Lessons on Leadership: Michael Abrashoff on Turning the Worst Ship in the Navy

Michael Abrashoff took the worst-performing ship in the Navy to the best without changing a single member of the crew. Learn how he did it. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Focus to Win

Since focus requires saying no, it also means really smart people and good competitors are saying no to really good ideas. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

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. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Mental Model Anchoring

This article introduces and explains the concept of Anchoring. We often anchor to irrelevant information and fail to make the proper adjustments | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People

The best summary of Dale Carnegie's famous How to Win Friends & Influence People—one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process?

We all make decisions. Some of them are large and many of them are small. Few of us understand that the process we use to make those decisions is more important than the analysis we put into the decision.  | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Let Go of the Learning Baggage

Most organizations promote a culture that runs counter to learning and playing, encouraging visible short-term actions that inspire guilt in employees who want to learn. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Avoid Running Faster Only to Stay in the Same Place

The Red Queen Effect explains why you need to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. Here's how to escape the trap that so many of us fall into. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Language: We Hear More Than Words

Too many errors are made because of taking language literally. It's not just a code: Language is complex and inferential. Stop being pedantic. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Pursuit of Worldly Wisdom

Charlie Munger explains how worldly wisdom can help you go further and faster than experts. You don't need to outwork if you can outsmart. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Thinking Rate Is Fixed – Farnam Street

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 them up. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The (Charlie) Munger Operating System

Charlie Munger offers a very wise operating system for leading a good life in his 2007 USC Law School Commencement Address. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Economic Inefficiency of Gift Giving: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents

An economic analysis of the inefficiency of gift giving. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Evaluating Information: Find the Signal in the Noise

Richard Feynman offers a list of seven tricks that you can use to quickly sort important from irrelevant information and focus on what matters. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Three Buckets of Knowledge

An exploration of what we can learn about history from three big buckets of human knowledge: inorganic, organic, and human history. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

How to Choose Your Next Book

Get the simple two-step filter that I use to help me select what to read to improve my total return on invested reading time. Basically, I combine two ideas that both work together. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Inversion and the Power of Avoiding Stupidity

Inversion is a powerful mental model to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success. Most of us tend to think one way about a problem: forward. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Arthur Schopenhauer on the Dangers of Clickbait

Arthur Schopenhauer Schopenhauer reminds us that the existence of words is no indication of their truth and offers timeless insights on clickbait. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Art of Being Alone

Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give … | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting

No topic provokes more unsolicited advice than parenting. The problem is, no matter how good the advice, it might not work for your child or your particular situation. Here are 5 principle-based models you can apply to any family, any situation, and any child. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

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

How do you test whether something is fair? The Veil of Ignorance helps remove cognitive biases and make fair choices affecting others. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Friction: The Force Holding You Back

One of the easiest ways to increase your value to an organization is to reduce the friction required to get you to do your job. You don't need to learn anything other than ... | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem

Baye’s theorem is a useful tool that helps us make more accurate predictions about the likelihood of potential outcomes. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Water (2005)

David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, this is water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Small Steps of Giant Leaps

One of the most beneficial skills you can learn in life is how to consistently put yourself in a good position. Strong positions are not an accident. Weak positions aren't bad luck.  | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Efficiency Is the Enemy

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

The Mindset Gap

It is easy to overestimate the role of money and underestimate the role of mindset. Often, we convince ourselves that if only we had the resources, we would apply the second mindset. But the second mindset isn't a luxury of the rich, it is a necessity to build wealth in the first … | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 1 year ago

Cognitive Overload

Highly successful people have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, which allows them to better focus their attention. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking

Peter Kaufman is one of the most successful businessmen of our time, and yet few people have ever heard of him. He’s the CEO of Glenair, an aerospace company based in California, and the editor of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book about Charlie Munger. This speech was to the Califo … | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Buffett Formula: Going to Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up

The Buffett Formula for getting smarter is simple but not easy. Warren Buffett combined the habits of reading and thinking to improve his mind. Here's how ... | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

First Principles tinking breaks down true understanding into building blocks we can reassemble. It turns out most of us don’t know as much as we think we do. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics

Most great thinkers have speculated about the kind of leadership that might give rise to a better society, analyzing it through what’s sometimes called a “normative” lens: What should we be doing? In Leviathan, for example, Thomas Hobbes argued for a single, absolute sovereign to … | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult Problems

Read this and learn how the mental model of thought experiment, helped people like Albert Einstein, Zeno, and Galileo solve difficult problems. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The single best interview question you can ask

Peter Thiel asks this one question when he interviews someone to determine their future. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Dave Packard's Simple Rules for Getting Along with Others (2013)

These 11 simple rules for getting along with others were first presented by Dave Packard at HP's second annual management conference in 1958. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The future of the Internet: Marc Andreessen [audio]

In this interview, Entrepreneur and Investor Marc Andreessen goes in-depth on a variety of lessons he’s learned from more than two decades in Silicon Valley, including the future of the Internet, how he assesses the judgment of startup founders, how he makes decisions with millio … | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Spacing Effect

We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against it. Find out how to use it here. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

No skill is more valuable than the ability to think. But how can we learn to think better? How can we avoid thinking poorly. Let's explore. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Daniel Kahneman’s Favorite Approach for Making Better Decisions

Pretending that a success or failure has happened—and looking back and inventing the details of why it happened—is one key to making better decisions. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Schopenhauer: On Reading and Books

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer offers a timeless meditation on reading, exploring what it means to read and whether it's a path to acquire wisdom. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything

The Feynman Technique is a simple method of learning that unlocks your potential and helps you learn anything. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The HP Way: Dave Packard on How to Operate a Company (2016)

In 1960 David Packard gave an informal speech to HP managers outlining his business philosophy. The timeless speech was not intended for publication. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2011)

This article explains the structure of scientific revolutions and how paradigm changes, usually come from significant shifts in the way we see problems. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Work Required to Have an Opinion

We all hold an opinion about almost everything, but how many of us do the work required to back up that opinion? Not many... | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

The Inevitable Failure of Organizational Planning (2010)

Herbert Simon explains that large organizations are plagued by a kind of Gresham's Law. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago

How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky

Learning to make smart decisions helps you get better results. This guide is packed with time-tested real world tools you can use today. | Continue reading


@fs.blog | 2 years ago