Can you make money in the long tail?
Jory Des Jardin writes about the "entrepreneurial sin" of postponing joy.
If you are starting a business, does it help or hurt to have a partner?
If close friends don't really know our preferences, should marketers still push for marketing by recommendation?
In a long and often strange piece about crowds and their behavior, Lila Rajiva gives a great example of how crowd behavior starts, and why it is so important to us (see the last three paragraphs of the story). And she nails the reason we embrace it:
By thinking like everyone else, our lump trades in the uncertainty and loneliness of being an individual for the certainty and camaraderie of belonging to a group. What use would it be for the poor lump to be right if he was right all on his own? What would it profit him to gain his soul but lose the world? He decides he would rather have the world. Or rather, an instinct lodged in his brain, drives him to it. Solidarity with his unthinking fellow lumps is wired deeper in his skull than the fleeting pleasures of reasoning on his own. In his heart and soul, man is a social animal and solidarity with his group — however wrong — is more important to him than being right alone.
Check it out: 10 Investing Books Recommended By Warren Buffett.
