There are pivotal times in life, times when you re-examine your priorities, beliefs, and your life-trajectory. August 3rd, 2015, was one of those moments for me, because on that morning, I had a near-death biking accident, in Montauk, New York.
In 2013, I purchased a summer house in Montauk, in the Hither Hills area. We lived in New York at the time, and went to Montauk a lot during the summers, so it made sense. But in late 2014, we moved to Miami. Still, we decided we would keep the Montauk house. We loved everything about the quiet town of Montauk, from our house, to the beach, the restaurants, everything. Flying up to spend the summers there would be great.
In August 2015, after a three-hour flight and five-hour drive, we finally arrived in Montauk: myself, my wife, and my little daughter, who was then about one and a half. After quickly unpacking, we headed out to dinner, making grand plans for all the places we would go and things we would do for the rest of the month. But as the old cliche has it, “Tell God your plans, and watch Him laugh.”
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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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