Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Tim Harford, "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure", Hachette Digital, 2011. In my review of The Undercover Economist  and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back , I noted that there is also a third Tim Harford book on Conceptually's bookshelf . Indeed, that book is Adapt  -- a book about bottom-up trial-and-error approaches to solving complex problems. For an economist who believes in the power of markets, this seems like a logical literary foray. ( Recall that, for economists L. von Mises and F. Hayek, the market's price system functions as a decentralized "economic calculator".) However, Adapt is about much more than economics; it touches on a diverse range of issues including terrorism, climate change, innovation, evolution, nuclear accidents, and even art. In the first of eight chapters, the author talks about how the complexity of the modern world can make it hard to solve problems, even for leaders and experts. Even the l...

Book Review: Brian Tracy, "Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time", Berrett-Koehler, 2007. In line with the self-improvement theme , I decided to check out "Eat That Frog!" by Brian Tracy, a popular audience book about productivity. It was a quick read (at 117 pages), and delivers exactly what you'd expect based on the subtitle -- twenty-one "principles" for managing time, each with its own chapter. But why the title "eat that frog"? Well, as Brian Tracy explains in the introduction: "Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long." So, a metaphorical "frog" is a big and important task that can have a great impact on your life but is also something that you are likely to procrastinate on (...