Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It’s a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before …
Thinking
Master Your Attention: Schopenhauer’s Strategy Against Clickbait
The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer would have recognized the problem of clickbait. In his essays, On Authorship and On Reading, he identified two types of authors: those who write …
Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
You can’t force yourself to think faster. If you try, you’re likely to end up making much worse decisions. Here’s how to improve the actual quality of your decisions instead of chasing hacks to speed …
How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking
There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just …
Mental Models For a Pandemic
Mental models help us understand the world better, something which is especially valuable during times of confusion, like a pandemic. Here’s how to apply mental models to gain a more accurate picture …
What You Truly Value
Our devotion to our values gets tested in the face of a true crisis. But it’s also an opportunity to reconnect, recommit, and sometimes, bake some bread. *** The recent outbreak of the coronavirus is …
Using Models to Stay Calm in Charged Situations
When polarizing topics are discussed in meetings, passions can run high and cloud our judgment. Learn how mental models can help you see clearly from this real-life scenario. *** Mental models can …
Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World
The less rigid we are in our thinking, the more open minded, creative and innovative we become. Here’s how to develop the power of an elastic mind. *** Society is changing fast. Do we need to change …
Ayn Rand on Why Philosophy Matters
Nearly four decades after her death, many of Ayn Rand’s works remain controversial and divide people into two camps: love them or hate them. Her lesser known book on philosophy provides broad, …
The Disproportional Power of Anecdotes
Anecdotes tend to not be statistically significant, but their added emotional significance leads us to place additional weight on them. *** Humans, it seems, have an innate tendency to overgeneralize …
Get Smart: Three Ways of Thinking to Make Better Decisions and Achieve Results
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln *** Your ability to think clearly determines the decisions you make and the …
The Metagame: Think One Step Ahead
“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” — Sun Tzu The metagame is about understanding the bigger picture and outsmarting the competition by doing something they can’t or won’t …
How To Mentally Overachieve — Charles Darwin’s Reflections On His Own Mind
We’ve written quite a bit about the marvelous British naturalist Charles Darwin, who with his Origin of Species created perhaps the most intense intellectual debate in human history, one which …
What Are You Doing About It? Reaching Deep Fluency with Mental Models
The mental models approach is very intellectually appealing, almost seductive to a certain type of person. (It certainly is for us.) The whole idea is to take the world’s greatest, most useful …
The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 2)
(Purchase a copy of the entire 3-part series in one sexy PDF for $3.99) *** In part one, we began a conversation about the trappings of the human memory, using Daniel Schacter’s excellent The …
Mental Models: Getting the World to Do the Work for You
People are working harder and harder to clean up otherwise avoidable messes they created by making poor initial decisions. There are many reasons we’re making poor decisions and failing to learn …