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Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen Master the art of trading resources to command results

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What's it about? Influence Without Authority (2005) offers strategies for driving results and commanding respect when you lack formal power to give orders. By mastering the universal law of reciprocity, you’ll learn to identify the unique needs of colleagues and trade what you have for the cooperation you need. This practical roadmap shifts you from frustrated bystander to skilled negotiator – someone capable of leading peers, partners, and even your boss. These days, navigating your way around the workplace can often feel like trying to steer a massive ship with a broken rudder. Sure, you see exactly where the project needs to go, and you carry the full weight of the deadline – but you still find yourself waiting on a colleague in another department who has no real reason to prioritize your request. It’s a peculiar kind of professional limbo: you’re accountable for results but lack the formal title to command resources. This disconnect arises from today’s interconnected, flatte...
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Pragmatism by William James A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

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What's it about? Pragmatism (1907) unpacks a practical approach to philosophy that evaluates ideas based on their real-world consequences and usefulness. It presents pragmatism as a mediating framework between rigid rationalism and pure empiricism, emphasizing truth as something that evolves through experience, human action, and plural perspectives. Ultimately, it argues that truth, meaning, and progress emerge from active human engagement with the world and the possibility of improving it through effort. Many philosophical debates feel oddly disconnected from everyday life.They circle big words like “truth,” “meaning,” and “reality,” yet rarely explain how any of it influences the way we think, decide, or act.The pragmatic method bridges this divide, asking, “What practical difference does this or that belief make?” At its core, the pragmatic perspective treats thinking as an engaged activity rather than a spectator sport. Ideas are not precious artifacts to be admired for thei...
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Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley The foundations of immaterialism

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What's it about? A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) introduces the radical metaphysical theory of immaterialism, which argues that the physical world possesses no existence independent of a perceiving mind. It contends that what we commonly mistake for “matter” is actually a collection of sensory perceptions coordinated by a divine spirit, thereby attempting to eliminate the gap between appearance and reality to defeat skepticism. By asserting that the very essence of sensible objects is to be perceived, it seeks to ground human knowledge in certain experience and reaffirm the immediate presence of a creator. Imagine for a moment that you’re holding an apple.You see its vibrant red skin, you feel its cool, smooth surface, and you taste its tart sweetness.Now, ask yourself: What is the apple, really?To most people, the answer is obvious. The apple is a solid, material object that exists “out there” in the world, whether you’re looking at it or not.But i...
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Why Do I Keep Doing This? by Kati Morton Unlearn the Habits Keeping You Stuck and Unhappy

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What's it about? Why Do I Keep Doing This? (2025) explores how childhood survival strategies around control keep adults trapped in toxic cycles of approval-seeking and people-pleasing. It unveils how behaviors that were once protective disconnect people from their authentic selves and block genuine connection, and shows how you can begin to break free from your unconscious patterns. You’ve done it again.Said yes when you meant no.Apologized for no reason.Pushed yourself until you burned out or chosen someone who hurts you in ways that feel hauntingly familiar. These patterns aren’t accidents.They aren’t character flaws or signs that you’re broken.They’re sophisticated survival strategies your younger self developed when the world felt chaotic and unsafe.The same behaviors that once protected you now keep you trapped in cycles that make you miserable. These patterns persist because they run deeper than conscious choice.They live in your nervous system, triggering automatically...
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Soft by Ferdinand Mount A History of Sentimentality

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What's it about? Soft (2025) traces how feelings have shaped Western civilization across a thousand years, from medieval poetry to contemporary reforms on divorce, gay marriage and abortion. Through vivid historical analysis, this exploration shows how sentimentality in art and culture, despite being dismissed as weak or manipulative, has quietly driven social and political progress. History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening lesson reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform. You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jer...
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52 Weeks of Wellbeing by Ryan Hopkins A No-Nonsense Guide to a Fulfilling Work Life

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What's it about? 52 Weeks of Wellbeing (2024) explores how to build a healthier, more fulfilling work life through 52 small, practical changes spread across a year. It focuses on simple, research-backed ideas – like improving boundaries, rest, movement and digital habits – that help people protect their mental health and thrive in modern, high-pressure workplaces. If you feel like life is happening at double speed while your energy runs on half charge, you’re not the only one.Long hours, constant notifications and blurred lines between work and home make it easy to ignore wellbeing until something breaks.Big promises to overhaul everything rarely last, because they demand willpower you simply don’t have at the end of another packed day.So why not try something smaller and more realistic? Instead of one big overhaul, you can treat a series of simple ideas as experiments, giving each one some focused attention for roughly a week, and seeing what happens.Some weeks you tweak your ro...
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Awakening Joy by James Baraz 10 Steps to True Happiness

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What's it about? Awakening Joy (2012) is a guide to training your mind to recognize and cultivate genuine well-being. It offers simple but powerful practices that help you shift out of autopilot and tap into a natural sense of aliveness that already exists within you. The approach blends practical guidance with insights from Buddhist meditation to show how joy becomes more stable when you nurture it from the inside out. Modern life pulls attention in every direction. Mornings blur into a rush of alarms, emails, and misplaced keys, and by lunchtime you may already feel worn thin. Even small joys, like warm sunlight through a window or a friend’s quick message, barely register because your mind is already leaning into whatever is next. It’s easy to assume that lasting joy requires dramatic change, but the real turning point usually begins much closer to home. What’s surprising is that your mind already knows how to make life feel brighter. You can sense it when you slow down enoug...
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