Ask yourself at the time — or later, as you reflect on an incident or exchange — One difficulty in learning from experience (despite its awesome power as a teacher) is that we often are so involved in the experience that we don’t step back — during the experience or, more likely, later — to ask ourselves “What does this tell me?” I learned from a friend…

Hear the dog that didn’t bark — Michelangelo said (though presumably in Italian), “It takes work to remove the traces of work.” What looks effortless, as any professional dancer will tell you, looks that way after hours of unremitting effort. Fred Astaire did not just walk on the set and do the routine impromptu. He worked for…

What’s so bad about a union, from a management perspective? — What seems evident from the aggressive overreaction from Amazon management is that it truly does fear workers getting any power at all. The ideal, from a management perspective, is that workers be powerless. The reason is obvious: if workers have no power, then management can do what it wants with…

Let the gods decide — In a lecture course there’s no need to choose among the students: all students simply take notes, though from time to time one may ask a question for clarification. Some courses, however, require students to actively participate in class. …

Withered good intentions can bloom again if you learn how to recover from failure — Given that immediate and sustained success is extremely rare, we all experience multiple instances and kinds of failure. It follows that knowing how to handle failure—and, ideally, how to recover from it and set things aright — is an important skill to learn. Some failures are easy to spot and…

Patience is not a gift but a skill; skills require practice. — Patience is important, but like any skill it must be learned, so impatience is common (and can have serious consequences). Impatience differs from impulsiveness. In impulsive behavior, the issue of patience does not arise: a person who habitually acts on impulse does so not because they are impatient but because…

The unfamiliar makes us uneasy, so some pretend it’s like previous experience. — I think we all like — or are at least comfortably reassured by — the familiar. In Patrick O’Brian’s (excellent) series of British naval novels in the Napoleonic era, Stephen Maturin quotes a Catalan benediction on parting: “May no new thing arise.” New things make us uneasy because they are…

Some say a disaster is looming, others believe it’s overblown — what’s your take? — FutureMe.org allows you to write an email that it will send to you at a date you specify. The World Health Organization has officially stated that we are now experiencing a pandemic of coronavirus. Test your prognostic talent. Go to FutureMe and write yourself an email to be delivered to…

But I finally figured out why I was repeatedly short of money — Years ago I was mystified at how consistently I ran short of money each month. I understood why someone supporting a family on a low-paying job (or two) would face financial straits. But I was earning a decent salary and living on my own — and still I came up…