The Pursuit of Worldly Wisdom
Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett and a major inspiration behind this site, is not only one of the best investors the world has witnessed, but he’s also one of …
Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett and a major inspiration behind this site, is not only one of the best investors the world has witnessed, but he’s also one of …
Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, frequently tells the story below to illustrate how to distinguish between the two types of knowledge: real knowledge and pretend …
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) remains best-known for Civil Disobedience and for Walden, a beautiful ode to simplicity and self-sufficiency. Thoreau moved into a cabin he built by Walden Pond to …
Human history is a fragment of biological history. If we are to learn enduring lessons it is best to go back in time Our view of the world is fairly shallow. We look backward but rarely to a time …
One of the most timeless and beautiful meditations on reading comes from the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). For me, reading has always been about our tagline: …
Out of the 44 books I read from January to June, here are the 7 that resonated with me the most. (For the curious see the 2012, 2013, I can’t find the 2014 edition.) Pebbles of Perception: How a …
How many of today’s problems are the result of leadership? What’s lacking, the author of The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership argues, is the lack of real leadership. Here the problem may lie …
Carl Sagan’s timeless and humbling Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, based on the photograph above. Here’s an excerpt: Look again at that dot. That’s here. …
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 …
The Lucretius Problem is a mental defect where we assume the worst-case event that has happened is the worst-case event that can happen. In so doing, we fail to understand that the worst event that …
David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, found in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, comments on our dread of both relationships and loneliness. It’s always tempting to …
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 …
Ahh leisure or as some call it, the art and science of doing nothing. It’s something we all want and yet rarely have. Our modern workplace culture prides itself on filling every one of our …
In a letter to his brother Theo, dated September 1882, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, Vincent van Gogh describes the advantages of never learning to paint. While making it I said to …
The excerpt is from this version online, although if you’re going to read it, get the Hayes translation. Our mental powers should enable us to perceive the swiftness with which all things vanish …
The anthology Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, contains 265 of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, which is nearly a third of all the surviving letters he penned. In a long and winding letter to his brother …