Of Flat Earth and Protein Mania
Decoding Our Labyrinth of Biases
Papberback ISBN 978-981-94-4552-3 | Digital 978-981-94-4553-0
Singapore & Worldwide Amazon
UK Waterstones | US Barnes & Noble
AUS Booktopia | Japan Rakuten
Of Flat Earth and Protein Mania is our founder's second book, drawing on a considerably broader intellectual scope. Where Staying H.I.R.E.d concentrated on organisational culture and the workplace, this book turns the lens, both inward and outward, onto the architecture of human thought itself. Its subject is cognitive bias: the invisible mental shortcuts that shape how we perceive reality, make decisions, form moral judgments, and construct identities.
The book is structured as a series of essays drawn from politics, food culture, history, urban planning, corporate governance, public health, and international conflict, each used as a lens to illuminate the universal patterns through which bias operates. Its ultimate aspiration, stated with characteristic modesty, is not to eliminate bias but to foster the metacognitive awareness needed to manage it more honestly.
Defying Categorisation
Methodologically Honest
Of Flat Earth and Protein Mania is an ambitious book that successfully resists easy categorisation. It is part cultural criticism, part organisational analysis, part cognitive science, and also part philosophical provocation. What holds it together is Soh's methodological honesty, which gives the book a credibility that books of the same material often lack. The essays function less as arguments than as exercises in perspective-taking, inviting readers to sit with complexity to notice the cognitive shortcuts we instinctively reach for, and why. If the author's first book, Staying H.I.R.E.d, asked what kind of workplaces we want to build, Of Flat Earth and Protein Mania asks what kind of thinkers we need to become in order to build them.
From The Author
Why I Wrote Of Flat Earth and Protein Mania
The book grew directly out of my writing of Staying H.I.R.E.d. As I mapped the belief systems required for a thriving work oasis, I realised that an organisational
framework is only as effective as the minds inhabiting it. Cultural kingsmanship, I conclude, begins with metacognition — the ability to think about one's own thinking. The framing for the whole book is anchored in childhood memory: a primary school burial ceremony for a classroom goldfish. That episode crystallised an important lesson for me: what one person considers obviously reasonable, another may consider obviously irrational, and often neither party recognises their certainty itself as the problem. This book is my attempt to address our biases directly and honestly.