Thomas McCrae was a young 19th Century doctor still unsure of his skills. One day he diagnosed a patient with a common, insignificant stomach ailment. McCrae’s medical school professor watched the diagnosis and interrupted with every student’s nightmare: In fact, the patient had a rare and serious disease. McCrae had never heard of it.
Two weeks ago, I was scheduled to attend an annual meeting in Chicago. I caught an early morning flight into O’Hare and arrived at my hotel on Michigan Avenue shortly before noon. Knowing I had a few hours to kill before my first meeting, I decided to walk around the city to see how much it had (or had not) emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Having your views confirmed is a powerful and addictive drug.
Reggie Vanderbilt was born into a family of bitter feuds, fragile egos, and impossible expectations. Everything went downhill from there.
People are very good at forecasting the future, except for the surprises, which tend to be all that matter.
A lot of good ideas are ignored because they’re only occasionally useful. No one wants to bring them up because there are so many counterexamples of times they were wrong.
Forecasting is hard because it’s easy to skip the question, “And then what?”
One hundred billion people have walked this planet.
We were so close.
I was born in the beautiful historic city of Lviv, Ukraine about six months after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence.