Choose Compliance Over Optimization

May 14, 2011

Intelligent and motivated people are strange creatures. We make grandiose promises to ourselves about actions we will take to achieve goals, put pressure on ourselves to optimize our actions, get frustrated when we don’t deliver on using optimal methods, and then give up.  Ramit Sehti writes quite a lot on IWillTeachYouToBeRich about psychological tricks for [...]

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You Make What You Eat

May 13, 2011

In the past two weeks, what entertainment have you consumed? Music, TV, movies, blog posts, and books all count. When you encounter a new work that you must decide whether or not to consume, you hold it to standards that are set by the media you consume on a regular basis. When you create your [...]

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Ten Thousand Hours

May 12, 2011

A few years ago, Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers released. As often happens with such books, one tiny quote from it became a meme, to the exclusion of almost everything else in it. In this case, the meme was that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to get truly good at anything. Ten thousand hours [...]

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Facts and Skills

May 10, 2011

A year and a half ago, I became active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a living history organization. Although the SCA focuses mainly on medieval Europe, any culture that interacted with Europeans before 1600 AD is fair game. I’m all about medieval Japan, and the Portuguese landed at Tanegashima in 1543. I knew from [...]

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Good Art Changes the World

May 10, 2011

There are thousands of books about personal health in the world. They offer diets, exercise routines, or other prescriptions. They are often dry, based on respected scientific research, and limited in scope. Then, there is Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. Tim Ferriss is not a man who is excited about working hard. Instead, his [...]

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Make Me Cry

May 9, 2011

A long time ago, I read Old Yeller. I was very young, so I don’t remember much. What I do remember is that it involves a dog, that the author takes great pains to make us like said dog, that the author dwells a great deal on the main human character’s friendship with said dog, [...]

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