The benefits of reading are negated if you forget remember what you read. This article discusses a tested system to increase retention. Learn how to use active reading to remember more from books. | Continue reading
There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoyed mathematics class in school, and the other 98% of the population. According to mathematician Paul Lockhart, that's because we fail to treat math as an art. | Continue reading
Marginalia, those broken fragments of thought that appear scribbled in the margins of books , help us connect ideas, spur critical thinking, and remember more of what we're reading. | Continue reading
Marina Abramovic began her art career in the 1960s, starting with traditional painting, before moving into performance pieces in the early 1970s. Many of her pieces are iconic, and she continues to work all over the world.Here are some of her insights from her memoir that transce … | Continue reading
Marina Abramovic began her art career in the 1960s, starting with traditional painting, before moving into performance pieces in the early 1970s. Many of her pieces are iconic, and she continues to work all over the world.Here are some of her insights from her memoir that transce … | Continue reading
Before writing things down became an easy option, people trained themselves to recall information using mnemonic techniques. Building a memory palace is a proven ancient method anyone can use to achieve perfect recall. | Continue reading
To control the game, one tries to control as much of the board as possible. At the outset, using your pieces to seize the middle of the playing field is a great strategy, because it gives you the widest possible vantage point from which to control the movement of the other pieces … | Continue reading
We tend to judge the likelihood and significance of things based on how easily they come to mind. The more “available” a piece of information is to us, the more important it seems. The result is that we give greater weight to information we learned recently because a news article … | Continue reading
At Farnam Street, we aim to master the best of what other people have figured out. Not surprisingly, it’s quite a lot. The past is full of useful lessons that have much to teach us. Sometimes, we just need to remember what we’re looking for and why. | Continue reading
In Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar shares practical advice for people planning to embark on a career in the sciences—and curious people in general. Here, we summarize some of Medawar’s key insights. | Continue reading
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
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
The Great Mental Models project is the clearest way to change the way you see the world, avoid problems before they happen, and make better decisions. | Continue reading
When you’re stuck, you need to actively seek feedback. Having the right information helps you change your behavior. Here's how to get better feedback and reach your goals. | Continue reading
The wit and wisdom of Charlie Munger has influenced great minds. This article is a compendium of his speeches, transcripts, videos and more. | Continue reading
The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. Read on to learn how to use the OODA Lo … | Continue reading
In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler teaches us the four levels of reading to become a more effective reader. Learning how to read is more than just picking up a book and starting to read. | Continue reading
Avoiding bad decisions is just as important as making good ones. Knowing the warning signs and having a set of rules for your decision-making process limits the amount of luck you need to get good outcomes. | Continue reading
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
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
Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. According to poet David Whyte, the key to taking initiative and being proactive is viewing yourself as the captain of your own “voyage of w … | Continue reading
Things change as they scale, often drastically. This is true for living creatures and it’s especially true for social systems. Here’s how the dynamics of social groups change as the numbers do and why utopia doesn’t work. | Continue reading
The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota spent much of his career at MIT, where students adored him for his engaging, passionate lectures. In 1996, Rota gave a talk entitled “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” which contains valuable advice for making people pay atte … | Continue reading
There’s nothing wrong with hoping for the best. But the best-case scenario is rarely the one that comes to pass. Being realistic about what is likely to happen lets you better prepare for a spectrum of possible outcomes and gives you peace of mind. | Continue reading
The most powerful skill they don't teach you in school is how to say no. School is all about compliance. You're assigned work and expected to do it on time or face the consequences. So it's only natural that you never really learn how to say no. | Continue reading
When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible. | Continue reading
Memory is an intrinsic part of our life experience. It is critical for learning, and without memories we would have no sense of self. Understanding why some memories stick better than others, as well as accepting their fluidity, helps us reduce conflict and better appreciate just … | Continue reading
What made Charles Darwin a great scientific thinker? He followed a golden rule of objectivity. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett and others use the same idea. | Continue reading
The biologist E.O. Wilson has written a great little book on what being a scientist really means, and what the process is really like. | Continue reading
There are many benefits to good conversations but perhaps one of the best is that you can benefit from the lessons that others have paid for. | Continue reading
Across the board, we tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what happens on the worst day. | Continue reading
Career changes are big moves that come with stress and uncertainty. Here’s how mental models can move you in the right direction and get you the information you need to make good decisions. The result of using mental models is a new career that aligns with where you want to be. | Continue reading
One big challenge we all face in life is knowing when to explore new opportunities, and when to double down on existing ones. Explore vs exploit algorithms - and poetry - teach us that it’s vital to consider how much time we have, how we can best avoid regrets, and what we can le … | Continue reading
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 following recipes. That’s what Julia Child, “The French Chef”, did throughout her care … | Continue reading
If you’re trying to gain a rapid understanding of a new area, one of the most important things you can do is to identify the most common mistakes people make, then aim to avoid them. Here are some of the most predictable errors we tend to make when thinking about statistics. | Continue reading
When we look at a representation of reality, we can choose to either see it as descriptive, meaning it tells us what the world is currently like, or as prescriptive, meaning it tells us how the world should be. Descriptions teach us, but they also give us room to innovate. Prescr … | Continue reading
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 misrepresent shark attacks highlights how survivorship bias distorts reality in … | Continue reading
The late Harold Bloom, literary critic and professor, may well have been one of the most prolific readers of all time. Given that, Bloom was uniquely well positioned to answer the question of why we should read and how we should go about it. | Continue reading
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinkin … | Continue reading
Just because we’ve lost our way doesn’t mean that we are lost forever. In the end, it’s not the failures that define us so much as how we respond. | Continue reading
Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe. Here’s how the spiral of silence works and how we can discover what people really think. | Continue reading
When hiring a team, we tend to favor the geniuses who hatch innovative ideas, but overlook the butterflies, the crucial ones who share and implement them. Here’s why it’s important to be both smart AND social. *** In business, it’s never enough to have a great idea. For any innov … | Continue reading
While runaway cars and vengeful stitched-together humans may be the stuff of science fiction, technology really can take revenge on us. Seeing technology as part of a complex system can help us avoid costly unintended consequences. Here’s what you need to know about revenge effec … | Continue reading
Wisdom is earned, not given. When other people give us the answer, it belongs to them and not us. While we might achieve the outcome we desire, it comes from dependence, not insight. | Continue reading
Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to escape from that and encourage creativity? | Continue reading
In the search for happiness, we often confuse how something looks with how it’s likely to make us feel. This is especially true when it comes to our homes. If we want to maximize happiness, we need to prioritize experiences over appearances. | Continue reading
Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ November 10, 1990 Transcript I’m going to talk about “Self-Renewal.” One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount … | Continue reading