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We all could use a healthier does of humility when we are too flush with great man hubris. The world is richer and more complicated than we give it credit for.

Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

By one estimate, 5 billion tons of carbon flow from plants to mycorrhizal fungi annually. Without help from the fungi, that carbon would likely stay in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the powerful greenhouse gas that is heating the planet and fueling dangerous weather. “Keeping this fungal network protected is paramount as we face climate change,” Dr. Kiers said.

There are now so few fires that there is double the number of false alarms each year in the US than genuine fires. The number of firefighters, however, has skyrocketed – primarily to meet medical demand.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

New research shows that we judge future positive events as both farther away and shorter than negative or neutral ones, leading us to feel like a holiday is over as soon as it begins.

Each of us constructs our model of reality via the experiences, relationships and knowledge we encounter in our random walks through the world. Early in life, you’re eager to add on — to collect concepts and ideas and perspectives. It’s empowering to add tools to your tool chest, even if indiscriminately. After a while, though, it becomes more difficult to make changes and additions. You grow accustomed to the stuff you have and sensitive to your internal design. If your house is in a particular style, some additions just don’t fit. You don’t want to put that modern sofa in your old Victorian.

We think of certain kinds of challenges as *really hard* when they are, in fact, *completely impossible*. And then we drive ourselves crazy trying to deal with them – thereby distracting and disempowering ourselves from tackling the *real* really hard things that make life worth living.

The Musk School is as much about cultivating the individual executive’s brand as it is about running an actual company. Its practitioners see themselves as visionaries, and they can often point to the early success of their companies as evidence. But they also believe that the skills they perceive as having in one area are applicable elsewhere—in particular, the messy art of managing people.

There’s something magical about being big enough to have “big city” amenities (bike shares, public transport, bars, food music, etc..) while being small enough that there are not too many options for people to choose between.