Polytheism is Inherently Open-Minded

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty […]

Embrace Imprecision

Seth Klarman’s extraordinary and mysterious book Margin of Safety, Risk Averse Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor has sold for $700 for used varieties with newer copies going for $2,500 to $4,000. His foremost investing premise is risk mitigation. He writes, Many investors insist on affixing exact values to their investments, seeking precision in an […]

To Love at All is to Be Vulnerable

C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves summarizes four kinds of human love—affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to […]

Living by Design

Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, […]

The Great Paradox of Poetry

Seamus Heaney wrote in The Government of the Tongue, Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brntality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of […]

Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism

Rob Norton writing about Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (2003) in the Winter 2003 issue of strategy+business magazine: Brinkley deals squarely with Ford’s most unattractive trait of all: his vicious anti-Semitism. After running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1918, Ford bought a local newspaper, […]

Opportunity Cost When Buying Property

In a recent podcast, British advertising guru Rory Sutherland said, I made the decision to underspend on property on the grounds that nearly everybody else was effectively maxing themselves out. The default behavior of housing was to buy as much as you can borrow. That assumes the greatest return on happiness comes from property expenditure. […]

The Desire to Acquire Companies

Niccolo Machiavelli writes in Chapter III (“De Principati Misti”) of The Prince (Italian: De Principatibus): The desire to acquire is a very common and natural thing; and when a man who is capable of doing it makes the attempt, he will generally be praised, or at least not blamed; error and blame arise when a […]

Can’t Turn Our Backs on the Global Economy

In The Weightless Society, Charles Leadbeater explains: Globalization is good. Through global trade in products and services, people learn and exchange ideas that drive economic growth. If we turn our backs on the global economy, we turn our backs on the most vital force: the accelerating spread of knowledge and ideas. A thriving knowledge society […]

Study Yourself

Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape, What you will discover as you continue to study the dharma to practice meditation is that nothing you have ever heard is separate from your life. Dharma is the study of what is, and the only way you can find out what is true is through […]