Start Here: Beyond Work
Twelve pieces on connection, wellbeing and how our minds work. The things that shape a good life, at work and well beyond it.
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What this is
Most of what makes life go well has little to do with a job title. Who we are close to, how our minds build the world we experience, and how we spend our attention matter more than most of what we chase.
These twelve are where we’d start. They move from connection, to how our minds work, to what living well looks like. Read them in order, or start with whichever title catches you.
The twelve
Why connection matters
1
Eighty-seven years of following people’s lives, and one finding keeps coming back: the quality of your close relationships predicts your health and happiness better than anything else.
2
Social pain runs on the same circuits as physical pain. We are social by design, not by temperament.
3
Why constant contact hasn’t made us less alone, and what digital connection lets us avoid.
4
We badly underestimate how much we’ll enjoy it, and how much the other person will too. The easiest experiment on this list.
How our minds work
5
Your brain doesn’t wait to see the world; it predicts it. A reframe that changes how you read stress, emotion and friction with other people.
6
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s case that emotions are built, not triggered, and why that gives you more say in them than you might think.
7
Most of us are far less self-aware than we believe. What the research shows, and what actually helps.
Living well
8
One walk measurably quietened rumination and the brain region linked to it. The case for getting outside, in numbers.
9
Not getting rid of difficult thoughts, but making room for them while you move towards what matters to you.
10
Csikszentmihalyi’s moments of full absorption, when time disappears. What creates them, and why they matter more than pleasure.
11
We are poor judges of what will make us happy, so we often want the wrong things. Daniel Gilbert on why.
12
Aristotle’s word for living well: not feeling good, but flourishing. Where we finish.
Then what?
If you manage people, the companion set covers the foundations of leading a team: twelve pieces, in the order we’d read them.