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Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann Perform at a Higher Level

What's it about? Make Your Brain Work (2013) is a practical guide to understanding the brain's key systems and how they shape focus, habits, and decision-making. Grounded in neuroscience, it shows how working with your brain's natural architecture rather than against it can transform productivity, emotional regulation, and goal achievement. Modern life is full of distractions. There’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle, endless social media feeds, overflowing inboxes, and meetings that probably should have been emails. Add in the unpredictable demands of work, family, and everyday life, and it’s no wonder focus can feel impossible and chaos often seems like the default. So how do you build the career, habits, and life you want amid all that daily noise? The answer lies in your brain. Far from working against you, your brain is an incredibly sophisticated system designed to help you adapt, learn, and thrive. When you understand how its networks and processes operate, you can...

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Timeless reflections in defense of Christianity

What's it about? Mere Christianity (1952) is one of the most famous and influential apologetics for the Christian faith ever written. Compiled from C.S. Lewis’s legendary World War II radio broadcasts, it brings together a series of timeless reflections designed to explain and defend Christianity. Mere Christianity outlines Lewis’s arguments for the truth of the Christian doctrine. It also explores what Christian life involves and why Lewis thinks we’re all better off as Christians. When C.S. Lewis first presented these reflections to the British public over the radio in 1942, Britain was at war. It was an uncertain moment in the history of the nation. The country had been living under the threat of invasion for over two years. And British citizens had just witnessed the horror of the blitz. It was under these trying circumstances, when public morale was at its absolute lowest, that Lewis delivered these broadcasts on faith and morality. It might have seemed strange, in the mids...

Positively Energizing Leadership by Kim Cameron Virtuous Actions and Relationships That Create High Performance

What's it about? Positively Energizing Leadership (2022) offers organization leaders and workers a practical guide to understanding and harnessing the power of positively energizing characteristics and interpersonal approaches. With empirical data and how-to advice, it aims to boost innovation, profits, and compassion in the workplace and at home. We live in serious times. Society is riddled by fear, mistrust, racial injustice, climate disasters, and the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic – all of which have sowed a climate of violence, outrage, and conflict. As a result of this culture of despair, the power of positive thinking has mushroomed as an industry. There are thousands of books out there promising to guide you to happiness, and each year more and more are published. But the problem with what Kim Cameron calls “happiology” is that it encourages us to put a smile on our faces while inside, our teeth are gritted and our jaws are clenched. The thing is, all lives are comple...

Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

What's it about? Starry Messenger (2022) is about a way of looking at the world called the cosmic perspective. It’s the view that opens up when we think about human life in its largest possible context – that of the universe itself. This isn’t an exercise in making our worldly affairs seem small and trivial, though. It’s about unlocking insights that can help us live more happily and meaningfully on the cosmic anomaly we call Earth. People are fed up with experts. That was the recent verdict of the British politician Michael Gove. What people want, he implied, is more feeling. Less weighing of the evidence and more gut instinct. As a recipe for politics, that statement met with lots of opposition. As a description of what’s actually happening, though, it hit the nail on the head. We live in an age of hyperpartisanship and culture wars. Reasoned debate is out; emotive shouting matches are in. The backlash against experts has generated its own backlash: a pro-expert faction tha...

Be Your Future Self Now by Benjamin Hardy The Science of Intentional Transformation

What's it about? Be Your Future Self Now (2022) is a guide to defining your future self – and making sure you get there. It walks readers through the seven threats to your future self, the seven truths about your future self, and the seven steps you can take to be your future self today. Until the 1990s, it was widely accepted in psychology that a person’s actions and behaviors were determined by their past. This deterministic view held that human beings were essentially a series of dominoes – propelled forward by the momentum of what had come before. Then, at the end of the twentieth century, a band of revolutionary researchers burst onto the scene. These self-dubbed “positive psychologists” provided an almost polar opposite explanation for human behavior: that human beings weren’t pushed by their past; they were pulled by their future. Reflect on your day so far. How many actions weren’t driven by an underlying desire for or aversion to a future outcome? Some motivations may...

Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to A Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success

What's it about? Sleep Smarter (2014) is your quickstart manual for improving the quality of your sleep. Drawing from a host of scientific studies and punctuated with practical tips, this accessible guide promises to change the way you think about sleep and give you a better night’s rest, starting tonight. We’ve all been there: waking up from a bad night’s sleep, we drift through the day like half-conscious zombies, yawning uncontrollably and unable to focus on our work. We dream about the moment we can get back to bed, but as soon as our head hits the pillow, we’re suddenly wide awake. It’s a nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Sleep can be a wonderful, rejuvenating experience, a time for repairing our bodies and refreshing our minds. And although the modern world seems intent on destroying the sanctity of sleep with screens, artificial lights and strenuous demands on our time, you can use modern science to push back against this. That’s where these lessons come in. Th...