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Psychology

Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy

In the search for happiness, we often confuse how something looks with how it’s likely to make us feel. This is especially true when it comes to our homes. If we want to maximize happiness, we need to …

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The Inner Game: Why Trying Too Hard Can Be Counterproductive

The standard way of learning is far from being the fastest or most enjoyable. It’s slow, makes us second guess ourselves, and interferes with our natural learning process. Here we explore a better way …

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There’s Seldom Any Traffic on the High Road

We’ve all been there: someone says something rude to us and our instinct is to strike back with a quick-witted comeback. That’s what many people do. It’s also a big reason that many people don’t get …

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Making Compassionate Decisions: The Role of Empathy in Decision Making

You don’t have to look hard to find quotes expounding the need for more empathy in society. As with Barack Obama’s quote above, we are encouraged to actively build empathy with others — …

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The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness

The Basics If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like? How would you distribute wealth and power? Would you make everyone equal or not? How would you define fairness and …

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The Power of Incentives: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior

Incentives are what drive human behavior. Understanding incentives is the key to understanding people. Conversely, failing to recognize the importance of incentives often leads us to make major …

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The Difference Between Open-Minded and Closed-Minded People

Why do some people seem to make constant progress in their professional and personal lives while others repeat the same mistakes? I think part of the answer is how they approach problems. It comes …

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Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen

Critical mass, which is sometimes referred to as tipping points, is one of the most effective mental models you can use to understand the world. The concept can explain everything from viral cat …

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Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence

Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same …

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Warnings From Sleep: Nightmares and Protecting The Self

“All of this is evidence that the mind, although asleep, is constantly concerned about the safety and integrity of the self.” *** Rosalind Cartwright — also known as the Queen of Dreams — …

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Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More

“In the chronicles of American financial history,” writes David Clark in The Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman on Life, Business, …

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Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on the Relationship between Vulnerability and Love

In 1923 the Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, which endures as a timeless classic meditation on living. The essence of …

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Racking The Shotgun: Quickly Sorting Those Who Know from Those Who Act Like They Know

One of the great challenges we all face in life is distinguishing between two classes of people: people who know and people who sound like they know. It’s called the Batesian Mimicry problem and …

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A Simple Exercise To Read The Emotions of Others

One of Charles Darwin’s less famous works, his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, released in 1872, kicked off the idea that emotions carry distinct facial expressions. We read these …

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The 16 Best Books of 2016

Rewarding reads on love, life, knowledge, history, the future, and tools for thinking. Out of all the books I read this year, here is a list of what I found most worth reading in 2016. 1. The …

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Words Like Loaded Pistols: Wartime Rhetoric

Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is an ancient topic that’s no less relevant today. We are in a golden age of information sharing, which means you are swimming in a pool of rhetoric every …

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