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Idea Almanac

Daily update on new ideas and books so that you can grow each day

January 12, 2022

Idea Almanac

Categorical variables

“Categorical variables are measures that can take on two or more categories, which may be
Unordered categories: such as a person’s country of origin, the colour of a car, or the hospital in which an operation takes place.
Ordered categories: such as the rank of military personnel.
Numbers that have been grouped: such as levels of obesity, which is often defined in terms of thresholds for the body mass index (BMI).”

Excerpt From: David Spiegelhalter. “The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books).”

January 11, 2022

Idea Almanac

The passion was always there

“When I visited the talent hotbeds, I saw a lot of passion. It showed in the way people carried their violins, cradled their soccer balls, and sharpened their pencils. It showed in the way they treated bare-bones practice areas as if they were cathedrals; in the alert, respectful gazes that followed a coach. The feeling wasn’t always shiny and happy—sometimes it was dark and obsessive, and sometimes it was like the quiet, abiding love you see in old married couples. But the passion was always there, providing the emotional rocket fuel that kept them firing their circuits, honing skills, getting better.”

Excerpt From: Daniel Coyle. “The Talent Code.”

January 10, 2022

Idea Almanac

Alphabet soup of agencies with overlapping responsibilities

“In fact, though, the centralization of intelligence never happened. Although the CIA was initially the key player in the postwar period, as time passed the intelligence community became more fragmented than ever, divided into a kind of alphabet soup of agencies with overlapping responsibilities and missions, including not just the CIA but also the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence arms of each of the three major military services. In theory, the director of the CIA was in charge of the U.S. intelligence community as a whole, but in practice he exercised very little supervision over these agencies, and most of the money for intelligence operations came from the Department of Defense.”

Excerpt From: James Surowiecki. “The Wisdom of Crowds.”

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January 9, 2022

Idea Almanac

Organism evolved subject to natural selection

“For close to 4 billion years, every single organism on the planet evolved subject to natural selection. Not even one was designed by an intelligent creator. The giraffe, for example, got its long neck thanks to competition between archaic giraffes rather than to the whims of a super-intelligent being. Proto-giraffes who had longer necks had access to more food and consequently produced more offspring than did those with shorter necks. Nobody, certainly not the giraffes, said, ‘A long neck would enable giraffes to munch leaves off the treetops. Let’s extend it.’ The beauty of Darwin’s theory is that it does not need to assume an intelligent designer to explain how giraffes ended up with long necks.”

Excerpt From: Yuval Noah Harari. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

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January 8, 2022

Idea Almanac

Spare the rod and spoil the child

“Over the recent decades, a vast and diverse flock of parenting experts has arisen. Anyone who tries even casually to follow their advice may be stymied, for the conventional wisdom on parenting seems to shift by the hour. Sometimes it is a case of one expert differing from another. At other times the most vocal experts suddenly agree en masse that the old wisdom was wrong and that the new wisdom is, for a little while at least, irrefutably right. Breast feeding, for example, is the only way to guarantee a healthy and intellectually advanced child—unless bottle feeding is the answer. A baby should always be put to sleep on her back—until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach. Eating liver is either a) toxic or b) imperative for brain development. Spare the rod and spoil the child; spank the child and go to jail.”

Excerpt From: Steven D. Levitt. “Freakonomics.”

January 7, 2022

Idea Almanac

Don’t cry over spilt milk

“Vince paid $1,000 to an indoor tennis club that entitled him to play once a week for the indoor season. After two months he developed tennis elbow, which made playing painful. He continued to play in pain for three more months because he did not want to waste the membership fee. He only stopped playing when the pain became unbearable. When an amount of money has been spent and the money cannot be retrieved, the money is said to be sunk, meaning gone. Expressions such as “don’t cry over spilt milk” and “let bygones be bygones” are another way of putting economists’ advice to ignore sunk costs. But this is hard advice to follow, as the example from the List about driving to a basketball game in a blizzard, and the story of Vince and his tennis elbow, illustrate.”

Excerpt From: Richard H. Thaler. “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.”

January 6, 2022

Idea Almanac

Clients feel their lives on Facebook are evaluated

“But look at Facebook! These are supposed to be my glory days!”
You might be surprised by the number of hours a week I spend hearing about Facebook. Many of my clients feel their lives on Facebook are evaluated, even judged, daily. They reluctantly admit they spend hours posting pictures and comments, flipping through them again and again, trying to see their Facebook pages as others will. They imagine their ex-girlfriends reacting to how they look now. They wonder whether the mean girls they used to know will think they have cool-looking friends. One of my clients laughs at what he calls his Facebook “self-advertisement.” When clients make this Facebook confession, they feel like the only ones who do this.”

Excerpt From: Jay, Meg. “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How to Make the Most of Them Now.”

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January 5, 2022

Idea Almanac

Email or Phone ?

“Yes, it’s easier to fire off an email than make a phone call. On the phone we’re put “on the spot” and need to come across polished and professional. It’s more stressful and requires more effort.
Still, there are times when a phone call isn’t preferred but necessary. Why? On the phone, you handle your business more quickly and show you’re not afraid to talk with someone in real time.

Excerpt From: Danny Rubin. “Wait, How Do I Write This Email?.”

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January 4, 2022

Idea Almanac

Redesigning the deeper system structures

“In order to tell a systems story, people need to make three shifts:
• From seeing just their part of the system to seeing more of the whole system—including why and how it currently operates as well as what is being done to change it.
• From hoping that others will change to seeing how they can first change themselves.
• From focusing on individual events (crises, fires) to understanding and redesigning the deeper system structures that give rise to these events.”

Excerpt From: David Peter Stroh. “Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results.”

January 3, 2022

Idea Almanac

Effects of Mental Models on our behavior.

“Mental models” are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. For example, we may notice that a co-worker dresses elegantly, and say to ourselves, “She’s a country club person.” About someone who dresses shabbily, we may feel, “He doesn’t care about what others think.” Mental models of what can or cannot be done in different management settings are no less deeply entrenched. Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models.”

Excerpt From: Peter M Senge. “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization: First Edition.”

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