• When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.

• Perspective often comes from distance or time. If you’re trying to solve a problem and you’re stuck, try shifting your vantage point. Examples of this are moving up and contemplating the bigger picture, moving down and seeing more details, or assuming the perspective of other stakeholders—customers, suppliers, partners, government.

• In physics, reciprocity is Newton’s third law, which states that for every force exerted by object A on object B, there is an equal but opposite force exerted by object B on object A.

• When I land on the ground after jumping, I am exerting a force on the ground. At the moment of landing, the ground is also applying a force that is equal but opposite in direction on me. The earth applies a force on me even when I am just standing. This force is gravity. But the gravitational force exerted on me by Earth is reciprocated by me through the force I am exerting on the earth.

• Jet propulsion works by forcing matter, such as gas produced by burning fuel, in one direction, leading to a corresponding movement of the vehicle in the opposite direction. This holds true for everything from fireworks and guns to huge spacecrafts.

• Sometimes, if you want to understand how pervasive a concept is, you can look at the vernacular of a society. English speakers from Commonwealth countries have many expressions that suggest the basics of reciprocity are foundational for how we expect our society to function. “Quid pro quo,” Latin for “something for something,” appeared in regular usage in the 16th century. We also have “give and take,” “tit for tat,” and “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The meaning behind these expressions, which implies an expectation of reciprocity, is perhaps best summed up by another Latin phrase: “do ut des,” translated as, “I give, so that you may give.”

• There are three physical modes through which to transfer energy: radiation, convection and conduction.

• A train can’t just stop moving as soon as the driver applies the brakes because of momentum. The equation for calculating momentum is p=m*v, where p is momentum, m is mass and v is velocity. When something with mass is moving, it has momentum. The greater the mass and the greater the velocity, the greater the momentum of an object. If you’re out for a run, it takes a lot less effort for you to stop than it does for a train because you’re lighter and slower. Doubling either the speed or the mass of an object will double its momentum.

• Within 50 years it was used, abused, and abandoned. Interestingly, “subsequent tests have shown that much of the supposed proof of absinthe’s inherently deleterious effects were nonsense.”9 It is actually no worse for you than any other alcohol of the same strength.

• Mass matters. It is much easier to apply the force to stop a light object versus a heavy one. Lead and absinthe had different societal masses. Lead performed a number of highly useful functions in multiple manufacturing processes. Absinthe got people drunk. Lead had been integrated into many other substances, and so there is also an incentive angle. The cost of containment and remedy for lead was extremely high, and people would have had to abstain from using products they found useful, not to mention the cost of retooling manufacturing systems that relied on lead. Absinthe stood on its own. Thus, it took far less effort to remove absinthe than it is taking to remove lead.

• This is part of the reason why the proof of something being harmful is not always enough to produce a change in behavior. The inertia of a product, a habit, or an idea increases the longer it is around. There are countless urban legends and popular myths that have been around for a long time and have woven themselves into our understanding of the world, despite available evidence of their inaccuracy.

• Sometimes it can seem monumentally frustrating when reliable information doesn’t seem to change an erroneous popular opinion. Using inertia as a lens helps us understand the dynamics that are involved and gives us some insights on how to tackle addressing the motion we want to change.

• Conclusion Energy is precious and we employ it sparingly. It’s human nature to allow the current state to remain as changing it requires us to expend energy. Getting started is the hardest part. Once something is moving in a direction, it’s much easier to keep it in motion. But once something is in motion, it’s hard to stop. The bigger the mass the more effort required.

• All objects experience friction. There are two key types of friction: kinetic and static. Kinetic friction occurs when two objects are sliding past each other. This explains why an object in motion, without consistent forces pushing it forward, will come to a halt. For example, if you place a book on a table and give it a push, it will move a bit then stop. The kinetic friction absorbs the energy you transfer to the book in the push. Static friction, on the other hand, occurs when an object is stationary; it’s what prevents it from moving.

• The Ford Model T left two legacies: the iconic image of the beginning of the automobile age, and the mass production system. For Ford, and later GM, mass production systems were not designed to incorporate the potential for innovation at the level of the factory worker. Essentially, “the workers on the shop floor were simply interchangeable parts of the production system.”9 Massive amounts of inventory were kept on the floor, and problems were not fixed until the end of the line. Workers were not there to address problems or improve the system. They were just there to perform their repetitive task, leaving any rework or problem-solving to specialists.

• He saw that output could be significantly affected by reducing the friction happening at that level. “If workers failed to anticipate problems before they occurred, and didn’t take the initiative to devise solutions, the work of the whole factory could easily come to a halt.”10 Therefore, getting more effective output from the shop floor worker was not about speeding up performance or setting higher quotas. It was about creating a smoother environment that empowered workers to engage with their work.

• As James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos explain in The Machine That Changed the World, “In striking contrast to the mass production plant, where stopping the line was the responsibility of the senior line manager, Ohno placed a cord above every workstation and instructed workers to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn’t fix. Then the whole team would come over to work on the problem.”13 Pulling this “Andon cord” created a lot of immediate friction—like going from water to cement in a second—but allowed for mistakes on the line to be addressed immediately.

• “It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for discovering defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.”

• Conclusion To achieve our aims, reducing resistance is often easier than using more force. While often hidden, friction and viscosity work against us whenever we try and do something. To overcome resistance, we often default to using more force when simply reducing the friction or viscosity will do. Doing both is more effective than either in isolation. Friction and viscosity can also be wielded as a weapon. Rather than try and catch up to the competition with more effort, you might want to explore slowing them down by adding resistance.

• If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him. » Seneca1

• Some people react by fighting to keep the language “pure” and consistent with centuries-old usage. They advocate a top-down approach to language development. Others accept changes and innovations and view them as a source of creativity and way of staying relevant.16 The lens of evolution and natural selection suggests that trying to freeze a language, or trying to maintain tight control on its evolution, is the exact wrong reaction in terms of preventing extinction. If a language cannot adapt it will cease to be useful. If it ceases to be useful, it will go extinct.

• Adaptations are about being successful in your environment, so it becomes critical to define success. For animals it means living long enough to pass on your genetics and, depending on your species, getting your young through the early vulnerable stages. Mammals, in particular, don’t just need to have offspring, but need to teach them how to successfully navigate their environment.

• In other words, structures that arise for the purposes of fulfilling an associated function, like echolocation in bats, are adaptations, while structures that arise that are then used for a function other than the one they originally performed, like feathers in birds, are exaptations.

• Inventions are almost never solitary, isolated creatures; they depend on other inventions that complete them or endow them with new applications that their original inventors never considered. » Steven Johnson 27

• The history of commercial products is littered with exaptations. Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 by Alfred W. Fielding and Marc Chavannes by sealing two shower curtains together and capturing bubbles of air on the inside. Obvious use? No. They first tried to sell it as wallpaper, but there were no takers. Then they tried marketing it as greenhouse insulation, but this failed. Then the company took it to IBM as a way to protect all their new business computers while in transit. The usage took off and the product developed into the bubble wrap we have today.

• Thus, what exaptation is fundamentally about is flexibility. We cannot know the exact pressures we will face in the future. So what we need is a box of diverse tools that can be used and combined in almost a limitless number of ways to meet the challenges we face. Some of these pieces will never have any use, and some will be complete game changers. But no one can divine this ahead of time. Survival of a business often depends on being able to change quickly. You can’t do that if you have to start from a blank slate every time environmental pressures push you to develop and innovate.

• It also teaches us that as individuals we must not underestimate the options we have at our disposal. Too often we get stuck in “functional fixedness,” a mindset where we see in things only their intended use, rather than their potential use. A fork doesn’t have to be just a tool to put food in your mouth. It could also be a hook, tack, or hair detangler.

• Complacency will kill you. The stronger we are relative to others, the less willing we generally are to change. We see strength as an immediate advantage that we don’t want to compromise. However, it’s not strength that survives, but adaptability. Strength becomes rigidity. Eventually your competitors will match your strength or find innovative ways to neutralize it.

• In biology, an ecosystem encompasses a community of interacting species and their nonliving environment. All components play a part in determining the characteristics, from the type of soil to the amount of sun or water available. Some animals cooperate, others compete, and changes in any component can affect both the fitness of individual species and the health of the entire system.

• Perhaps most importantly, regular small fires burn up accumulating plant matter. If humans intervene and put these out, larger amounts of fuel build up and pave the way for fires that are beyond the scope of what the ecosystem can handle. Often, the harder we try to control ecosystems, the harder they fight back.

• Without the keystone, the arch would collapse. It is a small component, but everything else depends on it. Keystone species can be hard to identify, as they may only be present in low numbers or may not be highly visible species. We can only know for sure that an organism is a keystone if its numbers drop and we see the knock-on effects of that.

• The Law of the Minimum states that the yield of a crop will always be dictated by the essential nutrient that is available at the lowest level. No matter how abundant the other essential nutrients are, being deficient in one will always limit the crop’s growth. If the level of that nutrient is increased, another will become the limiting factor. One way to envision this is as a bucket with a hole through which water leaks out. The bucket cannot fill to the brim as a result. The deficient nutrient is the hole in the bucket.

• In manufacturing, a bottleneck is a similar concept. A factory process can only move as fast as the slowest step. Likewise, in mathematics we refer to multiplying by zero which is akin to the Law of the Minimum—put a zero at the end of a multiplicative calculation and it cancels out the numbers before it, no matter how high.

• A species’ niche includes everything that affects its ability to reproduce and survive. For example, the amount of water and sunlight it needs, the temperatures it can tolerate, and how much space it requires to live are all part of its niche and are called abiotic factors, meaning the non-living aspects of an ecosystem.

• This is known as resource partitioning. If it doesn’t, the second species’ slight advantages will become significant enough to wipe out the first. For instance, if there are two carnivores in the same area that hunt the same prey animals, one species will always have some meaningful advantage, like greater speed or camouflage. This will enable it to outpace its competitor, which will have to find another food source or face extinction.

• Most people don’t realize that the fax machine, something that sends images over wires, was invented in the 1840s.

• finite.13 A more widespread example is the evolution of eyes. It might seem natural to us that most animals, except ones living underground or at the depths of the sea, have eyes. But the fact that so many unrelated lineages evolved organs that look the same and function in the same way is extraordinary. The eye of a squid has much the same structure as that of a spider.

• Echolocation, another way of “seeing,” evolved in unconnected lineages: cetaceans, bats, shrews, tenrecs, some birds, and possibly hedgehogs.

• In popular culture, organisms from other planets are generally depicted as wildly different to anything on earth. But convergent evolution suggests that might not be the case and that other life forms could have evolved to be recognizably similar to ones on earth.

• Convergence explains why people in disconnected cultures throughout history have made similar tools, told similar stories, organized themselves in similar social structures, cooked similar food, and generally found analogous solutions to the problems they faced.

• Specialists have less competition and stress, but only in times of stability. Generalists face a greater day-to-day challenge for resources and survival but have more flexibility to respond when times change.

• as her “only way into a more meaningful existence.”6 There is a nuance here: that for humans survival is not merely a binary like dead/alive. We don’t want to just continue breathing, but to have a life that we perceive as having meaning, value, or at least a point.

• Hoarding and hiding are not lifelong strategies.

• Beginning in the 11th century and ending in the 18th, the Habsburg family dynasty ruled over a significant portion of Europe. Members of the family at various times ruled over Germany, England, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and other countries.

• Closed systems, those without any new inputs, die in changing environments. Ultimately, after 16 generations of intermarriages, the Habsburgs ended up with such serious disabilities that they wiped the family out. Their success in controlling Europe proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. The final member, Charles II, was infertile and thus unable to produce an heir.

• Thus, replication alone is not always beneficial. Imagine a teacher photocopying a worksheet for a class then throwing away the original. The next year they make photocopies of the photocopies then again throw away the originals. As the years go by, the quality of the sheet progressively gets worse because each copy will pass on errors and introduce new ones.

• Recognizing the need for a new strategy, the Germans developed Auftragstaktik or what we now call commander’s intent, which is the idea of sharing the information necessary “to empower subordinate commanders on the scene.”

• entity is likely to encounter during its lifetime.”11 When the Germans faced Napoleon, they were experiencing problems related to their rigidity of organization. The guys on the front lines couldn’t adapt. Discouraged from ever considering the why or the rationale behind an order, the German troops had nothing to draw on when Napoleon changed his tactics mid-battle.12 The environment always changes, which is why successful replication has a bit of flexibility built in.

• Empowered subordinates can adapt to changing battlefield conditions, but giving flexibility cannot cost the commander the ability to synchronize events to execute the strategy.

• Strategy is the employment of the battle to gain the end of the war; it must therefore give an aim to the whole military action, which must be in accordance with the object of the war; in other words, strategy forms the plan of the war, and to the said aim it links the series of acts which are to lead to the same, that is to say, it makes the plans for the separate campaigns, and regulates the combats to be fought in each. As these are all things which to a great extent can only be determined on conjectures, some of which turn out incorrect, while a number of other arrangements pertaining to details cannot be made at all beforehand, it follows, as a matter of course, that strategy must go with the army to the field in order to arrange particulars on the spot, and to make the modifications in the general plan which incessantly become necessary in war. Strategy can therefore never take its hand from the work for a moment.

• In chimpanzees, “the alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. These coalitions play a central part not only during overt struggles for the alpha position, but in almost all day-to-day activities. Members of a coalition spend more time together, share food, and help one another in time of trouble.”

• Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. » Charlie Munger1

• “Perhaps the greatest economic innovation in human society was the invention of money, an exchangeable commodity that in effect stores the power to purchase and sell goods.”

• Consider the story of Andrew Wakefield, the lead author on the paper published in The Lancet that claimed it had found a positive correlation between vaccines and autism. Later debunked, but not before causing a widespread drop in vaccinations that has resulted in needless deaths, the article was retracted. He did not sign the retraction. Why? He had “a conflict of interest that he had failed to disclose to the journal: he was conducting research on behalf of lawyers representing parents of autistic children. Wakefield* had been paid more than eight hundred thousand dollars to determine whether there were grounds for pursuing legal action.”18 Tavris and Aronson demonstrate that “unlike truly independent scientists, however, he had no incentive to look for disconfirming evidence

• Humans can also be heavily motivated by uncertainty. There are particular situations in which we find it more compelling to go after a possible payoff instead of a sure thing. Why? Because it is often more stimulating, which is an incentive in itself. Think of getting together with a group of friends every Saturday to play board games. Numerous studies have shown that we would cease this behavior if we knew we were going to win every time. Winning is fun. Guaranteed winning is not.

• Change is costly for most organisms. It can be easier to keep doing whatever has guaranteed their survival so far than to try something new that might fail and waste energy or endanger them. The instinct to minimize energy output can lead us to be resistant to change or risk-taking. Using this model as a lens help us better understand our default thinking tendencies, and how our patterns of movement impact our physical environments.

• Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

• We fall to the level of our evolutionary programming, not our best, often naive, intentions.

• When it comes to offices, open-plan layouts don’t reduce overall energy expenditure. They may make it easier to move around, but they vastly increase the effort needed to focus and get work done—which are what matters most in an office. In an open office, workers have to ignore the constant onslaught of stimulus and disruptions—the ding of phones, the slurping of drinks, the sound of music leaking out of headphones, the clatter of feet, the sound of laughter, the annoyance of coworkers tapping on shoulders to ask questions, the slamming of doors, and so on.

• A large part of the appeal of open offices to employers and designers is that they reduce costs. They also look impressive on the recruitment page of a website or when showing an investor around. However, any claims that they also increase collaboration and reduce information silos tend not to be substantiated by research, which means that they actually are likely to increase costs in the long term. For example, face-to-face interactions decrease by as much as 70%, with more emails, messages, and other forms of digital communication making up the difference.6 What is really interesting is that open-plan offices are far from modern and have indeed been the standard throughout much of history. Although their design has taken on many different iterations, their deficiencies are not new.