When the cure is worse than the disease — Galileo Galilei is famous for sparking the birth of modern astronomy. But his final work opens with a slightly more mundane topic — how to store a stone column on a building site. A seemingly logical way to do this is to store it flat, propped up by a support…

The dangers of confusing cause and effect — The swimmer’s body illusion is a cognitive bias that makes us confuse results and selection factors. In other words, we often think that certain results are caused by certain activities, when in fact, people only take part in certain activities because they already have some or all of the results. A few examples: …

5 lessons from Ryan Holiday’s latest book — Ryan Holiday has carved out a niche as a modern philosopher, combining his deep understanding of Stoicism with insights into contemporary society and culture. I recently picked up his latest book Discipline is Destiny, which explores the power of temperance, through the stories of historical figures like Ernest Shackleton, Martha…

How humans make memories — The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic (shortcut) that explains how we remember past experiences. It observes that our memories are snapshots, not a sum or average of our experiences. These snapshots are dominated by two things: The highlights of an experience The end of an experience Some evidence The peak-end rule…

The dangers of being comfortably complacent — There is a concept in psychology called the region-beta paradox. It describes how worse situations can actually end up being better for you. It was coined by Daniel Gilbert in a 2004 paper called The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad, referencing a person commuting to work. The person…

How our insignificance gives life meaning — Imagine if every event since the beginning of time (roughly 14 billion years ago) was compressed into one year. On this cosmic calendar, the Big Bang occurred at 12:00:00 am on January 1. The Milky Way galaxy formed on March 16. Our solar system took shape on September 2 and…

The power of our expectations — Happiness is not an objective reality, but a function of our expectations. One way to think about this is a 2x2 matrix. On the horizontal axis is what we have and on the vertical axis is what we want. The issue is that our wants are not static. They increase…

Why good ideas age like Benjamin Button — The Lindy Effect states: the longer something lasts, the longer it can be expected to last. This idea was popularised by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile: “If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But…if…

Reflecting on what has worked and what hasn’t — I started working as a graduate at Bain and Company in March 2022. These are 7 key learnings after my first 10 months. Attitude is everything Take an “answer-first” approach Be brief and structured in your communication View feedback as a gift Be reliable Zoom out frequently Comparison is the…