Personal Science

Human conduct is fundamentally driven by motivation. It establishes the amount of work people do to reach their objectives, go over barriers, and persevere through difficulties. Motivation is essential for success and well-being in a variety of contexts, including the job, sports, education, and personal growth. Gaining knowledge of the science behind motivation helps us improve performance, stay consistent, and feel more satisfied with our lives overall. The two main categories of motivation are extrinsic and intrinsic.

Already a major Japanese best seller, this eye-opening and accessible follow-up to the “compelling” (Marc Andreessen) international phenomenon The Courage to Be Disliked shares the powerful teachings of Alfred Adler, one of the giants of 19th-century psychology, through another illuminating dialogue between the philosopher and the young man.

In this timely, personal guide, Mónica, the chief storyteller for the national cross-partisan depolarization organization Braver Angels, takes you to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt - broken conversations among confounded people. She shows you how to overcome the fear and certainty that surround us to finally do what only seems impossible: understand and even learn from people in your life whose whole worldview is different from or even opposed to yours.

Two-thirds of us have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, or ACE, such as abuse, neglect, parental substance dependence, or mental illness. Even though these events may have occurred long ago, they have the power to haunt us long into adulthood, and now we have found that they may even contribute to lifelong illness. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the founder/CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness and recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, expands on similar topics as in her popular TED talk.

How does trauma affect a child's mind—and how can that mind recover? In the classic The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry explains what happens to the brains of children exposed to extreme stress and shares their lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

When Stephanie Kiser moves to New York City after college to pursue a career in writing, she quickly learns that her entry-level salary won't cover the cost of living. But there is one in-demand job that pays enough to allow Stephanie to stay in the city: nannying for the 1%. Desperate to escape the poverty of her own childhood, Stephanie falls into a job that hijacks her life for the next seven years: a glorified personal assistant to toddlers on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

In Build the Life You Want, Harvard's Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness, no matter how challenging your circumstances. Combining their decades of experience studying happiness from every angle, they show you how to improve your life right now - instead of waiting for the outside world to change. Build the Life You Want introduces you to the cutting-edge science that can change your life, in understandable terms and with actionable strategies.

Your comfort zone provides the safety and security of being tucked into bed. But in that safety, you accomplish nothing, experience nothing, learn nothing, and end up with nothing. It's a trap, and you need to get out. Life is for living, not merely existing. Which are you doing? The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone is not a motivational "rah rah" book. It is not 10 different versions of "just do it" or "live, laugh, love." This book is a little different. It is a deep look, backed by science, into what keeps us from doing what we want, when we want. This book answers the question: how do you gain the confidence to consistently break out of your comfort zone to accomplish any goals you have? You'll learn what actually matters, and what to stop wasting your time on.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher.

What did your boss mean in that email? Is your mechanic stretching the truth? Whether you’re engaged in a casual conversation or a high-stakes negotiation, it’s critical to understand the subtext of a situation. But with so much interaction happening on screens—via email, texts, or video chat—we are losing the ability to interpret expressions and cues. Furthermore, since many are now savvy about the meaning of body language, it’s become even harder to discern someone’s true thoughts or intentions.

A life of wholeness and purpose are well within our reach - The Art of Abundance outlines 10 rules, or practices, that lay the foundation for a life worth living.

It seems like every time a new mother turns on her computer, radio, or television she is greeted with news of yet another scientific study about infancy. Ignoring good information isn't the right course, but just how does one tell the difference between solid studies, preliminary results, and snake oil? In this friendly guide through the science of infancy, Science of Mom blogger and PhD scientist Alice Callahan explains how nonscientist mothers can learn the difference between hype and evidence.

What if your best days weren’t left to chance, but something you could control and activate at will? Most of us want to be a little happier, a little more focused, and a lot less stressed. We want simple approaches that are easy to fold into our everyday lives. In Sharp, you’ll discover dozens of evidence-backed strategies to help you unlock your potential and enhance your performance—whether at work, school, home, or in relationships. Cognitive scientist Therese Huston unpacks the latest neuroscience research to deliver a gold mine of techniques to help you feel your sharpest.

Working women today are better educated and more well-qualified than ever before. Yet men still predominate in the corporate world. In The Confidence Code, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay argue that the key reason is confidence.

Combining cutting-edge research in genetics, gender, behavior, and cognition - with examples from their own lives and those of other successful women in politics, media, and business - Kay and Shipman go beyond admonishing women to "lean in".

The ancient Toltecs believed that life, as we perceive it, is a dream. We each live in our own personal dream, and these come together to form the dream of the planet, or the world in which we live. Problems arise when our perception of the dream becomes clouded with negativity, drama, and judgment (of ourselves and others), because it's in these moments of suffering that we have forgotten that we are the architects of our own reality and we have the power to change our dream if we choose.

Whether you're trying to communicate your business idea to an investor, encourage your children to embrace your moral values, or break an addiction to endless web surfing - if you lack the skill of influence, you will be unable to convince yourself or anyone else. The human mind is like a titanium lock. If you communicate poorly - through endless talking, inattentive listening, or over-the-top pressure - it's like spinning the numbers on the lock over and over uselessly. But if you develop the key skills of influence, it's like knowing the exact combination to that lock.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

This audiobook is pragmatical, not philosophical; a practical manual, not a treatise upon theories. It is intended for the men and women whose most pressing need is for money; who wish to get rich first, and philosophize afterward. It is for those who have, so far, found neither the time, the means, nor the opportunity to go deeply into the study of metaphysics, but who want results and who are willing to take the conclusions of science as a basis for action, without going into all the processes by which those conclusions were reached.

Death might seem to render pointless all our attempts to create a meaningful life. Doesn't meaning require transcending death through an afterlife or in some other way? On the contrary, Dean Rickles argues, life without death would be like playing tennis without a net. Only constraints—and death is the ultimate constraint—make our actions meaningful. In Life Is Short, Rickles explains why the finiteness and shortness of life is the essence of its meaning-and how this insight is the key to making the most of the time we do have.

Sun Tzu's Art of War for Women helps women find the peaceful path to success through strategies made famous in the ancient Chinese text, The Art of War. Female wisdom, or common sense, is about avoiding needless confrontation, conserving energy for the things that matter, and seeking an outcome in which everyone wins. And for women, as for Sun Tzu, success doesn't come simply from knowing what to do, but from knowing who you are.