ConceptsNest

  A Story: In the 1920s, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel moved to Japan to teach philosophy at a university in a city called Sendai, near Tokyo. To deepen his understanding of Japanese culture, Herrigel began training in Kyudo, the Japanese martial art of archery. He was taught by a legendary archer named Awa Kenzo. Kenzo was convinced that beginners should master the fundamentals of archery before attempting to shoot at a real target, and he took this method to the extreme. For the first four years of his training, Herrigel was only allowed to shoot at a roll of straw just seven feet away. When Herrigel complained of the incredibly slow pace, his teacher replied: When he was finally permitted to shoot at more distant targets, Herrigel’s performance was dismal. The arrows flew off course and he became more discouraged with each wayward shot . During a particularly humbling session, Herrigel stated that his problem must be poor aim. Kenzo, however, looked at his student and re

  The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). Other names for this principle are the  80/20 rule , the  law of the vital few ,  or the  principle of factor sparsity . Management consultant Joseph Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement, naming it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted the 80/20 connection while at the University of Lausanne in 1896. In his first work, Cours d'économie politique, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency. More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly . It can mean all of the following things: The Uneven Distribution What does it mean when we say that things aren’t distributed evenly? The key point is that each unit of wor

The famous French philosopher Denis Diderot lived nearly his entire life in poverty, but that all changed in 1765. Diderot was 52 years old and his daughter was about to be married, but he could not afford to provide a dowry. Despite his lack of wealth, Diderot’s name was well-known because he was the co-founder and writer of Encyclopédie , one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias of the time. When Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, heard of Diderot’s financial troubles she offered to buy his library from him for £1000 GBP (in AD 1765….!!) Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare. Shortly after this lucky sale, Diderot acquired a new scarlet robe. That's when everything went wrong. The Diderot Effect Diderot’s scarlet robe was so beautiful, that he immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by the rest of his common possessions. In his words, there was “no more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty” between his robe and the rest of his items

  ***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: What Is Big Picture Thinking, Importance Of Big Picture Thinking, Detail Oriented Or A Big Picture Thinker- The Difference) Link to Chapter 01 Identifying the Different Approaches - Approach Indicators No matter which field we belong to – an aspiring entrepreneur, someone who’s putting together a dream team, or polishing our leadership skills, big picture thinking can help open up, innovative and unexpected creative paths, ideas and solutions. Detail-Oriented Approach Indicators o    We prefer tweaking an existing plan than creating one from scratch o    We think over issues in such great detail that we sometimes miss the bigger picture o    We end up putting down or highlighting almost all notes o    We work towards high-quality work in most areas of our life and struggle with perfectionist tendencies o    We’re organized and/or like routine   Big Picture Approach Indicators o    We can easily spot patterns

  Most people fall under either of the two main types of thinking paradigms- big picture or detail-oriented . The big picture thinker usually keeps coming up with ideas of what the ideal world would look like. The detail-oriented thinker on the other hand mostly thinks pragmatically and is organized. A Story: Around 1959 or 1960, Dashrath Manjhi, a laborer in India’s Gehlaur village lost his injured wife because the nearest hospital was about 45 minutes away. 22 years later, the same man had carved a 10-meter long path through the rocky ridge – all with a hammer and chisel – that chopped the travel time to 15 minutes. Manjhi is an extreme example of seeing the big picture — instead of getting overwhelmed by the details of how he was going to get it done, he focused on the broader issue at hand: he didn’t want anyone else to suffer his wife’s fate. So, he worked tirelessly for years to prevent that from happening again. What Is Big Picture Thinking? Big picture thinking is the ability t