All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 103 in total
Episode 107: Beginner's Mind: The Expert's Hidden Trap
Today's episode teaches Beginner's Mind — shoshin — the Zen principle that Shunryu Suzuki captured in one unforgettable line: in the expert's mind, there are few possi...
Episode 106: The Dichotomy of Control — Revisited
We revisited Epictetus's Dichotomy of Control today — not as a lesson in letting go, but as a discipline of attention. The real insight, drawn from the Enchiridion and...
Episode 105: Cognitive Dissonance and the Cheap Exit
Today's episode teaches Leon Festinger's concept of cognitive dissonance — the discomfort we feel when our beliefs and our actions don't match — and the sneaky ways we...
Episode 104: Antifragility: Getting Stronger From Stress
Today's episode teaches antifragility — Nassim Taleb's idea that some systems don't just endure stress, they grow stronger because of it — and shows what that looks li...
Episode 103: The Habit Loop
Today's episode teaches the Habit Loop — the cue, routine, reward cycle that Charles Duhigg documented in his reporting and research — and shows how you can change a b...
Episode 102: Failure as the Literal Path to the Shot
Today's episode teaches Michael Jordan's own framework for failure — the idea that missed shots, lost games, and choked moments aren't detours from success but the lit...
Episode 100: Marginal Gains: The 1% Rule
Today's episode teaches Dave Brailsford's philosophy of marginal gains — the idea that a one-percent improvement across every small element of a system compounds into ...
Episode 99: Satisficing: Why Good Enough Wins
Today's episode teaches satisficing — the decision-making principle Herbert Simon introduced in the nineteen-fifties and Barry Schwartz later brought to life through h...
Episode 97: The Barbell Strategy
Today's episode teaches the Barbell Strategy — Nassim Taleb's idea that the safest and most effective position is to pair an extremely secure foundation with a small s...
Episode 96: Deliberate Practice and the Cost of Comfortable Reps
Today's episode is built around deliberate practice, the concept psychologist Anders Ericsson developed through his landmark research at the Berlin Academy of Music. T...
Episode 95: Margin of Safety
Today's episode teaches Benjamin Graham's margin of safety — the principle that the gap between what something is worth and what you pay for it isn't just upside, it's...
Episode 94: The Stockdale Paradox
Today's episode teaches the Stockdale Paradox — named by Jim Collins after Admiral James Stockdale, who endured years of captivity as a prisoner of war and emerged wit...
Episode 93: Discipline Equals Freedom — Revisited
We've touched on Jocko Willink's Discipline Equals Freedom before — today we go a layer deeper into why constraint is the actual engine of freedom, not its opposite. T...
Episode 92: The 80/20 Principle
Today's episode teaches the Eighty-Twenty Principle — the pattern Vilfredo Pareto first documented in nineteenth-century Italy showing that a small share of inputs dri...
Episode 91: Growth Mindset and the Power of Yet
Today's episode teaches Carol Dweck's growth mindset — the idea that ability is buildable, not fixed, and that the word "yet" can change your whole relationship with d...
Episode 90: The Belief Barrier: Roger Bannister's 4-Minute Mile
Today's episode teaches the belief barrier — the idea Roger Bannister made undeniable when he ran the first sub-four-minute mile in nineteen fifty-four and, within thr...
Episode 89: Regret Minimization: The Bezos Decision Rule
Today's episode teaches Jeff Bezos's Regret Minimization Framework — the simple but powerful idea that when you face a hard decision, you project to age eighty and cho...
Episode 88: Survivorship Bias
Today's episode teaches survivorship bias — the perceptual error Abraham Wald famously exposed when he showed WWII military planners they were reinforcing the wrong pa...
Episode 86: Two-Way Doors: Jeff Bezos on Reversible Decisions
Today's episode teaches the Two-Way Door framework, introduced by Jeff Bezos in his two thousand fifteen Amazon shareholder letter: reversible decisions deserve speed,...
Episode 85: Big Rocks First
Today's episode teaches Stephen Covey's Big Rocks First framework — the simple, powerful idea that you have to schedule what truly matters before the small, reactive t...