Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Our desire to feel good about ourselves permeates everything we do. Wanting to maintain a positive self-image often leads us to adopt a biased image of the world. If we want to learn to align …
In Stronger: Develop the Resilience You Need to Succeed there is a section on the Biological Bases of Human Resilience that is fascinating. It turns out the key to developing resilience at the …
We’re busier than ever. We’re often on autopilot. We “go through the motions” without really paying attention to the decisions we’re making or the implications. This is …
In sports, ‘choking’ is when an athlete makes a major, unexpected blunder in a high stakes situation. Often, an expert who chokes will act like a clueless novice. Here, we examine why we choke and how …
Meditation isn’t easy. It takes time and energy. Some people wonder why they should bother with meditation at all. Here is an inversion of meditation. This is what Meditation isn’t. There …
My favorite chapter in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher is called ‘Decisions: Focusing Illusions.’ It’s a really great summary of how focusing on the wrong things …
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 …
An anecdote found in Seeking Wisdom, that reminds me of a funny story from university and the use of calculators. First, the excerpt. When someone asked Charlie Munger if he used a computer, he …
Meditation can seem like a lot of time and work for no obvious pay-off. Yet the benefits are dramatic. Meditation can help us truly experience life, rather than just letting it pass us by. Here’s a …
We live in a world scarce of understanding and abundant with information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. …
We expect the immediate outcome of events to represent the broader outcomes expected from a large number of trials. We believe that chance events will immediately self-correct and that small sample …
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 …
Despite my experiments with meditation, I have difficulty focusing on my breath if I take a few days off meditating or yoga. The world is distracting, there are texts coming in, fire trucks going by, …
Earlier this year, a prominent friend of mine was tasked with coming up with a list of behavioral economics book recommendations for the military leaders of a G7 country and I was on the limited email …
This beautiful excerpt from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention beautifully illustrates why it’s so hard to pin down creativity and …
Our resistance to thinking about failure is especially curious in light of the fact that failure is so ubiquitous. ‘Failure is the distinguishing feature of corporate life,’ writes the economist Paul …