Supritha S

“The polymath not only moves between different spheres or different fields and disciplines, but seeks fundamental connections between those fields, so as to give them a unique insight into each of them,” says Ahmed.

People enjoy all-inclusive vacations because they pay one lump sum at the beginning (the pain) and the rest of the trip is divided into positive experiences, excursions, and parties. In the words of my professor, all-inclusive vacations “segment the pleasure and combine the pain.”

Again, it’s not that there’s no such thing as fault, or that solutions never require holding a particular party to account. Only that there’s something about the human mind that wants a given problem to be someone’s fault, simply because it would be easier if it were.

As far as I can tell, interpreting problems as the crimes of clear perpetrators is the only way we attempt to justify real hatred for people. We need that sense of simplicity – the bad thing comes from the bad people — to hate a person or group without reservation, and history is full of examples.

Too often, we assume innovative ideas and meaningful changes require a blank slate. When business projects fail, we say things like, “Let's go back to the drawing board.” When we consider the habits we would like to change, we think, “I just need a fresh start.” However, creative progress is rarely the result of throwing out all previous ideas and... See more

Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?The lizard brain.

In other words, the gentle ramp allows for that fabled “lifestyle change” to actually happen. Your identity has time to catch up with your aspirations. The effort required to advance along a gentle ramp is doable for a regular person with other commitments and limited willpower, which describes pretty much everyone. (When you get into advanced... See more

The least articulate form of the bad actor explanation might be the one we hear most often: that human beings are terrible and society is terrible. As much as that might explain any problem you can think of, it’s a ridiculous conclusion to make, if you consider that our species is obsessed with right and wrong and discerning one from the other.