Farnam Street
Timeless lessons on decision making, thinking, and continuous improvement. Written by Shane Parrish.hinking, and continuous improvement.
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- 1,422 from 16 Jul 2009 to 22 Oct 2026
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2026 31
- The Science of Doing Your Best Work
- Ryan Serhant: How to Get People to Say Yes
- [Outliers] Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs
- Bill Ackman: The Biggest Fight of His Life
- Tobi Lütke: AI Agents, Better Decisions, and the Future of Work
- Steve Jobs in Exile
- Roblox CEO: How to Make Better Decisions by Fixing Yourself First
- The Mindset Behind Building a Great Little Business | Brad Jacobs
- [Outliers] John D. Rockefeller: The Principles Behind The Greatest Fortune in History
- Truth Over Feelings: Inside Opendoor’s Turnaround
- The Best Summary of Atlas Shrugged
- The Mindset That Unlocks Your Full Potential | Dr. Gio Valiante
- How to Repair and Nourish Your Gut | Dr. Giulia Enders
- Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley
- Proven, Better, New: Mark Pincus on the Rules of Innovation
- [Outliers] Chung Ju-yung: The Hyundai Founder Who Put a Country on His Back
- Winston Weinberg: Speed, Stress, and Better Decisions
- Greg Brockman: Inside the 72 Hours That Almost Killed OpenAI
- Mario Harik: Playing to Win
- Joe Liemandt: Alpha School and the Future of Education
- [Outliers] The Potato Billionaire | Harrison McCain
- Brookfield CEO Connor Teskey: AI Infrastructure, Data Centers, and the Future of Investing
- An Unlikely Empire | J.W. Marriott
- Inside the Mind of Robinhood Co-Founder Vlad Tenev
- [Outliers] Phil Knight: The Obsession That Built Nike
- Nicolai Tangen: The $2 Trillion Mind
- Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power
- [Outliers] Ray Kroc: How McDonald’s Took Over America
- Morgan Housel: Wealth is What You Have Minus What You Want
- [Outliers] The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking | Peter D. Kaufman
- James Clear: How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
2025 10
- Pierre Poilievre on the Role of Government, Freedom, and Affordability
- The Outlier Playbook: The Patterns Behind Enduring Success
- Be Your Best in 2026: The Most Important Lessons from The Knowledge Project (2025)
- [Outliers] Bernie Marcus: The Home Depot Story
- How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland
- [Outliers] Mary Kay Ash: The Greatest Saleswoman In History
- 7 Principles of Inner Excellence to Stay Calm Under Fire | Jim Murphy
- [Outliers] Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
- Ron Shaich: Lessons from Building Panera
- Ride the Wave
2024 2
2023 3
2022 19
- Lessons on Leadership: Michael Abrashoff’s Turnaround Playbook
- Let Go of the Learning Baggage
- Language: Why We Hear More Than Words
- Learning Through Play
- Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
- The Ultimate Productivity Hack is Focus
- Tit For Tat
- Reciprocity: Getting What You Give
- A Wandering Mind: How Travel Can Change the Way You Think
- Evaluating Information: Find the Signal in the Noise
- How To Spot Bad Science
- The Art of Being Alone
- Master Your Attention: Schopenhauer’s Strategy Against Clickbait
- 5 Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting
- Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem
- Math Makes Life Beautiful.
- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time
- The Small Steps of Giant Leaps
- Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult Problems
2021 26
- Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It
- How to Remember What You Read
- How Description Leads to Understanding
- Mirror Your Audience: Four Life Lessons From Performance Artist Marina Abramović
- The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe than Sorry?
- Seizing The Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
- The Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion
- How to Write Creative Fiction: Umberto Eco’s Four Rules
- Better Thinking & Incentives: Lessons From Shakespeare
- Advice for Young Scientists—and Curious People in General
- The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right
- Efficiency is the Enemy
- The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best
- What Information Do You Need in Order to Change?
- John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of Equality
- The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions
- Avoiding Bad Decisions
- Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
- The Feynman Learning Technique
- Solve Problems Before They Happen by Developing an “Inner Sense of Captaincy”
- 12 Life Lessons From Mathematician and Philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota
- The Best-Case Outcomes Are Statistical Outliers
- The High Price of Mistrust
- Why You Should Practice Failure
- We Are What We Remember
- “Jootsing”: The Key to Creativity
2020 39
- The Best of The Knowledge Project 2020
- You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day
- Explore Or Exploit? How To Choose New Opportunities
- Mental Models for Career Changes
- How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking
- Common Probability Errors to Avoid
- Descriptions Aren’t Prescriptions
- What Sharks Can Teach Us About Survivorship Bias
- Why Read? Advice From Harold Bloom
- Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
- Being Smart is Not Enough
- The Spiral of Silence
- When Technology Takes Revenge
- A Primer on Algorithms and Bias
- Aim For What’s Reasonable: Leadership Lessons From Director Jean Renoir
- The Observer Effect: Seeing Is Changing
- The Ingredients For Innovation
- Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy
- Job Interviews Don’t Work
- Why You Feel At Home In A Crisis
- Stop Preparing For The Last Disaster
- Coordination Problems: What It Takes to Change the World
- When Safety Proves Dangerous
- Mental Models For a Pandemic
- Rethinking Fear
- Bad Arguments and How to Avoid Them
- Muscular Bonding: How Dance Made Us Human
- Why We Focus on Trivial Things: The Bikeshed Effect
- Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
- Unlikely Optimism: The Conjunctive Events Bias
- What You Truly Value
- Preserving Optionality: Preparing for the Unknown
- Using Models to Stay Calm in Charged Situations
- Finite and Infinite Games: Two Ways to Play the Game of Life
- Prisoner’s Dilemma: What Game Are you Playing?
- The Illusory Truth Effect: Why We Believe Fake News, Conspiracy Theories and Propaganda
- The Positive Side of Shame
- The Inner Game: Why Trying Too Hard Can Be Counterproductive
- Is Vulnerability a Choice?
2019 39
- The Top 5 Episodes of The Knowledge Project 2019
- The Best of Farnam Street 2019
- The Gift of Hope
- Farnam Street’s 2019 Annual Letter to Readers
- Influence, Gender, and Defying Social Conventions with Friedrich Nietzsche and Jane Austen
- Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making
- Survivorship Bias: The Tale of Forgotten Failures
- How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture
- Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World
- Signaling: The Language Peacocks, Gazelles, and Humans All Speak
- Illusion of Transparency: Your Poker Face is Better Than You Think
- How to Use Occam’s Razor Without Getting Cut
- Ayn Rand on Why Philosophy Matters
- Focused and Diffuse: Two Modes of Thinking
- The Best of Goethe’s Aphorisms
- Externalities: Why We Can Never Do “One Thing”
- The Evolutionary Benefit of Friendship
- The Power of Questions
- The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness
- The Danger of Comparing Yourself to Others
- Jeff Bezos: Big Things Start Small
- Resonance: How to Open Doors For Other People
- Gates’ Law: How Progress Compounds and Why It Matters
- Renaissance Paragone: An Ancient Tactic for Getting the Most From People
- The Lies We Tell
- The Anatomy of a Great Decision
- The Importance of Working With “A” Players
- In the face of adversity, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman?
- It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets
- The Stormtrooper Problem
- An Investment Approach That Works
- Learning Community AMA: James Clear
- The Distrust of Intellectual Authority
- Compounding Knowledge
- Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient
- Yuval Noah Harari: Why We Dominate the Earth
- Samuel Andrews: The Man With the Billion Dollar Ego
- How to Do Great Things
- How Not to Be Stupid
2018 42
- The Best of Farnam Street 2018
- The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention
- Farnam Street’s 2018 Annual Letter to Readers
- Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference
- Entropy: The Hidden Force Making Life Complicated
- There’s Seldom Any Traffic on the High Road
- Defensive Decision Making: What IS Best vs. What LOOKS Best
- The Magic Behind Bezos and Buffett: Things That Don’t Change
- The Surprising Power of The Long Game
- Hemingway, a Lost Suitcase, and the Recipe for Stupidity
- How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape our Reality
- Sex on the Beach with Montaigne and Descartes
- Winner Takes it All: How Markets Favor the Few at the Expense of the Many
- The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters
- The Disproportional Power of Anecdotes
- Why Honor Matters
- Strategy vs. Tactics: Why the Difference Matters
- Double Loop Learning: Download New Skills and Information into Your Brain
- Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work
- Pain Plus Reflection Equals Progress
- Deductive vs Inductive Reasoning: Make Smarter Arguments, Better Decisions, and Stronger Conclusions
- The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right
- The Value of Probabilistic Thinking: Spies, Crime, and Lightning Strikes
- Inertia: The Force That Holds the Universe Together
- Reversible and Irreversible Decisions
- My Berkshire Hathaway Reflections
- What is First Principles Thinking?
- Break the Chain: Stop Being a Slave
- So Two Stoics Walk Into a Bar…
- The Terror of Totalitarianism Explained
- The Difference Between Speed and Velocity: Getting Stuff Done
- Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It
- Friction: The Hidden Force Holding You Back
- The Law of Unintended Consequences: Shakespeare, Cobra Breeding, and a Tower in Pisa
- Your First Thought Is Rarely Your Best Thought: Lessons on Thinking
- Pyrrhic Victory: Winning the Battle, Losing the War
- Making the Most of Second Chances
- Bayes and Deadweight: Using Statistics to Eject the Deadweight From Your Life
- OODA LOOP: What You Can Learn from Fighter Pilots About Making Fast and Accurate Decisions
- Poker, Speeding Tickets, and Expected Value: Making Decisions in an Uncertain World
- Complexity Bias: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple
- Intuition vs. Rationality: Where One Stops the Other Starts
2017 93
- Farnam Street’s 2017 Annual Letter to Readers
- The Narratives of History: Applying Lessons from the Past
- Making Compassionate Decisions: The Role of Empathy in Decision Making
- Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You
- 29 of the Most Gifted and Highly Recommended Books
- The Code of Hammurabi: The Best Rule To Manage Risk
- The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled
- Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results
- The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness
- How to Remember What You Read
- The Art of Having an Informed Opinion
- Finding Truth in History
- Loops of Progress, or How Modern Are You?
- The Power of Incentives: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior
- Maya Angelou on Living
- Why You Shouldn’t Slog Through Books
- The Difference Between Open-Minded and Closed-Minded People
- Complex Adaptive Cities
- Reciprocation Bias
- The Wrong Side of Right
- The Value of Play As a Driver of Innovation
- The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Actions Unleash Global Consequences
- Turning Pro: The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals
- How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know
- Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen
- Attrition Warfare: When Even Winners Lose
- Zero — Invented or Discovered?
- The Trojan Horse: When True Intents Are Concealed
- Human Misjudgment and the American Revolution
- Active Listening: The Master Key to Effective Communication
- Marc Garneau on the Future of Transportation
- Activation Energy: Why Getting Started Is the Hardest Part
- Counterinsurgency: Fighting Back
- All Models Are Wrong
- Mutually Assured Destruction: When Not to Play
- People Don’t Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership
- Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life
- Leverage: Gaining Disproportionate Strength
- Understanding the Limitations of Maps
- Proximate vs Root Causes: Keep Digging to Find the Answer
- Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence
- Galilean Relativity and the Invasion of Scotland
- Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Freedom
- Cleopatra and Self-Preservation
- Emergence and Power — Four 13th-Century Sisters Who Became Queens
- Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: Creating a Holistic View of the World Through A Web of Interdisciplinary Knowledge
- Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You
- Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on The Tension Between Reason and the Silence Required for Thinking
- General James Mattis: Arm Yourself With Books
- Warnings From Sleep: Nightmares and Protecting The Self
- What We Can Learn From The Laboratory of Literature: Two Great Thinkers
- Get Smart: Three Ways of Thinking to Make Better Decisions and Achieve Results
- Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet and the Struggles to create the Newtonian Revolution
- Get More Done By Working Less
- The Science of Sleep: Regulating Emotions and the 24 Hour Mind
- The Metagame: Think One Step Ahead
- The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
- Do Algorithms Beat Us at Complex Decision Making?
- Rich Thinking Versus Poor Thinking: Why it Matters
- Competition, Cooperation, and the Selfish Gene
- Scientific Concepts We All Ought To Know
- Friedrich Nietzsche on Making Something Worthwhile of Ourselves
- The Shortness of Time
- Why the Printing Press and the Telegraph Were as Impactful as the Internet
- Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Why The Best Thing To Give is Yourself
- Richard Restak: Mozart’s Memorization of Miserere and Improving your Memory with Visual Chess
- Blog Posts, Book Reviews, and Abstracts: On Shallowness
- Tyranny, Democracy, and the Polity: Aristotle’s Politics
- Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More
- Memory and the Printing Press
- Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on the Relationship between Vulnerability and Love
- Who’s in Charge of Our Minds? The Interpreter
- A Cascade of Sand: Complex Systems in a Complex Time
- Why Cross-Pollinating Your Work, Works
- Tribal Leadership: The Key To Building Great Teams
- Survival of the Fittest: Groups versus Individuals
- John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?
- Are Great Men and Women a Product of Circumstance?
- Inside a Miracle: The 1980 U.S. Hockey Team
- Krista Tippett: On Generous Listening and Asking Better Questions
- Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive By
- Kristin Dombek: The Selfishness of Others
- Racking The Shotgun: Quickly Sorting Those Who Know from Those Who Act Like They Know
- Edward Deci: On the Relationship Between Need Fulfillment and Motivation
- Under One Roof: What Can we Learn from the Mayo Clinic?
- The Most Respectful Interpretation
- A Simple Exercise To Read The Emotions of Others
- Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Art of Living
- Principles for an Age of Acceleration
- Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
- Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
- George Marshall’s 1920 Letter on True Leadership
- Making a Change: One Small Step
2016 174
- The 16 Best Books of 2016
- Farnam Street’s 2016 Annual Letter to Readers
- The Self-Education of Louis L’Amour
- Epistemology: How do you know that you know what you know?
- Leaders and Followers, Planners and Doers
- Immigration, Extinction, and Island Equilibrium
- Fiction that Influences and Inspires
- Embrace the Mess: The Upside of Disorder
- Batesian Mimicry: Why Copycats Are Successful
- The Probability Distribution of the Future
- Book Recommendations by the Legendary Washington Post CEO Don Graham
- The Founder Principle: A Wonderful Idea from Biology
- Why Great Writers Write
- Ethos, Logos and Pathos: The Structure of a Great Speech
- The Green Lumber Fallacy: The Difference between Talking and Doing
- Creating a Growth Mindset in the Workplace
- Frozen Accidents: Why the Future Is So Unpredictable
- Remembering More of Everything: The Memory Palace
- What Biology Enables, Culture Forbids
- Using Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World
- Becoming an Expert: The Elements of Success
- Breaking the Rules: Moneyball Edition
- Words Like Loaded Pistols: Wartime Rhetoric
- A Short List of Books for Doing New Things
- Simple Rules for Business Strategy
- Moving the Finish Line: The Goal Gradient Hypothesis
- Choosing your Choice Architect(ure)
- How To Mentally Overachieve — Charles Darwin’s Reflections On His Own Mind
- Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More
- Jared Diamond: How to Get Rich
- Michael Pollan’s Simple Rules for Eating
- At Some Point, You Have to Eat The Broccoli
- Ken Iverson: The Cure for the Common MBA
- A Year of Books: 23 Book Recommendations from Mark Zuckerberg
- The Island of Knowledge: Science and the Meaning of Life
- The Need for Biological Thinking to Solve Complex Problems
- The Chessboard Fallacy
- What Books Would You Recommend Someone Read to Improve their General Knowledge of the World?
- What Are You Doing About It? Reaching Deep Fluency with Mental Models
- Bias from Disliking/Hating
- Gradually Getting Closer to the Truth
- Daniel Kahneman on Human Gullibility
- Lee Kuan Yew’s Rule
- Bias from Liking/Loving: Why We Comply With Those We Love
- A Parable of Contentment and Happiness
- Robert Moses and the Oxygen of Pure Competence
- Mental Model: Bias from Conjunction Fallacy
- The Inner Scorecard: How Warren Buffett Mastered Life
- Isaac Watts and the Improvement of the Mind
- Commitment and Consistency Bias
- The Many Ways our Memory Fails Us (Part 3)
- The Fundamental Attribution Error: Why Predicting Behavior is so Hard
- 20 Rules for a Knight: A Timeless Guide from 1483
- The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 2)
- Andy Grove and the Value of Facing Reality
- Multiplicative Systems: Understanding The Power of Multiplying by Zero
- What’s So Significant About Significance?
- The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 1)
- Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy
- Daniel Pink on Incentives and the Two Types of Motivation
- Alex Bellos: Every Number Tells a Story
- Don’t Let Your (Technology) Tools Use You
- Mental Models: Getting the World to Do the Work for You
- Henry Ford and the Actual Value of Education
- Daniel Dennett: Tools for Critical Thinking
- Is Our Faulty Memory Really So Bad?
- Hares, Tortoises, and the Trouble with Genius
- Fun with Logical Fallacies
- Our Genes and Our Behavior
- J.K. Rowling On People’s Intolerance of Alternative Viewpoints
- A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman
- Richard Feynman on Teaching Math to Kids and the Lessons of Knowledge
- Warren Berger’s Three-Part Method for More Creativity
- The Four Tools of Discipline
- Why Are No Two People Alike? (Part 2)
- Atul Gawande and the Mistrust of Science
- Why Are No Two People Alike? (Part 1)
- Homeostasis and Why We Backslide
- Eric Hoffer and the Creation of Fanatical Mass Movements
- Lee Kuan Yew on the Proper Balance Between Competitiveness and Equality
- 7 Things I Learned in Architecture School
- Ego is the Enemy: The Legend of Genghis Khan
- George Washington’s Practical Self-Education
- Life Advice: Be Careful of Life Advice
- Sol Price: A Fiduciary Relationship with the Customer
- The Value of Grey Thinking
- Ben Franklin and the Virtues and Ills of Pursuing Luxury
- Architect Matthew Frederick on the Three Levels of Knowing
- John Seabrook and the Modern Song Machine
- 12 Things Lee Kuan Yew Taught Me About the World
- Gary Taubes and the Exquisite Balancing Act of Getting it Right
- Why Fiddling With Prices Doesn’t Work
- Civilization and its Fundamental Passions
- Eager to Be Wrong
- Incentives Gone Wrong: Cobras, Severed Hands, and Shea Butter
- Francis Bacon and the Four Idols of the Mind
- The HP Way: Dave Packard on How to Operate a Company
- The Difference Between Love and Tolerance
- Lewis Thomas on our Social Nature and “Getting the Air Right”
- How (Supposedly) Rational People Make Decisions
- Is Human Progress Real or An Illusion?
- Agnes Martin on The Secret of Happiness
- B.H. Liddell Hart and the Study of Truth and History
- Paul Graham on Free Speech, Suburbia, Getting Rich, and Nerds
- Seneca on Letting the Eminent Dead Guide You
- Don’t Get “Should” Mixed Up with “Is”
- How The Four Laws of Ecology Help You Solve Problems
- Stop Crashing Planes: Charlie Munger’s Six-Element System
- Mattering Instinct
- Important Truths about Population Growth
- Learning From Your Mistakes … When You Win
- Luck Meets Perseverance: The Creation of IBM’s Competitive Advantage
- An Important Life Lesson we can Learn from Sailors
- Avoiding Falling Victim to The Narrative Fallacy
- The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
- Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform
- Roger Fisher on a Better Way to Negotiate, Part 2
- Ten Words That Forever Change How You View Leadership
- The Road Less Travelled: The Source of Many of the Ills of Mankind
- Mortimer Adler on Understanding What You Read
- Spring 2016 Reading List — More Curated Recommendations For a Curious Mind
- Can We Reason Our Way to a Better Morality?
- How Clever Leaders Overcome More Talented and Better Funded Competitors
- Carl Braun’s Writing Lessons for Clear Thinking and Productive Communication
- Towards a Greater Synthesis: Steven Pinker on How to Apply Science to the Humanities
- Elon Musk and the Question of Overconfidence
- The Iconic Think Different Apple Commercial Narrated by Steve Jobs
- A Journey of Self Discovery
- What Can We Learn From the Prolific Mr. Asimov?
- Letters to a Prime Minister
- Roger Fisher on a Better Way to Negotiate, Part 1
- The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny
- Investing: The Rules of the Road
- Multitasking: Giving the World an Advantage it Shouldn’t Have
- Tiny Gains. Massive Results.
- The Distorting Power of Incentives
- What History Teaches us about The Concentration of Wealth
- Unlock the Power of Effective Writing: Insights from Steven Pinker
- 3 Famous Writers on the Relationship Between Reading and Writing
- There Are No Called Strikes and Other Lessons You Learn in Business School
- The False Allure of a “Natural State” of Man
- How to Provide Great Feedback When You’re Not In Charge
- When Breath Becomes Air: What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death?
- James Cash Penney and the Golden Rule
- The Boundaries Between Science and Religion: Alan Lightman on Different Kinds of Knowledge
- Creating Effective Incentive Systems: Ken Iverson on the Principles that Unleash Human Potential
- Isaac Asimov: Integrity over Honesty
- Carol Dweck: When a Fixed Mindset is Better than a Growth Mindset
- Shane Parrish on Mental Models, Decision Making, Charlie Munger, Farnam Street, And More
- The Three Buckets of Knowledge
- Too Busy to Pay Attention
- Elon Musk on Regulators
- Friedrich Nietzsche: On Love And Hate
- Charlie Munger on the Medical System
- Merchants Of Doubt: How The Tobacco Strategy Obscures the Realities of Global Warming
- Recognizing Our Flaws is The Beginning of Wisdom
- Why Micromanaging Kills Corporate Culture
- Alignment: The Key to Success Nobody Ever Taught You
- To Sacrifice the Joy of Life is to Miss the Point
- Montaigne’s Rule for Reading: The Promiscuous Pursuit of Pleasure
- Karl Popper: The Line Between Science and Pseudoscience
- The Best Way to Get Smarter? Learn to Read the Right Way.
- What Can Chain Letters Teach us about Natural Selection?
- Need to Improve your Relations with Others? Start by Getting Human Nature Right
- Yuval Noah Harari on Why Humans Dominate the Earth: Myth-Making
- Nick Hornby Reminds us Why We Love Books (Sometimes)
- Maria Konnikova on How we Get Conned
- How Darwin Thought: The Golden Rule of Thinking
- Confidence and Validity
- The Difference Between Truth and Honesty: What Law School Teaches us About Insight, Logic, and Thinking
- Religion and History: Will Durant on the Role of Religion and Morality
- Culture Eats Strategy: Nucor’s Ken Iverson on Building a Different Kind of Company
- The Accidental Universe
- Andy Benoit: Exploiting Unrecognized Simplicity
2015 167
- Just Twenty-Five Pages a Day
- The Best of Farnam Street 2015
- Gary Taubes on What Really Makes Us Fat
- Farnam Street’s 2015 Annual Letter to Readers
- Steven Pinker: What a Broad Education Should Entail
- Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters
- E.O. Wilson on Becoming a Great Scientist
- Dan Ariely on How and Why We Cheat
- Mindfulness versus Concentration
- Three Filters Needed to Think Through Problems
- The Two Sides of Seneca and A Lesson on Human Fallibility
- Biases and Blunders
- Knowledge Makes Everything Simpler
- Richard Feynman on Refusing an Honorary Degree, Being Driven, and Understanding his Circle of Competence
- Peter Thiel on the End of Hubris and the Lessons from the Internet Bubble of the Late 90s
- Three Fundamental Activities of Mindfulness
- The Effect of Scale in Social Science, or Why Utopia Doesn’t Work
- The Best Non-Fiction Books of 2015: The Year of the Biography
- The 10 Qualities of Creative Leaders
- Albert Bandura on Acquiring Self-Efficacy and Personal Agency
- Rendez-Vous with Art: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Art
- Cargo Cult Science: Richard Feynman On Believing What Isn’t True
- The 2015 Farnam Street Members Book List
- How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
- The Single Best Interview Question You Can Ask
- Listening and the Learning Lens
- How People Make Big Decisions
- A Visual History of Human Knowledge
- Stronger: Developing Personal Resilience and Becoming Antifragile
- The Map Is Not the Territory
- Why Early Decisions Have the Greatest Impact and Why Growing too Much is a Bad Thing
- Lifelong Learning
- Emilie Wapnick: Why Some of us Don’t Have One True Calling
- The Creative Process in 10 Acts
- The Simplest Way to Achieve Simplicity is Through Thoughtful Reduction
- To Learn, Retrieve
- Charlie Munger: 2008 DuBridge Lecture (Transcript)
- The 11 Essential Attitudes for Meditation
- Bias from Self-Interest — Self Deception and Denial to Reduce Pain or Increase Pleasure
- Peter Thiel: Zero To One
- The Biological Bases of Human Resilience
- The Physics of Relationships: Going Positive and Going First
- The Reasons We Work
- Are You an Outsider Trying To Change A Broken System?
- Hunter S. Thompson on Living versus Existing
- The Four States of Mind
- The Meaning of History
- The Psychology of Risk and Reward
- Why We Choke
- Will Durant: The Age of Play
- Henry David Thoreau on Success
- 11 Misconceptions about Meditation
- The Role of Race in History
- William McKnight: The Basic Rule of Management that Propelled 3M
- Keeping Things Simple and Tuning out Folly
- Focusing Illusions
- The Pursuit of Worldly Wisdom
- Charlie Munger on Avoiding Computers
- The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test
- Henry David Thoreau on Reading Deliberately
- Meditation: Why Bother?
- Bias from Association: Why We Shoot the Messenger
- Making Decisions in a Complex Adaptive System
- Three Lessons of Biological History
- In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
- The Busy Person’s Guide to Thinking
- A Meditation on Reading
- Mental Model: Misconceptions of Chance
- Reads for the Curious Mind
- The Wisdom of Seneca: A Lawyer’s Advice For Life In The Fast Lane
- Attentional Blink
- Books Everyone Should Read on Psychology and Behavioral Economics
- The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership: Classical Wisdom for Modern Leaders
- Rory Sutherland Offers 4 Interesting Reads
- Billy Beane on Making Better Decisions, Challenging Entrenched Thinking, and Avoiding Biases
- How Situations Influence Decisions
- Regression Toward the Mean: An Introduction with Examples
- Ten Pairs of Opposite Traits That Creative People Exhibit
- Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
- Turning Towards Failure
- Winifred Gallagher On Living a Focused Life
- How David Allen increased Drew Carey’s Productivity
- The Wisdom of Crowds and The Expert Squeeze
- David Whyte on The Three Marriages of Work, Self, and Relationship
- Garrett Hardin: The Other Side of Expertise
- The Three Essential Properties of the Engineering Mind-Set
- Why it’s easier to describe “what makes us happy” than answer the question “what is happiness?”
- 13 Practical Ideas That Have Helped Me Make Better Decisions
- Stress Management
- A Guide to Meditation
- 40 Books that Improve your Ability to Make Decisions
- Aristotle on Time
- The Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer
- The Power of Full Engagement: The Four Energy Management Principles That Drive Performance
- Carl Sagan: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”
- Do Something Syndrome: When Movement Trumps Results
- The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
- Reading a Book is a Conversation Between You and the Author
- A Brief History of the To-Do List
- Marshall McLuhan: The Here And Now
- The Inside View and Making Better Decisions
- Roald Dahl’s Heartbreaking Letter About Losing his Daughter in 1962
- Elon Musk on How to Tell if People Are Lying
- Happiness: A Philosopher’s Guide
- How Warren Buffett Keeps up with a Torrent of Information
- Exercise as a Tool to Manage Stress
- Nassim Taleb: How to Not be a Sucker From the Past
- Stephen Hawking Explains The Origin of the Universe
- Kyle Bass: How Freediving Enables Better Decision Making
- A Successful Businessperson Has to Learn to Say No
- Overconfidence: How to Fail Spectacularly
- The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us
- Stephen King Shares His (Long) Reading List
- The Last Thing We Need Right Now is a Vision Statement
- David Foster Wallace: The Mortality Paradox
- Miracle Grow for Your Brain
- The Reasons We Deny Luck
- How Successful People Increase Productivity
- David Foster Wallace on The Moral Clarity of the Immature
- Seymour Schulich on Deals, Business, Decisions and Life
- Six Common Strategy Traps
- Andy Warhol: Don’t Make a Problem of your Problems, How a Person Gets Disciplined, and The Value of Time on Values
- When Things Go Wrong: The Warren Buffett Way to Handle Problems
- Elon Musk: A Framework for Thinking
- Ray Dalio: Open-Mindedness And The Power of Not Knowing
- Improving Your Luck
- The Mind’s Search Algorithm: Sorting Mental Models
- Bruce Lee: The Four Basic Philosophical Approaches
- Seuss-isms: A Guide to Life for Those Just Starting Out and Those Already on Their Way
- Wired for Culture
- Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
- Developing a Mental Framework for Effective Thinking
- Vincent van Gogh on Color
- Produce More by Removing More: The Disciplined Pursuit of Essentialism
- The Tension Created By Stretch Goals
- Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets
- Andy Warhol on Beauty
- What A Rembrandt Can Teach you about Software and Programmers
- Cognitive Exhaustion: Resting Your Mental Muscle
- Ben Horowitz: The Struggle
- Vincent van Gogh on Why Never Learning How to Paint Helped
- Fooled By Randomness: My Notes
- A Plunge and Squish View of the Mind
- Albert Einstein on Education and the Secret to Learning
- The Art of Stillness
- Lan Leav’s Beautiful Poem: Soul Mates
- Vincent van Gogh Writes a Letter on the Three Stages of Love
- A Simple Way to Improve the Pro-Con List to Make Better Decisions
- The Peter Principle and the Law of Crappy People
- The Nine Primary Tactics Used to Influence Others
- Atul Gawande: The Building Industry’s Strategy for Getting Things Right in Complexity
- Marcus Aurelius: You Have One Life To Live
- Andy Warhol on Love and Sex
- Real vs. Simulated Memories
- Vincent van Gogh on the Two Types of Idlers
- Remember Not to Trust Your Memory
- Frederick W. Taylor: Time Management Skills
- The Difference Between Good And Bad Organizations
- The Books That Influenced Edward O. Wilson
- How Play Enriches Our Creative Capacity
- Elon Musk on How To Build Knowledge
- The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
- Vincent van Gogh on How To Live
- The Necessity of Marginalia
- What’s Accomplished in Conversation?
- Richard Feynman: The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something
- Bruce Lee on Self Regulation versus External Regulation
2014 223
- Bruce Lee on Self-Actualization
- The Ghost of Christmas Past: A Look At the History of Christmas
- The Relationship Between Design and Planning
- Ursula K. Le Guin on The Human Spirit
- Sifting the Essential from the Non-Essential
- Learned Helplessness
- Albert Einstein to Marie Curie: Haters Gonna Hate
- Best Books for Investors: A Short Shelf
- Giving up Your Best Loved Ideas and Starting Over
- Marie Kondo: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
- Patagonia: The Art of Telling a Beautiful Story
- Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage
- The Difference Between Losing and Being Beaten
- The Surprising Books That Billionaires, Chess Prodigies, Performance Coaches, and Bestselling Authors Recommend
- Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story
- The Powerful Predictor Behind Successful Relationships
- Books for Schools That Need Them
- Charles Darwin — Natural Selection was like Confessing a Murder
- Eight Ways to Say No With Grace and Style
- How Do People Get New Ideas?
- Building a Business and Making Your Mark
- Ideas Are Not Singular
- Charles Dickens to The Times — I Stand Astounded and Appalled
- Elon Musk Recommends 12 Books that Changed his Life
- Andy Warhol on Loneliness
- Tiny Beautiful Things
- David Foster Wallace: The Future of Writing In the Age of Information
- Charlie Munger: Adding Mental Tools to Your Toolbox
- Peter Thiel Recommends 7 Reads
- Four Reasons Why Plato Matters
- The Ten Pillars of Cutthroat Zen
- Craig Callender: Introducing Time
- John Steinbeck on Love
- What Matters Most
- Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish: The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin
- The Keys to Happiness
- How to be 10% Happier
- Brené Brown on The Difference Between Guilt and Shame
- No Risky Chances: The Conversation That Matters Most
- To Give or Take? The Surprising Science Behind Success
- What Book has the Most Page-for-Page Wisdom?
- Google and Combinatorial Innovation
- Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story
- E.B. White’s Beautiful Letter to Someone Who Lost Faith in Humanity
- David Foster Wallace on Argumentative Writing and Nonfiction
- 10 Principles to Live an Antifragile Life
- Win Without Fighting: 10 Secrets to Persuasive Communication
- Edward Hess, Interview No. 6
- The Glass Cage: Automation and US
- The Art of Roughhousing
- Marcel Proust: Imminent Death Reminds us that Life is Beautiful
- What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
- Harper Lee’s Letter to Oprah Winfrey on Reading and Loving Books
- Your Response to Mistakes Defines You
- The Darwin Economy – Why Smith’s Invisible Hand Breaks Down
- Summary: Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
- The History of Cognitive Overload
- Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability
- The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
- The Education of a Value Investor: A Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
- Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before Saying YES to a New Commitment
- The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge
- Seneca on The One Thing Nature Loans us That we Cannot Repay
- Maya Angelou on Haters, Life, Reading, and Love
- Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
- What Is Meditation?
- Neil deGrasse Tyson: Your Ego and the Cosmic Perspective
- Seneca on Wisdom
- John Keats on the Quality That Formed a Man of Achievement: Negative Capability
- Dead Poets Society
- A Lesson in Friendship
- Lincoln on Leadership
- What makes Warren Buffett a great investor? Intelligence or Discipline?
- Steve Jobs on Creativity
- Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Journalists, and Others
- Marcus Aurelius: Debts and Lessons
- Henry Miller on Turning 80, Fighting Evil, And Why Life is the Best Teacher
- Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve
- Habit Stacking: 17 Small Productivity Habits
- Henry Miller on The Relationship Between Friendship and Aging
- The Common Pattern To Procrastination
- 12 Books Every Investor Should Read
- What Makes a Genius?
- Alan Watts: Why Modern Civilization is a Vicious Circle
- Two Forms of Human Motivation: Gain And Pain
- Using Language to Change How We Think
- Harold Macmillan: The Fragility of Memory
- John Locke’s Method of Organizing Common Place Books
- Paying for Outcomes
- Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
- Michel Foucault on the Panopticon Effect
- Commonplace Books: Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
- The Notebooks of Paul Klee
- Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
- The Six Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer
- Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
- Seneca on Gathering Ideas And Combinatorial Creativity
- Claude Shannon: The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels
- The Uses Of Being Wrong
- Sir William Osler: A Way of Life
- Forget The “To-Do” List, You Need A ‘Stop Doing’ List
- French Nobility And The Origins of Modern Culture
- Charlie Munger on the Value of Thinking Backward and Forward
- An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day And Finding Focus
- The Role of a Critic
- Ruth Chang: How to Make Hard Choices
- 9 Habits You Need to Stop Now
- Dan Gilbert: Why do we make decisions our future selves regret?
- Five Simple Notions that Solve Problems
- Warren Buffett on Scorecards, Investing, Friends, and the Family Motto
- Charles Bukowski: An Argument Against Censorship
- Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance
- The Art of Winning An Argument
- The Simple Problem Einstein Couldn’t Solve … At First
- Stephen Cave: The Four Stories we tell Ourselves About Death
- Epictetus on our Attachment to our Own Interest
- Maya Angelou: The Most Important Virtue
- Miracles Happen — The Simple Heuristic That Saved 150 Lives
- Charlie Munger: Book Recommendations That will Make you Smarter
- Certainty Is an Illusion
- Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
- 10 Life Lessons From a Navy SEAL
- The Skills of Leonardo Da Vinci
- Standing Up for Freedom: Kurt Vonnegut’s Unyielding Defense Against Book Censorship
- Douglas Adams on our Reactions to Technology Over Time
- The Ethics of Business
- Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance
- The Stoic Way of Life
- Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life
- Eudora Welty to The New Yorker: The best job application ever
- Sol LeWitt on the Power of Doing
- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
- The Best way to Improve Your Performance at Almost Anything
- Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom
- Work in Pulses
- A Philosophy of Walking: Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant on Walking
- Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
- A System for Remembering What You Read
- Three (Underrated) Reasons for Berkshire Hathaway’s Success
- Turning Adversity Into Advantage
- Einstein: The World As I See It
- Ernest Hemingway on Writing
- 5 Life Changing Books
- Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
- Gabriel García Márquez : 1982 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
- Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Acceptance Speech on Working Alone
- Einstein on The Essential Feature of Productive Thought
- The Heart of Humanity
- An Introduction to Complex Adaptive Systems
- How Complex Systems Fail
- The Stoic Reading List: Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and More
- the WAR of ART and the Unlived Life
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- The Best Summary of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- The Deliberative President
- The Ability To Focus And Make The Best Move When There Are No Good Moves
- The “Ink Spot” Strategy That Propels Wal-Mart And Counterinsurgency
- The Default-Thinking Method of Problem Solving
- The Art and Science of Doing Nothing
- A Definition of Antifragile and its Implications
- Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses
- A Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman
- How to Succeed in Sales: Insights from Daniel Pink’s “To Sell is Human”
- Average Is Over: Why The Skills Required For Great Jobs Are Changing
- 16 Leadership Lessons from a Four Star General
- Socrates and the Search For Wisdom
- David Foster Wallace: Five Common Word Usage Mistakes
- Leonard Mlodinow: The Three Laws of Probability
- A Few General Principles Associated With Wise Behavior
- Sensemaking as a Complement to Default Thinking
- Brené Brown: Your Critics Aren’t Always The Ones Who Count
- William Blake — Heaven and Hell
- Max Bazerman Offers Books for Leaders
- True Grit: What an Olympic Snowboarder, an A-list Actor and Finland Can Teach Us About Building Resilience
- Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
- Nassim Taleb on the Notion of Alternative Histories
- Hooked — How Companies Create Habit Forming Products
- 10 Ways to Get Smarter, Be More Productive, and Do Everything with Zero Effort
- Richard Feynman: The Universe in a Glass of Wine
- Contagious: 6 Reasons Things Catch On
- 5 Short Reads to Expand Your Mind
- The Cookie Monster Knows More About Willpower Than You
- What Is Complexity?
- Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules For Reading
- Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
- Bird By Bird: Anne Lamott offers Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- Angela Duckworth on Why Grit Matters More than IQ
- Falsification: How to Destroy Incorrect Ideas
- Decision Journal: Template and Example Included
- Slow Down and Think
- Goal Induced Blindness
- The Structure of a Story
- Chris Hadfield on Life, the Universe and What’s Really Out There
- Passionate Prose: Balzac’s Love Letter
- Bertrand Russell: Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish
- What Is Love?
- The Minimum Effective Dose: Why Less is More
- Abraham Lincoln’s Last Public Address
- The Man Who Never Quit
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
- The Optimism Bias: Imagining A Positive Future
- Talent Is Persistence
- My Life In Middlemarch
- 26 Musings from Kierkegaard on What It Means to be A Human Being
- Breakpoint: When Bigger is Not Better
- Quiet: Why Introverts Have a Creative Advantage
- The Human Search for Meaning
- Laws of Character and Personality
- 11 Rules for Critical Thinking
- Daniel Kahneman’s Favorite Approach For Making Better Decisions
- A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans
- What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast
- An FBI Agent Reveals 5 Steps To Gaining Anyone’s Trust
- Genetically Modified: Where Does the Burden of Proof Rest?
- Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
- Ben Franklin: The Thirteen Necessary Virtues
- Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed
- The Impoverishment of Attention
- Retrograde Analysis: Working Backward to Solve Problems
- What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House
- On Listening
- Are Our Opinions Really Our Own?
- This Time is Different: The Four Most Costly Words Ever Spoken
2013 231
- Stop Reading News
- The Best Books of 2013: Your 10 Overall Favorites
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
- Your Environment Shapes Your Decisions
- Margin of Safety: Expect the Unexpected
- Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook
- The Original Parkinson’s Law and The Law of Triviality
- Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
- Forbes Interview
- The 7 Myths of Innovation
- The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
- Antigone: Better Decisions Through Literature
- The Economic Inefficiency of Gift Giving: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays
- Edward Frenkel: Love and Math —The Heart of Hidden Reality
- The best non-fiction books of 2013
- Avoiding Ignorance
- Seven Books Everyone Should Read
- Mastering Success: Navigating Within Your Circle of Competence
- The Two Types of Ignorance
- Atul Gawande: Why We Fail
- Beyond Email: What Knowledge Workers Really Create
- The Top 3 Most Effective Ways to Take Notes While Reading
- Temperament is more important than IQ
- Decisions Under Uncertainty
- Avoid Organizational Empty Suits at All Costs
- The Science of Sleep
- In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World
- The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are
- A History of Genius
- Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
- Richard Feynman on Curiosity
- Books that Changed My Life
- The Three Disciplines of Stoicism: Life Lessons from a Roman Emperor
- The Secrets of Happy Families
- Reason is the Enemy of Greatness
- Your organization sucks at innovating
- The Timeless Parable of Mr. Market
- The Joy of Finding Things Out
- Zibaldone
- The Great Books
- Iatrogenics: Why Intervention Often Leads to Worse Outcomes
- Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity
- 10 Things I Learned Reading Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- Much of What You’re Going to Do or Say Today is Not Essential
- Jeff Bezos’s Reading List
- Marcus Aurelius on How to Act and Four Habits of Thought to Eliminate
- How to Run a Country: Ten Lessons for Modern Leaders
- Neil Gaiman on The Importance of Reading, Libraries, and Imagination
- Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything Animated in 2.5 Minutes
- The Decision Maker’s Edge: Why Less Data Beats Analysis Paralysis
- The Science of High Performance
- Heraclitus’s Fragments: Ancient Wisdom for a Changing World
- Richard Feynman Explains How Rubber Bands Work
- Improve Your Life by Paying Attention
- Napoleon’s Fatal Mistake
- Free Radicals: Don’t Follow your Passion, Cultivate it
- Epictetus on How to Live and the Ability to Choose
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: A List of Things to Worry About and Things to Not Worry About
- Robert Greene: The Two Kinds of Failure and Why They Matter
- Jeff Bezos Had His Top Execs Read These Three Books
- Evolution is Blind but We’re Not
- 11 Simple Rules For Getting Along With Others
- Ancient Wisdom For Lifelong Health
- The Seven Characteristics of Effective Creative Teams
- Elmore Leonard: 10 Rules Of Writing
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics
- 20 Aphorisms from Nassim Taleb
- Why Lazy and Smart People Make the Best Leaders
- What happens when you ask over 15k people to name the best book they’ve read this year?
- David Foster Wallace: The Relationship Between Ambition and Perfectionism
- Michel de Montaigne
- Conversations with David Foster Wallace
- Improving Performance
- The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights
- The Art of Thinking Clearly
- Peter Bevelin: A Few Lessons From Sherlock Holmes
- A Technique for Producing Ideas
- The Best Way to Find More Time to Read
- Education is a Priceless Opportunity to Furnish Your Mind and Enrich Your Life
- How You Climb A Mountain Is More Important Than Reaching The Top
- Michael Mauboussin, Interview No. 4
- Ernest Hemingway: Three Tips on How to Write Fiction
- The Art of Ordinary Conversation
- 66 Personal Development Habits For Smart People
- The Laws of Simplicity
- Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife, Sixteen Months After Her Death
- Robert Oppenheimer And The Shape of Genius
- Maria Konnikova, Interview No. 3
- 34 Insights From Nassim Taleb
- William Morris: Adventures in Decision-Making
- Vaclav Smil: Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequence of Modern Carnivory
- Coevolution and Artificial Selection
- The Hidden Power of Wisdom That Never Expires
- Naive Realism — I’m Right; You’re Biased
- Choosing Your Next Book
- The Hidden Edge: What Baseball’s Greatest Hitter Can Teach Us About Decision-Making
- Impressions Are Schematically Determined
- Peak Listening — A Simple Trick You Can Apply Today
- Charlie Munger: Energy Independence is a Terribly Stupid Idea
- Eight Books Bill Gates Is Reading This Summer
- Marshall McLuhan: Old Versus New Assumptions
- Seneca On Reading
- Elements of Effective Thinking
- Warren Buffett — The Best Book On Investing And What It Can Teach You
- The Fragilista
- Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change
- What Makes You Happy?
- The Difference Between Science And Engineering
- Ten Techniques To (Quickly) Build Trust With Anyone
- 4 Must-Read Books on Storytelling
- There is No Such Thing as Information Overload
- Karl Pillemer, Interview No. 2
- The Art of Reading: Analytical Reading
- The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience
- Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- Daily Routines of Famous Creatives: Artists, Writers, Composers
- The Biggest Barrier to Accomplishing Great Things
- 30 Lessons For Living
- How Charitable are you Supposed to be When Criticizing the Views of an Opponent?
- The Unwritten Rules of Management
- The 8 Causes of Plateaus
- Save Time: Intelligently Skimming a Book
- Richard Feynman on The Key to Science
- The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books
- Daniel Dennett: How to Make Mistakes
- The Tyranny of Email — 10 Tips to Save You
- David Ogilvy 10 Tips on Writing
- The Four Levels of Reading: Improve Skills One Level At A Time
- The Building Blocks of A Great Daily Routine
- Mental Model: Bias from Insensitivity to Sample Size
- Samuel Arbesman, Interview No. 1
- Understanding and Diagnosing Problems
- The Nature of Explanation
- The Most Productive Change You Can Make In Your Working Habits
- The three types of specialist
- 2013 Summer Reading List — Curated Recommendations For a Curious Mind
- The Most Effective Way to Retain What You Read
- The Honeybee Conjecture: What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?
- The Power of I Don’t Know
- What Can One of The Great Coaches of All Time Teach You About Leadership?
- Philip Roth — One Skill That Every Writer Needs
- Assertive Inquiry
- Susan Sontag — How I Write
- The Buffett Formula: Going to Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up
- William James on Habit
- Warren Buffett: The Three Things I Look For in a Person
- Hemingway’s Routine
- Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
- Pluralistic Ignorance: You’re Not Alone
- The Divine Comedy
- How To Be Happy
- The Scroll of the Scribes
- America’s Food Crisis: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
- The Mind of a Con Man
- Food As Culture
- James T. Mangan: 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge
- Opinions and Organizational Theory
- The Work Required to Have an Opinion
- Haruki Murakami on Reading What Everyone Else is Reading
- Nate Silver: Confidence Kills Predictions
- “That’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort”
- The Munger Two Step
- The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves
- The False Allure of Group Selection.
- Why we Praise Meaningless Jargon and Fail to Realize the Emperor has No Clothes
- Why do trains stay on the track as they go around a curve?
- How Differential Gears Work
- The Relativity of Wrong
- The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers
- Think Like Sherlock Holmes
- Temperament Matters: In Life and Business
- Master Productivity: The Proven Eisenhower Matrix Method
- Competitive Strategy
- The Art of Observation: The Two Types of Observations
- Technology and Intermittent Reinforcement
- A Decision-Making Magic Trick
- Decision Making Psychology with Rory Sutherland
- The Revenge of Geography
- The Four Villains of Decision Making
- Brain Rules: 12 Ways to Supercharge Brain Power
- Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
- What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process?
- Notes From Underground
- Benoit Mandelbrot — The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
- What Animals Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing
- What is the Purpose of Dreaming? And more on Circadian Rhythms
- How You Can Sleep Better
- TED Bookstore 2013
- The Paris Review Guide to Becoming a Well-Read, Cultured, and Critically Thinking Person
- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
- Worldly-Wisdom from Charlie Munger
- Things you should focus on
- Richard Zeckhauser on Making Better Decisions
- The Science of Addictive Junk Food
- Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation
- How You Can Make Brainstorming Better
- Gaming the System
- Rethinking the Value of a Business Major
- Susan Sontag on Style and Metaphors
- What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion
- Nassim Taleb: The Big Errors of Big Data
- The Psychology Of The To-Do List
- Ernest Hemingway’s Powerful Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Letting Children Fail Is Not A Dereliction Of Duty
- Gossip
- Plato’s Argument Against Writing
- The (Really) Invisible Gorilla
- The sentiments of crowds
- Henry Singleton on Strategic Planning — Stay Flexible
- The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
- Pride and Prejudice Turns 200
- The Secret Ingredient for Success: The Brutal Discipline Necessary for Self-Assessment
- Mental Model: Equilibrium
- Robert Greene explains the Process to Attain Mastery
- Edward Tufte on Cognitive Load and Picasso
- John Holland: The Building Blocks of Innovation
- Metaphors
- History Does Not Belong To Us But We Belong To It
- Wittgenstein: Reality is Shaped by the Words we Use
- Why LEGOs Are So Expensive — And So Popular
- What is the Objective of a Company?
- How Good Gamblers Think
- The Value of Culture
- Arguments Are For Learning, Not Winning
- Extraordinary is the New Ordinary
- How feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind
- Kathryn Schulz on why Knowledge Collapses as often as it Accretes
- The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
- The Difference Between “Knowing That” and “Knowing How”
- The Seductive Path of Good Enough
- Michael Mauboussin: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
2012 180
- Matthew Crawford: “We’re not as free and independent as we thought.”
- W.H. Auden’s Horae Canonicae
- Betty Crocker: Why You Need to Add Ingredients to Your Cake Mix
- Niccolò Machiavelli on Reading as a Cure for Boredom
- Is Everything For Sale? What Money Can’t Buy
- The Difference Between Persuade, Convince, and Coerce
- Rudyard Kipling: How To Be A Man
- “We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”
- Hetty Green: The Richest Woman In America
- Oliver Burkeman: The Power of Negative Thinking
- Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
- “The ability to inflict evil, or harm, on other people in huge numbers has grown exponentially.”
- The Power of Concentration
- My Symphony
- Can History Tell the Truth?
- The Difference Between Persuading and Convincing
- Nassim Taleb and the Seven Rules of Anti-Fragility
- Michael Mauboussin: Three Things to Consider in Order To Make an Effective Prediction
- Erik Hollnagel: The Search For Causes
- Toni Morrison — Good, but never simple
- “Everyone has filters to select information that receives attention.”
- The Half-life of Facts
- Secrets from the Science of Persuasion
- Nate Silver: The Difference Between Risk and Uncertainty
- Cognitive Dissonance and Change Blindness
- An Ancient Lesson on Taking Responsibility For Decisions
- Charles Frankel: What We Suffer from Today
- Making Smart Choices: 8 Keys to Making Effective Decisions
- Epictetus on Freedom, Thinking, Information and Conventional Thinking
- Five Rules to help you Learn to Love Volatility
- Insensitivity To Base Rates: An Introduction
- What’s on Malcolm Gladwell’s Bookshelf
- Are Cities More Innovative?
- The Worst Mistake of All: Outshining the Master
- Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity
- The Problem With Information
- Why Catastrophes Happen
- The Top Non-Fiction Books of 2012
- The Peter Principle
- The Future Is Not Like The Past
- The Paradox of Skill
- The Principle of Incomplete Knowledge
- Charlie Munger: How I Would Teach Business School
- The role of error in innovation
- Mental Model: Game Theory
- Value Process Before Results
- Charlie Munger: Bad Morals Drive Out The Good
- Jeff Bezos on Why People that Are Often Right Change Their Minds Often
- What Is Critical Thinking?
- Imitation Without Understanding Does Not Work
- Freeman Dyson on The Difference Between Science and Philsophy
- What Competition in Nature Should Teach Us about Markets
- Richard Feynman — Take the World From Another Point of View
- Trust Me, I’m Lying: Why Sites Like Gawker Manipulate You
- The Human Mind has a Shut-Off Device
- Whoever tells the best story wins
- None of us really likes honesty
- Josh Waitzkin on Mastering the Fundamentals
- The Red Queen Effect: Avoid Running Faster to Stay in the Same Place
- The Limits of Crowd Wisdom
- Why Bad Things Happen to Good Decisions
- They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?
- The Velocity of Skill Development: Quickly Closing the Gap
- May The Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
- The Art of Learning
- When it comes to learning depth beats breadth
- Why We Overpay at Auctions
- What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?
- Kurt Vonnegut: How To Write With Style
- Scientism
- The challenge with history
- Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Words, Names, and Labels matter
- What makes predictions succeed or fail?
- An Introduction to Creativity
- Stretching yourself to learn new things
- Michael Mauboussin: Two Tips to Improve The Quality of Your Decisions
- The evolutionary roots of human behaviour
- Kurt Vonnegut at the Writers’ Workshop
- Benjamin Franklin’s Rule for Making Decisions
- Arthur Schopenhauer: Men of learning …
- “When we encounter pain, we are at an important juncture in our decision-making process.”
- The evolutionary function of religion
- Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies
- A Simple Tool to Help You Learn Better
- “the truth is that prediction is hard, often impossible.”
- The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
- “stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face”
- Insanely Simple
- On Reading and Books
- The Great Ideas of the Social Sciences
- David Foster Wallace: The Paradox of Plagiarism
- The Oracle, a Manual of the Art of Discretion
- Richard Dawkins on Pascal’s Wager
- Why Read the Classics?
- Michael Mauboussin’s Behavioral Economics Reading List
- Rembrandt — The Power of Art
- Daniel Kahneman: Thinking That We Know
- Not All Good Arguments Are Logically Sound
- The Power of Negative Thinking
- Increasing The Productivity of Computer Programmers and Engineers
- The clarity paradox — why success is a catalyst for failure
- Why Are Olympic Athletes So Much Faster Today?
- Susan Sontag: The Function of Common Sense
- Why Can’t Someone Be Taught Until They’re Ready To Learn?
- When Storytelling Leads To Unhappy Endings
- Nassim Taleb: We Should Read Seneca, Not Jonah Lehrer
- Simplicity’s Best Friend: Small Groups of Smart People
- Susan Sontag: Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom
- The Château de Versailles: From The Seat of Power to The Museum Of The History of France
- What is Deliberate Practice?
- The Writer’s Role
- What Facts Do We Know About Food?
- The Best Book On The Art Of Writing
- 10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart
- Smart People Are Reading These Books
- The Best Of The Worst About The Best
- Your Strategy Is Not What You Say It Is — Clayton Christensen
- 12 History Books to Read
- Daniel Kahneman — What I Know
- Dale Carnegie’s 7 Powerful Rules For Better Relationships
- The Best Summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People
- The Pursuit of Fairness
- Susan Sontag: 3 Steps to Refuting Any Argument
- Daniel Kahneman Explains Multitasking
- Nassim Taleb: The Winner-Take-All Effect In Longevity
- Can Waiting Help You Make Better Decisions?
- Happy Birthday Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- An Algorithm for Solving Problems
- The Copernican Principle: How To Predict Everything
- C.S. Lewis on Reading Old Books
- Daniel Kahneman: Debunking the Myth of Intuition
- Michael Lewis: Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie
- Why Do People Choke When the Stakes Are High?
- Everyone Lies. Dan Ariely Explains Why
- The Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
- Why Do People Choose Political Loyalties Over Facts?
- Summer Reading List: Curated Recommendations For a Curious Mind
- Do You Know What You Don’t Know?
- How To Find Work You Love
- Ten Commandments For Living From Philosopher Bertrand Russell
- How Stories Make Us Human
- Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically?
- The Lie Detector Paradox
- Why First Impressions Don’t Matter Much For Experiences
- The Learning Paradox: Why Struggling to Learn is a Good Thing
- What They Don’t Teach You In Business School
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
- Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster
- The Fatal Flaw of the Storyteller
- Changing Minds: It Takes More than Facts
- A Primer on Strategy
- Why Nations Fail
- Are People Thinking Less Than They Used To?
- Steve Jobs on Design
- The Effect Of Alcohol On Willpower
- Become A Learning Machine
- Daniel Kahneman and Herbert Simon on Intuition
- The Science Of Habit Formation And Change
- Does Experience Make You an Expert?
- 5 Things Cicero Can Teach You About Winning An Election
- The Filter Bubble — What the Internet is Hiding From You
- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
- How Raising Prices Can Increase Sales
- What I’ve been reading
- How Companies Learn Your Secrets
- Former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King on The Law of Competing Standards
- Mental Model: Prisoners’ Dilemma
- Owning up to Your Ignorance by Saying “I Don’t Know”
- Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb
- Master of Influence Robert Cialdini Recommends Five Books
- The Principles of Influence
- The Difference Between a Puzzle and a Mystery?
- The Best Books on The Psychology Behind Human Decision Making and Irrationality
- Viktor Frankl — Why to Believe in Others
- The Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
- Open-plan Offices Suck — Privacy Makes Us Productive
- Richard Feynman on Why Questions
- Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
- Tyler Cowen on The Dangers of Storytelling
- The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas
2011 91
- Daniel Kahneman Answers
- Situations Matter
- An Interview on Leadership with James March
- How Infomercials Persuade
- The Simple Principles of Good Management
- Daniel Kahneman: How We Think
- An Incredible Offer — But Wait…There’s More
- Daniel Kahneman on the Definition of Rationality and the Difference Between Information and Insight
- Why you eat too much: The Delboeuf Illusion
- Bill Gates Picks 4 Reads That Bring Clarity and Solutions to Energy Issues
- Leadership Is a Gift Given by Those Who Follow
- Mental Model: Conjunctive and Disjunctive Events Bias
- Poaching Stars is a Terrible Idea to Improve Performance
- Five books on Holding Power to Account
- Mental Model: Feedback Loops
- Daniel Kahneman: Some Thoughts on Thinking
- What did Steve Jobs Read?
- Herbert Simon on the Distinction Between What is Legal and What We Will Tolerate
- Gary Klein: Streetlights and Shadows
- The Default Choice, So Hard to Resist
- Seneca on Clemency, Blood, Happiness, and Anger
- Five Must-Reads for Tackling Complex Problems
- The Decision-Making Flaw in Powerful People
- Top Athletes And Singers Have Coaches. Should You?
- What is a Black Swan?
- Steve Jobs on the Destination We All Share
- Two Questions Everyone Asks Themselves When They Meet You
- Physicist Richard Feynman on Beauty of a Flower
- Warren Buffett on Temperament
- Rating Teachers is Educational Seduction
- Kantian Fairness Tendency: The World Isn’t Fair
- The Planning Fallacy
- 17 Management Lessons from Ray Dalio
- Putting people and things into categories
- Reading Fiction Stretches Our Imaginations
- Several Uncomfortable Realities
- Herbert Simon: On Experts and Intuition
- Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- The Focus to Say No
- Kurt Vonnegut: The Shapes of Stories
- Too Many Decisions
- We’re in the (bad) Habit of Associating Value with Scarcity
- David Quammen on Why Big Populations Survive and Small Ones Go Extinct
- Born, and Evolved, to Run
- This is a World of Incentives
- 3 Ways You’re Wrong in a Disagreement (Even if You’re Right)
- Intervention Bias: When to Step in and When To Leave Things Alone
- The Tragedy Of The Commons
- Promoting People In Organizations
- Why is it so Hard to Kill a Cockroach with your Shoe?
- 3 Things Everyone Should Know About the Availability Heuristic
- The Myth of Multitasking: Why the Key to Better Work is Developing Forgotten Skills
- The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture
- Multitasking: The Costs of Switching From One Task to Another
- What Does Bill Gates Read for Fun?
- Five Book recommendations from Dan Ariely on Behavioural Economics
- Is Everything Obvious Once You Know The Answer?
- Vaclav Smil: Why America is not a New Rome
- Greg Mankiw Recommends Reading These 18 Economics Books
- Marshall McLuhan — The Man, The Mystery, The Life
- David Foster Wallace: SNOOTlet
- Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway
- 6 Must-Read Books To Help Navigate the Workplace
- The Ben Franklin Effect
- Donald Norman on the Two Types of Knowledge
- Selling: The Crucial Skill Nobody Taught You
- Overvaluing Hard Work
- An Introduction to the Mental Model of Redundancy (with examples)
- A Simple Checklist to Improve Decisions
- James March: On Leadership
- Reductionism: Understanding the Parts, Misunderstanding the Whole
- Suppressing Volatility: Making the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous
- Derek Parfit: Does Anything Matter?
- The Science of Obesity
- Problem Solving Tools
- Predicting the Improbable
- Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Toxic?
- The Art and Science of High-Stakes Decisions
- Giffen Goods: Raising prices and increasing consumption
- Ethical Breakdowns: Why Good People often Let Bad Things Happen
- The power of lonely: What we do better without other people around
- James March: The Ambiguities of Experience
- Why You Are Not As Ethical As You Think
- Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
- Nicolas Carr: On Situational and Ambient Overload
- The Art and Science of Asking Better Questions
- Jeffrey Pfeffer: Why Performance Won’t Get You Promoted
- The Best Persuasion Technique for Job-Seekers
- William Deresiewicz on Learning To Lead and the Ills of Exposing Yourself to a Constant Stream of Other People’s Thoughts
- Are intelligence and rationality different?
- What Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
2010 26
- The Ten Most Popular Posts of 2010
- The Mask of Sanity
- The Inevitable Failure of Organizational Planning
- The Hidden Link Between Scientific Research and Investing
- Opinion Warning Signs
- Choice Under Uncertainty
- The Ikea Effect: Why Doing Things Ourselves Makes us Happier
- Solution By Recognition
- How Will You Measure Your Life?
- The Colonel Blotto Game: How Underdogs Can Win
- Fortune’s Summer CEO Reading List
- Youngme Moon: On Business Competition and Escaping the Competitive Herd
- Jamie Dimon’s Summer Reading List for Intern’s
- Behavioral Economics Reading List
- How Williams Sonoma Inadvertently Sold More Bread Machines
- The long chains of reasonings …
- Hiring and the Mismatch Problem
- Taleb: The Fooled by Randomness Effect and the Internet Diet?
- Can one person successfully play different roles that require different, and often competing, perspectives?
- Seth Klarman: The Forgotten Lessons of 2008
- Basically, It’s Over: A Parable About How One Nation Came To Financial Ruin
- Lessons of the Past
- Machiavelli’s Mistake: Why Good Laws Are No Substitute For Good Citizens
- Jamie Dimon — What Caused The Financial Crisis
- Information Without Context
- How credit cards bribe the purchasing agent
2009 26
- Gresham’s Law: Why Bad Drives Out Good As Time Passes
- Richard Feynman Teaches you the Scientific Method
- In The Arena: Citizenship In A Republic
- Taleb: The Risk Externalities of Too Big to Fail
- Niccolò Machiavelli and the Four Princes of Pragmatism
- The High Cost of Distractions
- The decline of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock from Triple-A status
- The Murder of Kitty Genovese and The Bystander Effect
- The Famous Game Show Problem
- Warren Buffett and the Power of Nontransitive Dice
- Three Questions to Remove Ego from Decision Making
- Bertrand Russell: On Avoiding Foolish Opinions
- Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
- Social Dilemmas: When to Defect and When to Cooperate
- Dan Ariely on 10 Irrational Human Behaviors
- Social Proof: Why We Look to Others For What We Should Think and Do
- Bruce Pandolfini Teaches Thinking, Not Chess
- Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
- Mental Model: Anchoring
- Charlie Munger Explains Why Bureaucracy is not Shareholder Friendly
- The Principles of Comparative Advantage: Why Tiger Woods Shouldn’t Mow Your Lawn
- Hindsight Bias: Why You’re Not As Smart As You Think You Are
- The Mis-Match Problem
- The Psychology of Pirates: How to Choose a Ransom
- The Anatomy of a Decision: An Introduction to Decision Making
- Mental Model: Supply and Demand