The World's Best Book Summaries
What is outcome bias? How does it manifest in your everyday life, and how can you avoid it? Outcome bias is the tendency to evaluate the quality of a decision when the outcome is already known. People who succeeded are assumed to have made better decisions than people who failed. We’ll look at outcome bias examples and why we’re so vulnerable to outcome bias.
While you may be a habitual smoker, pregnancy is a special time when smoking will affect the fetus. How much smoking is OK while pregnant? And what are the risks of smoking during pregnancy?
What is “slow thinking?” How can you use it to become a better thinker and make better decisions? Slow thinking is when you allocate attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. It’s often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration. We’ll cover what slow thinking is and how to use it to make better decisions.
A premature birth occurs before 36 weeks and occurs in 12% of pregnancies. Early-term is between 37-38 weeks, and full-term is 39 and beyond. Over the past decades, survival for preterm babies has increased dramatically due to improvements like assisted ventilation (lungs develop later in pregnancy). It’s a marvel that even babies born at 22 weeks still have a shot at survival. What are the specific chances of survival for each week of pregnancy? How likely is a baby to survive at 24 weeks, vs 26 weeks, and 28 weeks?
What are your chances of getting pregnant, depending on the day that you ovulate? The good news is, your chances of getting pregnant are pretty good, ranging from 10 to 35%, depending on when you try conceiving relative to your ovulation day. However, outside of a range of days, you have 0% chance of getting pregnant. We’ll cover how ovulation works, your specific chances of conception before ovulation, and why the chance of getting pregnant varies so much.
Who is Wing Chau of The Big Short fame? What was his role in the 2008 financial crisis, and why was it controversial? And how did he make an estimated $26 million shuffling papers? Wing Chau is an investment advisor and bond manager whose role as a CDO manager was depicted in The Big Short. Wing Chau wasn’t happy with the way he came across in the book and movie. Learn why his position as a “CDO manager” was, and is, controversial and how he contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
Leaders set the tone and example for their teams, and as they navigate challenging situations leaders must constantly keep a careful balance of seemingly opposite forces. When a leader struggles or is ineffective, it is typically a sign that she has veered too far to either side of one of these dichotomies; in this way, a leader’s greatest strength can become her weakness if she doesn’t keep it balanced. Here are the key dichotomies of leadership, from the book by Jocko Willink.
What is the key to being a great leader? Is it about having the right personality type, training, or team? Former U.S. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, authors of Extreme Ownership, argue that the best leaders take responsibility for every aspect of their team and every task they’re working to accomplish. Extreme Ownership is total accountability over everything that happens under a leader’s direction. Extreme ownership requires a leader to own her team’s mistakes and failures — without blame or excuses — and objectively assess what works and what doesn’t in order to constantly improve. As Willink and
Does it make sense for you to undergo genetic prenatal testing? What are the different ways you can do this, and what are their pros and cons? Learn the three methods of genetic testing here.
How were the credit rating agencies involved in the financial crisis of 2007-2008? Why did they fail so miserably in their role rating subprime? We’ll cover how credit rating agencies contributed to the financial crisis and why their failures were the result of both incompetence and greed.