Most Popular Editorials: The unsolved murder of an unusual billionaire

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� Invite Friends   CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time!   The unsolved murder of an unusual billionaire Last December, a Canadian pharmaceutical executive and his wife were strangled in their home. No one knows who did it or why, but everyone has a theory. Last Dec. 15, two real estate agents arrived at a sprawling modern house near the northern edge of Toronto. They were accompanied by a couple who were considering buying the 12,000-square-foot mansion at 50 Old Colony Rd., recently listed for just shy of C$7 million. With five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a gym, a sauna, a tennis court, and underground parking for six cars, it was one of the more impressive properties on a street lined with grand homes. The sellers, pharmaceuticals billionaire Barry Sherman, 75, and his wife, Honey, 70, had lived there for more than two decades but were preparing to build a house closer to the center of the city. Continued here I'm a Developer. I Won't Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You. On a recent late-night formula run, I passed by a large display of books about teaching children to code. I have seen these books around, but never such a large display directed toward elementary-aged children. These books are part of a flood of resources - summer coding camps, after-school code clubs, apps designed to teach kindergarteners the rudiments of JavaScript - aimed at equipping children with future-proof skills. It\'s easy to see why parents push coding on their children. What better way to prepare our kids for a future ruled by software than by training them how to build it? If everything is going to be automated, it\'s much safer to be the one doing the automating. And if learning to code is good, then learning earlier is better. But while these products may teach kids specific coding languages, they actually have very little to do with the work of creating software. Continued here Tears 'R' Us: The World's Biggest Toy Store Didn't Have to Die An object lesson in financial mismanagement and miscalculation from the fallen Toys "R" Us. The early tale of Toys "R" Us brims with ambition, energy, and no small amount of ruthlessness, as creation stories often do. Charles Lazarus had gone from high school straight to the U.S. Army, where he served as a cryptographer during World War II, and as he cast about for a business venture upon his return, he identified a market that was largely unexploited: kids. "Everyone I talked to said they were going to go home, get married, have children, and live the American dream," he often recounted of those days. Lazarus may not have anticipated the full impact of the Baby Boom or the accompanying sprawl, malls, television, and advertising, but he took advantage of Americans\' desire to accumulate and the cultural imperative to conform. He opened the first big-box toy store, outside Washington, D.C., in 1957, then another and another, until by the mid-1980s there were more than 200 across the country. Toys "R" Us Inc. offered abundance on a scale that smaller competitors could never equal, much of it at prices they could never match. As its mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe, became as recognizable as Tony the Tiger and its "I don\'t want to grow up" jingle lodged itself in the brains of a generation of kids, Toys "R" Us became the first category killer. In 1985, Goldman Sachs called it "one of the outstanding companies in all of retailing," and for much of the decade, Lazarus was among the highest-paid chief executive officers in the U.S. Continued here Five smart ways to fight food waste An estimated 30 percent of the planet\'s food supply is needlessly discarded. Here are some imaginative ideas to stop the rot. We humans have a puzzling attitude towards food - it\'s one of the few things in life that we absolutely need to survive, yet we can be shockingly careless with it. From a shriveled up peach that went ignored in a fridge drawer to a misshapen cabbage tossed for not meeting supermarket standards, 1.3 billion tons of food is discarded each year, while an estimated 795 million people are undernourished. "Most European and North American countries already have between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations," says food waste activist Tristram Stuart. "For example, America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed all its residents." And food waste affects far more than our garbage cans, wallets or stores; it squanders our limited resources of water, energy and land. If wasted food were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, consume $2.6 trillion a year, and occupy nearly 30 percent of the planet\'s farmable land, according to a report from the UN\'s Food and Agriculture Organization. Action to combat the problem is taking place on multiple fronts. At the World Economic Forum in 2016, a group announced the Champions 12.3 campaign to halve global food waste by 2030. On the grassroots level, many people around the world have developed a wide range of smart - sometimes fun or stylish - ways to help us feed billions and reduce the strain on the Earth. Here\'s five of them. Continued here � � Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson "The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive." On May 20, 1990, Bill Watterson, creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, took the podium at Kenyon College - the same stage David Foster Wallace would occupy 15 years later to deliver his memorable commencement address - and gave the graduating class a gift of equally remarkable insight and impact, which remains among the greatest commencement addresses of all time. Watterson begins the speech by articulating the same sentiment at the heart of the most unforgettable commencement addresses: the notion that not-knowing is not only a part of the journey, but an integral part: Continued here The 'serendipity mindset': how to make your own luck Seeing meaning in the unexpected can help turn mistakes into opportunities, says researcher Dr Christian Busch. Dr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. "I turned my life around. Before that I\'d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The accident instilled a sense of urgency to try to find meaning." Luck continued to play a positive role in his life. An accidental coffee spillage in Starbucks led to romance and though the person in question is no longer his girlfriend they are still close. In his work as an entrepreneur, researcher and community-builder, he co-founded several social enterprises and teaches at both New York University and the London School of Economics - enjoying plenty of lucky breaks along the way. But Busch noticed that he wasn\'t the only "lucky" one among his friends and colleagues. In fact, many of the most successful and happiest people he encountered also seemed to be on a permanent lucky streak. Continued here How to think about coronavirus risk in your life A Harvard epidemiologist offers a framework for making key life decisions while also managing pandemic risk. Covid-19 has turned life into an endless series of risk calculations. Can I take my child to see their grandparents, even if it means getting on a plane? Is it okay to begin seeing friends or dating? Should I attend religious services even if they are held inside? Do I have to wear a mask around my roommates? The profusion of these questions reflects public health failures, but we live in the wreckage of those failures. So how do we live our lives? Julia Marcus is an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and a contributing writer for the Atlantic who has penned a brilliant series of essays about how to think about risk in the midst of this pandemic. Marcus\'s starting point, which emerges from her previous work on HIV prevention, is that an all-or-nothing approach is blindly unrealistic: Everything is a trade-off. Shaming is a terrible public health strategy. And we can\'t have a conversation about risk that ignores the reality of benefits, too. Continued here The Rising Frugal Economy To build new industry value chains that benefit people, society, and the planet, we need a new economic operating system. Given its deep systemic flaws, it makes no sense to reboot a dysfunctional capitalist economy. Instead, we need to upgrade and reinvent it to make it more efficient and agile, socially inclusive, and ecologically beneficial. Even before COVID-19, the discussion around "stakeholder capitalism" and "eco-capitalism" had been underway for quite some time. But while these concepts address some of the flaws of capitalism mentioned above, they don\'t tackle all of them. Although these concepts have enabled individual companies to boost the impact of their corporate social responsibility programs, they haven\'t created breakthrough multicompany business models that fundamentally reshape the structures and dynamics of entire industries. It\'s time to think bigger and bolder. To build and support radically new industry value chains that are truly beneficial to people, society, and the planet, we need a new operating system that I call a frugal economy. Continued here � � Take Ownership of Your Future Self In his TED Talk "The Psychology of Your Future Self," Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert explains a bias that almost all of us have: We tend to think that the person we are today is the person we will always be. Most people, when asked if they are the same person they were 10 years ago, will say no - but we have a much harder time seeing potential for change in the future. Gilbert and others refer to this as the "end of history illusion." Despite awareness that our past self is clearly different than our present self, we tend to think that who we are right now is the "real" and "finished" version of ourselves, and our future self will be basically the same as who we are today. Gilbert puts it simply: "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they\'re finished." Continued here How to Deal With the Anxiety of Uncertainty Our brains weren\'t wired to deal with the "psychological pandemic" of not knowing what the future holds. Here\'s how to cope with living in limbo. If there\'s one defining feature of the coronavirus pandemic, it\'s uncertainty. Will there be a vaccine? When can schools safely reopen? Will I still have a job next week? Should I book a spring vacation abroad? A crisis that we\'d all hoped would be short-lived is dragging on indefinitely, and the list of unanswered questions keeps growing. "Waiting periods are marked by two existentially challenging states: We don\'t know what\'s coming, and we can\'t do much about it," explains Kate Sweeny, professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside. "Together, those states are a recipe for anxiety and worry. People would often rather deal with the certainty of bad news than the anxiety of remaining in limbo." That\'s what researchers at three institutions in the UK found in a 2013 experiment, when they attached electrodes to 35 subjects and asked them to choose between receiving a sharp shock immediately or waiting for a milder one. The vast majority chose the more painful option, just to get it out of the way. "It\'s counterintuitive," admits Giles Story, one of the academics behind the study. "But it\'s a testament to how anxiety-inducing and miserable it can be to have things looming in the future." Continued here Spies Are More Common, and Boring, Than You Think How many spies are there anyway? Many Americans were surprised this month by allegations that a Russian woman, Mariia Butina, had infiltrated the National Rifle Association and was having sex with well-placed men, in the hopes of receiving information for Russia. A recent Politico article noted that Russia and China were significantly stepping up their spying operations in Silicon Valley, to extract useful tech knowledge. I think Americans underestimate the extent of spying in their midst. Because we do not know the number of operating spies, that\'s a hard hypothesis to test, but there are a number of reasons to find it plausible. Our underestimation is partly the fault of movies and television, which give us overly glamorized images of espionage. Continued here The Dark Core of Personality What\'s your dark core score? Over 100 years ago Charles Spearman made two monumental discoveries about human intelligence. First, a general factor of intelligence (g) exists: people who score high on one test of intelligence also tend to score high on other tests of intelligence. Second, Spearman found that the g-factor conforms to the principle of the "indifference of the indicator": It doesn\'t matter what test of intelligence you administer; as long as the intelligence test is sufficiently cognitively complex and has enough items, you can reliably and validly measure a person\'s general cognitive ability. Fast forward to 2018, and a hot-off-the-press paper suggests that the very same principle may not only apply to human cognitive abilities, but also to human malevolence. New research conducted by a team from Germany and Denmark suggests that a General Dark Factor of Personality (D-factor) exists among the human population, and that this factor conforms to the principle of indifference of the indicator. This is big news, so let\'s take a look. Continued here � You Might Like � � � When It's OK to Trust Your Gut on a Big Decision Some executives pride themselves on having a strong intuition, honed through years of experience, that guides their decisions. Others are ambivalent about relying on their intuition to make important choices, concerned that their gut reaction is inherently biased or emotional. This latter group is no doubt responding to the oft-given advice that we should use formal data and analysis to "check" our intuitions. So who\'s right? Should leaders make decisions based on their gut feel, or shouldn\'t they? My recent research suggests that gut feel can in fact be useful, especially in highly uncertain circumstances where further data gathering and analysis won\'t sway you one way or another. In several studies I\'ve conducted over the past eight years looking at high-stakes decisions, such as surgeons making life-or-death emergency room decisions, or early-stage investors deciding how to allocate millions of dollars in startup capital, I found that the role of gut feel is often to inspire a leader to make a call, particularly when the decision is risky. Continued here How to be a good listener: my mission to learn the most important skill of all Kate Murphy\'s new book, You\'re Not Listening, suggests that many of us - absorbed in our own thoughts and dreams, occupying our little digital bubbles - have lost the ability to listen, creating an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Murphy argues that our growing failure to listen has dire political consequences because we are no longer willing to engage with our opponents\' points of view. In the US, for instance, "senators used to meet in a communal dining room where they talked to each other and were exposed to each other in a way where they could really listen, whether it was about politics or something else. They humanised each other. Now people are intent on being separate and demonising one another. It\'s not just that they don\'t agree. They think the other person is bad, is an evil person. You can\'t start listening if you think the other person is fundamentally an idiot or a bad person." She says you only grow when you listen to opposing viewpoints - a powerful argument for escaping from our social-media echo chamber.  Continued here Meet the woman who gave the world antiviral drugs Fifty years ago, few scientists believed a drug could fight viruses with low side effects. Then Gertrude Elion showed the doubters "what I could do on my own." When news broke in April that the drug remdesivir had been shown to speed recovery in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, hailed the finding as "an important proof of concept" in the race to bring the pandemic to heel. Unlike a vaccine, which prompts the body to mount a defense against invading viruses, remdesivir is an antiviral drug, which hampers the ability of a virus to replicate and spread. For now, results related to remdesivir are mixed, although some studies continue to suggest the drug can improve outcomes for patients with severe forms of COVID-19. Still, only a few decades ago, most scientists doubted such a thing was even possible - that a tiny, parasitic particle wholly reliant on a host cell to reproduce could be inhibited without harm to the cell itself. Now, antivirals are used to treat herpes, hepatitis, HIV, Ebola, and more. And arguably, none would exist today were it not for Gertrude "Trudy" Elion. Born in 1918 in Manhattan, Elion overcame early financial hardship and outright sexism to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming only the fifth woman to do so. She shared the award with her longtime collaborator George Hitchings, who hired her in 1944 to join his biochemistry lab at the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline). Continued here How I Built Resilience: Brian Chesky of Airbnb (24 min listen) In the early stages of the lockdown, Airbnb was in a freefall: it lost 80 percent of its business and laid off a quarter of its staff. But CEO Brian Chesky tells Guy that as people start to travel again - in cars, and closer to home - the company is beginning to recover. "This has been, by far the most difficult thing that we\'ve experienced since we started the company a dozen years ago. And I think Joe and I used to talk about how starting Airbnb, basically this idea that, strangers will live with each other, that was the hardest thing we were ever going to do. It was like pushing a rock up a hill. And it turned out that trying to run a company that does travel and preparing to go public in the middle of a pandemic is about as hard". Continued here � � From Hemingway to Haruki Murakami- great writers' tips about working from home The coronavirus pandemic is forcing many of us to work from home. There\\'s plenty to learn from the people who\\'ve always worked in isolation. If there is one cohort uniquely prepared for both working from home and going into isolation - it is writers (also people in closed monastic orders). Writers with book deadlines or a passion project that must be written now usually have to go into lockdown in order to get the damn thing finished. They stock up on food, limit their communication with the outside world, create and stick to a routine and stay healthy by getting enough rest and healthy food. Here\\'s some of their tips for not just surviving while you work from home or socially isolate - but for thriving and doing some of your best work yet. Continued here How Instacart Hacked YC Editor\'s note: Apoorva Mehta is the founder of YC-backed Instacart, a startup that\'s taking on 1-hour grocery delivery. He previously worked on supply chain infrastructure at Amazon.com. Getting into Y-Combinator is hard enough; but getting in two months late and as a single founder is almost impossible. This is how I hacked my way in. It was June, and I decided to apply to Y-Combinator. I always wanted to go through the intense program, and I knew that getting in would dramatically improve the chances that Instacart would succeed. But there was a problem: I missed the application deadline. By over two months. Continued here Why It's So Lonely at the Top Work friendships are crucial to happiness. What happens when you can\'t make them? "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" This is the most famous line in William Shakespeare\'s play Henry IV, Part 2, spoken by the titular 15th-century English king. He is tired, sick, sad, and alone in his misery. His remark expresses the persistent idea that leaders tend to be isolated and lonely. Modern research supports this claim. It\'s not that leaders are more likely than others to say they are lonely people in general, but isolation and loneliness at work are a special source of unhappiness for people at the top. Friendship at work is crucial to happiness for most people. Among employees and managers studied by the human-resource advisory firm Future Workplace and the workplace-wellness company Virgin Pulse, more than 90 percent said they have friends from work, 70 percent said friendship at work is the most important element to a happy work life, and 58 percent said they would turn down a higher-paying job if it meant not getting along with co-workers. According to a proprietary data analysis by Gallup conducted this month, employees who say they have a "best friend" at work are almost twice as likely as others to enjoy their workday, and almost 50 percent more likely to report high social well-being. Continued here Serial Entrepreneur, Prolific Investor & Kauffman Fellow Ashish Gupta on Entrepreneurship & Investing in India So one of the myths that I have heard from a lot of folks, especially those who are not in investing is that somehow angel investing is a way to make money. I found that angel investing is more a way to exercise one\'s passion, and it costs a lot of money. So it is probably more expensive than golf or tennis as a way to keep yourself entertained. And once in a while when one gets lucky, which forms the apocryphal stories as to what draws rest of the flies only to get fried on the flames of angel investing. But that is one. The other one which I find as an investor is that one can become a good investor by learning what works for others. And probably Warren Buffett is an interesting example. He\'s written more about investing than most other investors. So by that token, we should all have become Warren Buffett by now. But man, is that story, a sad ending for most of us who have tried to emulate. So it comes down to discipline of execution. It\'s very easy to read but like everything else in life, we all play a certain stroke. And just by watching Nadal, I can\'t change my backhand to the way he plays his backhand, and we regress back to the stuff that we know. So one of the things that I find is the myth that a lot of people believe in, that I found it very hard to practice is that talking to folks and learning what others do one can become an investor. That is what I found. It is more like finding what works for you. Because all one needs are three good deals in an entire lifetime. And one is done. And that is out of hundreds of millions of deals. And it\'s discovering what is that special something about how you play the game that I think is the hard part. Continued here � � How Angela Merkel's great migrant gamble paid off Mohammad Hallak found the key to unlock the mysteries of his new homeland when he realised you could switch the subtitles on your Netflix account to German. The 21-year-old Syrian from Aleppo jotted down words he didn\'t know, increased his vocabulary and quickly became fluent. Last year, he passed his end of high school exams with a grade of 1.5, the top mark in his year group. Five years to the month after arriving in Germany as an unaccompanied minor, Hallak is now in his third term studying computer science at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences and harbours an aspiration to become an IT entrepreneur. "Germany was always my goal", he says, in the mumbled sing-song of the Ruhr valley dialect. "I\'ve always had a funny feeling that I belong here." Continued here Want to Learn a New Skill Faster? Take Short Breaks, Early And Often (Secrets From New Research) Downtime is crucial to retaining anything you choose to learn. Break-time is an important component of any serious learning session. According to recent research, taking short breaks, early and often, can help you learn things better and even improve your retention rate. "Everyone thinks you need to \'practice, practice, practice\' when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, maybe just as critical to learning as practice," said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., a senior investigator at NIH\'s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Better breaks help the brain solidify, memories during the rest periods. Continued here The new neuroscience of stuttering After centuries of misunderstanding, research has finally tied the speech disorder to certain genes and brain alterations - and new treatments may be on the horizon Gerald Maguire has stuttered since childhood, but you might not guess it from talking to him. For the past 25 years, Maguire - a psychiatrist at the University of California, Riverside - has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition. Only with careful attention might you discern his occasional stumble on multisyllabic words like "statistically" and "pharmaceutical." Maguire has plenty of company: More than 70 million people worldwide, including about 3 million Americans, stutter - that is, they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech, resulting in halting and repetition. That number includes approximately 5 percent of children, many of whom outgrow the condition, and 1 percent of adults. Their numbers include presidential candidate Joe Biden, deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others. Continued here TradeBriefs Publications are read by over 10,00,000 Industry Executives About Us  |  Advertise Privacy Policy    Unsubscribe You are receiving this mail because of your subscription with TradeBriefs. Our mailing address is GF 25/39, West Patel Nagar, New Delhi 110008, India