Chess

To win, to have fun, to exercise your mind. 

 The board and pieces.

 The rules of the game.

 Seeing the whole board.

Jazz

Self expression, fun, to make a buck. 

Skill and musical instruments. 

European harmony fused with African rhythm. 

 Improvisation

Quantification

To simplify complex phenomena to the point where the mind can grasp them, because said Leonardo da Vinci, “No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.”

Logic and mathematics.

 The rules that numbers play by.

 Map the numbers to the world within the rules that numbers play by.

Universities

 According to Don Michael Randel, former president of the University of Chicago, universities are in the truth-and-beauty business.

The human mind, books, laboratories, buildings, endowments, and so on.

 President Randel again, “The job of leadership in this environment is to try to figure out what might constitute truth and beauty at any given point and then to align our resources in such a way as to maximize our production of them.”

 Research and teaching.

Virology

 To help people by fighting the viruses that ail them.

Electron microscopes, guinea pigs, and, most important, the talent of the researchers.

 Conjectures and refutations, which is having the researchers generate ideas as to the nature of viruses and using experimentation to weed out the ideas that data disproves.

 Conduct research.

Yoga

 Harmony.

Mind and body.

An eight-step process that moves from ethical living to spiritual liberation.

 Concentration.

Zhou Enlai, China’s foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. He is widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s great statesmen.

 He wanted what was best for China.

 He had an unlimited ability to focus on details.

 Pragmatism, the art of compromise.

 He was likeable, persuasive, and he worked very, very hard.

Economics (quoting from Freakonomics)

 “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”

 “Economics is above all a science of measurement.”

 Figure out the role of incentives. Who benefits and how from a transaction?

Putting the following fundamental ideas to work: “Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. … The conventional wisdom is often wrong. … Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes. … ‘Experts’ – from criminologists to real-estate agents – use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. … Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.”