Do Not Let Your Vision of People Be Distorted

From Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged: In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those […]

Hate the Sin, and Not the Sinner

Mahatma Gandhi writes in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world… . It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, […]

There is No Such Thing as God

You’ve Got to Read This Book is a compendium of 55 individual’s stories of life-altering events. Jim Guy writes about discovering Buddhism and acquainting himself with its foundational principles. Not that I was interested in religion. I was an agnostic—with an attitude. I had been raised Methodist but had let it go as a teenager […]

Social Proof and Peer Pressure

In Organizational Alpha, investment manager Ben Carlson discourses on the conundrum with peer pressure. He consults Robert Cialdini’s work (see Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) on the common themes that customarily motivate we human’s recognized endeavors to influence one another: Psychologist Robert Cialdini has shown that one of the main filters we use to make […]

Humankind is a Banana Republic Dictator

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have […]

Consumerism’s Addiction to Daily Deals

Suzanne Shu, UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Professor of Marketing said in her interview with Marketplace radio program on American Public Media on Sep 2, 2011: You see something that is just an unbelievable discount to you. And you think, ‘Wow that is so great that I can get this so cheap.’ And you get […]

The Power of Empathy

Arthur P. Ciaramicoli and Katherine Ketcham write in The Power of Empathy, Empathy allows is to see the connections between us, making strangers less strange, foreigners less foreign. When we adopt other people’s perspectives, we do more than step into their shoes—we use their eyes, we borrow their skin, we feel their hearts beating within […]

Experiences Influence Perception

Richard Bookstaber in The End of Theory: How we look at the world, even how we understand what someone else is saying, depends on context, and context changes with our experience and with circumstance. In the day-to-day world, these changes usually move slowly—though they do change: what we want for our lives, what we strive […]

Charlie Munger Explains the Genius of Investor Li Lu

At the 2018 Daily Journal annual meeting, Charlie Munger praised investor Li Lu: What was unusual about Li Lu. Li Lu is one of the most successful investors. Imagine him, he just popped out of somebody’s womb and he just assaulted life the best he could and he ended up pretty good at it. But […]

Dante Alighieri, “The Giver”

Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio writes in The Early Lives of Dante, … And she delivered of a son, whom by common consent with his father, they called by the name Dante [the Giver]; and rightly so, because, as will be seen in the sequel, the issue was most perfectly consonant with this name. This was […]