Learning From Your Mistakes … When You Win
“Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man...
View ArticleB.H. Liddell Hart and the Study of Truth and History
B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was many things, but above all, he was a military historian. He wrote tracts on Sherman, Scipio, Rommel, and on military strategy itself. His work influenced Neville...
View ArticleIs Human Progress Real or An Illusion?
Against the historical backdrop of nations, morals and religions that rise and fall, “the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape”, according to Will and Ariel Durant in their amazing book The...
View ArticleIncentives Gone Wrong: Cobras, Severed Hands, and Shea Butter
There’s a great little story on incentives which some of you may already know. The tale may be apocryphal, but it instructs so wonderfully that it’s worth a repeat. “You must have the confidence to...
View ArticleCivilization and its Fundamental Passions
“To describe a culture is to describe the structure of its institutions.” — Joseph Tussman *** In his book The Burden of Office, the educator and philosopher Joseph Tussman, who brought us profound...
View Article12 Things Lee Kuan Yew Taught Me About the World
“It’s no accident that Singapore has a much better record, given where it started, than the United States. There, power was concentrated in one enormously talented person, Lee Kuan Yew, who was the...
View ArticleUsing Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World
Complex outcomes in human systems are a tough nut to crack when it comes to deciding what’s really true. Any phenomena we might try to explain will have a host of competing theories, many of them...
View ArticleFrozen Accidents: Why the Future Is So Unpredictable
“Each of us human beings, for example, is the product of an enormously long sequence of accidents, any of which could have turned out differently.” — Murray Gell-Mann *** What parts of reality are the...
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Are Great Men and Women a Product of Circumstance?
Few books have ever struck us as much as Will Durant’s 100-page masterpiece The Lessons of History, a collection of essays which sum up the lifelong thoughts of a brilliant historian. We recently dug...
View ArticleYuval Noah Harari: Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches...
View ArticleStanding on the Shoulders of Giants
Innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Doers and thinkers from Shakespeare to Jobs, liberally “stole” inspiration from the doers and thinkers who came before. Here’s how to do it right. *** “If I have...
View ArticleMuscular Bonding: How Dance Made Us Human
Do we dance simply for recreation? Or is there a primal urge that compels us to do it? Historian William McNeill claims it saved our species by creating community togetherness and transforming “me”...
View ArticleWhy You Feel At Home In A Crisis
When disaster strikes, people come together. During the worst times of our lives, we can end up experiencing the best mental health and relationships with others. Here’s why that happens and how we can...
View ArticleBetter Thinking & Incentives: Lessons From Shakespeare
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...
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