Letters Remain

Tag: advice

  • Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address

    Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…

  • Life Advice Through Management Theory and Business Strategy

    When Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 invited professor Clayton Christensen (expert on disruptive technology and innovation, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) to address them, they requested he talk on how to apply management theory principles to one’s personal life. Christensen responded by answering three questions: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy…

  • Information, Not Recommendation, the Best Advice

    Attempting to discover the most effective way to offer advice, researchers identified four separate types of advice: Advice for is a recommendation to pick a particular option. Advice against is a recommendation to avoid a particular option. Information supplies a piece of information that the decision maker might not know about. Decision support suggests how…

  • Fiction-Writing Rules, from Fiction Writers

    Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s lauded book of the same name, Ten Rules of Writing, The Guardian asks a selection of 28 authors (from Margaret Atwood to Will Self) for their ten rules of writing for the aspiring fiction author (part two). Elmore Leonard’s ten are included, and he summarises them with the following: My most important rule…

  • Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky

    In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…

  • Advice from Economists

    Jim Rogers—co-founder of the Quantum Fund (with George Soros), economic commentator, guest professor of finance at Columbia University and author of A Gift to My Children—provided a short interview with the FT discussing his thoughts on making that first million, on travelling, and some general advice to the next generation. What is the secret of your success? As…

  • Eliciting Quality Feedback

    Feedback is important, there’s no doubt, but obtaining quality feedback that is honest and of use can be difficult. After spending an evening with a person “oblivious to the social dynamics” of a situation, Ben Casnocha provides tips on obtaining honest feedback: For feedback on specifics — such as your participation at a dinner or a…

  • Self-Awareness and the Importance of Feedback

    It comes as no surprise to hear that we are poor at perceiving how others view us and are poor at recognising the true personality traits of those we observe, but it’s the extent to which this is true and methods we can use to overcome these ‘personality blind spots’ that I find interesting. When…

  • Life Advice

    Not from a life coach, personal development guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actually worth paying attention to: those older than you. First is Life Advice From Old People (via Kottke)–a video blog containing nothing but interviews with a wide range of ‘old’ people, including…

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless. English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a…