Category: Thought

  • RIP Christopher Hitchens

  • Unexpected Things Happen – Why We Study Them

  • Successful people vs. Failures

    “Successful people suffer through catastrophes and bankruptcies. The successful person fails many times and bounces back. The failure fails only once, letting that one failure become a judgement of his worth, and thus his label.” From a well-designed PDF summary of The Now Habit by Neil Fiore, which is moving straight to the top of […]

  • My Anti-library

    <picture missing> Pictured above is part of my anti-library. The first bottom row are unread or partly-read books. The back row and shelf are either read or reference books. What’s an anti-library? In The Black Swan, Taleb talks about Umberto Eco’s collection of 30,000 unread books. These books represent Eco’s anti-library, the reservoir of information […]

  • Forget About Black Swans, the One Ahead is Neon

    From Forget About Black Swans, the One Ahead is Neon on the Wall Street Journal: As Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller “The Black Swan” made clear, the human mind is poorly equipped to prepare us for rare, important and unpredictable events. But maybe our minds—and our markets—aren’t very well equipped to protect us against neon swans, […]

  • Live Dangerously

    “For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously!” —Nietzsche, The Gay Science (section 283)

  • Brent Pottenger on “Self-Experimentation with Story Systems”

    Brent Pottenger, author of the healthcare epistemocrat blog, asks: How should we invest our intellectual and spiritual energy and capacity? His answer lies within the confines of tradition. Take a look at his m=1 Story Systems example. I’ve been experimenting in an n=1 fashion for quite a while now, but the idea of an m=1 […]

  • I think Russell Brand is my new celebrity hero.

    I think Russell Brand is my new celebrity hero. Definitely watch this full interview. The ideas Brand talks about are strikingly similar to what I’ve been thinking or reading lately. It’s exceedingly rare to find a celebrity that can talk like this. Via twitter

  • Christianity and Alcohol

    “—Christianity, alcohol, the two great means of corruption.” The Portable Nietzsche, page 652 “Every kind of faith is itself an expression of self-abnegation, of self-alienation.” The Portable Nietzsche, page 639 The analogy of Christianity to alcohol is interesting to me. The chemistry of alcohol: ethanol is a carbohydrate, the metabolism of which leads to the […]

  • Entrepreneurship Risk

    From Summation by Auren Hoffman: Entrepreneurs tend to be street-smarter than strategy consultants. Entrepreneurs are more practical, more focused on the bottom line, and more attuned to real-world contingencies. A typical strategy consultant job interview might go something like this: “I toss a coin. Heads you win $10,000. Tails you lose $6,000. Do you play […]