Essays

What Can We Learn from Sun Tzu on the Art of War

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One of the better discoveries of the last few months was Jonathan Clements’ books. From Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God to Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, from An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland to A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? these books are tremendous efforts of introducing slices of history to laypeople. And the language is often witty:  The Russians were not particularly impressed with Finland. Since they already had trees, lakes and snow of …

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Lillian Gilbreth: When Emancipation Starts In the Kitchen

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I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again. Joan Rivers  Wiping, hoovering, polishing, dusting, washing, scrubbing. Shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning. Repainting, redecorating, decluttering, repairing. Housekeeping is not like other types of work: we can’t put it on our CV, we get no recognition for not letting things fall apart, and it’s a Sisyphean work, as it must be done over and over again.  And yet, our generation has access to some …

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How Ideas Cross-Pollinate to Advance Diverse Disciplines

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I always advise my people to read outside your field, every day something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections. Nobel prize winner Oliver Smithies in dialogue with writer David Epstein in Epstein’s book Range  One of the things that surprised me as a parent was how much I benefited from …

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How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) This article will present other techniques that women (who usually experience gender stereotyping or/and are caregivers) choose to follow in their work aspirations. As in the previous article, most of this research is based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.   Hidden in plain sight   Costume designer Edith Head created the …

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How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) As I mentioned in the previous article, the focus of this article is adding more examples of women (who usually either experience gender stereotyping or are caregivers or both) to the deep work philosophies Cal Newport identified in his book Deep Work. To recap some work strategies, Newport categorized four types of work philosophies …

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The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) In his Deep Work bestseller, Cal Newport coins the term “deep work” as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”   In contrast, Newport defines shallow work as “non-cognitively demanding, …

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Wise Ideas from Morgan Housel’s Book The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

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One of the better books about financial education that I have read is Morgan Housel’s book, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. This book started as a blog post that can be read here. Some sharp insights in this book struck me, and I will discuss them in more detail in the following paragraphs.  Investing is not the study of finance but how people behave with money The premise of this book is that doing well with money has little to …

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What Holds Back Innovation

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The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Sherlock Holmes  For at least five millennia, we used wheels for transportation, from carts to cars, trains, pushchairs, bicycles, etc. Across ages, we also had heavy trunks to carry luggage. To help with the workload of carrying bags, we used carts with wheels to transport them because wheeling bags was much easier than lugging them. But still, for all the creative minds and visionaries that humankind had across centuries, it …

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