mindsets

A great “Life Hack” is to simply combine these two into one basic approach to living your life: “Go positive and go first, and be constant in doing it.”

In his AMA on reddit, Elon Musk talks about how to build knowledge.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking offers easily learnable habits of mind that improve your ability to think clearly and rationally.

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here . Reading time: 10 mins Summary : We often make decisions/create outputs based on intuition and thoughtless thinking. IMO the best outputs are products of thinking about the thinking that went into creating that output. Then, levelling up that

Background This speech was originally given by Charlie Munger at USC Business School in 1994. The full title of the talk is “”A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business”. Speech Transcript I'm going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is […]

In The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Charlie Munger explains why we behave the way we do. This is a transcript of the fully updated talk.

In this letter, Richard Feynman argues the worthwhile problems are the ones you can really contribute something meaningful to or help solve.

Charlie Munger says that “developing the habit of mastering the multiple (mental) models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do.” Here's how.

The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...

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.

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.

I probably get asked this question more than any other: How do you read so much? I don’t think the question is really about me. I’m an author. It’s my job to read a lot. I think what people are really asking is how they can read more. Because as wonderful as reading is, in a busy, distracting world, it’s hard to find the time. Or rather, it’s hard to make the time. So when people ask: How can I read more? How can I read more books this year? What’s the secret to reading a lot? The short answer is just do it. (Nobody asks, “How do you find the time to eat?”) But obviously you know that. What...

This brief guide on power laws covers what they are and how we can use them to expand our understanding of the world and get better results.

The long read: The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young

I've often wondered how I would start my digital identity again. This wouldn't be applicable to me but rather for anyone just sta...

... then I did a bunch of mushrooms and realized the whole thing was super inauthentic so I quit.

The play before time ran out. The last speech of the campaign. The typo on your resume or the spot on your tie. The final decision before the company declared bankruptcy. We focus on the thing that…

“Am I dead? Am I still alive?” “Those aren’t the questions you should be asking.” (Care of Adult Swim)

I turn 35 today. Here are 35 principles I have accumulated and try to live by.

The Diderot Effect helps explain why we buy things we don't need.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here . Reading time: 5 mins One Sentence Summary : I want to be the best at getting better, specifically the best at getting from Level 0 => Level 10.  “Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally.” Sam Altm

3074 quotes from John Steinbeck: 'I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.', 'Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.', and 'All great and precious things are lonely.'

First off, allow me to tell/remind you that new book Four Thousand Weeks, about making the most of our absurdly brief time on the planet, is now available for pre-order in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand! (The subtitle is either Time Management for Mortals or Time and How to Use It, depending on where you live.) Pre-orders are hugely important for authors these days: they count towards the first week's sales, giving a crucial signal to publishers and booksellers that a title has momentum. So if you value the writing I do here or elsewhere, by far the most effective way to support my work is to pre-order the book, from any retailer. If you decide to do so: thank you! And hold on to your receipt, pending details of a forthcoming giveaway I'll be announcing exclusively for pre-orderers. For more about the book, and to pre-order, click here. • The therapist and writer Sheryl Paul defines anxiety as "a feeling of dread, agitation, or foreboding associated with a danger that does not exist in the present moment." I'm guessing you can relate; I certainly can. (Holding this sort of feeling at bay is, I think, the secret motive behind many people's interest in productivity techniques, personal development and so on.) Both parts of Paul's definition are crucial: anxiety is the feeling that something very bad might be going to happen – combined with the absence or near-absence of any real evidence to believe it actually will. Which is extremely bizarre, when you think about it, and worth a closer look, if only because – and I speak from experience – going around all day with a pit in your stomach is no way to live. In my last book, The Antidote, I explored a Stoic technique for coping with this sort of worry called "the premeditation of evils" – the practice of soberly envisaging what the real worst-case scenario in any given situation could truly be. Suppose you're anxious about giving a speech. It helps to imagine, in detail, the experience of embarrassing yourself before an audience of hundreds, then shuffling off stage and hiding under the bedcovers – because while that's certainly unpleasant, it's also pretty clearly copeable with. And since anxiety is the fear of a danger with which you couldn't cope, the exercise has the effect of cutting your worries down to size. I still recommend (and use) that practice today. But I've come to see it has a limitation. It risks implying that nothing catastrophically bad could ever really happen. Whereas the anxious person knows, if only subconsciously, that it could. Public humiliation won't kill you, but in fact it's always the case that the next hour or week or month could contain a bereavement, a terrible accident, or a shattering medical diagnosis. So the attempt to reassure yourself that nothing too appalling is coming down the pike will always run up against the gnawing realisation that actually you can't be sure. I think that's part of what Paul means in calling her (excellent) book The Wisdom of Anxiety, echoing the title of Alan Watts's great book The Wisdom of Insecurity. Anxiety isn't a silly mistake about how bad things could get. It's a logical response to what's entailed by the human situation – thrown into the river of time, unable to know what's coming let alone to control it, condemned to the condition the author Robert Saltzman calls "total vulnerability to events", yet obliged to try to build a meaningful and enjoyable life anyway. My partner vividly describes the teenage epiphany when she realised, after a childhood steeped in moviegoing, that if something devastating were to happen to her, it wouldn't be foreshadowed by sinister music so that at least she could mentally prepare. Nope: it would just happen. Anything always could. In this predicament, you won't find the deepest solace in compulsive planning, or from visualising worst-case scenarios. You find it from seeing a) that there's nothing you could ever do to change this state of affairs, so you might as well relax into it if you can; and b) that literally everyone's in the same boat, so at least you needn't worry that, existentially speaking, anyone else is more in command of their lives than you are. And you find it above all, in my experience, not with any kind of mental insight or cognitive exercise, but in action: inching forward into the future, doing tiny bits of the things that are causing the anxiety, committing a little more to the relationships you're feeling tentative about – and discovering, in each moment, further concrete evidence than in fact you can cope with what reality tosses your way. ("It's easier to act yourself into new ways of thinking than to think yourself into new ways of acting.") My life so far provides zero reason to believe I'll ever attain the degree of control over the future I always thought I needed. But then again, my track record of not yet having been entirely overwhelmed by existence suggests that maybe I never needed it to begin with. • I'd love to hear from you – just hit reply. (I read all messages, and try to respond, but not always in a timely fashion: sorry!) 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The author Joan Didion By Joan Didion This piece, about the author's college rejection from her first-choice college, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post April 16, 1968. “Dear Joan,” the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all. The letter is dated April 25, 1952, and for ...