The Big Idea: AI isn’t coming for your job title, it’s coming for your tasks. That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Why It Matters The old career playbook is obsolete. The ladder is gone. The skills once dismissed as “soft” — curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, communication — are now your primary competitive advantage. And the quirks, detours, and unconventional experiences you’ve been told to hide on your résumé? In a world where AI handles the standard, those are what make you irreplaceable.

Try This Today Write down the dozen tasks that take up most of your time at work. Sort them into three buckets: tasks AI can already do alone, tasks you’ll do with AI, and tasks that remain uniquely human. That list is your career roadmap. Start shifting your work from the first bucket toward the third.

Theses ideas come from Aneesh Raman and Ryan Roslansky, authors of the new book, Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. Aneesh is LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, and Ryan is the company’s CEO. Read on for five of their key insights.

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1. Jobs are tasks, not titles.

Most of us define ourselves and what we do based on our job titles: I’m an accountant, I’m a nurse, I’m a marketer, or I’m an engineer. And it makes sense, given that for decades our titles told our companies where to put us. But titles are not the most useful way to think about work anymore because AI is not coming for titles, it’s coming for tasks. When you start seeing your job not as a title but as a set of tasks, it makes it easier to understand what’s changing and what to do about it.

Go grab a piece of paper. Now write down the top dozen tasks that take up most of your time at work. Not your job title, job description, or your goals. The actual things you do day-to-day. Then, sort all those tasks into three buckets:

• Bucket 1: Tasks AI can do alone. Think of this as data entry. Basic research. Scheduling that doesn’t require conversation.

• Bucket 2: Tasks you’ll do with AI. Think of this as strategy with AI analysis. Creative work with AI tools. Problem-solving aided by market research. This is where most of your work will start to live.

• Bucket 3: Tasks that remain uniquely human. Think of this as building relationships. Leading through uncertainty. Making hard judgment calls. Ask yourself: Does this require reading emotions or building trust? Would a human touch make a crucial difference? If yes, it belongs here.

Now, think of these three buckets like a conveyor belt: Bucket 1 tasks will increasingly disappear as AI gets more advanced. But as they do, new opportunities emerge in Bucket 2, allowing you to use AI to do things that weren’t possible before. And as you master Bucket 2, you create space and ideas for deeper Bucket 3 work that no machine can touch.

Over time, success is about moving tasks across your buckets. Start deliberately moving tasks from Bucket 1 to Bucket 2 by adding human judgment to routine work. Start using AI tools in Bucket 2 to free up time for more Bucket 3 tasks. And start expanding your Bucket 3 capabilities, because that’s where durable value lives.

It’s not just about sorting tasks into buckets but developing the meta-skill of actively curating them over time. This is not a one-time exercise, but something you’ll continue to work at as your job evolves.

2. Soft skills are survival skills.

Certain skills set us apart from AI, and we call them the 5Cs:

• Curiosity

• Courage

• Creativity

• Compassion

• Communication

These skills are core to how we come up with new ideas and solutions. For decades, the 5Cs have been dismissed as soft skills, meaning “nice-to-haves” that took a back seat to the hard skills our economy valued most. In the coming years, it will become clear that soft skills are anything but soft. They are key to our survival at work.

Think about how these 5Cs show up in your own work today:

• Curiosity. AI can process patterns. Only you ask, “What if we tried something completely different?”

• Courage. AI can calculate risk. Only you decide what risk is worth taking.

• Creativity. AI remixes what exists. Only you reimagine what’s possible.

• Compassion. AI can simulate concern. Only you can empathize from lived experience.

• Communication. AI translates language. Only you turn language into meaning.

Don’t think of these skills in isolation. As neuroscientist Vivienne Ming points out, “These aren’t five separate items on a checklist. They feed each other. Curiosity without courage leads to inaction. Creativity without communication remains a private hobby. Compassion gives our work purpose.”

While everyone’s racing to out-code AI, you should be honing the things that AI can never replace. The 5Cs are your competitive edge.

3. Careers aren’t ladders; they’re climbing walls.

The career ladder is a relic of the industrial age, and it’s coming undone. For generations, the playbook was clear and unchanging: by and large, you joined a company after graduating from school, climbed steadily for decades, and retired with a pension and a gold watch. One path. One employer. One direction—up.

“The career ladder is a relic of the industrial age, and it’s coming undone.”

But ladders only work when the world is stable. When skills last decades. When jobs stay the same. That world has been on the way out, but now AI is accelerating the pace. Professionals entering the workforce today will hold twice as many jobs over their careers as those in the previous generation. The ladder doesn’t work when your job changes faster than you can get promoted. Or when your industry shifts faster than you can figure out what to pivot into next.

So, think of your career path less like a ladder and more like a climbing wall. Multiple routes up. Sideways motions that build new skills. Sometimes, even going down to find stronger positions. The best climbers won’t follow someone else’s path: they’ll design their own.

You’re already on the wall, whether you realize it or not. To guide your climb, ask yourself three big questions:

• Why do you work? Whether it’s financial security or a sense of purpose, what’s driving you to show up every day?

• What do you uniquely do? What’s the combination of skills only you bring?

• Where are you going? What problems do you want to solve and who do you want to solve them with?

4. Our brains aren’t wired to handle exponential change.

The S-curve of change is a helpful way to understand how big shifts, like new technologies or major trends, tend to unfold over time. At first, progress is slow and almost invisible—that’s the bottom of the S, and that’s when most people feel comfortable ignoring it. Like the internet in 1993, social media in 2004, and AI in 2020. Then, momentum builds and adoption accelerates rapidly—that’s the steep middle of the S. Finally, growth levels off as the change becomes mainstream and widely accepted—that’s the top of the S.

AI isn’t at the bottom of the S-curve anymore. ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than any technology in history. We’re entering the steep part where adoption stops being optional. The question is: Are you engaging with this change as it starts to speed up?

Our brains are wired to fear change and not process exponential change. That’s why managing S-curves is so hard. And while we have had decades and years to manage past ones, we don’t have as much time with AI. Change will never be this slow again. AI will never be this basic again. The time to experiment is now. Adapting beats predicting.

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5. Nobody beats you at being you.

There are well over three billion people in the global workforce. More than a billion of them are on LinkedIn. Only one of them is you.

That might sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget when you’re at work, trying to fit in. We often spend our careers molding ourselves to job descriptions, industry standards, and the “proven path.” We’re asked to demonstrate the right competencies to show we can do what others have already done. The entire machinery of work, from résumés to reviews, is designed to make us comparable, categorizable, and measurable against others.

“Suddenly, your differences become your competitive advantage.”

But when AI handles the standard, things start to flip. Suddenly, your differences become your competitive advantage. The specific combination of failures and triumphs that taught you resilience in ways no curriculum could capture. The childhood spent between cultures that lets you see patterns others miss. The decade you “wasted” in the wrong career that gave you insights no straight path could provide. The quirks in how you approach problems. The unconventional connections you make between ideas.

For your entire career, you’ve probably been told to smooth over these edges to make yourself more marketable. In a world where AI can replicate the standard approach, those edges are going to make you irreplaceable.

The Big Idea: Emotions like shame, envy, anger, and regret aren’t character flaws. They’re trying to teach you something.

Why It Matters: When we stop trying to suppress our difficult feelings and start getting curious about them, we unlock information about ourselves that no amount of positive thinking can provide.

Try This Today: The next time a “bad” feeling surfaces, pause before pushing it away. Ask: What is this feeling trying to tell me? You don’t have to act on it. Just listen. That’s where the wisdom starts.

These ideas come from the new book Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions, by Daniel Smith, a psychotherapist and journalist. Read on for five of his key insights.

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1. Emotions aren’t real.

Obviously, that’s not true in any lived sense. Emotions exist. After all, we feel them all the time—every moment, in fact. They influence us. They drive us. They hold us back. They cause us pleasure and excitement, confusion and anguish. Without emotions, our lives wouldn’t have any color or texture, and maybe have no meaning at all.

And yet, emotions aren’t real in the way we’ve been taught to think of them as real. They aren’t what philosophers call “natural kinds,” which is to say, things in the world, things with solidity and structure. But that’s exactly how we’ve been encouraged to think about our emotions—as natural kinds.

These days, when people think about emotions, they tend to think of those adorable cartoon characters in the Inside Out movies—little independent features of our minds that are “triggered” by events out in the world. You see a rattlesnake on the path, the part of your brain called “Fear” pops up, and you feel scared. This is a very clear and understandable view, and over the past 40 or 50 years, a lot of psychologists have endorsed it. It just turns out that it isn’t true.

Our emotions aren’t essences or programs in our heads. If they were, scientists would be able to find those essences. And they haven’t. Not one. Dozens of studies, with thousands of subjects, have tried to pinpoint the location of specific emotions in our brains, and they’ve failed. The real picture of what our emotions are turns out to be a lot weirder and more complex. Emotions are tied up with culture and learning and human differences, and with the way our brains are always trying to make sense of what’s going on both outside and inside our bodies. To understand ourselves better, it helps to understand this richer view of our emotional lives.

2. There’s no such thing as a bad emotion.

We’ve been absorbing the message for so long, from so many different places, that we almost take it for granted now: Some emotions are good for us, and some are bad. Aristotle said something like this 2,300 years ago. The Greek and Roman Stoics wanted us to avoid pretty much all emotions.

“The real work isn’t sorting emotions into good or bad.”

Then came the rise of Christianity, and things got dark. According to the Church Fathers, there are some human emotions that aren’t only bad for us, they’re demonic. Some of the famous Seven Deadly Sins, like anger and pride, are basically just emotional states. And this isn’t ancient history. The Catholic Church still denounces greed, envy, and a form of boredom known as acedia as contrary to God’s purpose. In 2016, Pope Francis related envy to the workings of the devil. “How ugly envy is!” he said. “[It] grows in the heart like a weed…It is a tormented heart, it is an ugly heart!” It isn’t hard to understand what he was getting at.

Emotions like envy and anger are often tormenting. They do lead people to act in dangerous and destructive ways. We do need help coping with our most painful and difficult emotions. As a therapist, I believe this. But I also believe that to call any emotion sinful, evil, ugly, bad, or even just negative is a dangerous and destructive act. It suggests that certain emotions shouldn’t be part of you. It is to make that emotion separate from what it means to be human. It is to get moralistic about aspects of our experience that, like it or not, aren’t going anywhere. These emotions are part of us. The real work isn’t sorting emotions into good or bad. It is to get curious about what our emotions are trying to tell us—to listen and learn.

3. Avoid the second arrow.

One of the problems with thinking about some emotions as good and others as bad is that when we feel the so-called bad emotions, we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be feeling them—and then we feel worse! We feel bad about feeling bad.

Thanks to my own therapist, I now think about this phenomenon in terms of the Buddhist concept of the “second arrow.” Life is hard. Difficult things happen, and in response, we feel painful emotions: anger, fear, guilt, resentment, regret, boredom, despair. This is the first arrow, and you can’t avoid it. What you can avoid is the belief that it is somehow wrong, a sign of ugliness or weakness, to feel “negative” things. This belief is the second arrow, and it’s self-inflicted. All it does is deepen the wound and double the pain.

“Your darkest emotions aren’t sins or character flaws.”

The path to greater contentment isn’t one of stern self-discipline or emotional censorship; it is one of exploration and understanding. Your darkest emotions aren’t sins or character flaws. They just are. They are part of you. Reject them, and you reject yourself.

4. It’s okay to find your kids annoying.

The act of raising children is rife with difficult emotions, and if we try to deny this fact—if we strive for some elusive, consistent positivity—we might just stumble on our own efforts and end up serving no one. In recent years, there’s been a movement toward what’s known as “child-centered parenting.” This is parenting in which the needs and interests of the kid take precedence over the needs and interests of the parent. This may or may not be an improvement over the alternative, but it breeds perfectionism—a kind of emotional self-vigilance. The child-centered parent feels pressure to be cheerful and caring, loving and entertaining, all the time. I tend to think this isn’t helpful for anyone, child or parent.

We need to be limber and forgiving in our emotional lives, and we should want our children to be exposed to the full range of emotional experiences so that they, too, can learn to handle difficult feelings. This doesn’t mean that we allow ourselves full rein emotionally. Of course, we should try to be patient and mindful rather than yelling or storming off. But we’re not always going to be. We’re human beings with complicated feelings, and our kids need to see and understand that.

One way or another, you’re probably going to lose it at some point, and in the aftermath of losing it everyone gets the chance to heal, repair, and learn. That’s how people get wiser and more resilient. To paraphrase Hemingway, you can’t avoid getting broken; you can just try to get stronger at the broken places.

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5. Life is boring; deal with it.

Of everything I read while researching this book, my favorite is probably a speech that the poet Joseph Brodsky gave at Dartmouth College in 1989. This was a commencement address for 1,100 students. It was called “In Praise of Boredom.” It’s a pretty unforgiving speech.

Brodsky tells the assembled students that once they leave college, they will be facing a “psychological Sahara” of tedium and ennui. No matter what they did, no matter the careers they chose or the families they started, no matter the luxuries and distractions they collected along the way, they would all ultimately experience the gnawing malaise of boredom. This was, Brodsky argued, because life is made of repetition—of patterned events—and repetition is “boredom’s mother.” There was just no escape from it. Life was going to get dull.

“We need to be limber and forgiving in our emotional lives.”

It sounds bleak, but Brodsky meant it to be helpful. He wanted those students to know the truth. And he had a very deep view of boredom. He saw the emotion as the voice with which time, with a capital T—the true meaning of Time—speaks to us. Boredom was the messenger that whispers in our ear, as Brodsky said, “You are finite…and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.” Not futile, full stop. Futile from the perspective of infinity. Boredom exists, Brodsky said, to teach us the full lesson of our insignificance.

But this lesson is also why he praised boredom. Because once you accept your own insignificance in the grand scheme of things, you can stop trying to distract yourself at every turn and come to accept, love, and glory in your own impermanence—your own finite, time-limited nature. Only the finite is “charged with life.” Only the impermanent leads to real passion. So don’t run from boredom. Make your credo that great line from Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.” This is true of boredom, and it’s true of all our difficult emotions.

The Big Idea: Workplace stress isn’t a personal resilience problem, it’s a design problem. And learning to recognize which kind of stress you’re under is the first step to actually fixing it.

Why It Matters: Stress is rising, engagement is falling, and global productivity losses now top $8.9 trillion a year. But the real cost is more intimate: we’re paying with our health, our relationships, and our sense of purpose.

Try This Today: Next time stress hits, name it. Is it schedule stress, suspense stress, social stress, sudden stress, or system stress? Pinning a label on the source shifts you from spinning to solving.

These ideas come from Amy Leneker’s new book, Cheers to Monday: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Lead and Live with Less Stress and More Joy. Amy is founder and CEO of the Center for Joyful Work and hosts the Less Stress, More Joy with Amy Leneker podcast. Read on for five of her key insights:

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1. Work isn’t working.

If you’ve ever woken up on a Monday exhausted—or spent Sunday night bracing yourself for the week ahead—you are not the problem. The problem is work. And more specifically, the problem is how stress has been built into the structure of modern work.

Workforce stress is rising, engagement is falling, and well-being is declining. The global cost is estimated at $8.9 trillion annually. But beyond the economic impact is something more personal: we are paying with our physical, mental, and emotional health.

I burned out in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way. Twice. That experience led me to conduct a national workforce study and more than 150 interviews and focus groups with leaders and teams across industries. I discovered that stress is systematically undermining success, and joy is part of the solution.

Stress isn’t the price of success; it’s the thief that steals it. People are not broken. The way work is designed is broken. Yet many organizations still treat stress as a personal resilience problem instead of a work-design issue. No amount of time management training can compensate for a system that produces stress faster than people can recover.

2. Humans and organizations both have stress stories.

If we want to change our relationship with stress, we have to take a real, honest look at the role it plays in our work and lives. We all carry beliefs about stress—what it means, why it shows up, and how we are supposed to respond to it. Some of these stories were handed down by families or workplaces. Others we wrote ourselves.

“These stories operate quietly in the background, shaping our choices without our awareness.”

Many of them are outdated. They tell us that stress is weakness, pushing through is strength, and everyone else is handling it better. These stories operate quietly in the background, shaping our choices without our awareness.

Organizations carry stress stories, too. Cultural narratives determine what gets praised, what gets normalized, and what people feel safe saying out loud. If stress is treated as a badge of honor, people will hide their struggles. If it is treated as a signal, people can respond to it effectively. Changing our relationship with stress begins by examining the stories driving it.

3. Start using the Stress Ruler.

When you’re not sure where to begin with stress, start with the Stress Ruler. It’s a simple Likert scale based on one question: On a scale of 0 to 10, how challenging has your stress been? I modeled it after one used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs because it gets three important things right that many other stress scales miss:

• It leaves the word challenging undefined because what’s challenging for one person may not be for another. Two people can experience the same organizational shake-up and have completely different internal responses. The scale makes room for that reality.

• It doesn’t impose a timeline. It doesn’t ask about the past week or month. Stress doesn’t arrive on a schedule, and it doesn’t always resolve on one either. By avoiding artificial time frames, the Stress Ruler captures what needs attention.

• It doesn’t separate work stress from life stress. It treats you as a whole human being. What’s happening at home affects your work, and what’s happening at work follows you home. The Stress Ruler honors that integration.

Its power is in its simplicity. What is often left invisible becomes visible. Once stress is visible, it can be addressed.

4. There are five kinds of work stress.

The majority of leaders and teams I work with make the mistake of believing that there is only one type of work stress. However, there are five primary sources of workplace stress:

• Schedule stress comes from too much to do and not enough time.

• Suspense stress builds while waiting for an uncertain decision, deadline, or difficult conversation.

• Social stress stems from tension and unresolved conflict in relationships.

• Sudden stress hits without warning in the form of urgent requests or last-minute changes.

• System stress is embedded in the structures, processes, and culture of the organization.

When we fail to distinguish between these sources, we treat symptoms instead of causes. Naming the type of stress changes the solution.

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5. The Un-Stressing Method™ is a simple way to reduce stress and restore joy.

This is where my three-step Un-Stressing Method™ comes in. In my national workforce study, 96 percent of working Americans said using these three steps would help them manage work stress more effectively.

See stress differently. Grab a pen, some sticky notes, and write down your stressors (one per sticky note). Then, for each stressor, ask yourself two questions:

Is this important right now?
Do I have control?

Imagine a simple 2×2 matrix: important vs. not important, and within your control vs. outside your control. Place each stressor into the box where it belongs.

Sort stress into actionable categories. When you can name the kind of stress you’re experiencing, you can start taking meaningful action. Using the five types of work stress, write the number(s) of the type(s) of stress on each sticky note.

Solve stress without spinning. Now that you’ve identified and sorted your stressors, you can use the matrix to inform your next move: acknowledge the stressor and move on, accept it without fixing it, ask for help, or act on the next right thing.

After you’ve gone through the three steps, celebrate the shift! Because reducing stress isn’t just a wellness strategy, it’s a joy strategy. In my research, 79 percent of working Americans say joy is essential to doing their best work, yet more than half report feeling far less joy than they want. That gap affects productivity, engagement, and retention.

“Reducing stress isn’t just a wellness strategy, it’s a joy strategy.”

Joy is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending everything is fine. In fact, pressure to “just stay positive” increases stress. Real joy tells the truth about what is hard and still creates the conditions for progress. At work, joy is grounded in three things: meaning in what we do, mattering in our relationships, and the momentum that comes from making progress.

Think of it as a simple equation: less stress + more joy – toxic positivity = the joyful rebellion against stress and burnout.

Some weeks call for big ideas that don’t just make you smarter—they make you steadier. These are the ones that jumped out at us this week.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

How to be okay.

It’s a big, bad, scary, lonely world out there. Lucky for us, has collected more than a hundred tricks and tools that have helped her keep going, and she shares them in her heartwarming and hilarious new book, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay. You can hear our chat with her on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How can we live happy, fulfilling lives in the face of today’s challenges?

Feeling happier, more connected, and more purposeful isn’t luck—it’s a set of skills you can practice and get better at. The wild part? Just a few minutes a day can start to change your own quality of life and that of the people around you.

Richard Davidson is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the Founder and Director of their Center for Healthy Minds. Cortland Dahl serves as a Contemplative Scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and as Chief Contemplative Officer at the center’s affiliated nonprofit, Humin. Pick up a copy of their new book Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving on Amazon or check out the key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Can you disagree without fighting?

We live in a world where you can argue with anyone, anytime, for any reason. But are we actually any good at it? Harvard behavioral scientist Julia Minson () shares a science-backed framework for disagreeing without making everyone miserable. Check out her summary on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea.

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books yesterday--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

, Waiting For Dawn: Living With Uncertainty

, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie

Trisha Pasricha, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy

Alexander Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life

Robert Moor, In Trees: An Exploration

Beverly Gage, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry

Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

Piera Gelardi, The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play

Catherine Carr, Who’s the Favorite?: The Loving, Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships

🧠 The Big Idea Your brain doesn’t perceive the present moment, it constructs it. Science journalist Jo Marchant reveals that “now” isn’t a fixed point in time; it’s a perspective your mind builds from sensations and memory.

💡 Why It Matters If the present moment is something we construct rather than something that happens to us, the quality of your attention and your habits of mind aren’t fixed, they’re shapeable.

✅ Try This Today The next time you feel overwhelmed, pause and take one slow breath. Then ask: what actually matters most right now? According to Marchant, this isn’t just a calming trick, it’s you actively redirecting the construction of your own present moment.

Below, Jo Marchant shares five key insights from her new book, In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment.

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1. Now is in you, not out in the world.

What is “now”? We often think of it as a point in time…a moving boundary, squeezed between past and future. A time when things happen, out in the world. But the present moment isn’t a time at all. It’s a perspective: something you create.

Neuroscience shows that our experience of the present moment can vary wildly. Take Lara, who has a brain disorder called akinetopsia. For her, time doesn’t move smoothly; it jolts from one frozen instant to the next. When she pours tea, the liquid stops in mid-air before suddenly overflowing the cup. If she tries to cross the street, she might see a car stopped in the distance, then right in front of her.

Lara’s experience shows that our smooth sense of Now isn’t inevitable. We work hard to build it, and it can go wrong. Research shows we can perceive things that haven’t happened yet or don’t exist at all, or experience events in a different order from how they occurred. Our brains are constantly guessing, predicting, and carving out a coherent flow of experience from a chaotic jumble of sensations.

Physicists don’t find any special moment in the universe when things actually “happen.” There is no shared cosmic clock. When you lose yourself in a task, react before thinking, or a crisis unfolds in slow motion, you’re directing your own unfolding of Now. So, if you ever feel rushed or overwhelmed by events, try pausing. Take a breath and consciously shift your attention to what matters most. You have more control than you think.

2. Each moment, we weave ourselves from time.

Have you ever wondered how we can hold so many layers of feeling and connection within one moment? In fact, we never experience time as a linear path. Each moment of our lives is like a tapestry, woven from strands across multiple timescales. Philosopher William James described consciousness as a “stream”—a flowing river, with all its eddies and currents.

Neuroscientists have found that our brains integrate information over milliseconds, seconds, minutes, and even years, binding together lasting memories and future plans with more immediate sensations and beliefs. You might taste your coffee, recall a childhood memory, hear a song, and anticipate a friend’s arrival—all woven together into a single experience of Now.

“If anything defines what it means to be human, it’s our remarkable ability to draw meaning from time.”

This weaving gives us our sense of self with a past, present, and future. When those threads fall apart, our identity does too. In schizophrenia, people can become less able to integrate different timescales and can feel as if they’re a different person from one moment to the next. Taking psychedelic drugs can also dissolve our experience of time and self, in a phenomenon known as ego death.

If anything defines what it means to be human, it’s our remarkable ability to draw meaning from time. When you listen to music, the notes only make sense as part of a longer phrase or piece. To recognize an old friend, you’re drawing on not just today’s meeting but a rich history of shared moments.

It’s a reminder that in our relationship with Now, balance matters. Mindfulness teaches us to let go of the baggage of past and future, to focus purely on the present. But it’s precisely in those threads of time—our stories, relationships, memories—that we find who we are. As you go about your day, notice the tapestry you’re weaving. Your “self” isn’t finished or fixed; it’s a living, evolving work of art.

3. Memories are stories we tell ourselves now.

We often think of memory as a recording that plays back what happened in the past. But research shows we’re not reading, we’re writing: our memories are made fresh each time we remember.

For example, after a plane crash in Amsterdam, psychologists asked locals to recall details from the TV footage of the disaster. Most people vividly remembered seeing it. Except, the footage didn’t exist. Their memories were convincing fabrications: stories based on the psychologists’ suggestions.

Such false memories appear everywhere, from lab experiments to childhood scenes to witness statements. Even “true” memories can include bogus information, such as parts of a scene that weren’t visible to us at the time. That’s because whenever you remember, your brain isn’t accessing a record or file, but rather creating a new experience. This process depends not only on your past, but who you are now: your beliefs, mood, situation. That’s why different people can recall the same event differently, or why a memory can change over time. Neuroscientists have found that the brain networks most active when we remember the past are those responsible for imagination.

“This process depends not only on your past, but who you are now: your beliefs, mood, situation.”

By recognizing how creative memories are, perhaps we can be more forgiving and curious when our recollections don’t match up with others. And rather than being ruled by the past, we can use our memories to heal and grow: by nurturing positive experiences, letting go of difficult ones, or trying out new perspectives and possibilities. It can be hard to accept that memories aren’t faithful records. But that was never their purpose. Memory evolved not to preserve the past, but to guide us in the present.

4. You’re in a dance with the world.

We often think of our minds as locked inside our heads. But our experience of each moment depends not just on our brains but also on how we physically move our bodies in the world, and on how the world responds. To see, hear, touch, or taste, we must do something: dart our eyes, brush our fingers across a surface, tilt our head. How the world appears to us will depend on the actions we take. Each moment feels radically different for a child, or a musician, or an athlete, because different physical possibilities are open to them.

It’s a process that reaches across time. What we perceive in each moment depends not just on what we’re doing or sensing right now, but on what similar movements and sensations have meant for us in the past. Take the story of Michael May: after decades of blindness, he had surgery to restore sight in one eye. But when he took off the bandages, he couldn’t recognize anything. He saw no friendly faces, or ticking clocks, or steaming mugs of tea—just a confusing mess of shapes and colors. Without a lifetime of bodily experience to make sense of the visual signals, he couldn’t understand what he saw.

We can never see beyond our physical ability to interact with the world. You could see this reliance on our bodies as a limitation, but I think it makes life worth living. When you walk barefoot on grass, or ease into a warm bath after a long day, or share a hug with a friend, you’re not just observing events. You’re fully immersed, bringing your full self—your body, your history—into that moment.

So, if you’re struggling to feel connected, try tuning in to your senses: the brush of silk, the crunch of leaves, the sparkle of sunlight on water. Feel yourself meeting the world. In every tiny interaction, there’s an invitation to dance.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Factor. Head to factormeals.com/idea50off and use code idea50off to get 50% off your first box.

5. We are building reality…moment by moment.

It’s easy to think of reality as something solid while dismissing our personal experiences as fleeting illusions. But some scientists and philosophers suggest that the moments we build aren’t just private hallucinations in our heads—they help shape what exists.

Take quantum physics, where what experimenters find depends on how they decide to look. This is often seen as a paradox: How could physicists’ choices influence what’s there? But isn’t this exactly what we all experience in our lives every day? When we pour a coffee, book a holiday, or cast a vote, our decisions open possibilities in the world. Far from quantum weirdness, perhaps the physicists’ results reflect a fundamental truth: reality was never just sitting there, nailed down before we reached out to look.

“When we pour a coffee, book a holiday, or cast a vote, our decisions open possibilities in the world.”

You can see this view echoed in many traditional cultures. The Aymara people of Chile don’t see the future as laid out in front of them, as we might, but as hidden behind them, unknowable until it happens. The Amondawa people of the Amazon also focus on the present, taking new names throughout their lives depending on their changing circumstances. They have no clocks, or even a word for “time.”

These perspectives are circling a radical idea: through our actions in each moment, we’re not just observing the universe but helping to create what comes next. I think this is a hopeful message. Through how we engage with the world, we make a difference in ways both small and large for those around us. If you’re feeling powerless, try noticing how every choice, every act of attention, every moment of connection, ripples outward, shaping not just your own experience but the reality you share with others. Working together, we help decide what’s in the world, and where it can go next.

The Big Idea: More often than not, quitting a job is not a well-thought-through decision. It’s a gut-level response to a single event: a comment, a setback, an opportunity.

Why it matters: These “jolts” are more common than we realize, and they often lead to impulsive decisions we later question. Understanding how they work gives you a crucial advantage: instead of reacting in the moment, you can step back, evaluate your options, and make a move you won’t regret.

These ideas come from the new book Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters by Anthony Klotz, professor of organizational behavior at UCL School of Management in London. Read on for five of his key insights.

1. We’re all one event away from quitting our jobs.

If you were to get enough money to live as comfortably as you would like for the rest of your life, would you continue to work or stop?

Every two years since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked a representative sample of Americans this very question. For most of that time, the results have steadily indicated that around seven out of 10 people would keep working even if they didn’t need the paycheck. Global surveys indicate similar findings. But then the pandemic hit, and the number of people reporting they would keep working if they won the lottery dropped precipitously to an all-time low. This drop corresponded with a historic surge in people quitting their jobs: The Great Resignation.

When teaching and speaking, I ask the lottery question and always find similar results. However, one time, a professional in the audience asked me to rephrase the question so that instead of asking How many people would keep working, it asked How many people would quit their jobs if they won the lottery. I have asked it in this rephrased way many times since, and consistently find that only around 10 percent of people would keep working at their current job if they struck it rich.

“But then the pandemic hit, and the number of people reporting they would keep working if they won the lottery dropped precipitously to an all-time low.”

What do the changes in these lottery-question responses—before and after the pandemic, and between working in general versus working at your current job—tell us about our relationship with work? We are all just one event away from quitting our jobs. These events, called jolts, happen much more frequently than lottery wins or pandemics.

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2. Jolts are the missing piece of the quitting puzzle.

In 2005, Comedian Dave Chappelle abruptly quit his TV show at the height of its success. What led him to suddenly walk away?

Organizational psychologists have studied the causes of quitting for over a century, and for most of that time, the research could be boiled down to two main reasons for turnover:

• The negative parts of your job add up over time and push you toward quitting.

• When positive opportunities for other jobs or careers are appealing enough, they pull you away from your current job, toward the exit door.

Push and pull. These two forces are intuitive and powerful, and they do explain why people quit in many cases. The only problem is that they only explain around half of the quitting that happens in the workforce. What about the other half, like Chappelle’s sudden turn away from success?

In the early 1990s, organizational researchers Tom Lee and Terry Mitchell found the missing piece of the puzzle. They proposed, and then provided evidence, that quitting often stems from one single event that jolts employees, causing them to rethink their relationship with work. In explaining why he left, Chappelle described one such jolt, in which the bad behavior of a single colleague during a specific episode triggered reflection, and then a strong urge to walk away from the show.

If you think back over your own life, you can probably recall some of the jolts you’ve experienced—events, big and small, that stop you in your tracks, often leading you to make major career changes.

3. You will encounter six types of jolts in your life.

Over the past three decades, researchers, including myself, have catalogued the different types of jolts that spur employees to quit:

• Direct jolts stem from negative events that happen to us at work. They can range from major failures that make us question whether we are a good fit for our jobs, to minor slights like a rude comment from our boss.

• Collateral jolts come to us collaterally, stemming from events that befall our coworkers. These also include when our colleagues quit their jobs, and it affects us through a process called turnover contagion.

• Crossover jolts reside outside of work, when negative events in our personal lives reveal that we need to rethink our relationship with work.

• Honeymoon jolts such as those that strike during what is, somewhat counterintuitively, the most common time for quitting across organizations: the first year on the job.

• Remote jolts don’t affect us directly, but still can jolt us. Science is increasingly revealing how and why events that happen in faraway places influence us.

• Positive jolts come from the bright side of life, emerging from both the big and the mundane positive events in our lives.

Jolts are everywhere! Because jolts are so prevalent, it can be difficult to determine when we should take action in response to them, versus simply carrying on. But figuring that out is critical, given the stakes involved.

4. The honeymoon-hangover effect is real, but avoidable.

In the years following The Great Resignation, dozens of news stories reported that some workers who quit during that period ultimately regretted their decision. Some went so far as to call it The Great Regret. For those of us who study turnover, however, a spike in regret following a spike in resignations is to be expected, due to what is known as the honeymoon-hangover effect.

One of the most common mistakes people make in response to jolts is quitting too soon. Although quick quitting is sometimes warranted, it is often a one-way ticket to regret. Discovered and coined by management scholar Wendy Boswell, the honeymoon-hangover effect describes the reality that many job and career changes lead to an immediate bump in happiness and well-being, followed by a crash that leaves many workers less happy in their new role than in the one they just quit.

This crash comes from two places. First, it comes from a jolt wherein you realize that one or more expectations that you had about your new job are not going to be met. Second, it comes from the realization that you could have taken action to fix the problem in your prior job before you called it quits.

“One of the most common mistakes people make in response to jolts is quitting too soon.”

While it’s normal to have some mixed feelings after quitting a job, regret needn’t be one of them. By developing a strategy for responding to jolts that goes beyond the binary options of carrying on or walking away, we can maximize the chances of either fixing our relationship with work without quitting or quitting in a way that avoids any hangovers in our next chapter.

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5. You can learn to leave better.

In 2012, Greg Smith quit his job at Goldman Sachs by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times that cast the bank in an unfavorable light. Although bridge-burning resignations remain rare, thanks to social media, examples of them are more prevalent than ever.

However, instead of actively harming their relationship with a soon-to-be former employer, most workers try to quit in a way that preserves or strengthens it. And yet, people often resign in ways that unnecessarily harm their connection to the company or don’t set them up for success in their next role. Quitting is complicated, doesn’t come with a guidebook, and you often can’t ask for help from the most useful sources of information—your current coworkers and boss. Still, we can quit better.

The pre-resignation period is critical because it’s when we decide on the reason we’ll give for our departure, who we’ll confide in (if anyone) before we put in our notice, and how we will say goodbye.

“The pre-resignation period is critical.”

Next comes the actual resignation. In my research, I’ve found that there are seven different ways people quit, and each has different consequences for your final days on the job and future relationship with their former employer.

Finally, there’s that awkward time after you’ve announced your departure but before you’ve left. When navigated well, the notice period can provide a satisfying close to one chapter of your life and a smooth transition to the next.

The big idea: Disagreement isn’t a problem. In fact, it is often useful, necessary, and even healthy. The real trouble starts when disagreement hardens into conflict, and each side begins to see the other as foolish, irrational, or morally suspect.

Why it matters: Most of us go into hard conversations trying to win. But persuasion usually backfires, especially on the issues that matter most. In families, workplaces, and public life, the people who make the most impact are often not the loudest or the most forceful. They are the ones who know how to signal openness, keep the conversation going, and make other people feel heard without giving up their own view.

Try this today: In your next disagreement, resist the urge to launch into your best case right away. Start by showing that you understand the other person’s concern. A simple phrase like “I can see why you’d think that” or “That makes sense from your perspective” can lower the temperature fast. Receptiveness is not surrender, it’s often the first step toward a better conversation.

These ideas are from the new book How to Disagree Better by Julia Minson. Julia is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a behavioral scientist with over twenty years of research experience in conflict, communication, negotiations, and decision-making. Read on for five of her key insights.

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1. Disagreement is not the same as conflict.

People use the terms “disagreement” and “conflict” interchangeably, but these are two distinct experiences. Disagreement is a difference of beliefs, preferences, or predictions. Two people can disagree about how to sequence a project at work, whether the ending of Stranger Things was a letdown, or the merits of U.S. Middle East policy. All these topics can lead to interesting conversations and a fun, informative exchange of viewpoints. Having a person disagree with us can prevent us from making catastrophic errors or introduce us to entirely new ways of thinking. Disagreement is good.

By contrast, conflict unfolds when two people in disagreement conclude that no intelligent, rational, moral person could hold the view that their counterpart espouses. Surprisingly, people can reach this conclusion about anything: the division of household chores, the meaning of a word, the interpretation of medical data, or the merits of a social policy.

When I was in my early twenties, I once found myself in a screaming fight with my grandfather about the proper method of storing cauliflower in the refrigerator. The topic does not matter. It is the assumptions of ignorance, irrationality, and immorality that can turn any discussion into World War III. Learn to check your assumptions, and life will get easier.

2. Persuasion is a losing game.

Think about the important disagreements in your life: parenting disagreements with your spouse, caretaking disagreements with your aging parents, or the policy battles convulsing our country. Now, think about how many times you have definitively won one of these arguments, with the other person verbally conceding defeat and admitting they were wrong. Your list of wins is probably pretty short.

The problem is not that you are especially bad at arguing. The problem is that persuasion is fundamentally a losing game. When we go in guns blazing, we overlook the fact that the other person has just as much life experience, conviction, and evidence to support their side.

“The problem is that persuasion is fundamentally a losing game.”

Every year over the holidays, my family gathers at my in-laws’ house. Unfortunately, this year, my sister got the flu, precipitating a debate about canceling the trip. My mother-in-law insisted on all of us coming anyway, arguing that everyone gets sick every winter and that her own developing cough was just a “little tickle.” We made the trip. My sister and my mother-in-law wore masks and washed their hands with extra frequency. Everyone in my family got sick. The holidays turned into a blur of high fevers, sleepless nights, and doctors’ visits.

Weeks later, everyone still thinks that they were right. The people who wanted to cancel the trip point to the days of misery and say that we should not have gone. The people who insisted on the trip argue that since a winter virus seems unavoidable and no precautions help, you might as well live it up. After weeks of debate, there remained no resolution in sight.

People see the world through the lens of their convictions and desires. As we give longer, louder speeches, we only give our counterparts more material to refute. Persuasion begets persuasion, and usually little else. People walk away frustrated, annoyed, and hoarse, having lost any opportunity at real, lasting influence.

3. Receptiveness will get you further.

Even the most disagreement-challenged among us can get much, much better. Several years ago, my team and I published a personality scale that measures people’s receptiveness to opposing views—the extent to which they can engage with divergent perspectives rather than avoiding or dismissing them out of hand. It took us years to develop and validate the scale, but now we have a rigorously tested metric of how receptive any given person is. If you go to my website, disagreeingbetter.com, you can take the survey, too.

“Receptive people are more desirable teammates, advisors, and friends.”

People who are more receptive disagree differently. They are less likely to experience negative emotions when others do not see eye-to-eye with them, and, as a result, they are more comfortable learning about opposing views. They think harder about arguments on both sides and appreciate the merits of multiple points of view. Having considered the situation from multiple perspectives, they tend to be better-informed people.

Others appreciate those qualities. Receptive people are more desirable teammates, advisors, and friends. They are seen as better leaders and are more likely to receive help in difficult situations. In a world of conflict, they manage to keep their cool and learn from both sides.

4. It’s not the thought that counts.

Receptiveness is not about becoming a more empathetic person, improving your active listening skills, or mastering open body language. Receptiveness is about words. While most people try to change how they think and feel during disagreements, our research shows that the words we use make the greatest difference in how we are perceived.

The reason? Other people can’t read our minds. To convince our conversation partners of our receptiveness, we need to use simple and repetitive language to ensure that they get the message.

A specific set of words and phrases signals engagement with opposing views. We call this communication style “conversational receptiveness”—language that clearly communicates that you are thinking about your counterpart’s concerns and keeping those concerns in mind, even as you advocate for your own position.

“The words we use make the greatest difference in how we are perceived.”

Conversational receptiveness gets results. People who master this style are seen as more trustworthy, more reasonable, and more intelligent by their conversation partners. Their counterparts want to continue talking with them in the future, allowing for long-term influence and relationship building.

Most importantly, conversational receptiveness is contagious. Experiments show that when you communicate with high levels of conversational receptiveness, others adopt that style as well. Each of us has power over how our conversations unfold. You don’t have to demand that other people listen to you. You can lead by example and set your conversations on a positive loop. Over time, we can reshape how entire families, teams, and communities disagree.

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5. Disagreeing well requires work.

You don’t need a new personality or years of therapy to get better at disagreement, but you do need to commit some time and effort to practicing the right skills so that you are ready when the moment of truth arrives. The problem is that most people don’t like to practice their disagreement skills.

Opposing views can be hard to stomach, and the threat of conflict is ever-present. So, most of us avoid disagreement and then feel surprised when our next encounter goes badly. The solution is to think of ways to practice engaging with opposing views and formulating receptive responses that are small and not too painful.

If you don’t learn to swim and somebody tosses you into deep water, you will drown. But if you start by first learning to blow bubbles, then learning to float, and then learning to dog paddle, you will eventually feel completely at ease, even as storm clouds roll in and the waves rise.

The Big Idea: We’re raising kids in an environment engineered to capture their attention and keep them wanting more. More screens, more sugar, more stimulation. And the usual parenting advice just isn’t built for this world.

Why it matters: When we treat these habits as discipline problems, we miss what’s really going on inside the brain. Dopamine isn’t about pleasure, it’s about craving. That means your child can desperately want something that doesn’t actually make them feel good. If we don’t understand this, we end up in constant battles that don’t work.

Try this today: Instead of focusing on restriction, try substitution. Replace the habit rather than trying to remove it. Swap screens for something equally engaging. Swap desserts for something naturally rewarding. The goal isn’t less joy, it’s better sources of it.

These ideas come from the new book Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods by Michaeleen Doucleff. Michaeleen is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Hunt, Gather, Parent. She has a PhD in chemistry but has spent the past 14 years covering children’s health and parenting at NPR.

Read on for five of her big ideas.

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1. Current advice about screens and ultraprocessed foods doesn’t work with kids.

We are parenting in a world no generation has ever faced. For the first time in history, our children are surrounded by products intentionally designed for overconsumption. That includes apps, devices, and foods. And our kids are consuming it all—starting earlier than ever. Are they happier? There’s actually more anxiety, less confidence, more agitation, and less joy.

This isn’t our fault. What’s missing isn’t effort or a lack of trying to fix this problem. What’s missing is guidance. Parents, like you and me, need an operating manual for this totally new era. My book gives parents five steps to gently shift the power dynamic at home, create spaces of safety and calm, and retrain developing kids’ brains to seek out what makes them feel good.

2. Depriving kids of screens and ultraprocessed foods doesn’t work.

I was struggling with screens in my own family. My daughter Rosie was obsessed with Lego Friends and YouTube. Honestly, I was also struggling personally. I was obsessed with my phone. I was doomscrolling at night and felt horrible afterward. It turned my world gray and gloomy. It made me sad.

I tried the common advice: restrict more, take things away, be stricter. More willpower. But what I found was that this often led to more conflict, and more struggle.

“What works is adding more joy to your life.”

So, I started studying how screens and ultraprocessed foods affect the brain. I discovered that deprivation doesn’t work. The solution is not saying “no” more often and shrinking life down. What works is adding more joy to your life.

When we understand dopamine, we realize this isn’t about taking pleasure away—it’s about reclaiming it. Creating more peace. More connection. More play. More excitement. More satisfaction. It’s about having more moments that make life feel meaningful and alive. Dopamine Kids is an invitation to build a family culture where kids don’t just give things up, but discover something better.

3. Powerful parents understand dopamine.

We’ve been taught that dopamine equals pleasure and more happiness. Therefore, we reason that our kids are scrolling endlessly on social media or playing Roblox for six hours because these activities bring them continual joy. But neuroscience from the past 30 years tells us something different.

Dopamine is not the feeling of joy. It gives us the feeling of wanting, craving, and desiring. It pulls us toward something—a game, app, or food—even when what we’re chasing doesn’t nourish us. It attracts us even when that something hurts us or robs us of pleasure.

The feeling of pleasure and satisfaction comes from a different part of the brain. Understanding that shift in definition is key to creating a healthy relationship with modern technologies and foods. The products around us today are designed to crank up our wanting for them, not the pleasure we gain as a result.

“It attracts us even when that something hurts us or robs us of pleasure.”

So, a child can want nothing more than to play six hours of video games, but receive very little pleasure from the experience. Making room in his life for other activities doesn’t mean taking pleasure away from him. It can mean adding more pleasure to his life.

4. See limits as opportunities for more fun.

When people hear the word limits, they often think of rules and restrictions. But we’re flipping the script. See limits as opportunities to add more fun, more excitement, and more life into children’s lives.

Decades of psychological research tell us that limits don’t work when you just take something away. If you ban watching Netflix after dinner, that’s a rule, not a strategy. And it’s no fun. Kids push back, they crave the screens even more, and you end up in a power struggle that leaves everyone frustrated.

What works is swapping in something just as fun and engaging—maybe even more exciting than the thing you’re trying to limit. In my own family, at some point, we decided no screens after dinner. No cartoons and no YouTube. Instead of just saying, “Nope, screens are done,” I said to my daughter, “We’re going to take a break from screens for a bit, and I’m going to teach you something you’ve been dying to learn.”

That something? Riding her bike around the neighborhood on her own. I wasn’t leaving her empty-handed. I wasn’t saying, “Go to your room and be bored.” I was saying, “No, this is going to be more fun than Netflix.” Today, my daughter rides her bike to piano practice and soccer practice. She loves zipping around outside. It’s one of her favorite hobbies.

When you replace limits with opportunities for fun, healthy activities become habits that stick. Kids don’t just comply—they want to do it. Instead of telling kids no, invite them to do something better.

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5. Make it easy-peasy, for you and your child.

Neuroscience tells us that we can retrain children’s brains. Dopamine is the “I want to do that again” signal in the brain, but you can literally swap out the screens or the fast food triggering a dopamine response with something else—anything you want. You can make dopamine work in your child’s favor.

“What works is swapping in something just as fun and engaging.”

With the right setup, kids can rediscover motivation for activities that make them feel good afterward. We do this by building times and places in our homes where the healthy option is the only option. But the critical part is that you can’t just shove the screen in a drawer or food in the pantry and say, “Nope, not now.” The device needs to disappear. The food needs to disappear.

In our home, we wanted to cut back on sugar and ultraprocessed foods. Instead of trying to change everything, we created one clear, simple rule that was easy to follow. We decided we’re not going to have desserts in the house, except when we have friends over. That’s it.

So, I removed all the desserts from our house and replaced them with frozen fruit and nuts. Then, after dinner, I said, “Ok we’re going to take a break from desserts after dinner. We’re only going to have them if we have friends over. But I bought all these sweet frozen mangos and peaches and walnuts. You can have as much of the fruit and nuts as you want after dinner.” Minimal drama. No negotiating. A new normal.

In these moments and spaces, the healthy choice winds up being the default. When you create these sanctuaries, kids naturally start to reach for what’s good for them. Over time, their brains build pathways that make these choices easier, more natural, and even enjoyable. They start to fall in love with the frozen mangos and peaches—in love with the activities offline.

I’m excited to introduce a new batch of standout nonfiction—the most compelling and thought-provoking titles scheduled for release in April 2026.

Each of these books has earned a spot on our longlist for Season 30 of the Next Big Idea Club. In the coming weeks, we will narrow our sights on a smaller pool of finalists. At the end of each season, we will announce the winner and distribute a hardcover copy (or an ebook) to our members.

If you’d like to get those winning books (along with author Q&A’s, invitations to special live events, and other perks), join us at NextBigIdeaClub.com.

Join us now!

So, without further ado, here are the April 2026 must-reads…

Thank You, Teachers: True Stories from America’s Teachers, Our Last Line of Defense and Our First Line of Hope

By & Matt Eversmann

Teachers are the heroes we too often forget to thank. And we need heroes more than ever. View on Amazon

Waiting For Dawn: Living With Uncertainty

By
Publication Date: April 7, 2026

Lee shares her two-year journey battling loss and illness—the death of her mother-in-law, ongoing sickness, and the emotional challenges she endured—that taught her that healing is about finding your own unique way through the darkness. View on Amazon

The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie

By
Publication Date: April 7, 2026

A fresh, charming, socially conscious tour of the mysteries of space-time. View on Amazon

You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy

By
Publication Date: April 7, 2026

A GI’s guide to the brain-gut-microbiome connection, including research on why people develop IBS and how anyone can achieve poophoria. View on Amazon

Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life

By
Publication Date: April 7, 2026

From the world’s leading economics podcast comes an irresistible guide to the hidden world of everyday economics. View on Amazon

Read on for the rest of the list:

Read more

This week we dug into two new books that tackle two of the biggest stressors in modern life: figuring out what we’re here to do, and figuring out how to talk to each other when we don’t see eye-to-eye. Read on for the big ideas from both—and a few simple shifts you can start using immediately.

Discover the best new nonfiction before everyone else. Join the Next Big Idea Club for curated books, author deep dives, and members-only conversations.

Join us now!

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

How to find the meaning of your life.

Let’s face it, modern life can be kind of a bummer. We’re glued to our phones, starved for meaning, haunted by a gnawing sense of emptiness. Enter Arthur C. Brooks. He’s a Harvard professor, happiness expert, and a man with a plan to help you find your why and build a life that actually fills you up.

Arthur’s new book is The Meaning of Your Life. You can hear our chat with him on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens by Dr. Elaine Aron — a deeply personal guide from the bestselling author of The Highly Sensitive Person, offering the first-ever objective overview of meditation and paths to enlightenment for anyone seeking inner peace in overwhelming times.

Book Bite of the Week

How can you disagree better?

Disagreement doesn’t have to turn into conflict. It can actually be a good thing—energizing and productive, even. The trick is knowing how to handle it. If we use science and put in a little effort, anyone can learn to disagree better.

Julia Minson is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral scientist with over twenty years of research experience in conflict, communication, negotiations, and decision-making. Pick up a copy of her new book How to Disagree Better on Amazon or check out her key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea.

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books yesterday--congratulations to them all!

Alexandra Sifferlin, The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis

Tyler Beck Goodspeed, Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It

Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness

, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself

, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life

, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life

Gillian Sandstrom, Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life

Ryan Roslansky & Aneesh Raman, Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI

Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It

The Big Idea: Science prides itself on being a truth-seeking machine. But history tells a messier story. Again and again, researchers with breakthrough ideas have been dismissed, ridiculed, or even destroyed but because they challenged the scientific establishment.

Why it matters: If bold thinking gets punished, progress slows down. That means some of the ideas we most need may never see the light of day.

Try this today: The next time you hear an idea that sounds strange or uncomfortable, resist the instinct to dismiss it. Ask: What if this were true? Progress often starts with questions that feel inconvenient.

These ideas come from the new book I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right, by Matt Kaplan, science correspondent at The Economist. Read on for five of his key insights:

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1. Stupidly silenced.

In the middle of the pandemic, I was interviewing researchers who were trying to defeat COVID-19 or help patients in hospitals. Something that blew me away during this period was how often I would hear really impressive ideas that I thought were worth reporting on, but then the scientist would say, “Oh no, no, no. You can’t say that.” And when I asked why, these are some of the responses I got:

• “Well, other scientists wouldn’t take me seriously anymore if you shared that.”

• “I’m a PhD student and the idea I just shared with you would be a threat to the work done by my PhD supervisor. I might be fired.”

• “Well, I really need to test my idea out extensively first and I’m never going to get funding for this, so it’s not even worth talking about or reporting on.”

• “This is immunology, Matt, and let’s face it, I’m a woman.”

I thought this was nuts. We were in the middle of a pandemic with thousands of people dying, and I’ve got researchers who are saying, “Yeah, don’t share my ideas with anybody else because either my PhD supervisor won’t accept it, or other people might laugh at me, or because I’m a woman.” These are not good reasons to hide important ideas during a time when many people are losing their lives.

Has science always been like this? Have we always had behaviors like this cropping up in the field? The answer is yes.

2. Punished for thinking outside the box.

Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis was based in Austria at the Vienna Hospital. Most of his work entailed delivering babies all day long. He was very, very good at it, but he was also deeply troubled by the fact that numerous women died shortly after delivery. And when they died, their baby almost always died too. Semmelweis was heartbroken by this reality and wanted to understand why.

The disease was called childbed fever, and Semmelweis ran experiments trying to figure out the cause. It was killing one in 10 women after delivery. He ultimately worked out that it was the common practice of doctors visiting the morgue in the morning. Doctors were going there to dissect patients who had died the previous day because they wanted to understand why they hadn’t survived. This was important for academic learning, but it was a disaster for health.

Yes, doctors washed their hands after handling dead patients, but the soap and water mechanism did not get rid of all the deadly bacteria growing on those corpses. As a result, doctors would then go up to deliver babies, and as they went up to mothers who were in labor, they would put their fingers inside to feel for the baby’s head, sometimes move the umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck, or just generally assist in delivery. Women who were treated by doctors who had only used soap and water to wash their hands were infected with bacteria from under the doctors’ fingernails. This caused childbed fever and was almost always lethal.

“Semmelweis was ultimately fired, exiled back to Hungary, and forced into an insane asylum by his own peers.”

Semmelweis developed a technique for washing hands with a chlorine solution that removed the bacteria and effectively eliminated childbed fever. It was a huge advancement. However, when he told other doctors to follow suit, he was vigorously criticized. The other doctors said, “Sir, we are gentlemen. How dare you tell us that our hands are dirty?” Nobody had any idea about bacteria at the time, so they couldn’t look at the microscope and demonstrate that these people all had dirty hands. Semmelweis was ultimately fired, exiled back to Hungary, and forced into an insane asylum by his own peers.

Semmelweis’ story is effectively reflected by the modern Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó. Karikó had come to the United States as an expert in messenger RNA. She had demonstrated that messenger RNA could produce almost any protein within the body, and it could be used to develop drugs or treat diseases. Nobody believed that messenger RNA had any kind of future because whenever it entered the body, it broke apart. Karikó worked with an immunologist to demonstrate that, by using certain immune proteins on the messenger RNA, she could prevent it from falling apart inside the body and use it to help treat diseases.

Ultimately, she and immunologist Drew Weissman created the COVID vaccine when she was based at BioNTech and Pfizer, two biotechnology companies. However, before she got there, she had been demoted by the University of Pennsylvania, fired and threatened with deportation by the US Department of State. More importantly, she couldn’t get funding. Nobody believed in her research. Without her resilience, we wouldn’t have the COVID vaccine.

3. Damned lies and journal articles.

There were two rural veterinarians in France, one named Henry Toussaint and another named Pierre Galtier. They’re unknown to most people, but they shouldn’t be. Toussaint effectively invented the anthrax vaccine in 1880. Galtier paved the way for the rabies vaccine to ultimately be invented in 1881. We don’t know their names because of a certain scientist who everyone knows: Louis Pasteur.

Pasteur had worked hard to develop vaccines against both anthrax and rabies. He wanted the glory and reward for defeating both diseases. When he found out that two country-bumpkin veterinarians had effectively invented the vaccines he had been working on, he could not tolerate the notion that they would beat him to the punch. As such, he copied their techniques, lied about it, and then used his political clout with the French government to discredit and destroy both veterinarians.

What’s particularly staggering about Louis Pasteur is how history has treated him. One scholar wrote, “His skillful exploitation of the political advantages that he enjoyed show that he was, in fact, the better scientist.” Another scholar wrote, “When considering his behaviors, you have to keep in mind the highly competitive context of mid-19th century French academic life.” Are you kidding me? Does the presence of a highly competitive environment make unethical behavior in some way excusable? And we still have this problem today.

In 2023, Retraction Watch noted that almost 19,000 papers in the realm of biomedical research alone were retracted. Some retractions occur because of contamination errors or other mistakes during research, but the majority of papers retracted in 2023 were retracted for plagiarism or fraud. We cannot be operating like this.

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4. Peer review or peer re-view.

Joseph Lister was working in the hospitals of Edinburgh and Glasgow during the Victorian period. During his work as a surgeon, he noted that postoperative infection was the leading cause of death after surgery. He worked out that he could prevent postoperative infection by drenching the wounds in carbolic acid and then disinfecting the surgical site with bandages soaked in the stuff during the healing process.

While his findings were initially met with cautious interest, a fellow surgeon named James Simpson whipped the medical community into an aggressive frenzy against him. This forced Lister into silence for years.

Simpson led the charge against Lister because he wanted to be the one to defeat postoperative infection first. Simpson had this theory that if you used a technique called acupressure, where you took little needles and stuck them into the wound around the surgical site, you would spread out the inflammation so that a big mass of surrounding tissue was inflamed rather than the one cutting site. He thought this would reduce the risk of postoperative infection. There was absolutely no evidence that his acupressure technique worked. Even so, being informed that carbolic acid could solve the problem he had been laboring to defeat was something he wasn’t willing to accept.

“Simpson led the charge against Lister because he wanted to be the one to defeat postoperative infection first.”

Attacking Lister was essential for the survival of his acupressure theory, and that’s exactly what he did. We still see this problem today. Scientists attack other scientists, not because their ideas are bad, but because the ideas are a threat to the territory that they’re currently exploring. We can’t have scientists shooting other scientists down just because they solved the problem first. Scientists are supposed to work together for the betterment of humanity.

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5. What the heck do we do about it?

With regard to fraud, we need to develop a system for tracking down researchers who are committing fraud. If you steal money from a bank, then you go to jail. If you commit fraud with research funding, that’s effectively stealing. There is no going to jail for that right now. At best, you get fired from your job at the university. That needs to change. We need to make sure that the minority of scientists who engage in fraud are punished.

Similarly, we need to find ways to not punish scientists who have ideas that are outside the mainstream. Just because someone’s got a weird idea, if they’ve got a good reason for putting it forward and wrote a convincing proposal explaining how that idea can be explored, then we need to make funding available to them, too. We need to do this more often because, as things stand, we only fund research that is expected to work. That’s not helpful for coming up with creative solutions to big problems, like feeding eight billion people or defeating climate change.

We also need to protect scientists in vulnerable positions. Researchers who are undergraduates or PhD students are afraid that their PhD supervisors will not like the ideas they come up with. That can’t stand. If a scientist, no matter how young they are, has an idea that is contrary to the ideas found in their lab, the university, or the greater scientific community, the university needs to be prepared to roll up its sleeves and say, “We need to give this interesting idea a fair shake.” Rather than, “Boy, that’s weird. Let’s throw it out just because it’s strange.” We can’t go on like this. A culture shift needs to occur in science to make space for fresh ideas.

“We need to make sure that the minority of scientists who engage in fraud are punished.”

And finally, we need to talk about the sausage-making. The Economist has long argued against the notion that you never want to see how laws and sausages are made because the process is disgusting. Well, we need to apply that to science, too. Talking about how science functions and malfunctions is important for people to understand. People are voters. They vote to support different kinds of funding and politicians who will support different types of research efforts. The public needs to know that scientists sometimes fail—and, in fact, failure is important. If we don’t fund those scientific efforts that take a gamble, we’re rarely (if ever) going to have the big breakthroughs we need.

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In a recent Substack Live, I sat down with , the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, and one of the leading thinkers on habits and behavior. His new book, Beyond Belief, explores how the beliefs we carry, often without realizing it, shape what we do and what we think is possible.

Whether it was his distinction between feel-good mindset advice—like trying to “think positive”—and actual research-backed behavior change, or his argument that many of our relationship problems are really belief problems (stories we’re telling ourselves that feel true but may not be serving us), Nir kept coming back to one idea: beliefs aren’t truths—they’re tools. And when you start to see them that way, you can begin to change what you see, how you act, and what you think is possible.

Watch the full conversation above—or jump to a few highlights:

Timestamps

01:08 The difference between fact, faith, and belief
03:15 Why helplessness is our default state
07:02 How beliefs shape what we see—and what we miss
10:28 “We don’t have relationship problems—we have belief problems”
12:40 A simple method for challenging limiting beliefs
24:00 Why positive thinking and affirmations often fall short
30:00 “Motivation is pain management.”
35:30 Chronic pain and belief
39:35 Anxious? Here’s why you should schedule “worry time”
48:33 The science of luck
52:48 “Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt.”

The Big Idea: We’ve been taught to avoid heat—to stay cool, comfortable, and dry. But our bodies evolved for the opposite. From sweating to sweating more efficiently, humans are built to handle—and benefit from—heat.

Why it matters: Emerging research suggests that regular heat exposure can improve cardiovascular health, boost athletic performance, and enhance mood. In some cases, its effects rival those of exercise, making it one of the most overlooked tools for living longer and better.

Try this today: Add one intentional “heat session” to your week: a sauna, a hot bath, or even a long, hot walk. Treat it like a workout, and notice how your body responds.

These ideas come from Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, by , who has been writing about health and longevity for about 20 years. Check out his key insights below:

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1. We were born to sweat.

Sweat has a bad rap nowadays. It’s considered kind of gross, and socially unacceptable. We wouldn’t show up for a dinner date or a job interview soaked in sweat, and we spend billions of dollars trying to stop or hide it. Which is crazy because the average adult human has between two and four million sweat glands spread all over their body. We are sweating machines!

There are two kinds of sweat, and the first is called apocrine—this is the sweat that soaks your armpits and other hairy areas, and it’s also the stuff that produces body odor. The other kind of sweat glands are called eccrine glands, and those are found all over. Eccrine sweat glands cool us down by bringing liquid to the surface of our skin and then letting it evaporate. When we exercise or feel hot, our eccrine sweat glands are activated.

Why do we have so many eccrine sweat glands? I spoke to an evolutionary geneticist named Yana Kamberov who discovered that at some point in our lineage, natural selection basically went crazy with our sweat-gland genes—mutating rapidly over a short period of time, giving us these cooling sweat glands, everywhere. Our ancestors could now forage and hunt in the heat of the day. Some evolutionary biologists believe that our ancestors would use our superior cooling ability to chase down prey animals in the middle of the day, basically running them to death (deer or antelope can only cool down by panting). We are natural-born endurance athletes, and sweating is our superpower.

2. Heat can heal us.

Sweating is good for us. An incredible series of studies out of Finland looked at a group of about 2,500 middle-aged men and found that the most frequent sauna users had less than half the rate of heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, and overall deaths than the infrequent users, and about one-third the rate of Alzheimer’s disease. This is an incredible result, more powerful than any medication, and similar, if not greater, than the effect of exercise. By going to sauna and experiencing intense but limited bouts of heat exposure, they were strengthening their cardiovascular systems, their vasculature, and that made them more resistant to heart disease and probably also Alzheimer’s.

“This is an incredible result, more powerful than any medication, and similar, if not greater, than the effect of exercise.”

Another important change that happens when we get hot is that our cells activate heat shock proteins, which are like the repair department for our cells, helping keep everything running smoothly and making us more resilient to the effects of heat stress. They may even play a role in slowing damage caused by aging.

There are other positive changes that take place in sauna users (also in people who just take hot baths), but what these Finnish studies also did was to change the conversation around heat. Where heat exposure was once viewed as always dangerous, people now see it has the potential to heal.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens by Dr. Elaine Aron — a deeply personal guide from the bestselling author of The Highly Sensitive Person, offering the first-ever objective overview of meditation and paths to enlightenment for anyone seeking inner peace in overwhelming times.

3. Sweat is like a performance-enhancing drug.

Humans are an incredibly adaptable animal. That’s how we have spread all over the planet. You’ve probably noticed that an 80-degree Fahrenheit day in May feels pretty hot, but in July, that temperature is a relief. That’s because we’ve become heat-adapted, which turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Olympic athletes use heat-adaptation training to compete in hot places like Tokyo and, soon, LA; all kinds of athletes use it, from Tour de France cyclists to dressage horses. Coaches and scientists have found that by raising your core body temperature just a little bit (around 101 degrees Fahrenheit) and keeping it there, your physiology changes in subtle but awesome ways: you sweat more, run at a lower core body temperature, and your aerobic capacity increases.

Heat training is the new altitude training, and you can benefit from it even if you’re not in the Olympics. I used heat training to prepare for a 100-mile bike ride in Texas, in 107-degree weather, called the “Hotter’n Hell Hundred”—and I was astounded how much it helped.

4. Cold kills.

As I was looking into the limits of human heat tolerance, I discovered that the death toll attributable to colder temperatures is far greater (seven to ten times greater) than deaths due to heat. This balance is changing a little with climate change, but it’s still overwhelming. Even in places like sub-Saharan Africa, there are many more excess deaths associated with cool temperatures than with hot temperatures. Why is that?

“Something deep within us craves warmth.”

As our ancestors developed the ability to sweat, they lost most of their fur, which meant they couldn’t keep warm. This is ironic because only then did our ancestors migrate to the Arctic, Siberia, and other inhospitable places. To me, it solves the riddle of why people seem to crave hot spaces—not only sauna, which is a thousands-of-years-old practice, but things like hot yoga, which people seem to get addicted to. Something deep within us craves warmth. And way back, in a premodern era, we would have gravitated to any kind of warm space.

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5. Heat can make us happier.

Heat waves are typically associated with an increase in violence, stress, and general grumpiness, but a little group of scientists is making progress using heat therapy as a treatment for depression.

Several studies have now found that whole body hyperthermia—heating people up, to simulate a mild fever—can drastically reduce or even eliminate symptoms of severe depression. I participated in one of those studies as a test subject, and it was no picnic, but I experienced a definite improvement in my level of depression.

Some research suggests that getting hot stimulates certain brain regions to produce more serotonin. But I also think this helps explain the popularity of social sauna; something about getting hot and uncomfortable seems to knock us out of whatever spiral we’re in, making us more willing, more receptive, more chatty, and just generally happier. Nature wants us to get sweaty together.

The Big Idea: Most people are far more honest, cooperative, and kind than we assume. The real danger doesn’t come from humanity at large, but from a small group of manipulative personalities who exploit our trust.

Why it matters: When we assume everyone might be a threat, we become overly cynical. But when we fail to recognize the specific traits of truly toxic individuals, we leave ourselves exposed. The cost shows up in broken relationships, workplace stress, and lost time and energy.

Try this today: Run a quick audit. Who in your life consistently drains energy, bends the truth, or dodges accountability? You don’t need a diagnosis, just a pattern. Start adjusting your boundaries accordingly.

These ideas come from the new book Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life. Leanne is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Truth and Trust Lab. Below, she shares five of her big ideas.

1. Most people are better than you think.

Imagine that I gave you $10 and asked you to make a decision: keep that tenner and go on with your day, or hand it over to a stranger you’ll never see again. If you take the latter option, that $10 will automatically quadruple. That stranger now has $40 and a decision of their own to make. They can keep it all for themselves or split it with you. Do you trust a stranger to double your money?

When researchers asked participants in a study this same question, only 45 percent said that they expected people to split the money. Researchers played out the scenario and found that nearly 80 percent of people actually shared their earnings. That’s right, the vast majority of people weren’t selfish or mean. They were kind and considerate enough to do the fair thing.

Another field study had research assistants drop off more than 17,000 “lost wallets” at hotel front desks and train station lost-and-founds around the world. Some of these wallets had no money in them. Others had about $15, and still others had nearly $100. Researchers waited to see how many people would try to return the wallets to their rightful owners. You might expect that the fattest wallets would be least likely to find their way home, but the opposite was true. The more money people found, the more likely they were to return it. People went out of their way not to feel like they were stealing.

These and many other similar findings reveal that most people aren’t often selfish or mean. They aren’t consistently violent or abusive either. They’re kind, honest, and concerned about others.

2. A few people do most of the damage.

Most people aren’t the problem. A few people are. People with psychopathy have callous, manipulative, impulsive, and antisocial personality traits. They don’t experience emotions as others do. You know that guilt you feel when you drop the ball at work? Or when you say something cruel in a moment of stress or anger? They don’t experience those pangs. People with psychopathy can commit horrific acts of violence without any remorse for the people they hurt or kill.

“They make up just one percent of the general population, but account for about 20 percent of incarcerated people.”

They also have inflated egos and might come across as having a holier-than-thou vibe, even though they’re anything but. People with psychopathy manipulate others using superficial charm and lies to get what they want. They live for momentary pleasures, seeking sex, money, and dominance. Long-term planning isn’t in their playbook—they act on impulse and care little about following the rules. It is no wonder then that people with extreme, clinical levels of these traits tend to find themselves at odds with the law. They make up just one percent of the general population, but account for about 20 percent of incarcerated people.

The more psychopathic traits that people possess, the less likely they are to share the spoils of that economic game I mentioned earlier. The less trustworthy they are, in general: people higher in psychopathic traits tell more lies, cheat more often on their romantic partners, and spend more time trolling in online forums. They rain more abuse on their subordinates at work and their families at home, and they’re more likely to favor an authoritarian approach in politics. Being on the receiving end of these behaviors costs us.

Let’s turn it into dollars. Researchers estimated the total cost of crime in the U.S., including money spent on prisons and legal fees, as well as the cost of security systems, medical care for victims, and the time we spend avoiding or recovering from crimes. That number topped $5 trillion annually. If people with psychopathy make up 20 percent of all incarcerated individuals, you might pin 20 percent of the cost on them. But it turns out that people with psychopathy commit 50 percent of all serious crimes. The total annual cost to society: $2.5 trillion U.S. dollars.

Most of us experience the costs of dark personalities not in dollars and cents, but in stress, fear, and cynicism. Maybe a supervisor at work, an ex-partner, a friend, or even a family member sprang to mind as I described the constellation of personality traits that make up psychopathy. While these people in your life may not meet clinical cut-offs for a disorder, higher-than-average levels of these traits can bring out-sized pain to those in their orbit. Research shows that up to about 20 percent of the population score higher on dark traits. These are the people who tend to backstab us at work, troll us online, treat us abusively in our romantic relationships, and more.

3. Dark personalities thrive on our (false) assumptions.

Research suggests that people rarely tell lies. When you ask people, “How many times have you lied today?” the most common answer is zero. So, it makes a certain kind of sense that people also tend to assume that others are telling the truth most of the time. People have such a strong truth bias that it rarely even occurs to them that someone might be lying. But dark personalities? They lie a lot, and because of our truth bias, they get away with it a lot, too.

We often use our own experience as a starting point for understanding how others might feel, think, or act in a given situation. That works well for people similar to us, but it really backfires with dark personalities. When someone with psychopathic traits does something wrong, our first impulse might be to guilt or shame them. While that might have worked to curb your bad behavior, they don’t experience guilt or shame. Alternatively, you might try to punish them, but again, that will likely prove ineffective. The brains of people with psychopathy don’t react to punishment like others do, and so it doesn’t shape future behavior like it does for most people.

“That works well for people similar to us, but it really backfires with dark personalities.”

Other false assumptions seem to benefit dark personalities, too. We tend to mistake confidence for competence, giving people with narcissistic personality traits a leg up when it comes to choosing leaders. Similarly, we might assume that people in positions of power need to have a bit of callousness, fearlessness, or the ability to manipulate to get the job done. But research tells a different story. There is strong evidence that narcissistic leaders tank team performance, and psychopathic traits don’t help investors maximize profits. In fact, they make less money than their less psychopathic peers.

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4. Understanding poisonous people provides an antidote.

Researchers have amassed a ton of data about dark personalities, and you can use that information to detect dark personalities early, make clear-eyed decisions about whether you want to stay or go in a relationship with one, and actively contain the damage if you decide to stick around. Some of the strategies are surprisingly simple.

In a 1961 CIA report, then-President JFK was presented with insights into the personality of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev had some dark traits. The report describes him as impetuous, ruthless, and prone to taking risks. He was at least somewhat narcissistic and was a wily manipulator. Khrushchev was also described as having the capacity to charm and smooth-talk others to his advantage. He did well in unscripted, face-to-face interactions. The CIA’s analysis notes that he was something of a chameleon, capable of playing different roles depending on the situation: “His personality has more impact than his words.”

It’s not just Khrushchev that seemed to have an in-person advantage. Research on parole board decisions finds that inmates with clinical levels of psychopathy are more likely to be released than their less psychopathic peers, despite a higher likelihood of reoffending. In a more benign scenario, dark personalities were able to negotiate a sweeter deal for themselves when selling a pair of concert tickets in person than when the same negotiation occurred over text. Shifting to text can help neutralize poisonous people, providing a simple, research-backed strategy for managing interactions with everyday dark personalities.

“Shifting to text can help neutralize poisonous people.”

There are other critical things we’ve learned, too. You know how punishment doesn’t work so well? That’s due to a failure of attention. Drawing someone’s attention to the punishment when it’s doled out can help make it more effective. And you know what might work even better than that? Rewards. So, when a generally callous and manipulative person does something kind or honest for once, reward them. Give them a reason to do it again.

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5. The problem is smaller than you think.

If a relatively few people are causing most of the harm, that means we can make huge headway by focusing on containing just a small group of individuals—a much easier challenge than changing all of humanity. Fortunately, science has provided us with powerful tools.

You can already detect poisonous people, and you can learn how to do that better and faster. There are a series of red flags and patterns that become evident if you spend enough time around a dark personality. Even first impressions based on a few seconds of observation contain a kernel of truth.

Detection is a critical skill to gain, but it’s not the only tool you need. I often hear people say that if you see these traits, run. Run far and fast in the opposite direction, and honestly, that’s a strategy you should keep on the table. But you won’t always be able to leave a relationship with a dark personality that is poisoning your life—perhaps you won’t even want to. To stay or go is your choice, but electing to stay doesn’t mean you have resigned yourself to becoming a victim. You can learn to manage the poisonous person in your midst.

The Big Idea: Protein didn’t become a dietary superstar because our bodies suddenly needed more of it. Its rise is the result of decades of marketing, cultural anxiety, and political influence shaping what—and how—we eat.

Why it matters: When a single nutrient gets elevated above all others, it distorts how we think about food, health, and even identity. The protein craze influences everything from grocery store shelves to national dietary guidelines, often in ways that have little to do with actual nutritional needs.

These ideas come from Samantha King and Gavin Weedon, authors of the new book, Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar. Gavin shares five of their big ideas below.

1. Protein is everywhere—again.

Samantha and I have spent a lot of time in the last few years thinking about the ubiquity of protein: the dietary superstar that likely needs no introduction given just how intensively it is marketed by food conglomerates and dietary influencers.

It started with us noticing that we were each being peddled high-protein diets, without ever really soliciting this advice from anyone or anywhere, and that the health and fitness circles in which we mixed were increasingly rife with talk about protein. Eventually, our critical faculties took over: we began looking into the origins of what seemed to be a growing cultural obsession with protein, beginning with a series of questions about why and how this macronutrient had infiltrated our health and fitness circles.

Questions like:

• What exactly is the appeal of those giant plastic tubs of highly processed protein powder?

• Why do food manufacturers emphasize the protein content of their products in increasingly larger fonts?

• What keeps consumers rotating through the latest high-protein dietary regimen, from Atkins to Paleo to Dukan?

• Who needs protein added to their beer, potato chips, or ice cream?

• Why are people scared of carbs?

One of the most curious things we learned is that this obsession with protein has been with us for nearly two centuries. It began when protein was first identified as a nutritional category, and was then developed into a supplement in a form that resembles the protein-infused smoothies and shakes we have today—perhaps even less palatable. The story of how it has fluctuated in and out of dietary consciousness, about how it has been mobilized as a solution to all manner of problems both real and imagined, is the story we seek to tell.

2. Protein is a cultural obsession based on want, not lack.

Why is protein everywhere? Given the relentless peddling of protein, you might be forgiven for thinking that there is a great dearth of this stuff. You might be forgiven for thinking that the protein boom is a coordinated movement to correct a cavernous protein-shaped gap in our diets. But this kind of ‘supply and demand’ logic is seldom how food systems and dietary trends work.

It turns out that the obsession with protein has little to do with what our bodies need. Protein deficiency is extremely rare in the absence of severe hunger, and therefore almost non-existent among the consuming classes at the center of the current protein boom.

Once we accept that protein production and marketing isn’t a neat and simple means of replenishing a lack, other possibilities come into view. For example, might protein’s popularity be explained by the desire for self-optimization? Might protein have become a handy vector for packaging food as healthy or powerful or even essential without having to explain much else about what goes into it?

“Protein deficiency is extremely rare in the absence of severe hunger.”

Even protein’s most devout evangelists are starting to wonder aloud if this obsession has outsized any real relationship to the actual needs of the human body. After all, we can only consume so much!

3. Protein is confounding—and always has been.

Sometimes, the simplest questions are the ones that remain elusive all the way to the end, long after seemingly more complex or specialized matters have been settled. The questions ‘What exactly is protein?’ and ‘How much should I eat?’ are exemplary of this paradox.

The problem, for those who want their definitions as neatly divided as their macronutrients, is that protein isn’t just one thing. It’s animal flesh, or human flesh if we entertain the humbling prospect that we, too, are food for some creatures. It’s a scoop of powder, of mysterious provenance, blended into your post-workout shake. It’s the secret and the symbol of muscular embodiment, and so takes us, in a short but consequential hop, to masculinity. Its molecules swirl within our bodies and outside them, perhaps in the harbinger form of the COVID-19 spike—the viral corona protruding from its globular surface. Protein is all of these things, and more.

When faced with something with such an extraordinary capacity for shapeshifting, a common approach is to search for an essence that unites all manifestations: the silver bullet explanation, the elevator pitch on protein. But you’ll be disappointed. Ever since its coining as a nutrient, protein’s status has been contested. One of the founding fathers of protein science, the German chemist and entrepreneur Justus von Liebig, declared protein the “only true nutrient” in the mid-19th century, only to confess later, in an exchange of letters with colleagues, that it may not exist as a coherent category at all.

So, rather than joining in the pursuit of protein’s essence, where many sharp minds have run into trouble, we take a different tack. Our approach is to embrace protein’s multiplicity as we try to follow it, almost like paparazzi seeking snapshots of an elusive subject in its many guises. This approach revealed how entangled protein has been in the social worlds in which it has thrived.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens by Dr. Elaine Aron — a deeply personal guide from the bestselling author of The Highly Sensitive Person, offering the first-ever objective overview of meditation and paths to enlightenment for anyone seeking inner peace in overwhelming times.

4. Protein powder is—or was—garbage.

Let’s take a more granular approach to thinking about protein powder, specifically whey powder: the most popular variant of protein supplement, making up 55 percent of protein sales.

Whey powder that is sold as a vital health supplement began life as garbage. Whey is the excess of dairy products, specifically the liquid left over from making milk and cheese. In the mid-20th century, when dairy agriculture in the U.S. was industrializing rapidly, a booming cheese industry led to the production of massive quantities of excess whey. Dairy farmers faced a conundrum: in the past, they fed surplus whey to their pigs or used it as fertilizer. But the amount they were now dealing with made local recycling impossible, and they started dumping the excess on their land or into sewers, rivers, and streams. Because of its high nitrogen content (the very quality that makes whey appealing as a health supplement), untreated whey effluent is toxic to soil and aquatic ecosystems. Looking for a way to avoid environmental penalties and monetize this waste, the agrifood industry undertook a decades-long effort to transform whey pollution into a palatable, proteinous foodstuff.

“Whey is never entirely purified of its toxic origins.”

Whey industry boosters like to promote protein as the epitome of a successful techno-solution, but on closer inspection, we found that the nitrogen content that allows whey to act as both panacea and poison does not disappear in the process of commodification, or even upon digestion. In other words, whey is never entirely purified of its toxic origins. Instead, it reemerges in other guises after passing through the bodies that consume it.

This is a sweeping account of a complex story, but we hope it conveys an important point: that whey’s nutrient density presents challenges to environmental health. This problem manifests not just at the point of production, where whey powder is posited as a techno-solution, but also in the lands and waters it moves through after consumption and excretion. Whey protein powder used to be garbage. But something of its potency remains through its lifecycle.

The invention of whey protein powder ensures that the dairy industry, with its harmful environmental impact and animal welfare issues, has not only continued to make cheese in abundance but also stumbled across a lucrative new revenue stream in the process.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi.

5. Protein is political—but not partisan.

In January 2026, when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released new federal dietary guidelines, we were not surprised to see that increased protein intake, in the form of meat and cheese, was now recommended. Dietary guidelines are always political. They are taken up by governments at all levels to shape the population’s food intake, and they are the subject of intensive lobbying by business interests that have a stake in this seemingly most personal of matters: what we eat.

Protein is the subject of fierce contestation over what truly matters to people—the fear that certain ways of life, such as ranching and meat-eating, are under threat, or the belief that a sustainable future will require producing novel techno-foods that are less environmentally damaging. Welcome, in other words, to protein’s entry into the culture wars.

While protein is contentious, it doesn’t fall neatly on either side in our politically divided present. Rather, it is mobilized with equal fervor by those concerned to protect meat rearing and consumption, and by those seeking to engineer and build markets for alternative proteins.

“While protein is contentious, it doesn’t fall neatly on either side in our politically divided present.”

On one side, we have the defenders of meat across older and newer factions of the Republican right; on the other, we have liberal tech capitalists and promoters of alternative sources of protein in their many forms. Both attach their claims to the climate crisis. While Trumpian Populism has veered between open dismissiveness and outright denial of environmental breakdown, alternative protein production is premised on the real and pressing consequences of environmental breakdown, albeit without necessarily disturbing the conditions of a global food system that is in desperate need of overhaul.

In these two starkly different visions of our future, protein has managed to land a starring role in each! Maybe it’s time to rethink what should occupy the center of our dinner plates and perhaps go further to question whether this stable nutrient is really able to live up to the promises with which it is endlessly imbued.

After a long winter of routines, ruts, and recycled ideas, spring offers a rare invitation: to see things differently. These five books don’t just promise a fresh start—they offer the smarter, more surprising ways to actually achieve one.

Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results

By with Julie Li

The best beliefs are both practical and provisional. They offer just enough certainty to act, yet enough flexibility to adapt when new evidence arrives. Choosing your beliefs wisely may be the most important skill nobody ever taught you. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Nir Eyal, or view on Amazon.

Daily Creative: The 5-Minute Habit to Rewire Your Brain

By &

Creativity is a natural human capacity that grows stronger with use. When we treat creativity as a small daily practice rather than a high-stakes performance, it becomes a powerful tool for well-being, flexibility, and feeling more alive. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by co-author Blythe Harris, or view on Amazon.

Read on for the rest of the list…

Read more

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

What happens when everyone can bet on everything?

On a muggy spring day in 2018, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that transformed America. In a 6-3 ruling, the high court cleared the way for legal sports betting from coast to coast. Since then, all bets have been off: Americans have wagered more than $500 billion on sports. And now, thanks to prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, we're betting on everything — the weather, where the next US airstrike will land in Iran, whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. , a staff writer at The Atlantic, wanted to write about this brave new world of betting. He got more than he bargained for. His story — "My Year as a Degenerate Gambler" — is the cover of The Atlantic's April issue.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

Get invitations to exclusive author chats and get great nonfiction sent right to your door by becoming a member of the Next Big Idea Club.

Book Bite of the Week

How do you raise sane children in the age of screens?

’s new book Dopamine Kids is a smart, practical reset for families who feel like screens (and ultraprocessed snacks) are running the house. Instead of treating the problem as a simple willpower battle, Doucleff argues that the fix isn’t deprivation so much as reintroducing real-world joy—more meaning, connection, and genuinely satisfying activities that make the brain less hungry for the low-grade rewards of devices. It’s a science-backed roadmap for taking back attention at home without turning parenting into a constant fight. Pick up a copy on Amazon or check out Michaeleen’s key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Join us for a live chat with Nir Eyal today at 1:30PM ET. Click here to RSVP and get notified when we go live.

Could your beliefs be holding you back?

Beyond Belief starts with a provocative premise: what if the biggest thing holding most of us back is not a lack of discipline, talent, or information, but our own beliefs? In this science-backed guide, Nir Eyal and Julie Li unpack how we confuse facts, faith, and beliefs, and how that confusion quietly shapes our choices, our relationships, and our sense of what’s possible. The payoff is practical and empowering: a framework for updating limiting beliefs with better evidence, and for building the kind of “radical nuance” and intellectual humility that’s in short supply right now. Check out Nir’s summary on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, pick up a copy of the book on Amazon, or join our live chat today at 1:30PM.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea.

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books this week — congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these new releases:

• , Cheers to Monday

• , How to Disagree Better

• Rachel Zoffness, Tell Me Where It Hurts

• Jonathan McNeill, The Algorithm

• & , Born to Flourish

The Big Idea: We tend to treat our beliefs like facts. But according to behavioral design expert Nir Eyal, beliefs are tools. And the ones you choose shape how you act and what you ultimately achieve.

Why it matters: Many of us hold self-limiting beliefs that hamper our ability to achieve our goals. But once we realize that we can choose our beliefs, we can leverage their power to achieve more than we ever thought possible.

Try this: The next time you feel stuck on a project, pause and ask a different question. Not “What should I do?” but “What would I need to believe for this to succeed?” Then try adopting that belief, if only as a test. Treat beliefs less like truths you have to defend and more like tools you can apply to your challenges.

These ideas come from Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results by . Read on for five of his big ideas.

Join us for a live conversation with Nir tomorrow, March 27th at 1:30PM EDT Sign up to save your spot.

1. Beliefs are tools, not truths.

Most people picture motivation as a straight line: If you want the benefit, then you’ll do the behavior. You do the work; you get the reward. Simple cause and effect. But this model is incomplete.

Knowing what to do and why you should do it isn’t enough. If it were, we’d all follow through on everything we know is good for us. You can have a perfect plan, backed by solid reasoning, but if you don’t believe your effort will make a difference, you won’t persist. And without that belief, even the best advice becomes wasted breath.

I learned this the hard way through 30 years of failed diets. Every plan worked until it didn’t. Every approach succeeded until I abandoned it. The pattern wasn’t about calories or carbs. It was about belief. When I truly believed in a diet, I followed it with near-religious devotion. But the moment doubt crept in, the commitment collapsed.

In the 1950s, biologist Curt Richter discovered something remarkable about rats swimming in glass cylinders. The ones who gave up and drowned weren’t physically weaker than those who survived. The difference was entirely in their minds. With one simple intervention, Richter transformed how long these animals could persist by a factor that still astonishes researchers today. I explain what that intervention was in the book.

The real question isn’t “Is this belief true?” but “Does this belief serve me?” Like a carpenter choosing between a hammer and a saw, we can select beliefs based on how well they serve our goals. Beliefs are tools, not necessarily truths.

2. You don’t have relationship problems; you have perception problems.

Think about the last time you had a heated argument with your partner, perhaps over something as mundane as household chores. You go to get a glass of water, and your spouse says, “All the glasses are in the sink.” You perceive their tone as accusatory. Within minutes, you’re in a full-blown argument. Meanwhile, your partner is genuinely confused by your defensive reaction, believing they simply made a neutral statement of fact.

“Your differing beliefs about each other’s intentions created two versions of the same reality.”

Despite experiencing the same 30-second interaction, the same words, the same environment, you each walk away with entirely different perceptions of what happened. You’re sure they were attacking you. They’re equally sure they were just stating an observation. Neither of you is lying nor deliberately misinterpreting. Your differing beliefs about each other’s intentions created two versions of the same reality.

Your conscious mind can process only about 50 bits of information per second. But your senses are collecting 11 million bits at that same moment. We live life through a keyhole of attention. Your brain fills in the gaps with beliefs, essentially hallucinating much of what you think you’re experiencing.

This is why two people witnessing the exact same event walk away with entirely different experiences. And it’s why the path to better relationships isn’t just better communication skills. It starts with examining the beliefs that shape what you see and hear in the first place.

3. Lies can become reality.

When Serena Williams was preparing for Wimbledon, she found herself trapped in a cycle of self-limiting beliefs. Her nerves were affecting her play at the net, causing her to hesitate. With only two weeks before the tournament, her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, made a bold decision. He told her that the statistics showed she was winning 80 percent of points at the net.

It wasn’t true. Not even close. But from that day forward, her performance transformed. She approached the net more frequently and more confidently. Her physical play underwent a dramatic change. As Mouratoglou later confessed, “The lie became the reality.” Williams went on to win the tournament.

This pattern appears consistently in research on performance. In one study, men who believed they were taking performance-enhancing steroids gained significantly more strength than a control group, even though the pills contained nothing but sugar. Their belief didn’t just make them feel stronger. It made them actually lift heavier weights because they trained with greater intensity and pushed harder.

Your expectations shape your effort, and your effort shapes your outcomes. This applies whether you’re negotiating a salary, building a business, or asking for the sale. The research shows that what you anticipate has measurable effects on what you achieve. The question is: What beliefs are you carrying into your most important moments? And are they helping you or holding you back?

4. Your beliefs can become your biology.

What if your thoughts could influence not just how you feel, but how long you live? Researchers have found that people seem able to postpone death until symbolically meaningful occasions. When three American presidents all died on July 4th, it suggested something profound about the connection between mind and body. But the science goes far deeper than historical coincidence.

“People who held positive views about getting older lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative views.”

In rigorous studies, researchers discovered that beliefs about aging predict longevity better than cholesterol levels, blood pressure, or whether someone smokes. People who held positive views about getting older lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative views. That’s a bigger effect than you’d get from exercising regularly!

Now, the field of mind-body research is filled with exaggerated claims and studies that don’t hold up. I spent considerable time separating wishful thinking from real science. Some famous studies you may have heard about, like elderly men “thinking themselves younger” or hotel cleaners losing weight just by viewing their work as exercise, haven’t replicated well under scrutiny.

But the research that does hold up is remarkable. Your beliefs trigger real physiological changes through specific, measurable pathways. The key is understanding which mental interventions work and which are nice stories that crumble under scientific rigor.

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5. Helplessness is your default. Hope must be learned.

In the late 1960s, researchers Martin Seligman and Steven Maier conducted famous experiments showing that animals who experienced uncontrollable negative events eventually stopped trying to escape, even when escape became possible. They called this “learned helplessness,” and the concept transformed our understanding of depression, trauma, and resilience.

But a detail buried in their data haunted the researchers for decades. Some animals never gave up, no matter what. Only with modern brain imaging technology did Maier discover the stunning truth: The brain’s first response to difficulty is always to freeze. What appears to be learned helplessness is actually the brain’s default state. The animals who kept trying had learned something that overrode this default. They had learned hope.

Think about what this means for your own life. Those moments when you feel stuck, procrastinating on an important project, delaying a difficult conversation, hesitating to make a career change, aren’t evidence of personal weakness. They’re your brain’s ancient operating system doing exactly what it evolved to do.

“The animals who kept trying had learned something that overrode this default.”

But here’s the liberating part: If hope is learned, it can be taught. There are specific experiences that build what researchers call the “hope circuit” in your brain. Each time you prove to yourself that your actions matter, you’re not just solving a problem. You’re rewiring your capacity to persist through the next challenge. The question is how to create those experiences systematically.

We all face the same fundamental challenges: building meaningful relationships, creating financial security, maintaining our health as we age, and finding the motivation to pursue what matters most. Research reveals that our beliefs underlie all these outcomes. Not as magical thinking or empty affirmations, but as practical tools that shape what we notice, what we feel, and what we do.

Why it matters Most histories of progress credit culture, religion, trade, or technology with building the modern world. But when you reframe the story around energy and engineering, the implications are uncomfortable. If civilization was built on an ever-increasing consumption of resources, then the “solutions” we keep reaching for (more technology, more efficiency, more growth) may be deepening the very crisis they’re meant to solve.

These ideas come from the new book, The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization, by Roland Ennos, author and visiting professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Hull. Check out five of his big ideas below.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Aftermath by Ted Dintersmith, the eye-opening book that reveals the financial, statistical, and real-world math skills that actually matter in life — the ones that never once appeared on a standardized test.

1. Our early ancestors survived because of their physical prowess.

We usually think of ourselves as weak creatures who have risen to prominence because of our intellectual and social skills. But in some ways, we are the most physically powerful animals on the planet—so much so that we are feared by even the fiercest of animals.

As soon as early hominids stood upright, they were able to use muscles from all over their body to produce rapid, powerful movements of their arms. And they could hold onto and control simple tools such as sticks and stones in the powerful grip of their hands, enabling them to hit harder, throw further, and cut deeper than any other animal. Early hominids were strong enough to look after themselves on the African plains.

2. We conquered the globe because of our engineering prowess.

Humans weren’t restricted to living in the African savannahs. We learned how to master any environment by developing a wide range of effective, powerful tools. We developed spears, slings, spear throwers, bows, and arrows that enabled us to kill animals at ever greater distances. We developed increasingly sophisticated hammers and knives to process our food. We developed axes and adzes, which we used to fell trees and work wood.

“It was thanks to our engineering prowess that humans spread across all five continents.”

By ten thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers could carry out an almost unlimited range of tasks. They could kill and butcher a huge range of animals and collect and process a wide variety of plants. They could make various tools, construct boats, and build houses. They even learned how to make clothes and build fires to keep themselves warm and cook their food. It was thanks to our engineering prowess that humans spread across all five continents.

3. Cereal farming stimulated engineering.

Despite what we have been told, cereal farming is not the best way to feed ourselves. In many warm, wet parts of the globe, people fed themselves far more easily by becoming horticulturalists, planting and harvesting root crops such as potatoes, yams, and manioc, and fruit such as bananas and squashes.

Cereal farming emerged in drier climates where only short-lived grasses could grow, and where it was harder to make a living. To survive, cereal farmers had to develop a whole new range of tools, materials, and machinery to cultivate, harvest, and process their crops. They developed ploughs to cultivate the land, kilns to make cooking vessels, metals to make axes and knives, querns to grind grain, and machines to irrigate their land. And they learned how to harness power from draft animals, water, and the wind to drive them.

These technologies enabled old-world cereal farmers to construct wheeled vehicles, build ships, and forge the swords and guns that created powerful empires. Ultimately, these inventions enabled a few Spanish adventurers to sail to the New World, conquer its horticultural inhabitants, and impose their inferior form of agriculture on them.

4. The Industrial Age was powered by horticulture and fossil fuels.

Despite its supposed importance, the Italian Renaissance had little effect on progress. Instead, industrialization, which originated in Protestant Northwest Europe, was spurred by the development of market gardening in the Netherlands and mixed farming in England. These fed a growing, wealthier population.

Further progress was powered by exploiting deposits of fossil fuel: peat in the Netherlands and coal in England. The English patent system then sped up technical innovation in the textile, mining, and iron industries to dramatically raise their productivity and kick off the factory system. In the 19th century, the development of wrought iron, high-pressure steam engines, and the hydraulic press further revolutionized manufacturing and transportation, enabling Britain to become the workshop of the world.

“Despite its supposed importance, the Italian Renaissance had little effect on progress.”

Coal finally made large cities habitable as its power was transmitted across town in the form of gas, water, and electricity, while oil finally spread the revolution into the countryside and up into the sky (thanks to the development of lightweight internal combustion engines). In the last 60 years, two new technologies—hydraulics and electronics—have enabled us to power our unprecedented standard of living, without us needing to lift a finger.

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5. Our civilization depends on an unsustainable rise in consumption.

At each stage of our civilization, we have solved our problems by harnessing more energy. We have built increasingly powerful machines and created more and more goods. And we have used energy-intensive machinery and chemicals to return to the inefficient cultivation of cereals.

As we use more energy and build more goods, we create more pollution and use more resources, causing problems that can only be solved by using yet more energy and yet more raw materials. Consequently, our farming uses so much land, and our industry uses so many resources and so much energy, that we are in danger of destroying our planet. We can only survive if we return to the simpler, lower-powered way of life that used to sustain the large populations of the New World civilizations: gardening.

The Big Idea: Your brain is not fixed—and aging doesn’t have to mean decline. With the right habits, you can actually grow a stronger, sharper, more resilient brain at any age.

Why it matters: Most of us assume memory loss, brain fog, and cognitive slowdown are inevitable. But decades of neuroscience suggest something very different: the cortex and hippocampus can expand or shrink based on how you live.

Try this today: Move your body for 20–30 minutes. Exercise is one of the fastest ways to increase blood flow to the brain and boost protective proteins that help grow new neural connections.

These ideas come from The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life by neurologist, professor, and neuroscientist Majid Fotuhi. Check out more of his age-proofing ideas below:

1. The most important—and most malleable—parts of your brain.

All your higher brain functions depend on two main brain structures: the cortex and the hippocampus.

The cortex is like a blanket that covers the surface of your brain. It supports cognitive functions such as reading, writing, planning, driving, cooking, problem-solving, doing your taxes, and creating art.

The hippocampus—about the size of your thumb, with one on each side of your brain—is essential for learning new information, forming and consolidating memories, and regulating emotions.

“All your higher brain functions depend on two main brain structures.”

The cortex and hippocampus have an incredible level of malleability. They can shrink or grow based on how you live. They can expand within weeks or months depending on how much you move, how well you sleep, what you eat, how you manage stress, and how you challenge your mind.

2. You can become more intelligent at any age.

Intelligence means being able to excel in many forms of cognitive functions, not only in areas like math, physics, and logic, but also in cooking well, playing a musical instrument, speaking in public, motivating an audience, fixing things around the house, being a comedian, or connecting with others on a deep emotional level.

In my book, I describe thirty different forms of intelligence and explain how you can excel in any of them you wish. Everything we call intelligence—every skill and talent—emerges from the health and connectivity of the cortex and hippocampus. When you learn something new, you engage different parts of your cortex and hippocampus and make them stronger.

When your cortex and hippocampus are healthy and optimally connected, you can learn and excel in almost any cognitive capacity, at any age. You can improve your memory, learn to play the piano, become better at public speaking, or even learn to juggle three balls in the air.

“Everything we call intelligence—every skill and talent—emerges from the health and connectivity of the cortex and hippocampus.”

If you also develop a growth mindset—the belief that your brain has the capacity to grow and improve and you can indeed get better at anything with practice—you will feel more confident and perform even better at any cognitive task.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Aftermath by Ted Dintersmith, the eye-opening book that reveals the financial, statistical, and real-world math skills that actually matter in life — the ones that never once appeared on a standardized test.

3. Cognitive decline is due to a soup of problems, not a single disease.

Decades of research have shown that late-life Alzheimer’s disease is not a single entity. When your grandparents appear confused or don’t know what year it is, their brain has shrivelled due to a soup of biological problems—not just a single disease.

The ingredients in this soup of brain shrinkers include gum-like aggregates of toxic proteins (amyloid plaques and tau tangles) as well as damaged and leaky blood vessels, inflammation, and silent strokes. Five common contributors to brain shrinkage with aging are chronic stress, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and poor sleep.

By preventing and treating these brain shrinkers, you can reduce the forces that slowly damage your brain tissue over the years. This is what I call building resistance to brain aging.

4. The five pillars of brain health build resilience.

Reducing damage to your brain is only half the story. The other half is building brain resilience: creating a healthy, strong brain that can function well even if there are footprints of Alzheimer’s disease in your brain.

The five pillars of brain health that boost resilience are:

• Regular physical exercise

• High-quality sleep

• Brain-friendly food

• A healthy mindset

• Consistently challenging your brain

Together, these five pillars of brain health increase blood flow to the brain, reduce inflammation, boost protective brain proteins such as BDNF, generate new neurons, and strengthen neural connections. They literally help grow the size of the cortex and hippocampus in your brain, which is the most effective insurance policy you can ever have against developing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

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5. Brain reserve is the key to becoming a brain super-ager.

Brain reserve means building a brain with fewer brain shrinkers and more factors that grow and protect the cortex and hippocampus. The larger your brain reserve, the more likely you are to remain sharp and independent in your eighties and nineties. This is how you become a brain super-ager.

“The larger your brain reserve, the more likely you are to remain sharp and independent in your eighties and nineties.”

Recent research demonstrates that staying mentally sharp as we age is not reserved for a lucky few with great genes. People who follow the five pillars of brain health can remain independent and active at all times, even when they reach the last two decades of their life.