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Think of written language: a way to leverage what people have learned in the past so that we don't have to relearn everything from scratch with each new generation. Or consider standardization of processes, which gives companies leverage over people by making them easier to replace. Levers are everywhere, once you start looking for them.

The trick is to start looking at outcomes in the aggregate instead of focusing on each unique situation.

Much of thermodynamics is about equilibrium, including the fact that two systems of different temperatures, when exposed to each other, eventually become the same temperature. If thermal equilibrium is desirable, we can expend our efforts to maximize the exposure of the two systems to each other. Conversely, in order to keep them from reaching a state of equilibrium, some sort of insulating barrier is required. Similar to the experience of using a thermos to keep coffee hot, insulators can slow down the temperature change but cannot stop it completely.

Leverage unleashes the potential of what we can do. When we all had sticks, the variation in productivity wasn't much. Small changes in individual performance didn't have significant absolute impacts. It wasn't until we developed tools that allowed us to leverage small changes in individual performance that we started to see a lot of variation in productivity.

Inertia is a useful model to try to understand some elements of our behavior, including our thinking patterns and habits. Our natural inclination to reject the new is in part normal resistance to the effort required to change. Keeping things as they are requires almost no effort and involves little uncertainty. We need force to effect change, and force requires effort. This model offers a lens to help us understand resistance to change and why we fail ourselves when we get complacent.

Like a smooth surface provides less challenge to a rolling ball, or how water is easier for a human to swim through than a krill, shaping our environment to reduce the challenges of opposing forces is a key to improving productivity.

When you see someone doing something that doesn't make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.

Catalysts accelerate change. While they cannot make a reaction happen that would normally not, they can significantly reduce the time required for change to occur. Finding the right catalyst is critical. No single substance increases the rate of all reactions. Because different reactions have different activation energies, there are many different catalysts.

Handwritten books were rare and the purview of a very small section of society. Getting access to them was complicated--you ... The printing press acted as a catalyst to accelerate the process of obtaining knowledge. There was now a repeatable process for copying knowledge: books. These books were cheaper and faster to make than the old manuscripts, and thus were more widely available.

The core concepts of relative perspective and framing have a broad application. When someone gives you something, an opinion, a report, an article, a plan, consider how it is framed. Who is involved in this information, and what do you know about their vantage point? Knowing the factors that influence how a person frames issues helps you understand their perspective and how you can use it to augment your own.

The precise origins of the Black Death are unlikely to ever be known, but we do know how it spread. Animals, in particular rats, carried fleas infected with the plague bacteria when they climbed aboard ships sailing around the world. The fleas then jumped onto humans, bit them, and infected them with the Black Death. In the 1340s, the trading routes that were bringing Europe new wealth and opportunities brought it something more sinister. With no knowledge of what was causing this devastating disease, people continued to move and trade, spreading the plague further and further afield.

two societies with different values. If we want to encourage equilibrium, then we can think of sharing as transfer of energy. There are three physical modes through which to transfer energy: radiation, convection and conduction. There are clear analogies of how these modes are used socially to achieve equilibrium across boundaries. For example, radio and TV radiate ideas across borders. Teacher-student exchanges act as intellectual and social convection currents. Brands and foreign aid conduct values. Mixing cultures gives them common ground. We move toward social equilibrium when we share ideas and values that have the same foundations.

Relativity helps us to understand that there is more than one way to see everything.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel prize winning physicist, clarifies entropy in contexts such as organizing a pile of coins or the mixing of jelly and peanut butter in their containers. Why is it that if someone knocks the table the coins will get mixed up, or that despite their best efforts your children inevitably get jelly into the peanut butter jar and vice versa? "The explanation is that there are more ways for [coins] to be mixed up than sorted. There are more ways for peanut butter and jelly to contaminate each other's containers than to remain completely pure. To the extent that chance is operating, it is likely that a closed system that has some order will move toward disorder, which offers so many more possibilities."

Velocity is often confused with speed, but the two concepts are very different. Speed is just movement; even if you are running in place, you have speed. Velocity has direction. You must go somewhere in order to have velocity. This model teaches us that it's much more important to pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving. No one wants to be a hamster in a wheel, focused on moving so fast that we lose track of what we're trying to achieve. While speed ensures movement, velocity produces a result.

like a traditional toolbox has a hammer when you need to pound a nail but a wrench for when you need to turn a bolt,

Black Death, which swept the world for several centuries, peaking in the 14th century. The epidemic was tragic, wiping out hundreds of millions of people. Yet it also proved to be a powerful catalyst for social, religious, economic, and cultural change. Though we can't know if these changes would have happened anyway and it is only the distance of time that enables us to find anything positive in it, it seems that the Black Death was the beginning of many elements of the society we now live in.

If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.

Life is an iterative and compounding game. In the words of Peter Kaufman, it pays to "go positive and go first." Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.

At a basic level, many brain studies have shown that the idea of multitasking is a myth. When we shift our focus from one input to another, we exert more energy and use more time to finish everything than if we would have completed one task before starting another.

Aristotle* discussed five components of knowledge. "They are what we today would call science or scientific knowledge (episteme), art or craft knowledge (techne), prudence or practical knowledge (phronesis), intellect or intuitive apprehension (nous) and wisdom (sophia)."

The mechanisms through which catalysts work are relatively simple in theory. By creating alternative pathways for the reaction to occur, more of the reactant particles have enough energy. The reaction is then faster, safer, and, in industrial contexts, cheaper.

"lean" and is summed up in the following: "It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for discovering defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause."