Warren Buffett turned a failing textile company into Berkshire Hathaway and compounded capital for over sixty years at a rate that remains essentially unmatched. He is also, unusually for a figure of that scale, a lucid teacher — his annual letters are a free education in business thinking. His habits are almost comically simple. He…
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Elon Musk has founded or led Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, and he reshaped two industries that were widely considered closed to newcomers: automotive manufacturing and orbital launch. Reusable rockets alone cut the cost of reaching orbit by an order of magnitude. His most borrowable mental tool is first-principles reasoning. Rather than accepting…
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Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and built Palantir and Founders Fund. His book “Zero to One,” drawn from a Stanford course, is one of the more intellectually serious things written about startups. His central distinction is in the title: going from zero to one means creating something genuinely new,…
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Sigmund Freud was a Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and, in doing so, permanently changed how human beings talk about themselves. Before Freud, the idea that your behaviour might be driven by motives you cannot directly inspect was not part of everyday thinking. After him, it was unavoidable. His architecture is familiar even to people…
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Alan Turing was a British mathematician, logician, computer scientist, and cryptographer. He is widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern computing and is best known for his work during World War II on breaking German codes, including the Enigma machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their communications. In 1936, Turing published…
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Albert Einstein published four papers in 1905 — his “miracle year” — that between them established the reality of atoms, the quantum nature of light, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy. He was 26 and working as a patent clerk. A decade later came general relativity, which reconceived gravity as the curvature…
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Leonard Susskind started out as a plumber in the South Bronx and became one of the most important theoretical physicists of his generation. He is a father of string theory, co-discoverer of the holographic principle, and the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford. He is best known publicly for the “black hole war”…
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Nikola Tesla was the Serbian-American engineer whose alternating current system won the “war of the currents” and became the basis of essentially all electrical power distribution on Earth. He also gave us the induction motor, major early work in radio, neon lighting, remote control, and the Tesla coil — around 300 patents in total. His…
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Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. There are various types of machine learning such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. Popular…
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Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” (1937) is one of the best-selling books of all time and the template for nearly a century of success literature. Its core claims: define a “definite major purpose,” write it down, hold it with burning desire, and surround yourself with a “mastermind” group of allied minds. Some of that…
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