Insights

A few days ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about the many people we knew in our lives who seemed to be stagnant—i.e., not changing, not progressing, not accomplishing their goals—and the many people we knew who were not stagnant—i.e., moving up in the world, making things happen, reinventing themselves and their…
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June, 2017: my partner Eve and I are stuck at the visa-on-arrival desk in the domestic transfer wing of Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa. The rest of the transfer passengers, all Ethiopian, are waltzing past us to form a monster queue at passport control. As soon as I get my precious stamp, I sprint off…
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If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it. So much…
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Kobe Bryant’s Tragic Flight  (Vanity Fair, 25 January 2021) This article is a timeline of the day Kobe died in the helicopter crash that also killed his daughter Gigi and seven other people. But more than a timeline, the piece gracefully interweaves details that inform Kobe’s love for travelling by helicopter, the personal narratives of…
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If you like Formula 1 and like to test your limits, this is an interesting piece. P. Attia wrote it as a commemorating to Ayrton Senna’s birthday:

If you are interested in hedge funds, this is a good education:

Q: A couple of geeks who sketched out some software could destroy Sears Roebuck? A: That’s the beauty of technology. Wonderful video that is worth watching in its entirety. People forget just how much skepticism there was about Amazon back then. One of the jokes that made old economy types chuckle was to refer to…
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Great but old Article about S. Schwarzman and H. Kravis: Topping each other’s deals—$31.4 billion! $39 billion! $45 billion!—K.K.R.’s Henry Kravis and the Blackstone Group’s Stephen Schwarzman are locked in combat at the top of the private-equity heap. The rivalry has only sharpened since Blackstone’s I.P.O. sparked public outrage over the low taxes on such…
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During his time as a college coach, Joe Haumacher, a minor league pitching coach for the Orioles, used to have a policy that he wouldn’t meet with a player until he could offer his undivided attention. He wondered if that was fair, but reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” helped Haumacher understand his rationale. … “I…
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The common denominator of success — the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful — lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do. The Common Denominator of Success