Many years ago, quite by accident, I noticed something amazing about the human brain. Although I’ve read many books on psychology and how the brain works, I never came across anything that prepared me for what I encountered. I believe this discovery can help anyone greatly improve their skills at whichever pursuit they wish to master. I’ve followed my accidental discovery with a ‘home-cooked’ science experiment that beautifully confirmed the original finding. This insight could help parents, teachers and coaches in the way they cultivate young talent. It should also be an encouragement to such talent: whatever your skill level at this moment, you ain’t seen nothing yet – mastery may be fully within your grasp, even if you can’t quite fathom it at present. Here it goes… Continue reading
Tag Archives: Psychology
The magical power of “I can’t.”
Words can be very powerful – especially the words we tell ourselves. I recently made a startling discovery about this.
One of the things I told myself through life was that I couldn’t draw. I can doodle – make geometric shapes on paper, circles, squares, etc… But I couldn’t draw – this I knew about myself.
One day however, I was unable to tell myself this.
That day my son asked me to draw him something. Hmm… I’m his dad. I can’t tell him that his dad can’t draw. I’m supposed to be the strongest, smartest, most capable man in the world. Tellinig him that I couldn’t draw was out of the question. Continue reading
Freedom of speech should be sacred
“There is no god higher than truth.” – Mohandas Gandhi
Update: just hours after I posted this article, Amazon.com sadly de-listed my book, “The Killing of William Browder.” (I assure you, there was no trace of hate speech in my book)
Across the Western world, government bureaucracies and large media corporations like Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook have been increasingly proactive in suppressing “hate speech,” always with bestest of intentions. However, these efforts are unnecessary and will likely prove counterproductive.
Warning about the danger of “disastrous rise of misplaced power” in our societies, Dwight Eisenhower said in his January 1961 farewell address that, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can curb the power of the state, “so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Freedom of expression is the essential means of keeping the citizenry alert and knowledgeable. As such it should not be suppressed under any pretext, but encouraged and cultivated. Continue reading
Lessons in asset valuation: the great warrants bubble of China
Investors exert a great deal of intellectual effort to determine the correct valuation of securities. Economic value is central to our decision making and it plays a major role in our intuitive psyche. In daily life, when we buy a loaf of bread or a tank of gasoline, we tend to have a good idea about what we think is cheap and what’s expensive. We like bargains, don’t enjoy being ripped off, and in the same way we’re inclined to shop for value as consumers, we find value investing intuitively appealing. But here’s the critical difference between buying goods and investing: shopping for investments is speculative while buying stuff isn’t, and speculation activates the part of our mental circuitry that can heat up to a boiling point and overwhelm any rational consideration of value. Continue reading
Deep reading – a gratifying routine for a better living
Before I became a parent I used to wake up around 6 AM every morning, made myself some coffee and spent at least an hour or two reading – not news or fiction but a book about something interesting and of consequence on psychology, history, economics, philosophy… This practice almost invariably charged up my batteries with ideas, energy and enthusiasm and each day started with excitement about what I could accomplish that day. I’ve recently come across an article that distinguished this kind of reading from the more casual kind (newspapers, magazines, e-mail stack…) calling it “deep reading,” which explained, sort of, why I so enjoyed this routine. Continue reading
The Naked Hedgie 