The Best of Farnam Street 2015
As the year heads toward an end, what better way to reflect than to look back on the pieces that moved you. Find below the 15 most read and shared articles published on Farnam Street in 2015, spanning …
Psychology
Gary Taubes on What Really Makes Us Fat
We’ve been told for decades that dietary fat makes us gain weight, yet research suggests refined carbohydrates are to blame. It’s time to turn the food pyramid upside down. Let’s examine the …
The Two Sides of Seneca and A Lesson on Human Fallibility
If you can withhold moral judgment, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero is a great historical account of making decisions in complex situations. Here is one way to describe the career …
Biases and Blunders
You would be hard pressed to come across a reading list on behavioral economics that doesn’t mention Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. …
Peter Thiel on the End of Hubris and the Lessons from the Internet Bubble of the Late 90s
The best interview question — what important truth do very few people agree with you on?— is tough to answer. Just think about it for a second. In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that it …
The Best Non-Fiction Books of 2015: The Year of the Biography
One of my favorite sources of reading material is Tyler Cowen. He’s consistently finding exceptional things that I’ve never heard of. His 2015 non-fiction list is no exception. If he had …
Albert Bandura on Acquiring Self-Efficacy and Personal Agency
Psychologist Albert Bandura is famous for his social learning theory which is really more of a model than a theory. He stresses the importance of observational learning. Who you spend time with …
The Single Best Interview Question You Can Ask
In Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future there is a great section on the single best interview question you can ask someone. When Peter Thiel interviews …
Listening and the Learning Lens
In Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices make All the Difference, there is an excellent chapter on listening. When it comes to describing much of what currently passes for personal …
How People Make Big Decisions
We all go through psychological steps when we make big decisions. Some people call this the “existential cycle,” which really has four stages: doing, contemplating, preparing, and experimenting. *** …
Stronger: Developing Personal Resilience and Becoming Antifragile
How is it that some people come back from crushing defeats while others simply give in? Why does adversity make some people and teams stronger and render others ineffective? These are the questions …
The Map Is Not the Territory
The Great Mental Models Volumes One and Two are out. Learn more about the project here. The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of …
Emilie Wapnick: Why Some of us Don’t Have One True Calling
What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you’re not sure you want to do just one thing for the rest of your life, you’re not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist …
The Simplest Way to Achieve Simplicity is Through Thoughtful Reduction
A close friend of mine argues that while we love the first part of Einstein’s quote, “Everything should be made as simple as possible,” we ignore the second part “but not …
To Learn, Retrieve
Mike Ebersold is a neurosurgeon. In neurosurgery and indeed life there is an essential kind of learning that only comes from reflection on personal experience. In the book Make It Stick: The Science …
The 11 Essential Attitudes for Meditation
This comes courtesy of Mindfulness in Plain English, one of the best books on meditation and mindfulness that I’ve ever come across. *** The very process of observation changes what we observe. …