The art of arbitrage - I believe - is the key to living smart. It allows you to get much more given the same amount of effort. What you do there is connecting to different worlds and then leveraging the “price differences” between them to your advantage. It’s just like what the merchants do in [...]

The single most important ingredient of effectiveness is clarity, and the only way to increase clarity is by minimizing noise. That actually is the reason why you should read history more than news: history has much less noise than news. By reading history, you will consume a much more noise-free information compared to reading news. [...]

What does it mean to live smart? In my opinion, living smart means knowing how to leverage your situations in the best possible way to your maximum advantage. Regarding this, there is one word I often hear recently: arbitrage. I believe this word captures the essence of living smart. In fact, I believe that the [...]

Bill Gates described himself as an avid reader. And as you who follow this blog might know, I am also an avid reader. I refer to a lot of books in this blog. I’ve had the habit of reading since my childhood by which time my favorite place had already been the bookstore.
The book Accelerated Learning for the [...]

We can improve our personal productivity by applying the the Pareto principle or Parkinson’s law. But why not going further by applying  the Long Tail concept?
The Long Tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson to describe how entities like iTunes or Netflix doing business. Due to the low cost of storing and distributing digital [...]

There is an article entitled Food Boom in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American which I found interesting. It talks about the tremendous increase in U.S. agricultural productivity in recent decades.
“Over the period 1948 to 2004, total farm production went up by 166 percent. But… productivity per person improved so much that only one [...]