Mark Lilla's new book explores the psychology and consequences of willful ignorance

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway. Content to being the lesser known of the two, Munger is no less impressive. Bill Gates says that Charlie Munger “is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered,” and Buffett calls him the ideal partner who is “both smarter and wiser.”

Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of Charlie Munger’s best advice given over 30 years, in the form of 11 speeches given as commencement addresses and roundtable talks. He covers a wide range of topics, including rationality and decision making, investing, and how to live a good life. You’ll learn why Charlie considers multidisciplinary learning vital to success, his checklist for investment criteria, and how to build a trillion dollar company from scratch.

Every decision carries risk. We don’t always think in terms of risk, and maybe that’s why we’re prone to making irrational decisions. But what if we worked on keeping risk at the forefront of our minds?

Annie Duke discusses how her decades-long poker career helped her develop decision-making strategies based on the idea that all decisions are bets. Being immersed in the game enabled her to observe how people make decisions in a setting where every choice leads to a clear outcome—winning or losing money. That’s what a bet is: a decision with quantifiable risk. In our guide to Thinking in Bets, you’ll find out how to work around your biases, objectively evaluate your beliefs, learn from your past, and ultimately get better at making good decisions.

Why and how do people justify their questionable actions and big mistakes? In Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson argue that we self-justify to relieve cognitive dissonance: discomfort triggered when we do things that don’t align with our other beliefs, actions, and values. They examine several unconscious processes we use to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, including self-justification, confirmation bias, and memory distortion. By learning about these psychological processes, you can unlock awareness of them in your own life and begin taking accountability for your actions.

In this guide, you’ll learn how contradictory thoughts and behaviors create painful dissonance. We’ll also discuss how self-justification, confirmation bias, and memory distortion help us relieve dissonance. Finally, we’ll discuss how the authors suggest we can break the cycle of self-justification and hold ourselves accountable for our uncomfortable actions. In our commentary, we’ll discuss healthier strategies you can use to deal with dissonance and explore some of the neurological processes that drive self-justifying behavior.

How can a loveable childhood character reveal the meaning of life? By living a simple life of doing nothing. In the Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff reveals how the simple-minded character of Winnie the Pooh perfectly emulates the teachings of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism. Taoist principles revolve around simply living as you are and following the natural power of the universe to find wisdom and happiness. While all the other creatures living in Pooh’s world get into all sorts of antics by overthinking or overacting, Pooh simply meanders as he is without question. The Way of Pooh is the Way of Taoism.

Defining creativity has historically been challenging because creatives are often walking contradictions—they’re introverted yet outgoing, focused yet easily distracted, and sensitive yet resilient. According to Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, this is because creativity isn’t a characteristic itself, but rather the effect of a collection of different characteristics.

The authors’ research shows that creative people are ultimately defined by their introspection, desire for learning and experiences, unconventional and fantastical thinking, and search for meaning. In Wired to Create, the authors say that creatives possess 10 characteristics that encompass these traits and result in their heightened creativity—by embracing these characteristics, you too can maximize your creative potential.

In this guide, we’ll explore Kaufman and Gregoire’s 10 creativity characteristics, explaining how they manifest and why they enhance creativity. In our commentary, we’ll supplement the authors’ discussion with information from other experts and books on creativity and well-being like The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and That Little Voice In Your Head by Mo Gawdat.

Have you ever had a sudden burst of inspiration that led you to a new solution to a problem? Or have you ever marveled at seemingly impossible modern inventions like the internet? If so, you may wonder how individuals are able to come up with such incredible innovations and how they develop them over time. In Where Good Ideas Come From, best-selling author and theorist Steven Johnson explains how good ideas grow from minor inklings to groundbreaking inventions, and how you can use this knowledge to come up with the best ideas possible.

In our guide, we’ll explore how good ideas grow from previous knowledge and networks. We’ll also look at how hunches lead to full-fledged ideas, often as a result of sudden insights, and how mistakes and the repurposing of other ideas can lead to new ones. Finally, we’ll compare Johnson’s ideas with ideas from other authors, contextualize them in other fields, and add tips for putting Johnson’s recommendations into practice.

The early 21st century has already seen numerous catastrophic failures of prediction: From terrorist attacks to financial crises to natural disasters to political upheaval, we routinely seem unable to predict the events that change the world. In The Signal and the Noise, statistician, analyst, and FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver sets out to explain why—and how we can do better.

Silver argues that our predictions falter because of mental mistakes such as incorrect assumptions, overconfidence, bias, and warped incentives. However, he also suggests that we can mitigate these thinking errors (and thus improve our forecasts) with the help of a method called Bayesian inference. In this guide, we’ll explain how fields ranging from politics to poker to meteorology can teach you how to make better predictions and avoid costly mistakes in judgment. Along the way, we’ll update Silver’s examples with the latest research and place his arguments in conversation with other experts on prediction such as Philip E. Tetlock and Daniel Kahneman.

The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. If people don’t face these challenges and help shape the future, the world could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated and people could lose their ability to make their own decisions. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and he offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times.

In this summary, you'll learn how algorithms like Netflix movie recommendations are teaching you to distrust your own judgment, why religion can’t solve 21st-century challenges, and how automation will threaten the jobs of humans in every industry.

How do you spark a trend that spreads like wildfire, or turn a product into the latest must-have item? You create a social epidemic. The Tipping Point explains how social epidemics — spreading ideas, messages, behaviors, and products — function like viruses, growing gradually until they reach a critical mass (the tipping point) and explode.

Three factors can be adjusted to tip an idea to a social epidemic: the messenger, the message itself, or the context of the message. Learn how Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Sesame Street, Airwalk skate shoes, and crime reduction in New York City began as ideas and tipped to become movements.