What I Am Reading
The Power of the Marginal
“If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.”
The Tacit Knowledge Series
“Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’.
This series explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition.”
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What I Am Reading
Why the ‘paradox mindset’ is the key to success
Although paradoxes often trip us up, embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.
Revealed: British accents are the world’s sexiest
Sorry, France: in our latest global survey, accents from the UK swept the world off their feet
Why Do We See Dead People?
Humans have always sensed the ghosts of loved ones. It’s only in the last century that we convinced ourselves this was a problem
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What I Am Reading
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.
The Science of Wisdom
As it turns out, wisdom doesn’t vary only between people who read about hypothetical scenarios in a laboratory. Even the same person typically shows substantial variability over time. Several years back, researchers asked a group of Berliners to report their most challenging personal issue. Participants also reported how they reasoned about each challenge, including meta-cognitive strategies similar to those described above. When inspecting the results, scholars observed a peculiar pattern: for most characteristics, there was more variability within the same person over time than there was between people. In short, wisdom was highly variable from one situation to the next. The variability also followed systematic rules. It heightened when participants focused on close others and work colleagues, compared with cases when participants focused solely on themselves.
These studies reveal a certain irony: in those situations where we might care the most about behaving wisely, we’re least likely to do so. Is there a way to use evidence-based insights to counter this tendency?
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You’re more likely to be struck by lightning. You’re more likely to be eaten by sharks. You’re more likely to score a royal flush in your first hand of poker. And on and on it goes. Basically, it’s scientifically proven that playing the lottery is a waste of money. So... why do it?
Every week, I play the lottery, and I have for years. I don’t plan on breaking this habit, either, even though I know that it’s essentially statistically impossible for me to win, and so the $2 I spend is a loss from the get-go. I’ve gotten some strange looks from friends and others when they find out I play or notice the tickets in my wallet. People are often surprised, and in some cases, disapproving-- playing the lottery has something of a taboo about it!
But for me, it’s not about the odds that I might not win-- it’s about the fact that I definitely can’t win if I don’t play. Let me explain ….
