Swart Donkey

Conversation is not the same as the written word.  When you read a transcript of a lively discussion, it often looks as if we’ve forgotten h...

Agreements are made by getting to know elephants. In Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the conscious choices we make are the riders, and normally wh...

Local markets should be more responsive to changes in preference, because they are able to respond to tacit knowledge. The stuff we can’t pu...

The French word for worried is inquiet. The German word for memory is erinnerung. More thesaurus than foreign if you look at the substance...

Shallow learning is when you force feed your Elephant, and then it goes round the corner and gets rid of it. Would you pass your school exa...

I spend a lot of time in my head. If you are like me, it is noisy there. More a committee than a voice that makes sense a lot of the time. ...

I want to trust people . My natural disposition is to give people the benefit of the doubt . I find if I assume the best intentions, then I...

I don't believe we have the 'unit' of who we are correct. Stopping at identity is lazy. There are conflicting voices beneath ...

I am a creature of habit. I like processes and patterns. Things I can understand. When I am part of a team, two things that drive me nuts a...

Have you heard yourself speak? It is quite disorientating. The voice in our head sounds different. Played back, we are able to see ourselv...

It is difficult to push on through reading a book where you don't agree with the ideas. It is not quite as difficult as having a conver...

There is a strong conflict between our short term desires and the the view from the top of the elephant of where we want to be. Change ha...

The battle between what we do and what we want to do is tragicomic. My favourite metaphor comes from Jonathan Haidt . He describes our men...

Getting bigger makes things more efficient. Getting bigger makes co-ordination and understanding a lot more difficult. As we have scaled pr...

It is great that we breathe without thinking. It is not great if, without thinking, we don't breathe properly. Our ability to do severa...

If you had to choose a chief candidate for a happiness battleground - what we put in our mouth would have to be right up there. Tastes, lik...

In general feedback sucks. We want to be the bigger person but normally despite our best intentions our elephant ** will go on the rampage...

Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. Don't mix friendships and work. Barriers start to become harder to enforce as informatio...

Josh Waitzkin has an incredible story. His is the kind of book you will read over and over, savouring every word and lesson. He started life...