Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Survivorship bias refers to the idea that we get a false representation of reality when we base our understanding only on the experiences of those who live to tell their story. Taking a look at how we …
“Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” — William Archer Joan Didion famously remarked that “We tell ourselves stories to live.” She was right. The business has become a story …
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie, author of Americanah, one of The New York Times’s ten best books of the year, tells the story of …
In response to Ernest Hemingway on Writing a reader passed along a pointer to Advice to Writers, “a compendium of quotes, anecdotes, and writerly wisdom from a dazzling array of literary lights.” Jon …
I stumbled across Anne Lamott’s beautiful Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Lamott’s advice is down to earth, real, and void of any pretentiousness. In fact, it’s …
“Human beings master the basics of storytelling as young children and retain this capability throughout their lives.” — Stephen Denning When psychologist T. A. Harley researched the academic …
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Atul Gawande. A reader recently pointed out that I hadn’t covered his most recent book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. I had …
Neil Gaiman, who brought us one of the best commencement speeches ever, chimes in on with a lecture explaining why using our imaginations is an obligation for all citizens. The correlation between …
Stories are the way in which we teach moral lessons, keep an audience engaged in what we’re saying, and convince others to pursue a course of action. In the business world, where time is short, …
In his book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely attempts to answer the question: “is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples or is …
In his new book Mastery, Robert Greene writes discusses how feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind. We live in a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are at …
In The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, Michael Mauboussin goes beyond the general idea that luck is important to outcomes. He explains the type of …
Michael Mauboussin commenting on Daniel Kahneman: When asked which was his favorite paper of all-time, Daniel Kahneman pointed to “On the Psychology of Prediction,” which he co-authored with Amos …
Michael Mauboussin talking about his new book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing with the WSJ: The key is this idea called the paradox of skill. As …
From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us: Historical explanations, in other words, are neither causal explanations nor even really descriptions—at least not in the sense that we imagine …
Excerpts from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal on the evolutionary function of religion. In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that …