Don’t Get Obsessed with the Short-Term
The biggest advantage you can have as an investor is the discipline to think and act for the long-term. Benjamin Graham discussed how investors would be better off if their stocks had no price quotations at all in his classic, The Intelligent Investor: The true investor scarcely ever is forced to sell his shares, and […]
The Hacker Credo: Information Wants to Be Free
First proposed by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, at the 1984 Hackers Conference: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting […]
Gandhi’s Talisman
Mahatma Gandhi’s piece of wisdom that you can use as a test to evaluate your actions in public life: I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you […]
What it Means to Just Be
Psychoanalyst and Zen teacher Barry Magid writes in his essay titled Uselessness in the Fall 2013 issue of Tricycle magazine: When we speak of just sitting, we are not limiting ourselves to describing a particular posture or practice. We are describing a way of being in the world in which everything we encounter is fully […]
Claiming Exemption from Error
John Stuart Mill writes On Liberty, Judgment is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, […]
Vanity of Resembling
David Hume writes in A Treatise of Human Nature: There are instances, indeed, wherein men shew a vanity in resembling a great man in his countenance, shape, air, or other minute circumstances, that contribute not in any degree to his reputation; but it must be confess’d, that this extends not very far, nor is of […]
The Great Surpassing Love of Interdependence
Reb Anderson writes in The Third Turning of the Wheel: Wisdom of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, A buddha is someone who sees the way things really are. When we see the way things really are, we see that we’re all in this together, that we are all interdependent. A great surpassing love arises from that wisdom, […]
Level 5 Leadership
In Good to Great, Jim Collins elaborates on whether or not you can learn to become exceptionally effective leader: My hypothesis is that there are two categories of people: those who do not have the seed of Level 5 and those who do. The first category consists of people who could never in a million […]
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
American poet Macha Louis Rosenthal admires in The Poetry of Yeats, Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear. … It was not this gift alone which made Yeats the poet he was, though without it no poet can be great. He was also the poet who, while very much […]
The Ethics of Short-Sightedness
The firebrand “New Atheist” and neuroscientist-author Sam Harris writes in Lying: A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could […]