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The best shot is a kick toward a corner of the goal with enough force that the keeper cannot make the save even if he guesses correctly. But such a shot leaves little margin for error: a slight miskick, and you’ll miss the goal completely. So you may want to ease up a bit, or aim slightly away from the corner—although that gives the keeper a better chance if he does guess correctly.
Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.
We wrote this book to answer that sort of question. It strikes us that in recent years, the idea has arisen that there is a “right” way to think about solving a given problem and of course a “wrong” way too. This inevitably leads to a lot of shouting—and, sadly, a lot of unsolved problems. Can this situation be improved upon? We hope so. We’d like to bury the idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different
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Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, deciphering them—is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved. Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.
“Few people think more than two or three times a year,” Shaw reportedly said. “I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
the highest moral obligation.” This made our ears prick up. One thing we’ve learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties. We asked the minister what he meant by “moral obligation.”
When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently. Think of the last time you sat down
