I made a mistake with this book.

I’ve read Michael Lewis before and found him entertaining. So, I bought this as an eBook. Because I allow myself to buy entertaining books as eBooks; but beautiful books, books I want to take my time reading, that I want to savor rather than devour – books like that, I buy on paper.

I read a scientific study a few years ago that said that, when you write digitally, you use the part of your brain that completes tasks; and when you write analog (pen and paper), you use the part of your brain that creates things. For that reason, I draft non-fiction digitally but handwrite fiction.

I have a theory that reading is also different, analog vs digital. With digital, I ingest a book – inhale it like blow – the world of the book still comes alive in my mind visually and aurally, but the emotional impact is… diminished. I am unable to linger in the language, to experience the frisson that comes from the poetry of a well-crafted description because reading digitally just happens so fast, the words stream through my eyes into my mind. When I read on paper, I read more slowly: the width of the page, the act of turning a page, of holding the book in my hands, create a natural barrier to speed, to efficiency, if you will, that forces me to slow down, to process at a more deliberate pace.

I was hooked from the very first chapter, from the story of two Jewish boys growing up separately during WWII, facing the inherent challenges and tragedies, and then living in the newly-birthed Israel, hating the wars that were necessary for their young nation to survive, and yet fighting grimly on, and finding themselves fascinated by the inaccurate assumptions they observed people in power making.

The story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky is like a pas de deux for two male dancers. Dancing at opposite ends of the stage, each alone, but with movements that occasionally echo each other. Gliding past each other at center stage, seeing that they are doing similar movements until they discover each other suddenly, like lightning, and from that electricity creating jumps and turns of a height and complexity that the rest of the troop can but watch in disbelief. Separating from time to time to dance alone or with female partners, but then casting movements across the stage to each other, to share, elaborate, pass back again. Coming again to dance together, then separately. Until the spotlight chooses one of them, casting the other in shadow. Until the illuminated one disappears from the stage and the shadowed one catches the light.

As a change management practitioner, I am a fan of behavioral economics which is what their work evolved into. So, reading about how our brains make decisions, take shortcuts to decisions, how assumptions evolve into resistance, is fascinating to me. I highlighted more passages in this book, made more notes, than I have in any other book ever, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland – and that only because I was using it as source material at the time.

The last chapter of this book moved me almost to tears. The two men, who had worked so closely together, had a falling out. A coming apart, stemming from the recognition Tversky received. To his credit, he didn’t seem to value recognition and seems to have insisted to schools, award committees, reporters that Kahneman deserved equal credit. But to Kahneman, Tversky dismissed the importance of external recognition without, between them, acknowledging their equal contributions.

This simmers through the later chapters of the book until a disagreement about how to respond to a detractor drives a final wedge between them.

Kahneman has a dream in which he is told that he has less than 6 months to live and has to choose how to spend that time. In the morning, he tells his friend that he chooses not to spend it filled with anger at detractors. But Tversky feels compelled to defend their work against unfair imputations.

They separate.

Soon after, Tversky receives a cancer diagnosis. Now he is the one given 6 months to live. And Kahneman is the second person he chooses to tell. There is discussion of working together again; but Tversky wants to keep his fate a secret, adhere to his routine: teach his classes, finish his papers in progress, live his life as it is now. The Nobel committee reaches out to offer him a nomination; but they don’t issue posthumous awards. His time will run out before the selection is finalized; and external recognition means so little to him.

After he dies, after his friend speaks his eulogy, Kahneman continues to work and, without the sun’s glare, people begin to appreciate the moon’s radiance. Eventually he, too, is nominated for the Nobel Prize. On the morning that the winners will be notified by phone, he and his wife wait for the call, filling time, not allowing hope to bubble up.

He doesn’t allow himself to imagine what he will do if he wins. Since his childhood, he has only allowed himself to imagine what he would do if impossible things happened – if he was the single person to stop a war, for example, and was hailed as a hero, what he would do. He doesn’t allow himself to imagine what he will do in possible situations because, he finds, then his brain tricks him into believing that the possible has already happened – and he stops trying to make the possible a reality. (Take that, The Secret!)

SO, only after the phone call doesn’t come that morning, after his wife leaves to do other chores, does he allow himself to imagine. And he imagines himself bringing recognition to Tversky: flying Tversky’s wife and children to the ceremony; including the eulogy in his acceptance speech. It feels like an apology to his friend for the irreparable tear in their partnership.

And then the phone rings.

When I was doing my grad work in change management, I loved research, scouring EBSCO for academic papers that lit up areas of my brain that had lain dormant while my professional life focused on Action and Results.

One of my favorite papers looked at the impact of diversity on performance. What it found was that a team who shared similar skills, experiences, and strengths was limited in achievement to the capacity of the strongest performer on the team. But a team with diverse skills and experiences challenged one another to think differently, pushing each other until they far exceeded the capacity of the strongest performer on the team.

This is what this story of these two brilliant thinkers reminds me of – separately, these scholars were bright as distant stars. Together, their stars combined to form a supernova-strength glare.

I should have read this book on paper.