Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

First-take feelings, if they’re anywhere near right, they’re generally the best. If you don’t take that one, generally, you take a dip emotionally.”

as soon as we formalize a rule of thumb into a target, it becomes a source of distortion.

We all know the grotesque project of the extermination camps during the Second World War. But in the prewar buildup, the persecution was of a different kind: Jews were hounded and humiliated. Academics with Jewish ancestry found their careers in ruins. The best of them left, seeking less intolerant cultures in Britain and the United States. A torment for those that fled, this policy was also a self-inflicted wound. German science was crippled. Despite a formidable industrial base and engineering tradition, Germany was unable to keep pace with the innovations that emerged from Britain and the United States—often from the very people who had been driven out. Racial and ideological purity is not a recipe for scientific success.

Mann’s point is not only that we are often too busy to get organized, but that if we focused on practical action, we wouldn’t need to get organized.

there’s a long tradition of using courageous questions to get us out of our tidy conversational habits. One list of questions was made famous by the novelist Marcel Proust, including “What is your most treasured possession?” “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?” “What is your favorite journey?” and “How would you like to die?” All of these questions beat “What do you do for a living?”