Reflections on Life and Leadership
The “curse of knowledge” occurs when a person has such mature and advanced knowledge in a specific area that he cannot remember what it’s like to not have this knowledge. This makes it harder to identify with people who don’t have this knowledge base. It also inhibits our ability to explain things in a manner …
Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing. Shakespeare I’ve always been an advocate of goal-setting, for two reasons. Setting and achieving goals leads to progress; it makes us effective. If you aim at nothing you will always hit it. People who don’t set goals often just meander through life. Their lives resemble …
What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention. Herbert A. Simon, cognitive scientist We are inundated with bits of information—emails, text messages, phone calls, snippets of news—and they all distract us from focused thought and work. We pride ourselves on being able to negotiate multiple, disparate tasks simultaneously. Multitasking …
In Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilych, the protagonist, Ivan Ilych, is a smart, competent attorney dying from an unknown cause. Tolstoy describes a scene in which Ivan has a sobering realization while gazing at his sleeping daughter, Gerasim. “Ivan Ilych’s physical sufferings were terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings were his …