Human World Rules — See how people before you handled it.

A knowledge base of the durable rules people have worked out about strategy, money, power, human nature and building things — drawn from 30 figures and classic texts across 2,600 years. Each entry gives the one idea that person is actually remembered for, the story behind it, the sub-principles with worked examples, and how it applies today.

Browse by topic: Modern · The industrial age · Family and relationships · Mind and feeling · Body and daily life · Learning and growth · Pre-Qin and classical

Arlie Hochschild — Arlie Hochschild (1983 · UC Berkeley) — Work nobody counts. A sociologist who twice gave a name to work that had none. The Managed Heart (1983) named emotional labour: jobs that require not only that you do it right but…
C.S. Lewis — C.S. Lewis (1898–1963 · Oxford) — The notebooks after she died. A writer and professor at Oxford and Cambridge, author of Narnia and of many books arguing people into belief.
Carl Jung — Carl Jung (1875–1961 · Zurich) — The afternoon has its own programme. The founder of analytical psychology, Freud's most valued student and his most famous defector.
Carol Dweck — Carol Dweck (2006 · Stanford) — Ability can grow. The Stanford psychologist behind the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets: whether you believe ability is a fixed quantity or something that grows with effort…
Christina Maslach — Christina Maslach (1946– · UC Berkeley) — Burnout is the job. Burnout became measurable largely because of her work. Her 1981 inventory split it into three components — emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a…
Esther Perel — Esther Perel (1958– · Belgium and New York) — Flat isn't broken. Thirty years of couples therapy, nine languages, and a caseload across many cultures. She doesn't work on how to argue — Gottman covered that in detail…
Excellent Sheep — Excellent Sheep (2014 · William Deresiewicz) — Can clear, can't choose. A critique of elite education by someone who taught at Yale for ten years and sat on admissions.
Fan Li — Fan Li (Spring and Autumn · 536–448 BC) — When to go. The most successful exit in Chinese history. He spent more than twenty years helping the king of Yue climb from hostage to hegemon, and walked away on the day it was…
Garry Kasparov — Garry Kasparov (1963– · Baku) — After losing to the machine. World chess champion for fifteen years, from 1985 to 2000. In 1996 he beat IBM's Deep Blue in Philadelphia; in the May 1997 rematch in New York he lost…
Han Feizi — Han Feizi (Warring States · 280–233 BC) — Law, method, position. The systematiser of Chinese Legalism, who combined law, administrative method and positional authority into one theory of power.
Harvard Study of Adult Development — Harvard Study of Adult Development (1938–present · Harvard Medical School) — Relationships predict the end. The longest study of adult life ever run. It began in 1938 with 268 Harvard sophomores, later merged with 456…
Huineng — Huineng (Tang · 638–713) — Already complete. An illiterate woodcutter from the far south who became the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism.
John Boyd — John Boyd (United States · 1927–1997) — Tempo. A US Air Force colonel known as Forty-Second Boyd, from a standing bet: any pilot, he starts from the disadvantaged position, and if he isn't on their tail within forty…
John Cacioppo — John Cacioppo (1951–2018 · University of Chicago) — Loneliness is a signal. A founder of social neuroscience who spent a career on one question: what loneliness actually is in the body and the brain.
John Gottman — John Gottman (1994 · University of Washington) — Four fatal signals. A psychologist who recorded thousands of couples in a laboratory, coding expression, tone and heart rate frame by frame, then tracked who divorced.
John Ratey — John Ratey (2008 · Harvard Medical School) — Move, then think. A professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who redefined what exercise is for. The primary return, he argues, is not the body but the brain…
Lev Vygotsky — Lev Vygotsky (1934 · Soviet psychologist) — One notch higher. A Soviet psychologist who died at thirty-seven and left concepts that shaped the whole of education.
Li Ka-shing — Li Ka-shing (Contemporary · 1928–) — Cycles. From a plastic flower workshop to a group spanning property, ports, telecoms, retail and energy.
Maria Montessori — Maria Montessori (1907 · Casa dei Bambini, Rome) — The room, not the discipline. One of Italy's first women doctors, who began with children with intellectual disabilities and then applied the same methods to ordinary…
Marie Curie — Marie Curie (1867–1934 · Warsaw and Paris) — She took his course. Physicist and chemist, born in Warsaw, in Paris from 1891, and in 1903 a Nobel laureate in physics alongside her husband Pierre.
Mark Granovetter — Mark Granovetter (1973 · American Journal of Sociology) — Weak ties. A sociologist whose 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, has been cited tens of thousands of times.
Norbert Wiener — Norbert Wiener (1894–1964 · United States) — He warned them first. The founder of cybernetics: Cybernetics in 1948, The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950. His position here is unusual — he is both the person who put…
Pu Songling — Pu Songling (1640–1715 · Shandong) — The side thing won. At nineteen he came first in three examinations and was locally famous. Then he sat the provincial examination for forty years and never passed, supporting his…
Rat Park — Rat Park (1978 · Simon Fraser University) — Look at the cage. A set of experiments from the late 1970s, plus a natural experiment nobody designed, which together unsettled a piece of common sense about addiction.
Robert Sapolsky — Robert Sapolsky (1994 · Stanford) — Stress is a mismatch. A neuroendocrinologist who spent thirty years with a troop of wild baboons in East Africa while studying human stress physiology.
Su Shi — Su Shi (Northern Song · 1037–1101) — Unbowed. One of the great Chinese poets, and also a calligrapher, a painter, a hydraulic engineer, a cook and a provincial governor.
Thomas Gordon — Thomas Gordon (1962 · Parent Effectiveness Training) — The I-message. A student of Carl Rogers who turned humanistic psychology into a course ordinary parents could take.
Wang Yangming — Wang Yangming (Ming · 1472–1529) — Knowing is doing. A philosopher who was also the most effective general of his generation — an almost unheard-of combination.
Winston Churchill — Winston Churchill (1874–1965 · Britain) — Ten years out, back at 65. Politician and writer. He went out with the government in 1929, lost the Exchequer, and held no office for ten years — the wilderness years.
Zhuangzi — Zhuangzi (Warring States · c. 369–286 BC) — Free and equal. The second peak of Daoism, and a very different writer from Laozi. Where Laozi addresses the person who has to govern, Zhuangzi addresses the individual who…

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