Read Your Way to Better Leadership
Selin Kesebir, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School’s Leadership Institute writes, Reading is spending your time with the finest minds, alive and dead, at their most thoughtful. It connects you to distant times and places and gives you access to knowledge unattainable through personal encounters. If you read non-fiction, you will […]
How to Pack a Suitcase
In the New York Times, Shivani Vora and Michelle Higgins write about packing efficiently and effectively for any trip: Do the clothing countdown: If you need a mantra to help streamline your wardrobe, use the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 rule for a weeklong trip: Limit yourself to no more than five sets of socks […]
The Nothingness of Life
Charlotte J. Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work: Essentially, this extra structure covering our life has no reality. It has come to be there because of the misuse of our minds. It’s not a question of getting rid of it, since it has no reality; but it is a question of seeing its nature. And […]
What Good Work Means
The web design and development firm Faculty, based in Boulder, Colorado, defines what good work means: Good work serves a purpose: Not everything has to save the world, but if we want to do good work, there should be meaning in it. We need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. Purpose is our […]
Richard Rainwater, Billionaire Texas Dealmaker
Richard Rainwater was a Texas billionaire who had a Midas touch for real estate, entertainment and oil. He co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with President George W. Bush. American investment advisor and author John Train described Rainwater in his Money Masters of Our Time (1980): Richard Rainwater’s investing technique resembles no one else’s in […]
Original Meaning of Serendipity
Pagan Kennedy (author of Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World (2016,)) of the New York Times explains the original meaning of the term serendipity (now generally designating ‘dumb luck,’) In 1754, a belle-lettrist named Horace Walpole retreated to a desk in his gaudy castle in Twickenham, in southwest London, and penned […]
Charlie Munger on Uncommon Sense
Charlie Munger at the Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2019 (transcript): It’s amazing how well Berkshire Hathaway and the Daily Journal, for that matter, have succeeded with nothing more than basic morality and sturdy common sense. But of course, when people talk about common sense, they mean uncommon sense. Every time you hear that somebody has […]
The Long-term Greedy Approach
Sarah Friar, CEO of the social network Nextdoor, on why focusing on the long-term is good for users and business: the long-term greedy approach—that’s a good Goldman term—is always the right way, even when it’s a little bit more painful in the short run. Long term greedy is the idea is that over the long […]
Happy Talk versus Hard Talk
Entrepreneur and investor David Sacks comments on how to communicate during a crisis, People don’t want “happy talk” from leaders—invocations to stay calm, dismissals of the seriousness of the problem, empty reassurances that things would get better. What people wanted was “hard talk”—a recognition of the problem and tangible steps to fight it. When people […]
Awareness, Acceptance, Suffering
The Buddhist Society’s John Snelling (1943–1992) writes in Elements of Buddhism, The person that desires to have only pleasure and refuses pain expends an enormous amount of energy resisting life – and at the same time misses out on it enormously. He or she is on a self-defeating mission in any case, for just as […]