Personalized Extra Effort

Robert Cialdini writes in Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, An ounce of personalized extra effort is worth a pound of persuasion. the more personalized you make a request, the more likely you’ll be to get someone to agree that request. More specifically, this research shows that in the office or in the […]

Compassion and Justice

Buddhist monk Buikku Bodhi, born Jeffrey Block, writes in Conscientious Compassion: When compassion and justice are unified, we arrive at what I call conscientious compassion. This is compassion, not merely as a beautiful inward feeling of empathy with those suffering, but a compassion that gives birth to a fierce determination to uplift others, to tackle […]

Give and Expect Nothing in Return

Swami Vivekananda writes in Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action, Do you ask anything from your children in return for what you have given them? It is your duty to work for them, and there the matter ends. In whatever you do for a particular person, a city, or a state, assume the same attitude […]

CEOs Don’t Have All the Answers

The New York Times Corner Office column interviews Bernardo Hees, CEO of Kraft Heinz, a public company sponsored by 3G Capital and Berkshire Hathaway: We normally think of C.E.O.s as the people who have the answers, right? I think C.E.O.s are the ones that have the questions. If you can provide the right framework and […]

Vulnerability and the Human Condition

Barry Magid writes in Right Here with You: Bringing Mindful Awareness into Our Relationships: We have to get to know and be honest about our particular strategies for dealing with vulnerability and learn to use mindfulness to allow ourselves to experience more of that vulnerability rather than less of it. To open yourself up to […]

Getting Paid for Being Right

At the 1998 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett declared, Markets can do anything. If you look at the history of markets, you see everything under the sun. But we have no time frame [for doing something]. If the money piles up, then it piles up. And when we see something that makes sense, we’re […]

Victor Hugo’s Genius

The English poet William Ernest Henley wrote in The Athenaeum, a literary magazine published in London between 1828 and 1921: [Hugo’s poetry] is often no more than a grand parade, a sort of triumph, of vocables . … What is perhaps a more damning reproach than any is that his work is saturate in his […]

Charlie Munger Explains Berkshire Hathaway’s Investment in Airlines

At the 2018 Daily Journal annual meeting, Charlie Munger discussed Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in the airline industry: Well, we did change our mind. For a long time, Warren and I (painted over) the railroad because there were too many of them, and it was too competitive, and union rules were too crazy. They were lousy […]

Getting People to Change is Difficult

Marty Nemko writes in his essay “On the Difficulty of Getting People to Change” in his “How to Do Life” column at Psychology Today: What’s going on? In some cases, the person simply doesn’t have the self-discipline to habituate it. Others claim to have forgotten about it. Others say (rationalize?) that it isn’t important enough […]

Hemingway in Praise of F Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast, His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it not more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged […]