Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

Author:Tim Harford
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-16T10:40:22.125000+00:00

Acknowledgements

‘ Write drunk. Edit sober.’

– attributed to Ernest Hemingway

‘ Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

– Samuel Beckett

My own most successful experiment was writing a book cal ed The Undercover Economist. One friend, David Bodanis, told me I should take some time off to write it instead of spending five days a week working for an oil company – in other words, pluralism. When the project had stal ed and I was planning to do something total y different, a second friend, Paul Domjan, talked me out of that and told me to finish what I had started – that’s discipline. A third friend, Andrew Wright, read every page again and again, tel ing me what was working and what wasn’t. I didn’t think of them as

‘the validation squad’, but they were and are. My entire second career as a writer would have been impossible without them. Thank you.

The book you now have in your hands took many years to write, much trial and error, and a great deal of help. I am particularly grateful to those who read parts of this book in draft and offered comments: David Bodanis, Duncan Cromarty, Mark Henstridge, Diana Jackson, Sandie Kanthal, John Kay, David Klemperer, Paul Klemperer, Richard Knight, Andrew Mackay, Fran Monks, Dave Morris, Roz Morris, Martin Sandbu and Tim Savin.

I am also hugely grateful to my col eagues at the Financial Times and the BBC More or Less team, in particular: Lionel Barber, Dan Bogler and Lisa MacLeod for their patience while I worked on the book; my col eagues on the leader-writing team; Sue Norris, Sue Matthias, Andy Davis and Caroline Daniel at FT Magazine; Peter Cheek and Bhavna Patel of the FT library; the ‘economics faculty’ of the FT, Chris Cook, Chris Giles, Robin Harding, Martin Sandbu and Martin Wolf; and at the BBC Richard Knight and Richard Vadon.

A large number of people were kind enough to agree to be interviewed or simply to provide suggestions or brief comments. I have also relied on the reporting of other writers, whom I hope I have properly acknowledged in the notes, but whom I wish to thank here where the debt is particularly great. Without in any way implicating them in the book that resulted, I am grateful to: Chapter One: Thomas Thwaites, Eric Beinhocker, Philip Tetlock, John Kay, Paul Ormerod, Donald Green, Michele Belot, Richard Thaler, David Halpern, Matthew Taylor and Jonah Lehrer.

Chapter Two: H.R. McMaster, Andrew Mackay, John Nagl, George Feese, Dennis DuTray, Jacob Shapiro, Steve Fidler, Toby Dodge, and Adrian Harford.

Chapter Three: Wil Whitehorn, Paul Shawcross, Richard Branson, Suzanne Scotchmer, David Rooney, Steven B. Johnson, Alex Tabarrok, Bob Weiss, Owen Barder, Robin Hanson, Jani Niipola and Ruth Levine.

Chapter Four: Wil iam Easterly, Owen Barder, Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Clemens, Edward Miguel, Sandra Sequeira, Esther Duflo, John McArthur, Ben Goldacre, Sir Iain Chalmers, Gabriel Demombynes, Michael Klein, Macartan Humphreys, Daron Acemoglu, Dean Karlan, Chris Blattman, Joshua Angrist, Jonathan Zinman, Clare Lockhart, Mark Henstridge, César Hidalgo, Bailey Klinger, Ricardo Hausmann and Paul Romer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.