Americanism

Cognitive load is like playing an iterated game of diminishing returns. Every choice—every click, every scroll—saps a little more of your mental energy. By the time you’re 20 decisions deep, your ability to make intentional choices is shot. It’s not that you’ve lost the game; you’ve been worn down by it.

In behavioral economics, this is known as dec... See more

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless creativit... See more

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers b... See more