With the untimely death of Tim Russert, this article from the Wall Street Journal was a profound reflection of what is real and what is a mirage in this life, and I quote:

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That’s what it really admires. That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, “The thing about Joe was he was rich.” We say, if we can, “The thing about Joe was he took care of people.

See here for the for full column

Do we do irrational things that make no common sense - authors Ori and Rom Brafman propose that we do in their new book, “Sway - The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior”. This relatively short book (an easy Sunday afternoon read) is a further contribution to an increasing number of books on the whole idea of behavioral economics and the like, perhaps most notably written about by Malcolm Gladwell in “Blink”. In fact I felt like I had read the first half of Sway somewhere else as the authors identified “sway” factors such as; loss aversion, value attribution and diagnosis bias - different terms perhaps but the same fundamental ideas as what I have read elsewhere. The last couple of chapters were for me the most helpful on our need for perceived fairness and the impact of pleasure versus altruism.

So, an enjoyable afternoon read - sure, but frankly it was so full of illustrations that I had to work hard to actually pull out the concrete components. Content headings, definition identification and/or summary table would have been useful to help summarize the well-told story. For full disclosure, I was sent this book for free - as I read it I was constantly challenging my perspective knowing that I had been sent a copy by the publisher - I wonder what “sway” that impacts?