MASTERMIND: Rick Warren

"I did a series of lectures for the faculty in the Kennedy School ... I started with this quote from Peter Drucker: 'The most significant sociological phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. The most significant sociological phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century has been the development of the large pastoral church - of the mega-church. It is the only organization that is actually working in our society.' Now Drucker has said that at least six times. I happen to know because he's my mentor. I've spent 20 years under his tutelage learning about leadership from him, and he's written it in two or three books, and he says he thinks it's [the mega-church] the only thing that really works in society." - Rick Warren

"A critical question for leaders is, 'When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?' The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, 'Don't tell me what you're doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.'" - Peter Drucker, Forbes, November 19, 2004

"Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it's because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper. With that said, I give you the best book on entrepreneurship, business and investment that I've read in some time. It's not new and it's not a business book. It was written in 1995 and comes from the field of religion. It's titled The Purpose-Driven Church and was penned by Rick Warren. Warren - in 1980 and from scratch - launched Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. Under his leadership, the church has become the fastest-growing one in America. Weekends bring in an average of 15,000 worshipers. Saddleback has spawned dozens of so-called daughter churches throughout the country. Were it a business, Saddleback would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks. The Purpose-Driven Church has sold more than 1 million copies. Its sequel, The Purpose-Driven Life, has sold 12 million copies. Whatever you think about Warren or his religious beliefs, he has discerned a consumer need out there." - Rich Karlgaard, publisher, Forbes Magazine (Read the rest of the article here.)


Rick Warren, Big Think Interview
How Do You Organize a Mega-Church?


What Is a Purpose Driven Life?


Other Questions from the Big Think Interview (Video)

From TED
Rick Warren, A Life of Purpose (Video)

From The New Yorker
The Cellular Church: How Rick Warren Built His Ministry by Malcolm Gladwell

MASTERMIND: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On Black Swans
"Our human race is affected with a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On Skeptical Empiricism
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a larger personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have your read?' And the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library. We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of the competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes form our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously. Let us call an anti-scholar – someone who focuses on the unread books and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device – a skeptical empiricist." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan

Life Tips, The Sunday Times, 6/1/2008

• Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
• Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
• It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
• Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
• Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
• Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
• Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
• Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
• Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
• Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, A Crazier Future



From Comedy Central
The Colbert Report with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Video)

From edge.org
Reflections on a Crisis: A Conversation in Munich with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman (Video)

From RSA Events
David Cameron in Conversation with Nassim Taleb (Video)

From The Sunday Times
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Prophet of Boom and Doom by Bryan Appleyard

From The New Yorker
BLOWING UP: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy, by Malcolm Gladwell (PDF)

From The Financial Times
Ten Principles for a Black Swan-Proof World by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)

From the Foreword of Lecturing Birds How to Fly
History Written by the Losers by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)

From NPR
'Black Swans' and the Problems of Probability by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Audio, Transcript, Book Excerpt)

From edge.org
The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From Change This Manifestos
Few and Far Between: Black Swans and the Impossibility of Prediction by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's WEBSITE

ODDS & ENDS: Criminal Minds Quotes, Why Can't We Be Good?, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pit Bulls and Profiling

Criminal Minds - Season 2
"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind." - Francois de la Roche Foucauld

"It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone." - Rose Kennedy

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Boenhoffer

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. The most massive characters are seared with scars." - Khalil Gibran

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde

"The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate." - Erich Fromm

"Crime butchers innocents to secure a prize. And innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime." - Maximilien Robespierre

"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate." - Elbert Hubbard

"Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Some of the best lessons are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future." - Dale Turner

"Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends." - T.S. Eliot

"Evil brings men together." - Aristotle

"There is not a righteous man on Earth who does what is right and never sins." - Ecclesiastes 7:20

"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate." - Socrates

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." - Thomas Paine

"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." - Robert Kennedy

"The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul." - John Calvin

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed." - Herman Melville

"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles." - Charles Chaplin

Jacob Needleman, Why Can't We Be Good


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2-Part 1


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 2 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 3 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 4 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 5 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 2 - Part 6 (Video)

From The New Yorker
Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Profiling by Malcolm Gladwell

ODDS & ENDS: Criminal Minds Quotes, What Makes Us Moral?, Jeffrey Dahmer, Criminal Profiling

Criminal Minds - Season 1
"All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets." - Cory Doctorow

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." - Joseph Conrad

"When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." - William Faulkner

"There are certain clues at a crime scene which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being collected or examined. How's one collect love, rage, hatred, fear...? These are things that we're trained to look for." - James Reese

"Don't forget that I cannot see myself -- that my role is limited to being the one who looks in the mirror." - Jacques Rigaut

"The irrationality of a thing is not an argument of its existence, rather, a condition of it." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"With foxes, we must play the fox." - Thomas Fuller

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough, and liked it, never really care for anything else." - Ernest Hemingway

"A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses. It is an idea that possesses the mind." - Robert Oxton Bolton

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together." - Eugene Ionesco

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Evil is always unspectacular and alway human. And shares our bed...and eats at our table." - W.H. Auden

"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." - Confucius

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world, remains and is immortal." - Albert Pine

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence." - Mahatma Gandhi

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know." - Diane Arbus

"Other things may change us, but we start and end with family." - Anthony Brandt

"The house does not rest on the ground, but upon a woman." - Mexican proverb

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts." - Voltaire

"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." - Francois de la Roche Foucald

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." - Albert Einstein

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

Elie Wiesel, What Makes Us Moral?


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 1


Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 2 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 3 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 4 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 5 (Video)
Stone Phillips, Jeffrey Dahmer Interview: Segment 1 - Part 6 (Video)

From The New Yorker
Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy by Malcolm Gladwell