Seth Godin made a good point: “In any failing system, the people at the top get hurt last.” From schools to students, higher education is playing out this maxim before our eyes in the US right now. The schools at the top in the US—Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Read more…
What a society taxes it gets less of, and what a society subsidizes it gets more of. For various social, economic, psychological, emotional, and other reasons, societies around the world, throughout history, have taxed peace, while subsidizing war. This is not a statement of judgment, just one of objective observation. We honor dead Read more…
Nuclear weapons are a touchy subject in geopolitical negotiations. Almost everyone involved in the negotiations around nuclear weapons knows what the outcomes of launching them against another country could be, which is why, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, regionalism in arms races became a geopolitical concern. But Read more…
Motivation is about individual effort and achievement. It’s about having internal drive that gets you personally engaged with something (a situation, a person, an interest, or an idea) that animates you. Motivation can be driven from a place of positivity, or it can be driven from a place of negativity, Read more…
In financial markets, in gambling, and even in entrepreneurship, there are two skills that are critical for success: making small bets consistently through developing a model (buying) and breaking an old model (selling), and building an anti-fragile machine that can withstand the shock of either of those small bets failing. Read more…
In many parts of the United States, there are people who are addicted to drugs. We could talk all day about the mechanics of addiction, but there is something that is almost never focused on in any discussion of addiction. We talk about the socioeconomic conditions, familial conditions, societal conditions Read more…
When you talk with divorce and family lawyers about divorces, separations, or even “conscious uncouplings” a statement they always make in the course of the conversation focuses around their amazement that couple choose to go through a litigation based process. In particular, their statement tends to focus on the fact Read more…
Three thoughts that may (or may not) intersect with each other: Thought #1: There’s a lot of high profile, persistent, whining going on in the space of web publishing, content creation, and even in the scrappy world of podcasting. This phenomenon of whining is also extending into commentary around entrepreneurship Read more…
There are now computer programs and algorithms that can render daily, rote, assembly line decisions faster at scale than human beings can. There are experiments beginning with artificial intelligence programming, that promises to make decisions faster, cheaper, and more rationally and accurately than human beings, without getting clogged up with Read more…
The fact of the matter is no one can truly penetrate another person’s conflict experience. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that, with all the social proofing via digital tools, and the peacock-like social media displays that we all put on every day, that we know other people’s inner lives. Read more…