How to make choosing easier by Sheena Lyengar

The keys to simplifying your decision making process....
Cut
Concretization
Categorization
Condition for Complexity

Boss rail: How a high speed rail disaster exposed China's corruption

 

http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=1...

"Inside the system today, if you don’t take bribes you have to get out. There’s no way you can stay. If three of us are in one department, and you are the only one who doesn’t take a bribe, are the two of us ever going to feel safe?”

Live before you Die - Steve Jobs

Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment, or failure; these things just fade away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.  Remembering that you are going to die, is the best I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You all already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart.
-Steve Jobs

Schools kill creativity by Ken Robinson

"if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original" 
Ken Robinson contends that creativity is just as important as literacy and should be treated that way in our educational systems.

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz says the abundance of choice (which springs from some faulty (perhaps) underlying unquestioned American values - i.e. personal freedom and it's relation to happiness) is actually causing paralysis and great dissatisfaction

Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce by Gladwell

Malcom Gladwell says:

  1. In embracing the diversity of humanity, we will find the way to true happiness.

  2. Rather than looking for universals of human happiness, it might be better to look towards clusters of similarity.

  3. People don't know what they want (what they say is very often quite different from what they actually want deep inside).

"All of science through the 19th century and much of the twentieth was obsessed with universals.  Psychologists, Medical Scientists, Economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave.  But that changed.  What is the great revolution in science over the last ten, fifteen years?  It is the movement from the search for universals, to the understanding of variability."