Timeless lessons on decision making, thinking, and continuous improvement. Written by Shane Parrish.hinking, and continuous improvement.
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If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works.
The filing cabinet of knowledge stored in Warren Buffett’s brain has helped make him the most successful investor of our time. But it takes much more than reading a lot. In this article, learn how to create your own “snowball effect” to compound what you know into opportunity.
Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works.
When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible.
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
The benefits of reading are negated if you forget remember what you read. This article discusses a tested system to increase retention. Learn how to use active reading to remember more from books.
Learn how to spot the difference between and expert and an imitator with 5 key tells.
Time is invisible so it's easy to spend without proper consideration to its value. Seneca offers a warning on how we squander our time only to regret it.
Deliberate practice is the key to expert performance in writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, business, and more. But there’s more to it than 10,000 hours. Read to learn how to accelerate learning, overcome plateaus, turn experience into expertise, and enhance focus.
Thinking better isn't about learning more; it's about doing a few simple things that really help create unstoppable progress.
Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy. You get things done – just not in the most effective way possible. You’re a bit sloppy, and use more energy. But don’t feel bad about it. There is real value in not being the best.
Industrial genius Carl Braun believed that clear thinking and clear communication go hand in hand. Here the guide on writing productively to get things done.
You can’t force yourself to think faster. If you try, you’re likely to end up making much worse decisions. Here’s how to improve the actual quality of your decisions instead of chasing hacks to speed them up.
In the search for happiness, we often confuse how something looks with how it’s likely to make us feel. This is especially true when it comes to our homes. If we want to maximize happiness, we need to prioritize experiences over appearances.
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly …
Thinking better isn't about learning more; it's about doing a few simple things that really help create unstoppable progress.
Saying no with grace is its own leadership capability. It is not just a peripheral skill. As with any ability, we start with limited experience.
Discover why constant news consumption makes us less informed and how to break free from information overload to think more clearly.
The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. Read on to learn how to use the OODA Loop.
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
Most great thinkers have speculated about the kind of leadership that might give rise to a better society, analyzing it through what’s sometimes called a “normative” lens: What should we be doing? In Leviathan, for example, Thomas Hobbes argued for a single, absolute sovereign to hold together the social contract. He…
To realize your potential you have to focus on the things that matter. You have to say no to good opportunities so you can pursue great ones.
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
In Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar shares practical advice for people planning to embark on a career in the sciences—and curious people in general. Here, we summarize some of Medawar’s key insights.
If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here's how to play the long game.
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.