Learning and Education

Have you ever been overwhelmed by a restaurant menu with far too many options? The Cheesecake Factory is notorious for this — they hand out a Bible-sized booklet of different dishes you can choose from. Most of us feel a little lost examining these menu treatises. How can we possibly decide on what to eat when there are so many options?

There's a faction of behavioral economists who think that too much choice is a bad thing; we, as humans, don't know how to optimize our choices when presented with more than six or seven options. Are they right?

An Ivy League education, capped with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics is a magical door opener and a gilt-edged beginning to a promising career. And if your Ph.D. is unique – for example, interviewing the top 40 leaders and opinion-formers of Egypt and Israel and receiving a Peace Medal for your efforts – you will be even more impressive. I know this, because that’s my history.

About three months ago, I embarked on a less-than-epic, although very entertaining, quest to confirm or deny the famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, originally conducted by Stanley Milgrim. My goal was to send out letters, as in the original experiment, and have those recipients do their best to get those letters to a named someone in Boston. Each link in the chain would write down their name on the letter, and, by the end, we’d have a list of how many people the letter went through to get to that final person.

Well, it’s time to report out on that experiment. Get ready to have your mind blown.

Not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.

Why did this happen?

One of my favorite parts about the tech revolution is the sheer amount of data that we, as end users, generate. I’m thrilled when companies or organizations use data, voluntarily offered by their users, to write impromptu market research reports. It’s even more exciting when market research isn’t their core competency.

Becoming a student of Futures Studies (FS) is a challenging endeavor that should be navigated not only by the academic leaders and professors, but also personally by the students.

Today's atheists have come a long way from the days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. For those that remember her, O'Hair was the quintessential angry atheist. Her days were filled with combating religion, undermining faith, and doing so with a caustic wit.

Last week, my roommate bought a Kindle. Since then, he hasn’t stopped talking about it. Mainly, he’s wanted to get me to borrow it to read Henry Hazlitt‘s book Economics in One Lesson. The book, published in 1946, is an introduction to free market economics, and is a seminal text on economic principles. Tax season being upon us, I filed my taxes last night. Afterwards, I started reading Hazlitt’s book. His “one lesson” seemed pointedly relevant to this time of year.

A regional business newspaper, the Valley Business Report, is sponsoring a Foresight Workshop for business people in May in Mission, Texas. This will be about futures/foresight methods and how to apply those methods in business, particularly in small business. This is a four-hour workshop, which allows business people to attend in the morning and be back in their offices in the afternoon.
The format that I’m planning is a personal futures approach, then a discussion of how each tool or method can be applied in a small business. As a result, I’m working on a supplemental workbook for small business.