The Big Idea: Growing up teaches us plenty of useful things. It also teaches us to hide our feelings, put limits on our friendships, dismiss our wild ideas, and follow rules nobody actually made.

Why It Matters: Kids offer a useful corrective. They feel things fully, love their friends extravagantly, turn imagination into action, question arbitrary rules, and assume what they do makes a difference. Those aren’t childish qualities. They’re human ones worth protecting in all of us.

Try This Today: Identify one rule you follow that nobody actually gave you. Maybe you’re “too old” to try something, you’d look silly doing it, or you shouldn’t care so much about something that excites you. Then ask yourself a kid’s question: Why not? If you don’t have a good answer, break the rule.

These ideas come from the new book How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids by Julian Shapiro-Barnum. Julian is a comedian, interviewer, and author best known as the creator of Recess Therapy, the wildly popular online series in which he interviews kids about life’s biggest questions. He also created Celebrity Substitute, which sends major stars into New York City public schools for a day of teaching. Read on for five big ideas from his book:

Join our community of big thinkers and get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Feel your feelings in real time.

When kids are upset, they throw a temper tantrum. When they’re happy, they jump for joy, run around, and giggle. When they’re sad, they cry. It happens right then, in real time, and then it’s over.

Adults are different. I am a prime example of this. If someone says something that hurts my feelings, if I get disappointing news, if something doesn’t go my way—nine times out of ten, instead of processing that feeling in the moment, I save it for later. I bottle it up for a time that feels more convenient, more palatable, more appropriate.

What kids understand instinctively is that when you delay a feeling, you don’t avoid it, you just carry it longer than you need to. The sadness, the anger, the embarrassment: it stays with you. It lingers. We end up living with discomfort far more than we have to, simply because we won’t give ourselves thirty seconds to feel it when it arrives.

Kids let feelings flow in and out of them. They don’t hoard emotions. When you feel something, give yourself the space to feel it. Your overall health will thank you.

2. Date your friends.

No, not like that. What I mean is that many adults operate under the assumption that certain kinds of intimacy are reserved exclusively for a romantic partner. Not just physical intimacy—though yes, that too—but the softer stuff. A nice dinner out. A cozy night watching a movie. Cuddling on a couch. The kind of closeness that makes you feel genuinely seen. Kids haven’t learned that rule yet. And watching them, I’ve come to believe it’s one of the worst rules adults have ever invented.

Kids give 100 percent of themselves to their friends. They’re physically affectionate: hugging, lying in the grass together, building daisy crowns, reading each other’s palms. There is a depth of closeness in children’s friendships that most adults never reach, and I think it’s because we’ve decided, somewhere along the way, that getting that close to a friend is somehow strange or excessive.

“Kids give 100 percent of themselves to their friends.”

It isn’t. Taking a friend on a proper friend date is a beautiful thing. You don’t have to wait. You can do it now, and it can be genuinely fulfilling. Kids do it constantly, without a second thought. Getting close to a friend is vulnerable. It can feel scary. But it can also be one of the most rewarding things you do. Don’t save it for later.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Genius and the Impostor by Josh Turknett, MD. We tend to believe genius is something you’re born with — a special brain handed to a lucky few. Drawing on decades of neuroscience and his own clinical case files, neurologist Josh Turknett dismantles that story, revealing two competing forces inside every brain: the genius that builds extraordinary ability through learning, and the impostor that spends your whole life insisting it can’t. Praised by David Perlmutter, Nelson Dellis, and Tommy Wood. Pre-order today and you’ll also get the free “Genius Toolkit” sent right away.

3. Your imagination is out of shape.

Kids have extraordinary imaginations, and what’s really remarkable is what they do with them.

Kids take something that they’ve only ever dreamed of and start acting it out. They dream something up and then put it in their body. They practice the motion of turning hope into action. What that process does—without them even knowing it—is get them into the habit of taking an idea and actualizing it. Adults dream big too, but we tend to stop there. We fantasize and then the fantasy just…sits there. We fantasize and then it stops there. We’re out of practice at putting our dreams on our feet.

Kids aren’t playing pretend because they don’t want to do these things for real. They’re playing pretend because they can’t do these things for real yet. They don’t have the access, the resources, the freedom. But you do. If your childhood self could see the opportunities available to you right now, they would be absolutely losing their mind.

That open mic you’ve always wanted to try. That trip you keep moving to “someday.” Your imagination is still in there, it’s just atrophied. Like any muscle, it needs to be worked. Start small. Practice the motion. Build it back up. Be your childhood self’s wildest dream.

4. Break as many rules as you can.

As we get older, we accumulate rules. Don’t do this. You can’t do that. That’s not how it’s done. What’s strange is that most of those rules aren’t coming from anywhere official. Nobody handed you a rulebook. You wrote it yourself.

Kids hate rules. They push back against authority constantly. Their biggest frustration is adults telling them what they’re not allowed to do. And then, slowly, they grow up and become those adults—not just following the rules, but enforcing them on themselves, often without realizing it.

I’m not talking about the rules that keep us safe or keep us from hurting one another. I’m talking about the self-imposed rules we create to avoid embarrassment, to stay inside our comfort zone, to manage how we’re perceived. We build a box and then live in it and call it being responsible.

“Nobody handed you a rulebook. You wrote it yourself.”

You are so much bigger than the box you’ve built. The first step to getting out of it is noticing it’s there—noticing which limitations you’re setting for yourself, and asking whether they’re actually serving you or just keeping you small. You don’t have to follow rules you invented. Kids figured that out early. It’s not too late to catch up.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Upwork. Find freelancers for any project by visiting upwork.com right now and posting your job for free.

5. Little things add up.

The world is in a tough spot politically, climatically, and interpersonally. Things be tough out there. And when things feel that broken on that scale, it’s easy to arrive at a very reasonable-sounding conclusion: nothing I do will make a difference.

Kids do not feel that way. Kids genuinely believe their actions matter. Some of that comes from the stories adults tell them. We tell children that their voices are important, and they believe us and live accordingly. But it’s more than just stories. Watch what kids actually do.

Kids turn off lights. Kids pick up trash. Kids push their parents to donate, switch to cleaner energy, and be more thoughtful about how they treat people. They are remarkably diligent about small, concrete acts of goodness.

When we adults get overwhelmed by how frightening everything feels, we do nothing. And nothing does nothing. But if we all did the small things—if we all acted like the adults kids seem to believe we’re capable of being—those little things would start to add up. They would build. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen small actions grow.

The little things are the only place where change actually begins.

The Big Idea: Imagination isn’t an escape from reality. It’s one of the main ways we navigate it. We use it to anticipate the future, solve problems, understand other people, and rehearse how we’ll respond to what comes next. But a life spent constantly consuming information leaves less room for wondering, daydreaming, and generating possibilities of our own.

Why It Matters: Modern attention-grabbing devices are making it harder than ever to simply let our minds wander. The result is a narrowing of possibility that can leave life feeling routine, predetermined, and gray. The good news: imagination isn’t a talent you’re born with. It’s a capacity you can train.

Try This Today: Protect 10 minutes for free-range thinking. Take a walk, sit outside, or stare out a window without your phone, a podcast, or anything else feeding you information. This is the way you train your imagination muscle.

These ideas come from the new book Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination by Cassandra Vieten. Cassandra is a clinical psychologist and clinical professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is director of research at UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, director of the UCSD Center for Mindfulness, and clinical psychology director at the Center for Psychedelic Research. Read on for 5 of her key insights:

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Imagination is a working tool of the brain.

When people hear what I study, I sometimes get a version of the same reaction: imagination, isn’t that a little soft for a scientist? Shouldn’t real science be curing diseases and solving the climate crisis? But from my perspective, I struggle to come up with anything more important than figuring out how humans generate original ideas and creative solutions.

Imagination isn’t frivolous daydreaming. It’s a working tool of the brain, integral to learning, foresight, empathy, and problem-solving. Cognitive scientists consider it a core component of intelligence itself.

Early in my research, my team ran into a wall trying to define it. We kept mapping imagination against memory, against creativity, against plain old thinking, and it never quite fit. It wasn’t memory, but it was tangled up in memory. It wasn’t creativity, but it overlapped with creativity. Finally, one of our students said: what if it’s like an octopus, with tentacles reaching into every other cognitive process? Or a utility infielder—the player who can be plugged in anywhere the team needs. That’s how imagination works.

Imagination is not one isolated skill sitting in a corner of your brain. It’s woven through memory, planning, creativity, and problem-solving. Every time you recall the past, plan tomorrow, or empathize with a friend, you’re quietly using it. When your imagination is well-exercised, it doesn’t just make you more creative, it makes nearly everything else you do better too. Repeated practice strengthens and rewires the neural connections behind it. What you imagine shapes what you’re capable of.

2. We’re living through “The Great Flattening.”

A lot of people I talk to—across ages, professions, every walk of life—describe feeling stuck, burned out, and disempowered to do anything about it. I call part of what’s driving this “The Great Flattening.”

Technology was supposed to make life easier. Instead, many of us feel like we have to plug in at daybreak and stay logged on until bedtime. We’re constantly asked to receive, synthesize, and manage information, but rarely to create anything new. Search engines and AI save us time, but they also rob us of the time we used to spend wondering, mind-wandering, and speculating before landing on an answer. Sitting in not-knowing now feels like a waste of time, when it’s actually the place where new ideas come from.

“Imagination is a muscle that can be rebuilt.”

Alongside this, I speak of “diseases of disenchantment.” A colleague of mine, Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia, has written about “diseases of despair”: the anxiety, depression, addiction, and loneliness tied to a narrowing of imagination, where people believe there are only one or two possible outcomes for their lives. It’s worth remembering that the word despair literally comes from the Latin for “without hope.” I’d add that we’re also suffering from an atrophied imagination, one that has stopped stretching toward wonder, mystery, and possibility. Life starts to feel routine, flat, and a little gray.

Fortunately this isn’t a permanent condition. Imagination is a muscle that can be rebuilt. I don’t think the answer is throwing out our phones or swearing off AI. The answer is about intentionally protecting a little space every day during which we’re not seeking, receiving, or managing information. We need to give ourselves space to just wonder.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Genius and the Impostor by Josh Turknett, MD. We tend to believe genius is something you’re born with — a special brain handed to a lucky few. Drawing on decades of neuroscience and his own clinical case files, neurologist Josh Turknett dismantles that story, revealing two competing forces inside every brain: the genius that builds extraordinary ability through learning, and the impostor that spends your whole life insisting it can’t. Praised by David Perlmutter, Nelson Dellis, and Tommy Wood. Pre-order today and you’ll also get the free “Genius Toolkit” sent right away.

3. Imagination has a fingerprint.

Imagination neurodiversity is the idea that each of us imagines differently, and that our particular pattern of imaginative strengths isn’t something we’re stuck with. It’s not an inborn trait. It’s something we can identify and deliberately grow.

I can trace exactly where my imagination profile came from. My parents had a nearly complete set of National Geographic magazines on our shelves, and as a kid I’d get lost for hours in photographs of bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean or the aboriginal art of Australia, worlds that stretched what I believed was possible. My dad was a biochemist, and he used to bring me into his lab, boost me up on a stool, and let me look at pond microbes under a microscope, so I learned early that even the invisible world was full of mystery. My mom was a Jungian-inspired counselor who introduced me to dreams, myths, and symbols—a different kind of truth, not measurable, but real all the same.

Those three influences, the outer world, the microscopic world, and the inner world, shaped a very specific kind of imagination in me. I lean toward visual, sensory imagining, and toward using story to make sense of hard things. But give someone else that exact same childhood, and they might come out of it an entirely different kind of imaginer.

“Imagination neurodiversity is the idea that each of us imagines differently.”

There’s no single “right” way to be imaginative. Some people are strong visualizers but weaker at generating new ideas from scratch. Some can conjure vivid sensory details but struggle to picture their own future. Once you understand your own profile, you can stop comparing yourself to somebody else’s version of “creative,” and start working with the imagination you have.

4. Imagination doesn’t just live in your head.

Your brain doesn’t distinguish nearly as much as you’d think between something you imagine and something you actually experience. Imagined experience registers in the body and brain in ways that are strikingly close to physical experience, and that happens both in the moment and cumulatively over the long term.

That cuts both ways. It means the mental images you rehearse—worst-case scenarios, old grudges, imagined confrontations—aren’t neutral. Your nervous system responds to them almost as if they’re really happening. But it also means the reverse is true: deliberately imagining a calmer version of a hard conversation, or vividly picturing yourself moving through a challenge, can shift your physiology in real, measurable ways before you ever act.

Imagination is a genuine health practice, not just a creative one. What you rehearse in your mind, you’re quite literally rehearsing in your body. Picture, in detail, walking into a hard conversation feeling calm and clear. Visualize the way you’re standing, the tone of your voice, how your shoulders feel, and then your nervous system starts laying down some of that groundwork before you ever walk through the door. That gives you an enormous amount of leverage, because unlike a lot of things that affect your health, this one is available to you anywhere, for free, anytime, no equipment necessary.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Momentous. Head to⁠ livemomentous.com ⁠and use code IDEA for up to 35% off your entire first order.

5. Imagination can be trained like a muscle.

Pete Docter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, wrote the foreword to my book, and he tells a great story about how he became an animator. As a kid, he was dragged to long classical concerts and told to sit still. Out of sheer boredom, he started grabbing programs and drawing cartoons of what he imagined: what if the violinist’s string snapped mid-solo, or what if someone fell into the tuba? Boredom is where his imagination, and eventually Pixar characters, came from.

Imagination isn’t a gift some people have and others don’t. It’s a practice. A set of tools I call VISTA offers concrete ways to exercise imagination:

• Visualizing: picturing something vividly.

• Ideating: generating options without judging them too fast.

• Sensing: tuning in to sensory detail.

• Transforming: playing with alternate versions of a story.

• Applying: applying what you find back to your real life.

Just as important as actively practicing imagination is protecting the unstructured time, boredom, and mind-wandering that lets imagination arrive on its own.

The antidote to despair isn’t just hope. It’s the skill of generating hope. And the antidote to disenchantment isn’t just wonder; it’s the ability to re-enchant your own world, on purpose, using a capacity you already have.

The Big Idea: Being smart isn’t enough. What matters just as much is how well you manage the brainpower you already have. Executive functions are the hidden mental skills that help you focus, resist impulses, plan ahead, regulate emotions, and turn good intentions into action.

Why It Matters: We obsess over intelligence and memory, but some of the mental abilities that shape our lives most are nearly invisible. Executive functions influence everything from whether you finish an important project to how you handle an argument or resist reaching for your phone. And in the age of AI, they may matter even more: The crucial skill isn’t doing all your thinking yourself, but deciding which thinking is worth doing.

Try This Today: Before you hand your next task to AI, pause and ask one question: Am I outsourcing busywork or outsourcing thinking? If it’s busywork, hand it over. If wrestling with the problem might sharpen your judgment, creativity, or understanding, keep that one for yourself.

These insights come from Adrian Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience and imaging at the University of Western Ontario and author of Think Before You Think: Understanding and Mastering Executive Function. Read on for five of his big ideas:

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. The brain system you rely on most is the one you understand the least.

Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgotten why you went there? Found yourself reading the same paragraph three times because your mind kept wandering? Perhaps you sent an email you immediately wished you hadn’t or promised yourself you’d start that important project today—only to find yourself scrolling through your phone an hour later instead.

Most of us treat these as unrelated little quirks. We blame our memory, our willpower, our attention span, or simply tell ourselves that we’re getting older. But these everyday experiences are all connected. They’re all examples of one remarkable set of mental abilities called executive functions.

Executive functions are the brain’s management system: the abilities that allow us to focus our attention on what’s important, hold information in mind while we use it, plan ahead, resist distractions and temptations, regulate our emotions, and understand what other people are thinking. They don’t determine how intelligent you are. They determine how effectively you use the intelligence you already have.

Executive functions quietly shape almost every aspect of our lives. They influence how well we do at school and at work, how successful our relationships are, how we raise our children, how we make decisions with money, how we cope with stress, and even how successfully we age. Yet if you stopped someone on the street and ask them what executive function was, very few could tell you.

I spent more than 30 years studying the brain, and during that time I’ve watched neuroscience transform our understanding of memory, intelligence, and even consciousness. Yet one of the most important discoveries has remained largely hidden from public view. We all know what IQ is. We all worry about our memory. But the mental abilities that often matter most in everyday life are the ones we’ve barely talked about.

The part of your brain that most influences the life you lead isn’t necessarily the one that’s best at solving crossword puzzles or remembering facts. It’s the part that helps you decide what deserves your attention, what to ignore, what to do next, and what not to do.

2. The smartest people can make the worst decisions.

If I asked you to name the smartest person you know, you’d probably think of somebody with an exceptionally high IQ. That’s how we have thought about intelligence for more than a century. We admire people who can solve difficult problems, recognize patterns, or perform impressive mental calculations. And there’s no question that IQ measures something important. But we’ve been asking the wrong question.

The question shouldn’t be: How intelligent are you? It should be: How well do you use the intelligence you already have?

We’ve all met people who are extraordinarily bright but somehow never quite fulfil their potential. They procrastinate, make impulsive decisions, struggle to organize their lives, and fall for the same mistakes over and over again. Equally, we’ve all met people who might never describe themselves as intellectual giants, yet consistently make wise decisions, build successful relationships, and navigate life with remarkably good judgement. What’s the difference? I would argue that it’s often executive function.

“We’ve all met people who are extraordinarily bright but somehow never quite fulfill their potential.”

Executive functions are what allow us to translate ability into action. They’re the mental skills that help us plan ahead instead of reacting impulsively, stay focused when we’re distracted, resist temptations that undermine our long-term goals, and adapt when life throws us something unexpected. They’re the bridge between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

One of the biggest studies ever conducted in my lab involved more than 44,000 people completing a series of cognitive tests online. We wanted to answer a deceptively simple question: Is intelligence really just one thing? And the answer surprised us. What we call intelligence turned out to be a collection of distinct mental abilities, many of which depended heavily on executive function. That changed the way I think about human potential.

So perhaps it’s time we stopped asking who’s the smartest person in the room. A better question might be: who’s making the best decisions?

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Genius and the Impostor by Josh Turknett, MD. We tend to believe genius is something you’re born with — a special brain handed to a lucky few. Drawing on decades of neuroscience and his own clinical case files, neurologist Josh Turknett dismantles that story, revealing two competing forces inside every brain: the genius that builds extraordinary ability through learning, and the impostor that spends your whole life insisting it can’t. Praised by David Perlmutter, Nelson Dellis, and Tommy Wood. Pre-order today and you’ll also get the free “Genius Toolkit” sent right away.

3. Hidden brain skills shape life more than you realize.

We tend to think of planning, attention, emotional control, or understanding other people’s feelings as completely separate abilities. In fact, they’re all part of the same mental toolkit.

Once you start looking through the lens of executive function, you see it everywhere. Think about the last disagreement you had with someone close to you. Perhaps you said something you regretted in the heat of the moment. That’s inhibition and emotional regulation, both key executive functions. Think about juggling several things at work while remembering to collect the children from school and pick up the shopping on the way home. That’s planning, attention, and working memory—three more key executive functions. And think about meeting someone new. As the conversation unfolds, you’re constantly trying to work out what they’re thinking, what they already know, whether they’re joking, whether they’re interested. That’s theory of mind, another important executive function.

We barely notice these abilities when they’re working well, because they’re operating quietly in the background. It’s a bit like the conductor of an orchestra. The audience notices the violins, the brass, or the percussion, but tend to overlook the person coordinating everything. Executive functions don’t perform the music, but they make sure everything comes together at exactly the right time.

“We barely notice these abilities when they’re working well, because they’re operating quietly in the background.”

They also explain why so many seemingly unrelated conditions have something important in common. Whether it’s ADHD, concussion, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or normal ageing, one of the first things that often changes is not intelligence but the ability to organize, prioritize, adapt, and regulate behavior. Executive function provides a single framework for understanding an enormous range of human experiences, from everyday absent-mindedness to some of the most serious neurological conditions.

Once you understand these hidden mental abilities, you begin to notice them in yourself. You become more forgiving when your attention wanders, more patient when other people make mistakes, and perhaps a little more intentional about the way you make decisions.

4. The real threat of AI isn’t what you think.

A little while ago, I asked ChatGPT to draft an email I could easily have written myself. It wasn’t a difficult email. I just wanted to thank a colleague, apologize for a delay, and explain why I couldn’t attend a meeting. ChatGPT produced a perfectly respectful draft in a couple of seconds. I tidied up a few sentences, pressed send, and got on with my day. Had artificial intelligence just made me more productive, or had it quietly persuaded me not to think?

That’s a question we’re all starting to ask. Every week brings another headline claiming that AI, smartphones, or social media are making us less intelligent, shortening our attention spans, or rotting our brains. And I think that framing is wrong. Human beings have always invented tools that extend our minds. We write shopping lists instead of memorizing everything. We use calculators instead of doing long division in our heads. GPS helps us navigate unfamiliar cities. AI is simply the latest tool we’ve ever created.

I don’t worry that technology is replacing our brains, but I do worry that we’re becoming less intentional about deciding when to rely on it. Sometimes handing a task over to AI is the right decision. If it saves me 20 minutes drafting a routine email, that’s probably a good use of technology. It frees me to spend more time on work that genuinely requires my attention, creativity, and judgement. The problem comes when we stop making that choice consciously. If we automatically ask AI to solve every problem, rewrite every paragraph, or make every decision for us, then we’re not using the technology to extend our thinking. We’re using it to avoid thinking.

The challenge of the AI age is protecting our brains from technology. It’s learning to become more intentional about which parts of our thinking we choose to outsource and which parts we should insist on keeping human. The future won’t belong to people who refuse to use AI. It will belong to those who know when not to.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. It's the AI notepad with notes, actions, memory — and no annoying meeting bots. You can try it totally free for three months at ⁠granola.ai/idea⁠

5. There’s no silver bullet, but there is a path.

I give a lot of public lectures, and someone always asks me: What’s the one thing I can do to improve my executive function? And people are often disappointed by my answer: There isn’t one.

If you’re hoping I’ll recommend a particular supplement, brain training app, or a simple daily exercise guaranteed to transform your thinking, I’m afraid the science just doesn’t support it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope. We just have to work a little bit harder to find the answer.

Executive function is a lot like physical fitness. You don’t become physically fit by doing one thing brilliantly. You become fitter by getting lots of different things broadly right: sleeping well, staying active, eating sensibly, and challenging your body regularly. Our brains work in much the same way. The neuroscientific evidence suggests that executive functions are supported by:

• Regular exercise.

• Good-quality sleep.

• Managing stress.

• Maintaining strong social relationships.

• Continuing to learn new skills.

• Keeping mentally engaged throughout life.

None of these is a silver bullet, but together they create the conditions in which our brains are most likely to thrive.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about executive function, though, has nothing to do with lifestyle. It’s awareness. Once you understand what executive functions are, you begin to notice them everywhere. You catch yourself reacting impulsively instead of pausing. You recognize when your attention has drifted, or when you’re putting off an important task. You become more aware of the moments when you’re letting technology think for you, and the moments when your own thinking would be more valuable.

That awareness doesn’t make you perfect, but it does make you more intentional. Executive function is not about having the world’s highest IQ or having the world’s best memory. It’s about developing the ability to pause, think, and make better choices.

The Big Idea: Most advice for twenty-somethings is really advice for forty-somethings delivered ten years too early: save aggressively, optimize your career, build stability. But your twenties are a distinct stage with their own windows, their own risks worth taking, and their own version of fun that won’t be available later.

Why It Matters: Every stage of life closes a few doors on its way out. The friends who can drop everything for a spontaneous trip, the low cost of a bad bet, the version of “fun” that costs almost nothing—these aren’t permanent features of adulthood. They’re specific to a window that’s already narrower than most people realize.

Try This Today: No matter your age, name one “risk-on” move you’ve been putting off—a move, a pitch, a trip, a hard conversation—and set a real date this month to act on it. Optionality is only valuable if you use it while it’s still cheap.

These ideas come from Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties by . Jack is an investor at Slow Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Everything in life is stage-specific.

A bad trade that a lot of young people make is treating their twenties like throwaway years—expendable, just a foundation for the rest of their life. It’s important to use your 20s to build, but it’s just as important to recognize that a lot of the opportunities available when you’re young won’t be available later. And they certainly won’t be as enjoyable as they would have been in the prime of youth.

When I was 24, I quit my job on a whim and spent a year backpacking Europe and Latin America before going to business school. I was hostel-hopping, hanging out with strangers, spending almost no money, and having a genuinely great time. At one hostel in Lagos, Portugal, I met another American named Simon. He was 33—nine years older than me. We grabbed a couple of beers and started trading life stories.

Simon had spent his first decade out of college optimizing for money, and money alone. Now, here we were on the same trip to Portugal. He said he was having fun, but he would have enjoyed it so much more five or ten years earlier. Back then, his friends were in their twenties too. Nobody was married or had kids, so some of them could have tagged along. But at 33, that window had closed. There was a version of young, reckless fun he could have had at 24 that he simply couldn’t access anymore.

The version of you that exists at 25 is not the same version that will exist at 35 or 45. So you have to think about not just what you want out of life, but what you want out of each specific stage of life while you’re in it. The part of life you’re in right now is going to end. Being aware of what you want, and the best time to go get it, matters enormously.

2. Be “risk-on” when you’re young.

The hard part about being 22 or 23 is that you don’t really know anything yet, and you’re constantly comparing yourself to people a few years ahead of you. They seem to have things figured out. So a lot of young people land on the same logic: I need to gather more experience, reach some level of financial stability, and then I will do something different.

The flaw in that plan is that the right moment never actually arrives. Your cost of living only goes up with time. Your responsibilities only get more complex as you move into your thirties. If you’re too focused on maxing out stability before you take any risks, you’ll never feel comfortable enough to take them.

“Your cost of living only goes up with time.”

Young people should be far more risk-on before those costs and responsibilities accelerate. By risk-on, I mean anything that deviates from your default: moving to a new city, joining a startup, starting your own business, ending a lackluster relationship. The opposite of inertia. It’s much easier to do this when you’re young because you have time to recover. Your burn rate at 24, living with a couple of friends, is cheap. No spouse, no kids, no mortgage—so you can take a lot of shots, and if they don’t work out, you have time to make more money and bounce back.

A second benefit of being “risk-on” when you’re young is developing self-knowledge. You learn a lot about yourself by having a wider range of experiences when you’re young. Follow one straight path through your twenties and you’ll arrive at 30 having never flexed the muscle of trying different things—and you won’t know how. You won’t even know what you like, what you’re good at, or what you actually want. The cost of experimentation when you’re young is low. The upside is high. So be more risk-on.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is The Genius and the Impostor by Josh Turknett, MD. We tend to believe genius is something you're born with — a special brain handed to a lucky few. Drawing on decades of neuroscience and his own clinical case files, neurologist Josh Turknett dismantles that story, revealing two competing forces inside every brain: the genius that builds extraordinary ability through learning, and the impostor that spends your whole life insisting it can't. Praised by David Perlmutter, Nelson Dellis, and Tommy Wood

3. Optionality is useful until it isn’t.

When you’re young, optionality is one of your most valuable assets. By optionality, I mean the ease with which you can move from one thing to another. You can pretty seamlessly end one chapter and start another at 23 or 24, be that switching jobs, cities, or relationships. But by 33 or 34—once you’ve made progress in your career, gotten married, or bought a home—your life becomes more rigid. That’s not a bad thing because it’s usually a sign that things are compounding. But it does mean the optionality you had at 24 is largely gone.

The upside of optionality is that when you find yourself on the wrong path, you can move to something else. But the value of optionality declines over time, because optionality is only worth what you actually get out of it. The reason to be exploratory when you’re young is to use that freedom to figure out what you like, what you’re good at, and where you want to spend your time. At some point, you do have to make a choice, but shop around while it’s worth it.

4. It’s okay to have a lower savings rate when you’re young.

Most financial advice centers on saving money and cutting expenses. Very little of it addresses how you actually want to spend money—and, importantly, when you want to spend it.

Here’s the trap: you’re not making much money when you’re young, and that’s scary. Combine that with the standard playbook—save 15 to 20 percent of every paycheck, put it in the market, build a nest egg—and it can feel like there’s nothing left for fun stuff. My counterintuitive take: while you shouldn’t blow thousands on bottle service every weekend, you can (and probably should) spend a higher percentage of your money on fun when you’re young.

Two reasons. First, the amount you save in your twenties matters less than the slope you’re on to earn more over your career. If you’re in a field where your income is likely to climb significantly over time, then whatever you sock away at 23 just isn’t going to move the needle on your lifetime savings. If you’re making $65,000 at 23 and you expect to be making multiples of that a few years later, you shouldn’t skip the ski trip or fun night out with the people you care about purely for the sake of financial hygiene.

“The older you get, the more your tastes change, and the more you have to spend to get the same enjoyment.”

Second, the fun you get per dollar spent is just so much higher when you’re young. Cheap thrills are fun. Going out with your friends and spending a couple hundred bucks is fun. The older you get, the more your tastes change, and the more you have to spend to get the same enjoyment.

When you have this finite window—where you and all your friends have just started making money, you’re out of school, and nobody has spouses or kids yet—take the trip. Your life satisfaction is going to be much higher for it. Financial advice isn’t black and white. Everything is stage-specific—including how much fun costs, and when to spend on it.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/NBIFree

5. Status games make you a spectator of your own life.

For most of human history, the biggest threats we faced were physiological. You had to find shelter, food, and safety. Today, if you live in a wealthy country, you can get a cheap apartment, eat fast food or shop at Trader Joe’s, and survive on what amounts to a couple thousand dollars a month. The problems we face now are psychological, and the biggest one is status.

Humans are status-seekers. We’re bad at measuring our objective standing in life, and we’re very good at measuring how we stack up against everyone else. Historically, that comparison was limited to the people immediately around you. Now, thanks to LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, you can now see what billions of strangers are doing at any given moment and compare yourself to them on salary, life milestones, everything.

It becomes very easy to feel insecure, envious, or anxious that you’re not keeping up. And you start, almost subconsciously, making decisions about where you live, what you do for work, and how you spend your time based on what you believe will earn you more status. The danger is that on a long enough timeline, every major decision you make is really just a bid for approval you wouldn’t otherwise care about. At that point, you’ve stopped living your own life. You’re just watching it. Pay attention to the motivations of those around you, and you’d be shocked to see how much status games drive everything.

These ideas come from Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties by Jack Raines, available now!

How can you lead a more gratifying life?

We’ve optimized nearly every part of modern life. So why does it feel like we’re missing the experience of actually living it?

In The Small Stuff, argues that our obsession with happiness, productivity, and efficiency has stripped everyday life of something essential: gratification, the immediate pleasure of physically engaging with the world around us. Today, he makes the case for rediscovering the sensory delights hiding in the life you already lead.

Listen to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

What can we learn from little kids?

Growing up doesn’t have to mean losing the best parts of being a child. By embracing children’s emotional honesty, creativity, openness, and optimism, adults can lead richer lives and contribute to a better world.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum is a comedian, interviewer, and author best known for creating Recess Therapy, a wildly popular online series in which he interviews young children about life’s biggest mysteries. He also created Celebrity Substitute, in which major stars from music and Hollywood spend a day teaching at public schools around New York City.

Check out five key insights from his new book, How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids, on the Next Big Idea app.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Are questions more important than answers?

We’re living through uncertain, unsettling times, and every instinct pulls us towards quick, comforting answers. But certainty, chased too hard, makes us rigid and closed. Uncertainty isn’t a problem to be eliminated, it’s the texture of a rich, complicated, unpredictable life. Questioning is what lets us meet it, not with anxiety, but with openness, curiosity and a little humility.

Lani Watson is a philosopher and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a world-leading expert in the philosophy of questions, having researched the topic for nearly two decades. Businesses and organizations around the world have sought her help in learning how to ask great questions

Pick up a copy of her book, Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers, on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by IM8, Get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order when you use code NBI at im8health.com/nbi

🎉 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:

Daisy Dixon, Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art

Paul Osterman, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment

Sam Roberts, Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit

Virginia Eubanks, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir

Cassandra Vieten, Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination

The Big Idea: America’s richest people don’t need to win elections to wield political power. When extreme wealth buys access to presidents, foreign dictators, media platforms, and even foreign policy, democracy starts giving way to something older: oligarchy.

Why It Matters: America has seen concentrations of wealth and power before, from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age. What makes this moment different is the scale and reach of today’s fortunes. Billionaires can control communications platforms, cultivate relationships with authoritarian governments, influence national policy, and pursue business interests that cross borders.

Try This Today: Follow the money behind one political story you’re reading. Instead of asking only what a politician wants, ask: Who stands to make money if they get it? Who funded the effort? What business interests are involved? You may find a second story hiding underneath the first.

These ideas come from United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by . Casey is a journalist who covers illicit finance, dark money, and kleptocracy for outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and more. He has also appeared on NPR, BBC, and CNN, among other stations. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. The oligarchs have taken over.

You might think you know what oligarchy means. It literally means “rule of a few,” or when a small group of people runs a country. In a certain sense, that’s correct. But if you go all the way back to the earliest definition—all the way back to the days of Aristotle—you’ll see that it means something else. It’s not just the number of people, but how much money they have.

An oligarchy isn’t just you or me running a country. It’s about when the wealthiest people in that country take over and begin to run it to meet their own ends. They don’t necessarily need to be president, prime minister, or even have official office. All they have to be is the wealthiest in that country, and all they have to do is control the levers of power.

That’s what oligarchy is: when a small number of the wealthiest people control a country or a nation. And that’s what we have in the U.S.: a small group of multi-billionaires, and even a lone trillionaire, using their wealth to control this country’s domestic politics, decimate democracy, and pursue whatever foreign policy they want. That, in the 21st century, is America.

2. Wealth inequality is worse than you think.

You’ve probably heard of wealth inequality, or the idea that the wealthiest group of Americans holds a disproportionate amount of resources. You also might have heard of things like the American middle class being hollowed out in recent years. All of that is true, but it gets worse.

Not only do the wealthiest Americans have magnitudes more money, even adjusted for inflation, than people like John Rockefeller had during the Gilded Age, but they’re only getting richer and richer compared to the rest of us. America’s billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. In 2024 alone, the net worths of the wealthiest 19 families in America expanded by about $1 trillion total, or about $53 billion per family. Over the past 50 years, the share of the national income they control has nearly doubled—while the share owned by the bottom 50 percent has been cut in half.

“In 2024 alone, the net worths of the wealthiest 19 families in America expanded by about $1 trillion total, or about $53 billion per family.”

And as for that middle class? Well, it has been destroyed. There’s no more middle class to speak of. There are only the oligarchs, and everyone else.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Casey himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

3. Oligarchs are a dictator’s best friend.

The oligarchs detailed in the book are familiar names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner. You probably know all the damage they’ve done domestically, and how rich they’ve become in the process. But did you know that they, and a number of other oligarchs, have opened the doors to dictators around the world, ushering them into America and selling off the U.S. to the highest bidder?

There’s Donald Trump, who both before and during his presidency built up financial links with dictators, from real estate investments in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to resorts in Saudi Arabia and new crypto investments from the United Arab Emirates. There’s Elon Musk, who held secret back-channel conversations with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—and became so powerful in the Ukraine War that he could single-handedly prevent Ukraine from attacking Russian forces, even in Ukraine itself. Zuckerberg allegedly offered his services to the Chinese Communist Party to strengthen its grip on power, all while claiming he wanted to usher in a more open world. And then there’s Kushner, who received billions of dollars from dictators and then became the most important diplomat in America, creating the biggest conflict of interest in American history.

Lobbyists or shell company operators used to be the best friends a dictator could find. Now it’s American oligarchs.

4. Oligarchs and empire.

Like most people, you probably thought that things like Trump’s obsession with expanding America and annexing places like Greenland came out of nowhere. After all, aren’t the days of territorial expansion behind us? What is this, 1848?

But you’re missing one key ingredient: oligarchs. A number of wealthy donors to Trump want nothing more than to loot places like Greenland of all its resources, enriching themselves while expanding America’s borders. They can’t access the materials they seek to profit from due to obstacles like environmental regulations. But they’ve already mapped out where the resources exist and are trying to restart the American empire to get their hands on them.

“A number of wealthy donors to Trump want nothing more than to loot places like Greenland of all its resources, enriching themselves while expanding America’s borders.”

Some oligarchs are even funding efforts to create an entirely new world in places like Greenland—one that can do away with democracy, and even America, entirely. It’s far weirder than you could possibly imagine, and it’s a project that’s now well underway.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Upwork. Find freelancers for any project by visiting upwork.com right now and posting your job for free.

5. The oligarchs won’t win.

Oligarchs are the biggest threat the U.S. has faced in decades, but that doesn’t mean they will win. If anything, we can be optimistic about where things are going. In many ways, we’ve been here before. The Confederacy was just a previous version of the oligarchy we now face. So were the figures during the Gilded Age, who turned American politics into their own personal plaything—but eventually sparked the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and the entire Progressive Era. Even the era of Richard Nixon and Watergate, in which we saw a more corrupt administration than anything before Trump, ended in defeat for Nixon and the greatest burst of anti-corruption reform we’ve ever seen.

None of this will be easy or immediate, but American history is like a pendulum. Even though we’re on a clear downswing, all those previous downswings ended with successful reforms, democratic progress, and a new, less oligarchic era.

The Big Idea: Lasting wellbeing doesn’t come from major life overhauls. It comes from small, specific, evidence-based habits practiced consistently, and from staying connected to the people around you.

Why It Matters: Self-improvement culture pushes big transformations and rigid routines that rarely stick. The research shows the opposite works better: tiny, personalized practices sustained over time, reinforced by real relationships.

Try This Today: Set a 5-minute timer tonight and write down one high point and one low point from today.

These ideas come from Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy by Matt Bloom. Matt is a social psychologist and emeritus professor of business at the University of Notre Dame, where for nearly thirty years he studied the wellbeing of people in the helping and healing professions. He is cofounder of Ritual, an app offering evidence-based wellbeing practices. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. The best way to start is to stop.

Many people feel stuck, not knowing how to even begin figuring out what to do. A great way to begin is to stop. Take a moment to reflect on how your life is unfolding. Consider what’s going well and where you are finding meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Also consider where you are facing challenges. Ask people who know you well to share what they think is going well for you and where they think you might be struggling. Stepping back like this allows for a shift from autopilot to awareness.

Time passes quickly, and we rarely remember the details of our days. We might say, “I’m stressed at work,” but if asked to be specific about what is causing that stress, our answer is often incomplete. Even when we think we know what is stressing us, we are often only partly right.

Let me illustrate: Can you remember what you had for your last meal yesterday? How about a week ago? A month ago? Unless you have a set menu, you probably answered yes to the first question and no to the others.

Our days slip by quickly, and we don’t remember many of the details that matter for our wellbeing. We forget some of the things that bring us joy and make life meaningful. We can’t remember what makes our days challenging, so we feel incapable of turning things around. Stepping back gives you the perspective needed to establish where you want to improve your wellbeing.

Map Your Days is a simple practice for stepping back. All you need is a place to record your thoughts. At the end of each day, make a quick evaluation of whether it was a good or bad day. Use a smiley or frowny face, a single word, or some other quick way of recording what the day was like. Do not overthink it. Go with your gut. Then, briefly describe one high point from that day and one low point. You decide what those are; the criteria you use are the right ones. Write just enough to remember what happened. You should be able to complete this entire process in five minutes or less.

Do this each day for at least two weeks—or longer, if you can. Then, take a look back. Note the high points on your good days and look for patterns. What kinds of things made those days good? Common themes shed light on what makes a day positive for you. Next, shift to the tough days and look for patterns in the low points. Look more closely at those days to identify what made them stressful, challenging, or difficult. At this point, you will have identified the areas you need to address to improve your wellbeing.

2. To make big changes, think small.

Many of us try too hard. We search for the absolutely “best” practices or imagine that caring for ourselves and those we love will take more hours of time than we have. We wonder how we can jam one more thing into our overfull days. But we don’t need to take on another major activity or try to make big changes. In fact, we shouldn’t do either.

Big changes and time-consuming experiments come with risks. Unless we get everything right, they often cause other problems that may be worse than the ones we are trying to fix. A much better way is to take the simple approach.

“The key is using a simple practice consistently.”

There are a variety of evidence-based practices that will fit comfortably into your daily life. I share dozens of simple wellbeing practices in the book, many of which require less than fifteen minutes. The key is using a simple practice consistently. Over time, the benefits will accumulate into the big improvements you seek.

For example, what I refer to as tranquil practices are highly effective ways to reduce stress. Mindfulness meditation is one, but there are plenty of others. You only need to spend five to ten minutes with a tranquil practice, and you can break that into chunks. Meditate while you are stopped at a red light, waiting in line at the grocery store, or even while brushing your teeth.

Or, consider receptive practices, which boost resilience. One simple and highly effective receptive practice is the Worry Window. Grab a piece of paper and something to write with. Set a timer for five minutes. Hit start, and worry. Write down a few words to capture those worries. Don’t censor yourself. Write down all of the big and small worries that pop up into your mind. Let your thoughts indulge in catastrophizing and exaggeration. Don’t distract yourself or reason your worries away. Just confess them. When time is up, stop writing. Do this regularly, and you will worry less.

Think small. Pick a practice and give it a try for a few weeks. Be patient because small changes add up to big improvements.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Matt himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

3. Be unique.

We live in a world that compels us to compare ourselves to others in every possible way, in every possible place, such as work, home, the gym, or on social media. This kind of constant social comparison undermines our self-confidence and self-worth. We ping-pong between trying to fit in by conforming to social pressures and trying to stand out to feel special and worthy.

But when it comes to choosing how to take care of yourself, be unique: find what works for you. I know people who swear by sitting meditation for building more tranquility into their days. For them, settling down on a cushion in a quiet room and clearing their mind is a great way to release stress and calm their troubled mind. My mind buzzes from one thought to another. I’ve tried breath-focused meditation, and that doesn’t work either. But walking does. I put in ear pods with some beautiful music and start walking. I let the music wash over me, and my mind settles into a quiet place.

“If a practice isn’t helping after a couple of weeks, try another practice.”

Another of my favorite tranquil practices is baking bread. There is just enough to think about that I get pleasantly lost in measuring ingredients, gently kneading the dough, baking the bread, and then having a delicious, warm piece fresh out of the oven.

So, if your friend’s favorite practice or an influencer’s “must use” technique or the latest-and-greatest advice doesn’t work for you, there are practices that will. If a practice isn’t helping after a couple of weeks, try another practice. There are dozens of great practices, so you will be able to find one that fits your unique wellbeing needs. Rather than copying what other people are doing or trying to match their level of wellbeing, be unique.

4. Achieving lasting wellbeing is a journey, not a destination.

Our lives unfold one day at a time. We travel through highs and lows, over inspiring mountaintop experiences and down into deep valleys of difficulty. We sometimes wander down the wrong path. Lasting wellbeing is a part of that journey. Our wellbeing will, naturally, have ebbs and flows. Some seasons bring ease and flourishing, while others bring stress, loss, and lower wellbeing.

Lasting wellbeing means building the capacity to live fully during the best parts of life, the most difficult ones, and all the times in between. It’s being grounded and guided through highs and lows by core values that create meaning and purpose. And it is sustained by strong relationships and a sturdy sense of self-integrity. Integrating simple practices into your life when the journey is easier will ensure you are well equipped when times become more difficult.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Momentous. Head to⁠ livemomentous.com ⁠and use code IDEA for up to 35% off your entire first order.

5. There is no such thing as your wellbeing.

The rugged individualism we prize so much in America creates one of the biggest challenges to our wellbeing. Whether we realize it or not, our health and our wellbeing are deeply intertwined with the wellbeing of the other people in our lives. It is no surprise that your family and friends have a significant impact on your wellbeing, as you do on theirs, but it goes much deeper than that.

In their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that even your friend’s friend’s friend—someone you may not even know—has a significant impact on your wellbeing. They summarized their findings this way: “We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.”

“Being more intentional about nurturing social connections can have a huge impact on everyone’s wellbeing.”

When we ignore or overlook these deep connections, we miss opportunities to support others, and we miss the ways other people can support us. Being more intentional about nurturing social connections can have a huge impact on everyone’s wellbeing. Even small gestures of respect toward a server or cashier make a difference—to them and to us. And, of course, our relationships with family and friends have an even bigger impact on our wellbeing, and theirs.

When I greet someone and ask how they are, I am more intentional about pausing to receive a real answer. I am more open with the important people in my life about my wellbeing challenges, and I am more willing to ask for their help. I am also, I hope, more eager and receptive to accompanying them through the highs and lows of their journey. I invite you to be more intentional about how you journey with the people in your life—those you are close to and, when you can, your friend’s friend’s friend.

The Big Idea: Your beliefs aren’t built from evidence. They’re built from feelings, then defended with logic later.

Why It Matters: In order to convince yourself or others of something, facts aren't enough. Belief has to feel right first.

Try This Today: Pick one of your firm beliefs. Ask yourself: What am I trying to achieve by holding it? Is it actually helping? What belief would serve me better?

These ideas come from Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times by Owen Fitzpatrick. Owen is a social psychologist, behavioral change expert, and international speaker who has spent three decades studying how beliefs are formed, challenged, and transformed, traveling to more than 100 countries — including North Korea, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Iran — to research the mechanics of persuasion. Read on for five of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. You are your own greatest propagandist.

When I was 14, I sat on my bed in Dublin and wrote a suicide note to my parents. I’d been bullied for years, and the story in my head had become unbearable: I was a reject, I was alone, and the pain would never stop.

But as I wrote, something strange happened. I had just written an apology—“I’m so sorry. I love you both so much.”—when I found myself writing a question: Is this how much you love them? That single question cracked open the story my mind had been telling me and started a war between two voices: one insisting I should die, and one fighting for me to live. Eventually, the voice for life won. I spent the next 30 years trying to understand why.

My brain wasn’t on my side that night. It was running a relentless internal campaign, selecting what I noticed, deciding what things meant, and feeding me a story I completely believed. When you’re depressed, you don’t think negatively; you believe negatively. We all have that inner voice to some extent. I call it your Inner Dictator, and it has its own Inner News Corporation, broadcasting reality to you 24 hours a day.

The danger is that we never question it, because we assume our own thoughts are telling us the truth. They aren’t. Whatever you’re thinking and feeling isn’t a report on reality. It’s a story your mind has already decided to believe. The first move is seeing that there’s a story at all.

2. Your brain is the ultimate double agent.

Let me tell you about the greatest spy of the Second World War. His name was Juan Pujol García, codenamed Garbo. He worked for the Nazis and became so successful that he even won the Iron Cross. He had a network of 27 sub-agents across Britain reporting to him. At a certain point, Germany stopped sending additional spies to the UK because Pujol had already provided so much intel.

In truth, Pujol was a Spanish civilian who hated the Nazis. The entire network was invented. The agents didn’t exist. He fabricated reports from his apartment using newspapers, tourist guides, and his imagination—pretending to send dispatches from Britain while sitting in a hotel room in Portugal. On D-Day, his misinformation helped convince Hitler that the real invasion was still coming at Pas-de-Calais. As a result, the Germans held divisions back from Normandy.

“The most effective deception isn’t the one you resist—it’s the one you trust completely.”

Pujol didn’t win with force. He won with belief. He gave the Germans a story that felt right and fit what they already expected, and they defended it as the truth.

Your brain does exactly this to you. It’s the ultimate double agent: appearing to work for you while quietly feeding you a version of reality that serves an agenda you never consciously approved. The most effective deception isn’t the one you resist—it’s the one you trust completely. It’s like a report that fits what you already expected, delivered by the one source you’d never think to question. The version of reality most worth interrogating isn’t the one that feels suspicious, but the one that feels most obviously, comfortably true.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Owen himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

3. We feel our way into beliefs, then justify them.

We like to think we’re rational. We believe we look at the evidence, weigh it, and arrive at a conclusion. But that’s not how belief works.

After many years of research, I found that every belief that takes hold—whether it happens naturally or someone deliberately plants it—must fulfill three conditions, in this order:

• It has to feel right.

• It has to fit in with who we think we are and what our group believes.

• It must make sense, building the logical case for what we already feel.

Logic comes last, and yet it almost always takes credit for the belief.

This explains why facts alone almost never change a mind. Say you are a leader trying to convince your team to incorporate more AI into their roles. A slide full of data won’t do it. The facts might be spot-on, but around the table, someone is thinking, This is a threat to my job. Another: This makes me look wrong. Another: I’ll lose control. Each of them is feeling their way to a conclusion long before your chart appears on screen.

Being right is not enough. If you want to change a belief, then you have to start where belief actually starts: with how it feels. Make it feel right and people will be more likely to accept it.

4. There are five types of truth.

In leadership and persuasion, there are five types of truth:

• Objective truth: what’s actually, verifiably the case.

• Emotional truth: what they feel is true.

• Desired truth: what they want to be true.

• Shared truth: what their group says is true.

• Past truth: what they remember as true.

You might disagree and say, “No, there’s only objective truth. The rest is bias, groupthink, and wishful thinking.” But people don’t experience it that way. They experience all five as true.

If you don’t acknowledge what feels true to someone, you will never change their mind. They won’t feel understood, and so you will lose your chance to influence them.

This is why polarization is so entrenched. We’re not in one shared reality, calmly disagreeing. We’re standing in different reality tunnels, each convinced we’re the only ones who’ve stepped outside the cave. Naming the kind of truth at play is the first step toward bridging the gap.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Granola. It's the AI notepad with notes, actions, memory — and no annoying meeting bots. You can try it totally free for three months at ⁠granola.ai/idea⁠

5. Become a Belief Leader.

Becoming a Belief Leader happens in three steps:

• Lead your own heart. Take charge of the daily stories that make you feel anxious or cause you to doubt yourself.

• Lead your own mind. Make sharper decisions by catching your own biases and assumptions.

• Lead the hearts and minds of others.

You cannot influence others well until you understand how you influence yourself. A tool you can use is called the Belief Audit—four questions for any belief that’s running you:

• What is the belief?

• What are you actually trying to achieve by believing it?

• Is it genuinely helping you?

• What belief might serve you better?

These four questions can help you become the director of your own inner propaganda, and prove to yourself that you can change your beliefs. The story war in your mind never ends. But now, you get to choose which side wins.

The Big Idea: A good question does more work than a good answer. It directs attention, sparks learning, and builds trust between people.

Why It Matters: Search engines and AI now answer instantly, so fewer questions ever reach an actual person. That convenience is quietly eroding curiosity, memory, and trust between people.

Try This Today: Ask one real question today, and wait for the full answer before responding.

These ideas come from The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers by Lani Watson. Lani is a philosopher and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a world-leading expert in the philosophy of questions with nearly two decades of research on the topic. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Questions direct our attention.

I’ll start by asking you a question: Where are you. Take a moment with this.

It’s a very simple question, but notice that before you even answer, it has already had an effect. Perhaps you glanced unconsciously at your surroundings or thought briefly about the view in front of you or reflected on the journey you’re on. That’s the first hidden power of questions. They direct our attention instantly.

Nobody understands this better than magicians. Watch a close-up magic show and you’ll notice the magician asking questions: what’s your name, is this your first magic show, can you check that this is a normal pack of cards. These questions are an integral part of the trick. Each one draws your attention to where the magician wants it, at precisely the moment the sleight of hand happens somewhere else. Psychologists have even tested this in the lab: volunteers are told to watch a simple card trick and not be distracted. Yet the moment the magician asks a question, almost everyone instinctively looks up at their face, the move is made right under their nose, and most people don’t even remember looking away.

That’s how strong the attentional pull of a question is. Even when we’re actively trying to resist it, we can’t. This is why I describe questioning as an attentional mechanism. Questions influence what we notice and what we miss. And because attention shapes what we think, how we feel and what we do, the questions running through your day are quietly steering your life.

Magicians use this attentional effect to surprise and delight us, but the same force is at work everywhere, all the time. The questions a doctor asks determine the diagnosis you get. The questions you ask at work affect how others see you. The question a headline asks influences what you click. Change the question, and you change the direction of travel. The trouble is that questions are so familiar we barely notice them. We rush past the question to grab the answer, but by then the question has already chosen where we’re going. If you want to understand your experiences, relationships, work, or the world around you, start by noticing the questions quietly moving your attention.

2. Questions change our brains.

The power of questions begins in your head. Think of a question that has genuinely gripped you: a half-remembered piece of trivia that you couldn’t quite place, a story you couldn’t resist clicking on, a personal question that stayed with you for days. That pull, that itch of wanting to figure it out, isn’t just a mild distraction—it’s your brain rewarding you for reaching toward what you don’t yet know.

When a question sparks curiosity, it lights up the brain’s reward circuits—the same dopamine-driven system involved in anticipating things we enjoy. It’s like your brain giving you a dopaminergic thumbs up, telling you to keep going, to keep asking, to stay curious. And that small hit of dopamine has a vital role to play in helping you learn and remember.

In one study, researchers scanned people’s brains while they were reading trivia questions and asked them to rate how curious each question made them. When curiosity was high, activity rose in the brain’s reward pathways and, crucially, in the hippocampus, a region essential for memory and learning. The questions worked as a kind of primer, alerting the brain to hold on to whatever was coming next. People were markedly better at recalling the answers to the questions that had made them most curious as well as remembering unrelated things they happened to see while in that curious state.

Your brain doesn’t reward you for finding the answer. It rewards you for wanting it, and it uses that impulse to help make the answer stick. Your natural curiosity isn’t a childish itch or an intellectual luxury. It’s one of the most powerful learning systems you own. A good question doesn’t just lead to learning. It’s what makes learning possible.

3. Questions show we care.

Questions help us learn about, understand, and connect with one another. Think of the small questions that hold a day together. How are you. How did you sleep. Do you need anything. Do you want a cup of tea. They can feel automatic, barely worth noticing. But they’re one of the main ways we say to another person: I know there’s an inner world in there that I can’t see, and you’re the only one who can tell me about it.

That makes questions deeply relational. When I ask you something and truly wait for the answer, I’m handing you my attention. Attention, given freely, is one of the most valuable things any of us has to offer. Of course, not every question connects. Some are careless, intrusive or hollow. “How are you” can be an honest invitation, or a reflex we don’t really mean. But asked with real attention, and listened to with genuine intent, a question is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to show that you care.

You see it in therapy rooms, where the right questions can help someone find words for a feeling they couldn’t name. You see it in hospitals, where whether a patient feels heard and informed can hinge on the questions they are asked. You see it in friendship, in parenting, in love and in grief, where often the most caring thing we can offer isn’t an answer, but a question, asked gently enough that another person can finally speak.

Staying curious about the people closest to us is what keeps those relationships alive. It reminds us that even the people we know best are never finished, never fully solved. There’s always another question worth asking. A good question is a powerful form of connection that can transform our relationships and make the people around us feel valued and understood.

4. We are taught to answer, not to ask.

Detailed studies of young children find them asking somewhere between one and three questions every minute in conversation with familiar adults, helping them connect with caregivers and making full use of the most efficient learning engine they have. Our questions get more sophisticated as we grow and we figure out when and how to ask, as well as who, to learn about the mysterious world around us and understand our place within it.

And then, for most of us, something changes when we go to school. Classrooms are typically full of questions, but it’s rarely children who are asking them. Study after study, going back to the 1930s, finds the same pattern: teachers ask questions and students answer them. Think of a classroom full of raised hands. That’s almost always a class full of students trying to answer a teacher’s question rather than asking one of their own. This question-answer dynamic has a powerful effect. It teaches us that answers are what determine our success, and throughout our education we slowly absorb the lesson: what’s rewarded isn’t the questions you ask, it’s the answers you give.

For many of us this lesson carries straight into our adult lives. We encounter it in exams, interviews, pitches and meetings, where we are often prized for being certain, fast and right, and where ‘I don’t know’ feels increasingly dangerous. Being taught to answer, not to ask, can lead us to value false certainty over the more real and honest ambiguity that characterizes much of our lives.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/NBIFree

5. Technology gives us answers but needs our questions.

Nowhere are the effects of this answer-orientation more obvious than in the palm of your hand. Search engines, apps, and AI have collapsed the time between questions and answers to almost nothing. Ask, and the answer is simply there. That’s a modern miracle, but it comes at a cost we rarely notice.

We stop asking each other. Search engines and large language models are so good at instantly telling us what we need to know that many of the questions we would once have asked a human are now directed at our screens without a second thought. But this impulse to turn to technology for answers is eroding our ability to trust each other.

When I ask you a question and you give me an answer, we build a simple but powerful form of trust. You might not be right every time, but for the most part, I can be pretty sure that you’ll try to be, or you’ll tell me if you aren’t sure. This kind of information-sharing is fundamental to our ability to coordinate, cooperate, and make progress. By having all the answers at our fingertips, we are losing something uniquely human that is foundational to our collective survival and success.

What’s more, our tech has become so good at working out what it thinks we want to know that we barely need to form a proper question in the first place. You simply type “pancakes” into Google and literally hundreds of thousands of recipes appear. That’s handy, in a way, but it means that our questioning muscles aren’t getting any exercise. AI is dramatically accelerating this by even generating the follow-up questions for us, so that we don’t have to.

But all this technology runs on human questions. On its own, even the largest dataset just sits there, inert. It’s our questions that bring it to life. Which means that our technology isn’t taking our questions away. Quite the opposite—it needs them to do anything at all. And that’s incredibly powerful. What we ask determines what we see, believe, and do. In a world drowning in answers, questions are a compass and a guide. When we put better questions to our devices, and harder questions to the people building them, we’ll get the answers, the technology, and ultimately the future that we need.

Are robots about to change everything?

We’ve spent the last few years watching AI transform the digital world. Now it’s coming for the physical one.

Humanoid robots are leaving the lab and entering homes, factories, and workplaces. But are we witnessing another ChatGPT moment, or are these machines still years away from becoming truly useful? Journalist Stephen Witt has spent months inside the world’s leading robotics companies to find out, and what he discovered surprised him.

Check out Stephen’s article “Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Be Deployed?,” and listen to our conversation with him on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How do your beliefs shape your world?

Your beliefs don’t come from objective reality—they’re stories your mind constructs, feels into, and then defends as truth. Once you understand how that internal “propaganda system” works, you can question it, reshape it, and more effectively influence both yourself and others.

Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist, behavioral change expert, and international speaker who has spent three decades studying how beliefs are formed, challenged, and transformed. He has traveled to more than 100 countries—including North Korea, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Iran—researching the mechanics of persuasion and propaganda, and works with leaders and organizations around the world to help them understand and harness the power of belief.

Check out five key insights from his new book, Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times, on the Next Big Idea app.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

How do you make self-discipline easy?

Discipline usually sounds like a punishment: more willpower, more grind, more pushing through. But what if achievement gets easier when you stop obsessing over the finish line and start designing a process you actually enjoy? Jia Jiang shares ideas from Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things, arguing that lasting success comes from loving the work, choosing better stories, and turning big goals into simple repeatable actions.

Pick up a copy of his book on Amazon or listen to their big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by IM8, Get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order when you use code NBI at im8health.com/nbi

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

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

Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing

Adrian Owen, Think Before You Think: Understanding and Mastering Executive Function

Jack Raines, Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties

Julian Shapiro-Barnum, How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids

James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction

Casey Michel, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy

Michael Bond, Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind

Stuart Firestein, It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty

Matt Bloom, Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy

Claire Stapleton, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech

Lani Watson, Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers

Owen Fitzpatrick, Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times

The Big Idea: Biological weapons are illegal, but they exist anyway. Modern biotechnology has made them cheaper, easier, and more lethal than nuclear weapons.

Why It Matters:
A single engineered pathogen could trigger mass death and societal collapse. Governments already plan for this outcome, but the public doesn’t know that.

Try This Today: Read up on your local emergency preparedness plan — most people have never looked at one.

These ideas come from Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen. Annie is an investigative reporter who writes about war, weapons, U.S. national security, and government secrets. She was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in the History category and a contributing editor at Los Angeles Times Magazine. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Biological warfare is illegal.

Biological weapons are illegal and yet biological weapons exist. The biological weapons that exist today include genetically modified weapons designed for hypervirulence and human-to-human transmission. These are weapons with a high lethality rate and no known cure.

The use of such a biological weapon would trigger a global pandemic causing mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection and anarchy, leaving behind a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. Everyone in the business of preventing biological warfare knows this to be true.

2. There is no homeland defense against a large-scale biological attack.

Dr. Thomas Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel who designed and ran large-scale nuclear and biological war games for the Secretary of Defense, puts it starkly: In the event of a nuclear or biological incident, there are no solutions. There are only ways to mitigate extermination.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inner Propaganda by Owen Fitzpatrick. Your mind runs its own propaganda machine, manufacturing certainty and keeping you loyal to beliefs that no longer serve you. A social psychologist who studied influence firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, Fitzpatrick reveals a simple framework — Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense — for seeing through the distortions and leading with clarity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, and Tony Robbins.

3. Of all weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons pose the greatest overall threat.

Nuclear weapons are often considered the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. But biological weapons may pose a greater threat. While nuclear weapons require tightly controlled fissile materials such as uranium and plutonium, biological weapons have a dangerously low barrier to entry.

“Biological weapons can be developed far from the oversight and chain-of-command controls that protect nuclear arsenals.”

Biological weapons can be engineered by someone with minimal training in biology using widely available tools, including AI-enabled systems. Unlike nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, which remain under control of a national militaries, biological weapons can be developed far from the oversight and chain-of-command controls that protect nuclear arsenals.

The release of a biological weapon could trigger a global pandemic, leading to mass death, societal breakdown, civil unrest, and anarchy. Where are our safeguards?

4. Not all biological weapons are created equal.

There are many classes of pathogens. A pathogen is any organism that causes disease, including viruses and bacteria. But when it comes to biological threats, one characteristic matters above all else: transmissibility.

Some of the deadliest pathogens, such as Ebola, Marburg virus, and Lassa fever virus, spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. They are extraordinarily lethal and have limited treatment options, but they are not airborne. That distinction is key because by not being airborne, their ability to spread is far more limited.

Airborne transmission happens in two ways:

• Droplet transmission: The relatively large droplets of saliva, mucus, or other respiratory fluids expelled when a person coughs, sneezes, talks, or sings.

• Aerosol transmission: Microscopic aerosol particles can remain suspended in the air, allowing a pathogen to spread far beyond close personal contact.

Nature has already given us highly contagious airborne diseases, such as smallpox, chickenpox, and measles. But biotechnology has changed the game. One of the most controversial areas of modern virology is gain-of-function research. In these experiments, scientists working in high- or maximum-containment biosecurity facilities, known as Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4), deliberately alter viruses or bacteria to give them new capabilities. That can include spreading faster, infecting humans more easily, evading existing immunity, and surviving longer in the environment.

Proponents of gain-of-function experiments argue that by making a pathogen more dangerous, scientists can better understand how to defend against a catastrophic biological incident or attack. Critics say these experiments create unacceptable global catastrophic risk, blurring the line between legitimate scientific research and illegal biological weapons work. Laboratory accidents and containment failures have happened hundreds of times over the decades, raising concerns about what could happen if an enhanced pathogen escaped.

What happens if a genetically modified pathogen begins spreading uncontrollably?

Upwork — Visit⁠ upwork.com right now and post your job for free.

5. Devolution.

Devolution is a highly classified continuity-of-government program designed to keep the federal government functioning after a catastrophic biological incident or attack. While the program’s name is public, most details remain classified.

“Laboratory accidents and containment failures have happened hundreds of times over the decades.”

Through a series of interviews with Craig Fugate, President Obama’s former FEMA administrator, who approved the current devolution protocols, I learned unclassified details about devolution that have never before been reported. These include plans to move a small group of preselected officials into secure, classified bunkers, where they would try to maintain the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution even as the nation’s infrastructure collapses, society succumbs to anarchy, and a majority of citizens die. The government rehearses for this kind of biological war scenario. Fugate calls it “a maximum of maximum events.”

The very existence of this program and the fact that it is regularly rehearsed by the military, FEMA, and other federal agencies, exposes a deep chasm between what government officials prepare for and what the public grasps.

The Big Idea: Gratification is the direct, physical pleasure of touching, hearing, and noticing the world around you. It’s separate from happiness, and it’s available every day.

Why It Matters: Automation, apps, and touchscreens have quietly replaced thousands of small physical interactions with the world. Rebuilding contact with ordinary sensation brings gratification and joy back into your life.

Try This Today: Next time you fold laundry, wash a dish, or zip a jacket, slow down for ten seconds and pay attention to how it feels in your hands.

These ideas come from The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by . Ian is a professor of computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design at Washington University in St. Louis. A contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, he explores how technology, media, and the ordinary objects of everyday life shape our experiences. His award-winning games have been held in collections internationally, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and played by millions. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Happiness isn’t enough.

Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about happiness. We want to be good parents, good partners, good friends. We want meaningful work, healthy bodies, strong communities. Those are worthwhile goals, but they’re also enormous. They can take years to achieve, and even then, it’s hard to know whether you’ve succeeded. If happiness becomes the only measure of a good life, then most ordinary days can start to feel merely in service of some future payoff.

Another kind of pleasure that we almost never talk about is gratification. Gratification is immediate. It comes from direct encounters with the physical world—with the things your hands touch, your ears hear, and your eyes notice. Think about the last time you held a hot paper coffee takeout cup in both hands. Without even realizing it, you probably rotated it slowly, letting the ridges of the cooling sleeve brush across your fingertips while the warmth spread through your palms. Nothing important happened in that moment. But it probably felt good. That’s gratification. So is the sound of a zipper closing, or leaves crunching under your shoes.

We’ve been taught to think these experiences are background noise, while the “real” parts of life happen somewhere else. But those tiny moments aren’t distractions from a meaningful life; they’re part of what makes life meaningful in the first place.

Gratification doesn’t compete with happiness. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can still pursue all the big things that matter—love, family, purpose, accomplishment. Gratification simply gives you another way to experience contentment that’s available, not someday, but today. Every ordinary day contains hundreds of opportunities to feel more alive.

2. You lost touch with the physical world.

If gratification comes from our encounters with the physical world, why don’t we experience more of it? Because over the last century—and especially over the last couple of decades—we’ve slowly lost touch with that world.

Remember when you had to turn the restroom faucet on and off yourself? You judged how much water you wanted. You felt the resistance of the handle. Today, you wave your hands under a sensor. It doesn’t even work most of the time! But even if it does, it amounts to one tiny interaction that’s disappeared.

You used to punch the giant button on a vending machine. You used to turn the key in a car ignition. Hurl coins into tollway catch basins. Tear the perforated edges off computer paper. Tape theater tickets to the back of the cabinet door so as not to lose them. Those interactions have been replaced by sensors, apps, automation, touchscreens, and obsolescence.

“Optimizing life came at a hidden cost.”

None of those changes is bad on its own. In fact, many of them are improvements. Your smartphone is more convenient than carrying a map, a boarding pass, a wallet, and a camera. Paying tolls without stopping is genuinely great. But optimizing life came at a hidden cost. We lost thousands of small physical encounters that once connected us to the world around us. I call this process dematerialization. We still accomplish the same tasks, but we no longer feel them in quite the same way.

The result isn’t just that life gets easier. It also gets flatter. A rich variety of textures, sounds, movements, and objects is replaced by screens, automated systems, economic circumstances, and bureaucratic institutions. You didn’t choose any of those changes, and it’s not your fault that they happened to you.

The good news is that the physical world hasn’t disappeared. It still surrounds us. Every day you button a shirt, zip a jacket, wash a dish, pet a dog, sharpen a pencil, or open a window. Those experiences never went away, because each of us lives in a human body in the physical world for every moment of every day. Once you understand that this world is still offering itself, you can begin reconnecting with the ordinary experiences that make everyday life feel vivid again.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inner Propaganda by Owen Fitzpatrick. Your mind runs its own propaganda machine, manufacturing certainty and keeping you loyal to beliefs that no longer serve you. A social psychologist who studied influence firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, Fitzpatrick reveals a simple framework — Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense — for seeing through the distortions and leading with clarity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, and Tony Robbins.

3. Gratification is hiding in plain sight.

We’ve been trained to think that the meaningful parts of life are the extraordinary ones: a vacation, a promotion, a graduation, a wedding. And those moments do matter, but they don’t happen often. Wouldn’t you like to feel contentment every day?

Luckily, most of life is made of ordinary activities. Cooking dinner. Folding laundry. Walking the dog. Watering plants. Sweeping the floor. Tightening a screw. Painting a wall. Getting a haircut. None of these activities seem particularly important, but those ordinary moments are rich with sensory experience. They’re full of textures, sounds, smells, movements, and other small opportunities to collaborate with the physical world. The pleasure isn’t hidden in some special object or expensive experience. It’s inside the things you’re already doing.

“The pleasure isn’t hidden in some special object or expensive experience.”

One of the people I write about told me how unexpectedly gratifying it was to paint his basement. Not because he loved home improvement, and not because he was proud of the finished project, but because of the simple experience of working with the thick, squelchy masonry paint itself. The density of it. The shwak-chlupf sound it made when he spread it. The sight of its whiteness coating the red-brown brick. He couldn’t stop talking about it.

That story captures the whole idea. Gratification isn’t rare. It’s ordinary. The problem isn’t that there’s too little of it in the world. It’s that we’ve forgotten how abundant it is. Once you begin looking, you’ll discover that everyday life has been quietly offering these moments all along.

4. Learn to feel more gratified.

Gratification is something anyone can cultivate. That doesn’t mean buying special products or taking up elaborate hobbies. It doesn’t require moving to the countryside, quitting your job, or giving up your smartphone. One of the central premises of living a more gratifying life is that you don’t have to change your life very much at all. What you do have to change is your relationship to ordinary experience.

We’ve learned to treat everyday interactions as obstacles to get past on the way to something more important. The dishes need doing. The leaves need raking. The grocery shopping needs finishing. We rush through these activities because we’ve decided they don’t count as life. They’re just the price of getting to the good parts. But what if they are the good parts?

Learning to feel more gratified begins with giving yourself permission to inhabit these ordinary moments instead of trying to escape them. Linger in them slightly longer and they will open up like flowers. The next time you’re walking across a parking lot, listen to the sound your shoes make on the pavement. Feel the air. Note the temperature. None of that changes your day, but it changes how you inhabit it. Let yourself enjoy the sound of scissors during a haircut. The rhythm of chopping vegetables. The weight of a watering can. The crunch of gravel beneath your feet as you walk. The warmth of the summer sun on your face.

“Learning to feel more gratified begins with giving yourself permission to inhabit these ordinary moments.”

The goal isn’t to force yourself to notice everything, practice mindfulness, or perform gratitude exercises. It’s simply to remain open to the pleasures that ordinary life is already offering to your body rather than your brain. The more often you welcome those moments instead of dismissing them, the easier they become to recognize. Gratification isn’t another task to add to your schedule. It’s another way of experiencing the day you already have.

Momentous — If you want to try Momentous Signature Spec Creatine, head to⁠ livemomentous.com ⁠and use code IDEA for up to 35% off your entire first order.

5. The life you have is richer than you think.

Gratification is a way to live in your body rather than just your mind. Modern life encourages us to spend most of our time inside our own heads. We’re planning the future. Replaying the past. Solving problems. Managing responsibilities. Generating ideas. Manipulating abstractions. Trying to become happier tomorrow than we are today. And we have to do those things, but while we’re busy thinking about life, we sometimes forget to experience it.

Gratification pulls us back into the present—not in some mystical or meditative way, but in a physical one. It reminds us that we’re not just minds pursuing intangible goals. We’re also bodies moving through a real world, full of objects, places, people, weather, sounds, textures, and ordinary encounters that ask something of us in return. The ask is simple: acceptance.

Build a relationship with the physical world. That world, and all the small stuff in it, is your life. When you reconnect with that world, your circumstances may not change. You might still have the same job, commute, responsibilities, and worries. But those things no longer exhaust the meaning of your day. The ordinary moments in between them begin to matter again. The life you already have is richer than you think.

The Big Idea: The weather has an undeniable impact on your mind. Light, heat, rain, and the seasons shape mood and mental health every day.

Why It Matters: Extreme heat is becoming more common. Long winter darkness hasn’t gone anywhere. Most people treat both as background noise, not as factors in their mental health. Learning how the weather impacts your mood is key to happier living.

Try This Today: Get outside within an hour of waking. Morning light resets your body clock better than any other cue.

These ideas come from Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health by Trevor Harley. Trevor is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee in Scotland and the author of several books on psychology, language, and consciousness. Read on for five of his big ideas.

1. The weather affects mental health.

Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, is a form of depression with a seasonal pattern, usually appearing in autumn or early winter and lifting in spring. People with winter-pattern SAD often feel low, lethargic, sleepy, and hungry in the winter months. They may crave carbohydrates and put on weight. They feel as if someone has turned down the light inside their head.

I suffer from it myself, and perhaps that is not surprising. Where I live in east Scotland, in midwinter the sun creeps over one hill at about 9:30 in the morning and sinks behind another at about 3:00 in the afternoon. The day feels as if it has barely started before it is over.

This lack of winter light is an important cause of SAD. We need light to help set our biological clock: the internal timing system that regulates our circadian rhythms, especially the sleep-wake cycle. Morning light is particularly important in helping our bodies understand that the day has begun. Light is what scientists call a zeitgeber—literally a “time-giver”—an external cue that helps keep the body’s clock in step with the outside world. Bright light affects melatonin production, the hormone associated with sleepiness, and interacts with other systems involving cortisol and serotonin. The whole process is not a simple switch, but an intricate dance of hormones, neurotransmitters, sleep, light, genes, behavior, and expectation. When the dance goes wrong, our mood suffers.

“Morning light is particularly important in helping our bodies understand that the day has begun.”

I think of seasonal low mood as a continuum. At one end are people with severe, debilitating winter depression. In the middle are people with the “winter blues.” Then there are some people who are not bothered at all. Others even experience the reverse pattern: low mood, agitation, insomnia, or anxiety, in summer. While winter SAD may be linked to too little light, summer-pattern depression may involve too much light, too much heat, disrupted sleep, and a sense of being overwhelmed by the season everyone else seems to be enjoying.

Temperature matters too. Many of us function best in moderate conditions, around 21°C, or 70°F. When it becomes very hot, mental health can suffer. Hospital admissions for mental and behavioral disorders rise during periods of high temperature. Heat can worsen sleep, increase irritability, and make distress harder to regulate. Cold is more complicated. For some people, cold weather is invigorating. A cold, bright winter day can feel wonderfully clarifying. Some carefully controlled forms of cold exposure are being studied for possible psychological benefits. But cold can also be painful, frightening, and dangerous.

There is no one kind of weather that is good and another bad. Our minds are embodied—not floating in a sealed container. They are affected by light, heat, cold, wind, rain, pressure, humidity, and the rhythms of the seasons.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

2. Weather affects behavior in surprising ways.

There is a cultural stereotype that sunny, warm, dry weather is “good,” while cold, wet, cloudy weather is “bad.” But not everyone agrees. Some people love heat. Some dread it. Some people come alive in spring while some prefer autumn. Some feel soothed by rain. Some find wind unbearable.

Just as we differ in personality, we differ in what we might call weather personalities. This helps explain why research on weather and mood has sometimes produced inconsistent results. Seeking averages across everyone may miss the fact that the same weather has different effects on different people.

Still, some patterns are clear. Hot, humid weather tends to make people more irritable. It is associated with aggression and violence. When people are overheated, sleeping badly, and physically uncomfortable, self-control becomes harder. Some studies suggest that small increases in temperature are associated with measurable increases in violent crime. There is even data suggesting that hot weather can affect speech, making it simpler and less fluent.

“Hot, humid weather tends to make people more irritable.”

Weather also influences judgment. Sunshine can make us more expansive, sociable, and creative, while cloudy or rainy weather may make us more careful, analytical, and detail-focused. Consider a university open day: on a sunny day, prospective students may pay more attention to sports fields, social life, and attractive surroundings. On a gray day, they may pay more attention to libraries, laboratories, and academic facilities. The weather has not changed the university, but it has changed the frame through which people see it. Weather alters what seems important, what we notice, what we remember, and how we interpret other people.

Rain has its own psychology. The smell after rain, called petrichor, can be deeply evocative. For many people, it is emotionally powerful and may lift mood, though the science of exactly why remains complicated. The sound of rain can also be calming. A rainy day can give us permission to slow down, stay in, read, write, or just think. Intense wind, by contrast, has long been associated with irritability, restlessness, and unease. But then a gentle breeze on a hot day can bring enormous relief and delight. Our response to weather is not purely rational. It is shaped by language, memory, culture, and emotion.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inner Propaganda by Owen Fitzpatrick. Your mind runs its own propaganda machine, manufacturing certainty and keeping you loyal to beliefs that no longer serve you. A social psychologist who studied influence firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, Fitzpatrick reveals a simple framework — Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense — for seeing through the distortions and leading with clarity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, and Tony Robbins.

3. We can change our behavior.

Weather can make us feel like passive participants. It is something that happens to us. We cannot command the sun to shine or the wind to drop. But we are not helpless. We can learn our own patterns: notice what weather unsettles us, what restores us, and what makes us productive.

If you know heat makes you irritable, you can avoid important discussions on oppressive afternoons. If you know winter darkness lowers your mood, you can treat light as a daily necessity rather than a luxury. If you know rain helps you concentrate, you can use rainy days for careful work.

This is not pretending that bad weather is wonderful. It is a form of acceptance: seeing clearly what is happening, then choosing how to respond. We shape our environments, and our environments shape us. We cannot control the weather, but we control more than we think.

4. The season you were born in may matter.

People born at different times of year have experienced different conditions in the womb and in early infancy: different amounts of daylight and temperature, different infections circulating in the population, different maternal vitamin D levels, and different diets. It would be surprising if none of these things had any lasting effect.

Research has found associations between winter birth and later risk of some psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Most people born in winter will not develop these conditions, but the pattern is there at the population level.

“We are seasonal creatures before we are even aware of the seasons.”

There is also evidence linking season of birth with later temperament and personality traits. Again, the effects are small, but they remind us that we are seasonal creatures before we are even aware of the seasons. Light, temperature, infection, food, sleep, biology, climate, and weather are woven into development from the beginning.

Granola — If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to ⁠granola.ai/idea⁠

5. We should be in awe of the weather.

Some of my most vivid memories are weather memories. I remember being terrified as a child by the brilliant flash of lightning and the roar of thunder. I remember making a snowman with my uncles during the severe winter of 1962–63. I remember skies that have stopped me in my tracks, the strange silence after snow, rare clouds, crepuscular rays, and much more.

If we are just a little receptive, weather gives us awe for free. Awe is the feeling we have when we encounter something vast that exceeds our ordinary frame of reference. It can make us feel small, but not diminished. It makes us feel connected: to nature, time, other people, something larger than ourselves. Growing evidence shows that awe can benefit mental health.

The weather is one of the most accessible sources of awe. You do not need to travel to the Grand Canyon; you can simply look up. You can watch a cumulonimbus cloud building on a humid afternoon. Stand under a clear winter sky full of stars. See sunlight break through after rain. Watch snow transform an ordinary street into another world.

Living in better sync with the seasons does not mean romanticizing hardship. The weather is not always benign—it can be lethal. There is inconvenient weather and there is dangerous weather. But there is also meaningful weather, beautiful weather, restorative weather, and weather that teaches us about ourselves.

The Big Idea: Obsessing over outcomes doesn’t build ambitious lives. Loving the process does.

Why It Matters: Grind culture treats suffering through work as a virtue. It isn’t sustainable. People who love the process outlast people who only want to win.

Try This Today: Turn your biggest goal into one easy, repeatable action you can track daily.

These ideas come from Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things by . Jia is an entrepreneur and award-winning speaker whose TED talk has drawn millions of views. He’s the founder of Rejection Therapy, a project that helps people build mental resilience. Read on for five of his big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Easy over hard.

In the Greek mythology there is the story of Sisyphus. He was a cunning king who made Zeus angry when he cheated death, so Zeus cursed him to push a rock up a hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus would near the top, the rock would roll all the way back down. It’s a classic story of futility—effort without reward. Many people in the world feel like Sisyphus. They try but never win. Their lives repeat in a loop.

But does Sisyphus have free will? Was Sisyphus choosing to walk back down and push the rock back up again? If so, Sisyphus must have loved pushing rocks. In that case, Zeus built him the greatest exercise machine ever made. This version of the story would end with Sisyphus becoming the greatest rock pusher alive. There are people in this world who are like my version of Sisyphus. People like my type of Sisyphus are often at the top of their field and have a strong work ethic, and they didn’t hate their way to the top. They didn’t tolerate the climb. Their love of the work is more powerful than a desire for results.

Over a decade ago, I started a company and got rejected for funding. At first, I thought I should quit. Then it dawned on me that successful people don’t give up immediately after a rejection. My problem wasn’t securing an investor. It was my fear. So I fixed my fear. Most people try to fix fear the hard way, but I asked a different question: What if I could have fun with rejection? So I started a project called 100 Days of Rejection Therapy.

Every day I would ask for something absurd on purpose, trying to get turned down, and I would record myself to make a vlog out of it. My only goal was to have fun and laugh. The first day, I asked a stranger to borrow $100. The second day, I asked for a “burger refill” at a fast-food restaurant. Then I went to Costco and asked to use their intercom to speak to customers. Then I went to PetSmart to ask for a haircut—I asked for a German Shepherd cut. They said no, but I had a lot of fun.

“What if I could have fun with rejection?”

But then, people started to say yes to me. I asked to play soccer in someone’s backyard and they said yes. The next day, I asked to drive a police car and the officer said yes. I walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked them to make me donuts shaped like Olympic rings. The woman behind the counter said yes and also gave the creation to me for free. That video went viral. My vlog went viral. Nobody got mad because I wasn’t afraid. I was relaxed and having a great time. So people kept saying yes.

100 Days of Rejection Therapy was a blast. More than 10 years later, people all over the world are still doing rejection therapy. They’re doing it on TikTok or among themselves. If you try grinding your way through hard things, you might succeed, but it’s not sustainable. That’s how people fail. If you aim to have fun and let passion pull the work, then you can keep going for a long time and you will summit one top after another.

2. Think like an artist.

If you have never been to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, I highly recommend it. It’s not really about tea. It’s a sensual, even spiritual, experience. As the host makes tea, every sound and movement is deliberate. Every word is deliberate. They are completely present with you as if nothing else mattered and nothing else existed in that room. The Japanese have a phrase for it which translates into one time, one meeting. It means that even though you can meet that person again in the future, the meeting you are having now can never be replicated. That’s why it matters to give it your all right there in the moment.

I call this the artist’s mindset because artists take the moment the world hands them and makes the best out of it. They aren’t thinking about the future or results. They’re thinking about the process. They’re thinking about what’s in front of them. The rest of us do the opposite. We worry about the outcome. We get anxious. That anxiety makes us perform badly, so we don’t get the desired result anyway.

I used to have serious social anxiety. I’m a professional speaker, so I had to get on booking calls with potential clients, trying to impress them. Hopefully they would hire me to speak at their event, but I was nervous and a terrible salesperson. I kept trying to decipher every cue that could hint at their expectations and match it. One day, I stopped trying to impress anyone or get anything. I just decided that I want to be my best self: fully present, going deep, and speaking from the heart and with humor.

When I focused on the moment instead of potential results, I became a better conversationalist. I connected better. I sold better. Everything got better. My social anxiety went away. I am no longer afraid of talking to people. That’s the artist’s mindset. Be fully present and give your best so that there is no room left to be afraid.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Inner Propaganda by Owen Fitzpatrick. Your mind runs its own propaganda machine, manufacturing certainty and keeping you loyal to beliefs that no longer serve you. A social psychologist who studied influence firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, Fitzpatrick reveals a simple framework — Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense — for seeing through the distortions and leading with clarity. Praised by Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, and Tony Robbins.

3. The one action goal.

Jim Collins is one of the most influential business thinkers alive. He wrote books such as Good to Great and Built to Last. He’s wildly creative and prolific. People ask him, “How do you do it?” You’d expect some elaborate answers, but his answer is a stopwatch. Jim Collins figured out that the most productive people spend about 1,000 hours a year on genuinely creative work. Whenever he sits down to that kind of work, he starts a stopwatch. When he stops, he pauses the clock and logs the minutes in a spreadsheet. He checks the running total to make sure that it never drops below 1,000 hours per year. One of the most creative minds in modern business works like an accountant—clock in, clock out. That’s what I call the one action goal.

“Jim Collins figured out that the most productive people spend about 1,000 hours a year on genuinely creative work.”

Take a goal that’s enormous and complicated and vague and reduce it into one single action that you can repeat endlessly. Make sure it is an action that you can actually enjoy. If your goal is starting a business, your one action goal can be to have 500 conversations with potential clients, investors, or partners in the next year. If your goal is sleeping better, maybe your goal is charging your phone outside your bedroom for the next 30 days.

My one action goal for writing this book was a daily drive. My biggest enemy is distraction, so every day I would leave my phone at home, take only my laptop, and drive to a spot called Half Moon Bay on the Northern California coast. There’s no Wi-Fi, no data, just me, my computer, and the ocean in front of my windshield. I would ride in my car for hours. The goal was not to write a great book, just to make that drive every day. As a result, I wrote three to five times more and better out there at Half Moon Bay than when I sat in my office or at home. Whenever I have a big goal, I turn that into one action I can take and control.

4. Use yourself.

In rap music culture, there’s a tradition called beef. Two rappers take turns writing and releasing songs that attack each other. The whole world reacts the way an audience might spectate two boxers, except instead of watching jabs and hooks, they listen to lyrics. The most famous recent one was Drake versus Kendrick Lamar.

By the end of their beef, Kendrick Lamar was writing songs that were so good and vicious that Drake couldn’t answer. One track was so amazing that he won multiple Grammys and performed it at the Super Bowl halftime show. People have argued for years about why Kendrick Lamar won the battle against Drake. Maybe he’s just a better rapper? He probably is, but Drake loves winning. He loves results, charts, trophies, and parties. Kendrick Lamar, on the other hand, just wants to be at home with his wife and kids and writing songs is his passion. If you get in a boxing match with someone who loves boxing more than winning, you’re probably not going to win that fight. The people who love the process tend to get the best results.

I grew up in Beijing, China. I saw Bill Gates speak when I was a teenager, and I decided then that I would be a tech entrepreneur who builds companies that change the world. I chased that dream for more than 20 years. I loved the idea of building a company, but I never loved the actual work of it. Raising money, hiring, firing, and running the operation were not compatible with my personality. What I loved was writing. Every time I wrote an email to customers or teammates, I felt a rush. I didn’t want to stop. It felt like the thing I was meant to do. I finally asked myself: Why am I chasing someone else’s dream? Why did I need to be Bill Gates?

There’s a famous saying that asks, who were you before the world told you who you’re supposed to be? I take it one step further, asking, who were you before you told yourself who you were supposed to be? That person is still inside you. Let your dream be something that comes out of you, rather than something that is installed into you. I stopped trying to build a company. I became a writer and I couldn’t be happier or more fulfilled. Your personality, your affinities, and the things you can’t help loving are your biggest assets. Use them. Use yourself.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

5. Tell yourself a better story.

My first car was a 1999 Toyota Corolla. I loved that car. The first day after getting it, I was driving home and approaching an intersection. The light turned yellow. I had plenty of time to go through the intersection. In fact, I was too close to the line to brake comfortably anyway, so I kept going. But a car was coming the other way, wanting to turn left. He started honking, flashing his lights, practically screaming at me through his windshield, telling me to stop so he could make his left turn. I stopped, and he turned, but I sat there stewing. Why was this guy so rude? That was dangerous. He should have waited. It was my right of way. What a jerk. I remember my feelings vividly even though it was over 25 years ago.

“Everything that happens to us happens twice.”

However, when I think about that event nowadays, I tell myself a completely different story. What if he was rushing home? What if someone in his family had a medical emergency? What if he had a terrible day? What if he was scared of getting fired? If any of that were true, then I hope whatever he was racing toward turned out okay. Same intersection, same man, same day, but a different story makes me feel something completely different.

Everything that happens to us happens twice. The first time is the actual event. The second time is the story we tell ourselves about what it meant. The second one shapes your life far more than the first. You get rejected. You can tell yourself you weren’t good enough. That is one version of the story. Or you can tell yourself that your quest will surely take five rejections, so you’re one rejection closer to success.

The stories we tell ourselves powerfully shape how we see our own flaws. I had real ambition, but I also had flaws. I could get nervous, fearful. I couldn’t focus. I had ADHD. I have a speech impediment. I could have told myself those things disqualify me from going after my dreams. Instead, I decided these so-called ‘flaws’ were my assets. If I can build my own system around those flaws, then maybe I can share tools for others to overcome those same flaws. I could write books about those tools, and I just did. My flaws turned out to be my greatest treasures.

Wherever you are, whatever has happened to you, whatever predicament you are in right now, those are just events. It’s the stories you tell yourselves afterward that either diminish or elevate you. So tell yourself a better story.

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

As always, we invite longlisted authors to create a “Book Bite”—a fifteen-minute audio recording where they share five big ideas from their book. Picture striking up a conversation with someone at a neighborhood block party…only they happen to be a brilliant nonfiction author. You can listen to Book Bites on the Next Big Idea app.

And here are the August 2026 must-reads…

Personal Development

• How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids by Julian Shapiro-Barnum. View on Amazon

• Too Sensitive: Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply by Sasha Hamdani. View on Amazon

• A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir by Virginia Eubanks. View on Amazon

• Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers by Lani Watson. View on Amazon

• What If Anger Is the Answer?: A Harvard Marine’s Guide to Shaping Aggression by Mike LeBlanc. View on Amazon

  ---

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

Health & Wellness

• Brain Defenders: Harness the Power of Your Immune Cells to Protect Your Brain for Life by David Perlmutter. View on Amazon

• Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy by Matt Bloom. View on Amazon

• Aligned: The Data-Driven Guide to Performance, Recovery, and Human Potential by Kristen Holmes. View on Amazon

• It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty by Stuart Firestein. View on Amazon

• The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction by James Crawford. View on Amazon

Download the Next Big Idea App to enjoy “Book Bite” summaries of hundreds of groundbreaking books like these:

Career & Habits

• Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties by Jack Raines. View on Amazon

• Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech by Claire Stapleton. View on Amazon

• Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment by Paul Osterman. View on Amazon

• Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop by Itamar Shatz. View on Amazon

• Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts. View on Amazon

Read on for the rest of the list…

Read more

How can you just do things?

Why do some people seem to create opportunities wherever they go while others spend years waiting for the right break? According to — lawyer turned poker player turned drug addict turned CEO of a $3B foundation — the difference isn’t luck. It’s the ability to question assumptions, reject the default path, and realize the world is far more malleable than it seems.

In this episode, Rufus and Cate explore what it really means to become a high-agency person — a.k.a. someone who just does things. Together, they unpack why ambition isn’t the same as agency, how fear of embarrassment and an obsession with hard work hold us back, and why curiosity, unconventional thinking, and expanding your “surface area for luck” are the keys to creating extraordinary opportunities.

Cate’s new book, You Can Just Do Things, is out now. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How can you achieve true tranquility and authenticity?

Lasting wellbeing isn’t about finding the perfect advice or transforming your life overnight. It’s about practicing small evidence-based habits that fit your unique life. Matt Bloom is a social psychologist and emeritus professor of business at the University of Notre Dame where, for almost thirty years, he studied the wellbeing of people who work in the helping and healing professions. He is cofounder of Ritual, a mobile app that offers a living library of evidence-based wellbeing practices.

Check out five key insights from his new book, Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy on the Next Big Idea app.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What are the best tools to improve your life?

You don’t need hundreds of self-help ideas—you need the right techniques. Nearly every effective approach to personal growth can be traced back to just 12 core strategies that give you a practical framework for improving your life.

Below, Jeremy Stevenson and Spencer Greenberg share five key insights from their new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist. Spencer is a psychology entrepreneur and mathematician who is founder and CEO of ClearerThinking.org.

Pick up a copy of their book on Amazon or listen to their big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

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

Trevor Harley, Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health

Annie Jacobsen, Biological War: A Scenario

Flyn, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness

Spencer Greenberg & Jeremy Stevenson, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life

Why It Matters: The design and architecture fields remain roughly 80% male, so products and spaces keep defaulting to a male standard. The result is a world that treats women’s discomfort, and sometimes their safety, as an afterthought.

Try This Today: Pick one everyday object—a bag, a tool, a seatbelt, a chair—and ask who it was actually designed for.

These ideas come from Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right by . Karen spent decades as a designer for globally recognizable brands like Nike and Reebok, and today works as an activist focused on ending gender bias in the built world. Read on for five of her big ideas.

1. “Shrink it and pink it” and other foolish ideas.

I don’t remember exactly when I heard it for the first time. Certainly, it was early in my design career—before Nike. In all likelihood, I was a young, impressionable college student when I heard the insidious little earworm first: “Shrink it and pink it.” Don’t let the cuteness fool you. It’s a euphemism for biased design and a blatant lack of consideration for women. Unfortunately, it’s a common phrase in the lexicon of design and marketing jargon, and often one that manifests as a legitimate strategy whereby a product originally designed for a male user is made smaller and in a stereotypically feminine color, like pink, to become viable to female consumers.

There exists a spectrum of gendered design examples in the built world—what we wear, use, and what surrounds us—that have resulted in consequences that range from insulting to deadly. Although shrinking something shows an acknowledgment of differences between male and female bodies, women are not just smaller men.

“Shrink it and pink it” doesn’t consider the user at all, failing to respect and address the distinct anatomical and functional needs of women. This all-too-common tactic, along with other foolish ideas that ultimately ignore women during the design process, from “unisex” apparel to menstrual products designed by men, manifests in products that are misleading, compromising, and undignified. “Shrink it and pink it” is not merely a flawed approach to product design; it is emblematic of a broader systemic issue that reduces women’s experiences to afterthoughts, and worse, commodities. The result is a daily reality where women are conditioned to accept less: less functionality, less dignity, less confidence. Each time our bodies meet a built world that doesn’t fit, we pay a price.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Karen herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

2. Thought it had to be this way.

We seldom notice the physical contortion that is constantly required and tolerated by women to get through the day. It’s everywhere: the woman struggling to reach and hold on to the strap on the moving subway car; the corporate attorney changing her gait to avoid blisters from her heels; any woman choreographing her every move inside a public restroom stall, accommodating a space designed to be barely sufficient. We fail to scrutinize these daily discomforts and instead accept them as more of life’s subtle disappointments. But they whisper to us in tenuous ways.

The distraction caused by an ill-fitting built world has a tangible consequence: headspace that would otherwise be focused on a goal or fulfilling one’s potential is wasted on silly workarounds. This is a headspace that our male counterparts have available to them. I call this the headspace gap. It perpetuates the man-made world, and it is a product of design.

“Headspace that would otherwise be focused on a goal or fulfilling one’s potential is wasted on silly workarounds.”

I’ve spent decades collecting anecdotes and evidence about gender bias in product design, focusing largely on products and environments that cater to male end users while leaving women behind, as well as the systems that enable and perpetuate those designs. Most of those products neglect women because they are designed first and foremost by and for men, occasionally with a last-minute “Hail Mary” size or color adaptation to make it more viable for women. What would a world look like if women didn’t have to expend time and energy on workarounds? If women’s voices were heard at the design table? I believe it would look quite different. More productive, happier. Safer. But if you still need convincing, let’s raise the stakes.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

3. Labor pains.

Danger is inherent to life, but it exists in greater quantities and higher frequencies for women. My parents started a roofing company in the northwest corner of Indiana in 1960. They were first-generation Greek Americans who grew up with very humble beginnings. Both worked hard, but my dad did the physical labor of roofing in the cold days of winter and in the brutally hot days of summer. I remember a photo from when he was still employed by another roofing company in which he was standing near his truck, his arm in a sling. The kettle that kept the tar boiling hot, at over four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, had splashed onto him and covered his arm as he lowered the hundred-pound brick of asphalt into the tar-filled kettle. He kept working because he didn’t want to lose the wage. When he went to see the doctor at the end of the day, the hardened tar was still on his arm. Years later, he told me the doctor had told him that leaving the hardened tar on his injured arm had been a good thing because it protected the wound. I believed him then, but I don’t believe it now. The fact that he was in this dangerous situation in the first place is something we wouldn’t accept today. My dad was proud that when he opened his own company, it was a union operation that worked to secure a living wage and safe conditions for everyone. And they were all men then.

I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, but I maintain the deepest respect for the trades. Our world can’t operate without them. A shortage of labor in the skilled trades compromises the ability to rebuild—from paving the roads we travel to constructing and maintaining the roofs over our heads. To overcome this challenge, we must embrace a workforce that has historically been absent from these essential, well-paying jobs.

Women represent an immense and largely untapped pool of available talent. The trades remain highly male-dominated. Women still make up only 10 percent of construction workers in the U.S. in 2024, and although 10 percent isn’t a lot, it does equal 1.2 million women. This trend of women joining the field will need to continue to grow in order to support the massive work on aging infrastructure needed in the U.S. and Europe. So we should make sure our 1.2 million and growing tradeswomen are empowered, supported, and safe—that their protective gear helps rather than hinders.

“There really is no excuse for failing to provide items that keep women safe, focused, and productive at work.”

Why, then, do only one-third of female industrial trade workers report access to female-specific PPE? Why do nearly all have challenges finding PPE that fits properly? Why aren’t employers providing them with the right gear? Claims of volume discounts and inefficiencies are no longer tenable. There really is no excuse for failing to provide items that keep women safe, focused, and productive at work. Whether safety boots, safety harnesses, earplugs, or earmuffs—if PPE is not worn and worn right, it endangers female workers. My dad’s accident, which left him scarred, probably wouldn’t happen to men today. But why can’t we say the same for women?

4. Scarcity by design.

How does this man-made world get built in the first place? And why does it fail women? It’s not only about the actual products and places we create; it’s about the invisible fabric of societal norms and expectations, especially who holds the power to design and build. Many people believe that the professions of design, architecture, and engineering today are more equitably split between the sexes, and that we have more equality and equity than what really exists. We’ve certainly made progress, but equality in these fields lags behind other stereotypically male professions like medicine, law, and software engineering.

Female creatives experience a double bind: having to navigate both the ingrained gender biases of a workplace that still operates far too often as a “boys’ club” and the broader tension between creative innovation and technical pragmatism. Like me, those who rise to leadership encounter a triple bind: facing bias as a woman, as a creative, and as a leader—a role where women are judged more harshly, compensated less, and offered fewer opportunities. These biases compound into barriers that are too often insurmountable, diminishing the impact of female designers. Their perspectives are systematically eroded and become invisible in the structure of a built world, which remains inhospitable toward women, dismissive of their needs, and at worst outright dangerous. It should come as no surprise that with approximately 80 percent of practicing industrial designers and licensed architects being men, studios employ a homogeneous, primarily white male approach to problem-solving and innovation.

With the promotion pipeline still favoring men at twice the rate, even if female designers remain in organizations, they are unable to make changes, affect decisions, or contribute their much-needed perspective in lasting ways. Talented female design leaders are being left behind in compensation, in promotions, and in opportunities. This workplace bias leads to women exiting the field, perpetuating the cycle of inequality. Slowly but surely, women internalize that they do not belong at that table. Women are still challenged with solving for the fundamentals—getting through the door in the first place—when our world deserves our focus on bigger challenges. The women bringing parity to design professions take giant leaps of faith every day. There are too few of us, and we are spread too thin. Too many of us, still, are “onlies”—maybe no longer in industries or at companies, but definitely among teams. It is a difficult place to survive, let alone thrive, and often an impossible place from which to challenge the status quo.

Upwork — Visit⁠ upwork.com right now and post your job for free.

5. The end of average.

Women and men inhabit the same world, yet it doesn’t suit them both equally. Women may not always notice the extent to which their physical ecosystem is ill-fitting, as they’ve become so accustomed to discomfort that it is accepted as fact. As a designer, I know it doesn’t need to be this way. Opportunities for improvement abound once we recognize that one size does not fit all, acknowledge women are not simply smaller men, and stop minimizing their distinct physicality. The promise of a safe, hospitable, and comfortable built world starts with dismissing the myth that designing to a male standard is sufficient.

“Progress for women won’t come from denying difference, but from embracing it.”

In an era characterized by rapid technological progress, we’re no longer constrained by the methods of measure that were established decades ago and are still in use today. But dismantling the persistent “law of averages” –the tendency to treat the male body as the default, or the “happy medium” when setting standards for physicality, design, and performance—continues to be an uphill battle. The widespread belief that “one size fits most” is often treated as objective truth, when in fact it reflects and reinforces a male-centered norm. The good news is that norms are not fixed. When new evidence disrupts accepted truths, belief systems can shift and the built world that rests on them. To build a more hospitable world for women, we must definitively acknowledge there is no standard or “happy medium” for human body dimensions.

Messages of women’s empowerment shaped my own life. Like many women, I’ve experienced moments of true empowerment, and I’ve also watched progress slip away. But there is no speech, protest sign, or knitted pink cap that can erase the physical differences between women and men. Progress for women won’t come from denying difference, but from embracing it.

The challenge facing us is reconciling the importance of gender equality and equitable treatment while acknowledging the biological and biomechanical differences that inform the design of the built world. This does not mean that female bodies should be valued any differently from men’s—quite the opposite: they should be valued equally, which demands design that accounts for their specific realities. Only with this understanding can we accept that biological and biomechanical differences are real without reinforcing harmful stereotypes, power imbalances, and social inequality. Understanding that will awaken a movement to end “average.”

The Big Idea: Sleep isn’t a skill you master. It’s a biological process that works best when you stop trying to control it.

Why It Matters: Sleep culture has turned rest into a performance metric. Trackers, supplements, and rigid rituals promise control, but they often build the very anxiety that disrupts sleep. Understanding sleep as a resilient, adaptive system removes the pressure that can fuel chronic insomnia.

Try This Today: Get outside within 30 minutes of waking. Mornings, not nights, set the sleep clock.

These ideas come from Think Less, Sleep More by Stephanie Romiszewski. Stephanie is a sleep physiologist who served as the sleep expert on Channel 4’s Secrets of Sleep and the BBC’s Insomnia and Me, and has appeared on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett. Read on for five of her big ideas.

1. Sleep is a biological process, not a skill.

Sleep is not something you learn to do. Nobody teaches a baby how to sleep. Nobody practices sleeping. Sleep is a biological process, like breathing, digestion, or healing a cut on your finger.

Despite this, when people come to see me, they often feel as though they’ve somehow lost the ability to sleep. They tell me they are trying harder than ever, which tends to make it worse. Sleep is something your body already knows how to do. In fact, it is remarkably difficult to stop yourself sleeping indefinitely. The body will always try to find a way to sleep. It may not happen in the way you want, at the time you want, or for as long as you want, but the biological drive for sleep remains.

It can be helpful to stop viewing sleep as a performance. You are not trying to become good at sleeping. You’re trying to create the conditions that allow your sleep to become more predictable for your lifestyle.

“The body will always try to find a way to sleep.”

When people stop treating sleep as a skill they must master, they often feel an enormous sense of relief. For some, this mindset shift is enough to get them sleeping the way they want to again. Instead of asking, “How do I make myself sleep?” they begin asking, “What might be getting in the way of sleep?” That is usually a much more useful question.

2. Sleep anxiety is one of the biggest sleep problems we have created.

Many people assume that worrying about sleep is a natural consequence of not sleeping. What I see in clinic is often the opposite. The worry becomes part of the problem.

You might have a few disrupted nights because of stress, illness, a new baby, menopause, work pressures, or any number of normal life events. Initially, the sleep disruption is understandable. The difficulty comes afterward. They begin monitoring sleep closely. They start checking the clock. They calculate how many hours remain before morning. They become convinced that tomorrow will be ruined if they don’t fall asleep soon. Sleep slowly becomes something that needs to be controlled and protected.

The irony is that the more important sleep becomes, the harder it often is to achieve. The brain starts treating the bedroom as a place of alertness and monitoring rather than rest. Sleep becomes associated with pressure rather than safety.

At the same time, we are surrounded by messages telling us that every aspect of sleep needs optimizing. We are told to track it, improve it, and worry about it. Many people end up spending a lot of time thinking about sleep, spending money on sleep, and manipulating all sorts of other behaviors to sleep. What began as a desire to improve sleep can eventually create insomnia, anxiety, and a surprisingly fragile relationship with sleep and life itself.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Stephanie herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

3. Your morning matters more than your evening.

When people want better sleep, they almost always start by looking at bedtime. They ask about supplements, herbal teas, strict routines, sprays and gadgets, breathing exercises, or elaborate rituals. What often surprises them is that I spend much more time talking about mornings and asking them to liberate themselves from all this other noise.

Sleep is strongly influenced by two biological systems. One is sleep drive, which builds the longer we are awake. The other is circadian rhythm, our internal body clock. Both systems are heavily influenced by what happens after we wake up. Getting up at a reasonably consistent time, exposing ourselves to light, moving around, and beginning the day sends powerful signals to the brain about when it should be awake and when it should prepare for sleep later.

“Many of the foundations of good sleep are laid during the day rather than in the final 30 minutes before bed.”

I am not suggesting that mornings need to become another perfect routine. Quite the opposite. What I want people to understand is that many of the foundations of good sleep are laid during the day rather than in the final 30 minutes before bed. When we focus exclusively on bedtime, we have little influence over sleep quality, duration, or wake-ups. And when the evening rituals do not work, it only feeds into this idea that you have lost the ability to sleep, when really the advice might be what’s a little topsy-turvy. Sleep starts when we wake up.

4. A good sleeper is not someone who sleeps perfectly.

One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What do you think a good sleeper looks like?” The answers are usually very similar.

Someone who:

• Falls asleep quickly.

• Sleeps through the night.

• Never wakes up.

• Gets exactly the right amount of sleep every night.

• Wakes feeling refreshed.

The problem is that this person doesn’t exist. Even healthy sleepers wake up during the night. Even healthy sleepers have poor nights. Even healthy sleepers sometimes take longer to fall asleep. They don’t become alarmed by normal sleep experiences.

To me, a good sleeper is somebody who trusts sleep. Somebody who understands that sleep can vary from night to night without that meaning anything has gone wrong. They don’t assume tomorrow is ruined because they had a difficult night. They don’t feel compelled to compensate, fix, or analyze every fluctuation. Good sleepers tend to have a flexible relationship with sleep rather than a perfect one and they have fairly consistent sleep behaviors which focus on their morning routine.

This isn’t to undermine those who have sleep disorders, and indeed there is evidence-based treatment for those, but in order for us to try to avoid them and not fear sleep, it is helpful to understand normal sleep.

Granola — If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to ⁠granola.ai/idea⁠

5. Sleep is flexible and adaptable.

Variation is built into sleep. Sleep changes across the week. It changes with age. It changes during pregnancy, parenthood, illness, stress, grief, travel, and major life events. You will not sleep the same at 50 as you did when you were 20. It changes because we are human beings living human lives. Yet many people expect sleep to be identical every night. When it isn’t, they assume something is wrong.

“The sleep system will alter itself to give you what you need.”

Variation is often evidence of a healthy and adaptable sleep system. Your sleep is constantly responding to your environment and your needs. If it didn’t do this, we would not be able to recover from illness and things like jet lag. Some nights you may need more deep sleep. Some nights you may need more dreaming sleep. Some nights may feel lighter or more fragmented. That doesn’t necessarily mean sleep has failed. The sleep system will alter itself to give you what you need.

You can strengthen your sleep baseline with a strong morning routine, but even this will not stop the normal variations of sleep. The more this is understood, the less likely sleep variation turns into chronic insomnia. One of the most reassuring things is that good sleep does not mean sleeping perfectly every night. It means having a sleep system that can adapt to life’s ups and downs.

The Big Idea: Data is one of humanity’s oldest tools for governing people. Every system built with it reflects choices about who is seen, who is ignored, and who holds power.

Why It Matters: Governments now depend on private companies to run core public functions: cloud storage, AI, health records, national security infrastructure. Public authority and corporate power are increasingly the same thing. Who controls data infrastructure is no longer an abstract policy question. It shapes who has power over daily life.

These ideas come from Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam. Roopika is a professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. Read on for 5 of her big ideas, or listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Roopika herself—in the Next Big Idea App.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Data built civilization.

Most people think data began with computers. In reality, data is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. Nearly five thousand years ago, someone named Kushim carefully recorded deliveries of barley on a clay tablet in ancient Mesopotamia. Kushim wasn’t a king or a priest. He was an accountant—and he is the first person with a name in recorded history.

Usually, we imagine history beginning with rulers, battles, or monuments. Instead, the first named person is someone doing paperwork. Kushim was tracking grain because survival in the ancient world depended on it. Cities needed to know who had contributed food, how much was stored, and how it would be redistributed. Without records like these, large settlements simply couldn’t function.

We tend to think of data as something abstract or digital. But from the very beginning, data was about solving a practical problem: how to coordinate thousands of people who no longer know one another personally? The answer was creating records that could outlast human memory. And that meant inventing new ways to record information.

We often think writing emerged so people could tell stories or preserve great works of literature. But some of humanity’s earliest surviving documents didn’t contain poetry or philosophy. They were inventories, receipts, and tax records. Writing emerged because growing societies needed reliable ways to keep track of grain, land, labor, and trade.

Once people could record information outside the human mind, they could coordinate increasingly complex forms of cooperation. Those records made it possible to collect taxes, manage trade, and govern growing cities. Data helped make civilization possible. Computers transformed the speed and scale of data. But they didn’t invent it.

2. To count is to govern.

One of the most important political decisions any society makes is deciding what to count.

After invading England in 1066, William the Conqueror ordered a massive survey of nearly every village, field, animal, and household in his kingdom. The result became known as the Domesday Book. It wasn’t created out of historical curiosity. It was a tool for taxation, administration, and control.

That pattern repeats throughout history. Colonial governments counted populations. Property records determined land ownership. Tax rolls established obligations. Every system of recordkeeping makes some people visible and others invisible.

“One of the most important political decisions any society makes is deciding what to count.”

The British Empire took this logic to an extraordinary scale in colonial India. Officials counted people, mapped land, classified castes, recorded religions, and cataloged languages. Those records didn’t simply describe Indian society. They reshaped it. Categories like caste that had once been fluid became fixed in bureaucratic forms, influencing political representation, access to resources, and even how communities came to understand themselves.

Counting changes the world it measures. Data has never simply described society. It has helped govern it.

3. Crises create data revolutions.

Many of the databases we rely on today were born during moments of crisis.

During the Great Depression, the United States realized it couldn’t solve unemployment because it didn’t even know how many people were unemployed. New surveys and statistical methods became essential for understanding the economy.

A few years later, the creation of Social Security required the federal government to identify and keep track of millions of Americans over the course of their entire working lives. That challenge demanded entirely new administrative systems.

World War II accelerated those developments even further. Governments developed new ways to coordinate troops, supplies, and logistics across continents. During the Cold War, they expanded those capacities again to model nuclear conflict, forecast economic trends, and support scientific research.

Again and again, crises transformed how societies gathered information—and how governments exercised power. The information age wasn’t simply the product of technological innovation. It was also built through political responses to extraordinary moments.

“Crises transformed how societies gathered information—and how governments exercised power.”

We often talk about technological change as though it unfolds naturally. History tells a different story. The biggest leaps in our information infrastructures often happened because societies confronted problems they couldn’t solve with the tools they already had. Technology mattered, but so did politics, public investment, and collective decisions about what information governments needed in order to act. The data technologies being used today are products of those choices, not simply the inevitable result of scientific progress.

4. Data is not objective.

When we discover bias in a tool like ChatGPT, it’s tempting to think the problem began with the algorithm. But AI is built on data, and data carries history.

Take the Dewey Decimal System. In 1876, a young librarian named Melvil Dewey set out to organize all human knowledge into a single classification system. It became one of the most successful information systems ever created and is still used in libraries around the world.

The categories looked like objective numbers, but they reflected Dewey’s own worldview. Christianity occupied seventy detailed classifications, while other religions were compressed into a single catch-all category. Western philosophy and science received expansive treatment, while Indigenous knowledge and many non-Western traditions were pushed to the margins.

Every system of classification reflects human choices about what matters and how the world should be organized. Artificial intelligence works the same way. Before an AI system can recognize patterns, it depends on categories, labels, and datasets that people have created. AI inherits centuries of human decisions about how to organize knowledge and classify the world.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

5. The new data empire is corporate.

Every empire has had its signature technology. All roads led to Rome. The British Empire had the telegraph. Today’s empires run on data.

For most of history, governments built and controlled the information infrastructures that organized public life. Today, many governments depend on private corporations to store public records, provide cloud computing, develop artificial intelligence, and build the digital infrastructure behind everything from healthcare to education to national security.

Governments increasingly rely on companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Palantir to perform functions that were once carried out primarily by the state. In many countries, public institutions can no longer function without technologies designed and maintained by private corporations.

“The future of democracy depends on who controls the data infrastructure behind it.”

That represents one of the biggest political shifts of our time. You often hear that technology companies are the new empires because they extract data the way earlier empires extracted land, minerals, or other natural resources. But corporations aren’t simply collecting enormous amounts of data. They are increasingly building, owning, and operating the technologies that nations use to exercise political power. As countries outsource more of their core administrative functions to private companies, public authority becomes increasingly entangled with corporate power.

The defining question of our moment isn’t simply how much data is being collected. It’s who controls it, who profits from it, and who is accountable when tech companies have a direct hand in governing us. The future of democracy depends on who controls the data infrastructure behind it.

History reminds us that none of this was inevitable. It is the result of people making political choices. And if people built these systems, people could change them. That means holding political leaders accountable for their choices about which companies gather our data, who regulates them, whose interests they serve, and what kind of digital future we want to build.

The Big Idea: Nearly every effective self-help technique falls into one of just 12 broad psychological strategies. Learn these levers, and improving your life becomes a lot easier.

Why It Matters: Self-help can be overwhelming. Countless books, podcasts, and therapies each push their own vocabulary, much of which repeats the same handful of ideas under new names. Without a map, it’s nearly impossible to tell which techniques are real and which are repackaged filler.

Try This Today: Pick one hard feeling you’re carrying right now. Write down the automatic thought behind it, then ask: is this actually true, or just how it feels? Rewrite the thought to be more accurate. That’s cognitive restructuring (one of the tools taught in the book) in under five minutes.

These ideas come from The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life by Jeremy Stevenson and Spencer Greenberg. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist. Spencer is a psychology entrepreneur and mathematician, and founder and CEO of ClearerThinking.org. Read on for 5 of their big ideas.

Get the best new nonfiction sent right to your door.

Join now!

1. Self-help is overwhelming, but you can simplify it by focusing on the techniques.

The other day, I was browsing the self-help aisle of an airport bookstore. There was advice on everything:

• How to build good habits.

• How to transform pain into purpose.

• How to stop sweating the small stuff.

• How to have the courage to be disliked.

• How to reset your vagus nerve.

And it’s not just books. There are millions of podcast episodes and YouTube videos with neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches, and other gurus telling you how to improve your life. On top of all that, there are dozens of therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy, that can also be used as self-help.

What are we supposed to do with this ocean of information? How do we make sense of it all and figure out what’s useful? We propose that you focus on the most important ingredient of self-help: the techniques.

Self-improvement resources contain various ingredients, like theory, stories, research, and case studies. But the techniques matter most. They’re the answer to the million-dollar question: what do you actually do to fix your problem? What do you do to reduce your anxiety or depression? What do you do to improve your happiness or productivity? What do you do to deepen your relationships?

Techniques matter because you control them directly. You can’t necessarily choose your feelings, beliefs, or circumstances, but you can always choose to try a technique. And effective techniques cause change—they can produce the outcomes you want, like greater fulfillment or stronger relationships.

2. Effective techniques can be surprisingly hard to find.

When I was younger, one pivotal discovery in my life was the concept of shame. It was a single word for an emotion that captured so much about my deepest struggles: feeling inferior, inadequate, not good enough.

You can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon a book specifically on shame and how to overcome it. But that excitement didn’t last long. As I delved deeper into the book, all I found was page after page of theory—what shame is and what causes it. Even when I reached the final chapter on healing shame, there were no clear instructions on what to do.

It was a frustrating experience because I was left empty-handed. This is common in the self-help world. It can be hard to find effective techniques because they can be buried beneath piles of complex theory or scattered across different books and therapies.

“Even when I reached the final chapter on healing shame, there were no clear instructions on what to do.”

Sometimes, useful techniques are only known to therapists, or even worse, only known to a small number of therapists with a specific type of training. There’s no single place where you can find all the best techniques. Which means you’re likely unaware that highly effective techniques (that might perfectly match your circumstance) exist.

And even when you do have access to a promising technique, the instructions can be unclear or difficult to follow. You might be told to do things you can’t control, like “believe in yourself” or “stop thinking negatively.” Despite the abundance of self-help resources, almost no one knows the full range of effective techniques and how to apply them.

3. A lot of techniques are repackaged under different names.

Spencer and I have both had life-changing experiences from applying self-help techniques. We know firsthand the potential of good techniques. But we discovered that there’s a lot of overlap between self-help resources. You might have found this too. Once you get past the theory, stories, and motivational material, you often arrive at techniques that seem familiar.

You can even find this in therapies (which is where a lot of self-improvement techniques come from). When I was doing my PhD in clinical psychology, I was starting a placement in a PTSD clinic, and I was eager to learn about cognitive processing therapy. To my surprise, the core technique in cognitive processing therapy is the same as one of the core techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy. (The technique I’m talking about is cognitive restructuring, which involves reframing your thoughts to make them more accurate and helpful.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that this technique or those therapies don’t work. Far from it. Both cognitive processing therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy are gold-standard therapies. But this is a good example of the patterns in the self-improvement world. Even if the terminology differs, many techniques are repackaged or recycled. And the same techniques are often used for many different problems.

For example, cognitive restructuring, can be used to help nearly any difficult feeling, like depression, anxiety, shame, and even behavioral problems like procrastination. Or take mindfulness. Mindfulness can be used for many issues, from chronic pain to excessive worry. In the world of psychology, we call these techniques “transdiagnostic” because they can each be used to treat many different issues. There are a handful of techniques for a bucketload of problems.

4. All self-help techniques boil down to just 12 broad strategies.

After years of observing these patterns in self-help techniques, my coauthor Spencer and I decided to embark on a massive research project studying self-improvement resources. We went through famous books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Atomic Habits, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. We did this for less famous books, too. Every time we came across a technique, we extracted it to a database.

“After two years of research, exploring 106 self-help books, 23 therapies, and numerous journal articles, videos, manuals, and other materials, we hit a saturation point.”

We also studied the protocols for therapies like acceptance and commitment therapy, compassion-focused therapy, and schema therapy, extracting whatever techniques could be applied as self-help. That database grew until we had a list of nearly 500 techniques. After two years of research, exploring 106 self-help books, 23 therapies, and numerous journal articles, videos, manuals, and other materials, we hit a saturation point. We stopped finding meaningfully new techniques, only variations of ones we’d already captured.

From there, we began to synthesize. We carefully reviewed each technique and grouped them into categories based on their similarities. This is where we made the central discovery: All the hundreds of techniques fell into just 12 distinct categories. We called these categories “The 12 Levers” because they reflect the broad strategies for improving your life—the Levers you can pull to create change. By contrast, we use the word techniques to refer to the specific ways one can implement each Lever.

Take Lever 3: Actualize your Guiding Foundations—that’s the broad strategy, which is about acting in line with your values. One specific technique within this Lever is habit formation. Levers are the macro. Techniques are the micro.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

5. Knowing the 12 Levers can meaningfully improve your life.

When my coauthor Spencer was younger, he suffered from intense social anxiety. The mere idea of talking to a stranger would fill him with dread.

In his 20s, he decided to seek help. He saw a psychologist and learned a technique called exposure therapy. This involved gradually confronting his fears by doing challenges assigned by his psychologist. The challenges started simple, like asking strangers for the time. But they became increasingly outrageous, like walking up to random men in bars and politely asking for a hug. At first, these challenges filled him with terror, but remarkably quickly, they helped him overcome his social anxiety.

For me, my life changed when I read a book called A New Guide to Rational Living. The book taught cognitive restructuring, and it blew me away. It gave me a tool that reliably relieved my misery. The impact this book had on me is a big reason why I became a clinical psychologist in the first place. It showed me the power of a good technique.

“Different techniques will resonate in different situations and during different phases of life.”

But cognitive restructuring won’t work for everyone. Likewise, the technique Spencer used, exposure, won’t work for every problem. That’s why we need more than one technique.

I see this in my clinic. Certain clients gravitate toward cognitive techniques, like cognitive restructuring, whereas other clients gravitate toward physical techniques, like controlled breathing. Not only that, but different techniques will resonate in different situations and during different phases of life. I’ve been through phases where it really clicked to clarify my values, and other phases where it was more helpful to use attentional techniques like mindfulness. It’s valuable to have access to the full range of effective techniques.