In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the…
Dave Hitz on Speckled-Egg Thinking; or How Leaders Should Help Their People
[…] An article about cliff-dwelling seagulls and the challenges they face helped shape my view of human nature. Small rocks are always falling down the cliffs and landing in the birds’ nests. That’s bad, because…
Charlie Munger on Avoiding Tough Things
[…] There are things that we stay away from. We’re like the man who said he had three baskets on his desk: in, out and too tough. We have such baskets – mental baskets –…
Jeff Bezos Answers the Question Whether Amazon Is Going To Fail
[…] In early 1997, Jeff Bezos flew to Boston to give a presentation at the Harvard Business School. He spoke to a class taking a course called Managing the Marketspace, and afterward the graduate students…
Rolf Dobelli on What to do Instead of Reading News
[…] If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on…
Barry Diller on The Importance of Unlearning
[…] HOFFMAN: So how did you apply your blank page, your process, to the starting of your Internet businesses?DILLER: The first one is always the first, and then since I’m always up for anything, I…
Naval Ravikant on What he Would Put on a Billboard
[…] I don’t know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I…
Sherlock Holmes on The Importance of a Blank Mind
[…] “Shall I go for the police?”We must define the situation a little more clearly. It may bear some more innocent interpretation. (Holmes; The Red Circle) We approached the case…with an absolutely blank mind, which…
Ed Catmull on the Importance of a Team
[…] The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way…