Greetings everyone,
This week’s newsletter at a glance:
Addition by Subtraction
How to Achieve Optimal Improvement
Sample Size Calculations
Enjoy!
A job that demands complete dedication, has fixed hours and is repetitive is intolerable; better is one which is free from boredom and which combines variety and importance, because change is refreshing. The best are those where dependency on others is minimal. The worst, one where you are held to account, both in this world and the next.
—Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)
✏️ Via Negativa
Modern life is centred around the pursuit of more. To move up in life, we need to do more, have more, and be more. But what less is the answer?
More and more (no pun intended), I find that removing things from my life actually leads to the greatest growth and improvement. Taking on less means that I have more for the things that truly matter. Avoiding the wrong people creates surroundings filled with people who inspire me and help me become who I want to be. Removing negative habits from my life gives me more energy to do the things that make me better.
Sometimes, subtraction is just as powerful as addition.
magna est vis consuetudinis
great is the power of habit
💡 Food for Thought
Optimal improvement occurs when you stop focusing on others and focus solely on yourself.
🔗 Sunday Best
We Have No Right to Happiness
An Essay by CS Lewis
The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives. We thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will—one dare not even add “unfortunately”—be swept away.
Sample size calculations: should the emperor’s clothes be off the peg or made to measure?
Citation: Norman, Geoffrey, Sandra Monteiro, and Suzette Salama. "Sample size calculations: should the emperor’s clothes be off the peg or made to measure?." Bmj 345 (2012).
Ethics committees require estimates of sample size for all trials, but statistical calculations are no more accurate than estimates from historical data. Geoffrey Norman and colleagues propose some “one size fits all” numbers for different study designs
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
—Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)
Thanks for reading!
See you next week.
AT