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Guy Kawasaki :Play to win and win to play

“Play to win and win to play. Playing to win is one of the finest things you can do. It enables you to fulfill your potential. It enables you to improve the world and, conveniently, develop high expectations for everyone else too. And what if you lose? Just make sure you lose while trying something grand. Avinash Dixit, an economics professor at Princeton, and Barry Nalebuff, an economics and management professor at the Yale School of Organization and Management, say it this way: “If you are going to fail, you might as well fail at a difficult task. Failure causes others to downgrade their expectations of you in the future. The seriousness of this problem depends on what you attempt.” In its purest form, winning becomes a means, not an end, to improve yourself and your competition. Winning is also a means to play again. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining. The rewards of winning – money, power, satisfaction, and self-confidence – should not be squandered. Thus, in addition to playing to win, you have a second, more important obligation: To compete again to the depth and breadth and height that your soul can reach. Ultimately, your greatest competition is yourself.” (more…)

The Illusion of Skill

“The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [financial] industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.”

I find that, unfortunately, to be terribly true.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Kahneman, he is a professor at Princeton and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, and behavioral economics.

A Simple Logic Question That Most Harvard Students Get Wrong

Havard students get near-perfect SAT scores. These are smart, smart kids. So they shouldn’t have trouble with a simple logic question, right?
Try the following puzzle:
A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
Scroll down for the answer … (more…)