of the dozen coffee shops you pass. Most of the goods you buy get delivered right to your door. If you live in a large city and have a car, you barely …
The Trojan Horse: When True Intents Are Concealed
A Trojan Horse is an innocuous appearing container for hiding something within to get past defenses or some other obstacle. Trojan Horses can be used for both good and evil. Here’s how to recognize …
Human Misjudgment and the American Revolution
We try to look at mental models in history through the lens of people who got it right, but once in a while, it’s beneficial to examine a model through the lens of those who got it wrong. In this …
People Don’t Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership
“Colonel Graff: You have a habit of upsetting your commander. Ender Wiggin: I find it hard to respect someone just because they outrank me, sir.” — Orson Scott Card *** Many leaders …
Understanding the Limitations of Maps
Maps are flawed but useful. For instance, we can leverage the experiences of others to help us navigate through territories that are, to us, new and unknown. We just have to understand and respect the …
Galilean Relativity and the Invasion of Scotland
A few centuries ago, when Galileo (1564-1642) was trying to make a couple of points about how our world really works, one of the arguments that frequently came up in response to his ‘the earth orbits …