Austin T 3/15/24 Austin T 3/15/24

Problem Solving: Avoiding The Silver Bullet Approach

As you move forward in life, you’ll continually be faced with problems of varying difficulty. Unlike grade school problems, many real world ones will tend to be tangles and tangles of causes—especially when people are involved. If you’re routinely blinded by the one-big-thing approach, you’ll miss valuable solutions.

But if you’re looking to improve your lot in life by solving important problems, you’ll want to avoid silver bullets by always looking for two causes.

Austin T 9/18/23 Austin T 9/18/23

Direct vs Indirect Communication: Why We Don’t Always Say What We Mean

With direct communication, politeness and tact isn’t the emphasis. Instead, the primary concern is the information itself. Where indirectness can allow too many costly misunderstandings to gum up a system, directness is clear as day. That’s one takeaway.

Indirect communication can have a softer touch as it suggests, implies, or indicates. This flanking maneuver doesn’t oppressively tell, which can antagonize egos, but instead it asks the audience to play a part in understanding.

Austin T 7/15/23 Austin T 7/15/23

Wearable Fitness Trackers: Shaping the Culture

Through temperature and heart rate measurement (sensors), smartwatches will provide readily available insights (data analytics) that ought to nudge users in healthier directions. With emerging technology like virtual assistants that have ChatGPT-like capabilities (AI assistants)

Austin T 5/2/23 Austin T 5/2/23

Why Leaders Overpromise

“Overpromising may be necessary to get the resources. It may be necessary to get the initial enthusiasm that is needed to do anything at all. There is so much inertia that realistic promises are at a major disadvantage. They’re at the major disadvantage because everybody else is over-promising.” - Daniel Kahneman

By a 72 2/1/22 By a 72 2/1/22

Hanlon’s Razor: Improve Your Social IQ

There are these small misfortunes in daily life, where a little mistreatment thrusts itself upon us.

If you’ve ever been left off an important e-mail, not saved a seat, criticized unfairly in public, or struck by a passive-aggressive comment, you’ve probably experienced this.

Austin T 1/13/22 Austin T 1/13/22

How to Guarantee a Life of Miscommunication

In the spirit of Carson and Munger’s speeches, I share with you my own recommendations, but for a different subject: how to guarantee a lifetime of miscommunication (so that you may avoid this).

And like them, I speak from experience.

By a 72 3/31/21 By a 72 3/31/21

Maya Angelou: How You Made Them Feel

What matters most in your daily interactions isn’t so much the specific actions we take or the words we say that people remember most, but how someone was made to feel: listened to or ignored, included or left out, amused or exhausted, or big instead of small.

By a 72 2/1/21 By a 72 2/1/21

Reframing Failure: What Did You Fail at Today?

Sarah Blakely, businesswoman and founder of Spanx, grew up with her father asking her, “What did you fail at today?”

Austin T 12/5/20 Austin T 12/5/20

Multi-Disciplinary Thinking: How Geology Shaped Darwin’s Tree of Life

Evolutionary Theory set forth a Tree of Life model for biology, putting all living organisms under a shared umbrella. Distinct species like cats and dogs turned out to be merely distant cousins, branching off from a shared ancestor. Interestingly though, it was 19th century geology, woven beautifully into biology, that helped Darwin bring forth the Tree of Life.

Austin T 10/16/20 Austin T 10/16/20

System 1 and System 2 Thinking: How We Make Decisions

You might think we make all of our decisions the same way, but it turns out we have two very different decision-making systems.

Nobel Prize winning Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, details two cognitive processes for decision-making: fast System 1 and slow System 2.

Noteworthy Nonsense