Mar 31, 2020 | Anticipation, Mega Trends, Modern Life, News, Perpendicular Thinking, Social Commentary, Strategy, Thinking Tools
Are you surprised that the whole US economic system has essentially collapsed in a matter of weeks? I am. This is an enormously disruptive shock, to be fair. But the speed with which the health of the American economy has gone from healthiest in history to gasping on...
Mar 9, 2020 | Anticipation, Mega Trends, Social Commentary, Strategy
Everyone is comparing COVID-19 to 1918 and the Spanish Flu. But I think that the better historical analogy is a century earlier, in 1816. I went to see a theatrical rendition of “Frankenstein” with a friend last night – in part to escape the scary reality that...
Feb 11, 2020 | Acceleration, Habits, Lifelong Learning, Productivity
Did you know that there is a Japanese word for buying books that you don’t read? This habit – one that I exhibit, sadly – is actually so universal that they created a term for it: 積ん読 or tsundoku. It combines the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”),...
Jan 25, 2020 | Acceleration, Perpendicular Thinking, Thinking Tools
If there was a holy trinity of crucial 21st-century skills, I would personally nominate the following: lifelong learning, stillness (of mind as well as of body) and contrarian (or least critical) thinking. The first one is obvious and the second is becoming more so....
Aug 7, 2019 | Attention, Deep Work, Modern Life, Stillness, Thinking Tools
Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” As a reaction to fast food (and its more modern incarnation, fast-casual ), a countermovement rose up a number years ago extolling the virtues of ‘ slow food ’. Since then, we’ve seen the emergence of slow fashion, slow...
