Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world, and why things are better than you think. The crowning jewel of one man’s life work. One of the most important books Bill Gates has ever read. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is a bit of a masterpiece. The team behind Factfulness is the same team that’s developed https://www.gapminder.org/ There are ten instincts that guide us astray when it comes to interpreting how the world is really developing....
Symposium is an ancient classic, it’s super short, and reading it in 2020 sets off a total clusterfuck of associative thoughts that I felt an extreme need to try to organise and reflect on. So here goes. What it is: Symposium is a story from The Dialogues of Plato, which essentially means it’s something Plato once heard someone say that they heard someone else say. It’s still an epic reflection of life in Greece 400 years BC....
Agency. The spice that makes everything anew. Agency is the cure for “stuck”. It’s the glue that makes organisations work. It’s like adding nitro to an otherwise “OK” engine. But it’s hard to screen for. High agency individuals don’t wear “Agent” badges. Agency doesn’t often show up in a job interview, and even when it seems to, it might not persist when the rubber hits road. Agency. The difference between giving up when the recipe didn’t work, and making a new, 10x better recipe....
I play a lot of Halo 5: Guardians at the moment, on Xbox. Most of the time in anonymous multiplayer, there’s a good amount of radio silence. Most people don’t have headsets, so there’s not a lot of team comms going on unless you manage to pre-organise a team. I’ve also been watching some streams on Twitch. The communication is epic. There’s a whole host of callouts the skilled players make to their team....
Range by David Epstein is a simple book, in many ways. Simple in its core message, simple in structure, and simple to remember. The core message could easily have been summed up in a 2-pager, but it wouldn’t be compelling without reading through all the argumentation and examples. When learning to solve problems in an unkind learning environment (that’s most of life) it’s preferable to have range across many fields rather than specialisation in one field....