The Next Big Idea Club Book of the Day Newsletter

1. Equanimity has been hiding in plain sight.

Equanimity shows up across traditions: Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, and secular ethics. Different languages and different frameworks point to the same human capacity. Equanimity isn’t exotic. It’s not something you have to import into your life. It’s already here.

Equanimity is basic to our nature. We share it with the natural world—it’s part of the same intelligence that regulates your body, keeps systems in balance, and moves every living organism toward homeostasis. It’s the ground we stand on, even when we don’t realize it.

What varies is not whether we have it, but whether we can access and cultivate it. And there are many ways in, including through:

· Faith traditions.
· Practices.
· Small cognitive reframes.
· Humor.
· Moments of awe.
· Communities that support and reinforce it.

You don’t have to get it perfect. It’s not a fixed state. It’s both a trait and a capacity that grows over time. Just by reading this Book Bite, your salience network has been primed toward equanimity, and it might just appear in that single moment when you need it most.

2. Equanimity is not indifference, passivity, apathy, or being calm.

This idea is one of the biggest misunderstandings. In truth:

· You can be excited and equanimous.
· You can be broken-hearted and equanimous.
· You can be fully engaged in the world, even fighting for change, and be equanimous. You can be calm, too. It’s just that equanimity isn’t only about being calm.

Think of Rosa Parks, sitting on that bus in Montgomery. Or the nineteen monks who walked for peace from Texas to Washington, D.C., in February of 2026—quiet, steady, and completely committed. Even their dog, Aloka, had over one million followers on social media. This is not disengagement. It’s the ability to stay present without collapsing or overreacting.

And this is where science is catching up. Psychologist Iris Mauss and her colleagues have found that people who try eliminating negative emotions—or relentlessly chase positive ones—are not healthier. They tend to have higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower well-being. Forcing ourselves to feel good doesn’t work.

Equanimity offers something different. It allows us to feel the full range of experience without dampening our zest for life. Because equanimity doesn’t come from feeling less. It comes from being able to feel more without getting lost in it.

3. Equanimity is about recovering more quickly from emotional reactions.

This is something scientists call affective chronometry—basically, how long does it take to return to baseline after you’ve been triggered. When I first encountered this in the research of Antoine Lutz and Richie Davidson, it surprised me. Highly experienced meditators (over 10,000 hours) weren’t numb emotionally. In many cases, they actually showed stronger initial reactions to provocative emotional stimuli than the rest of us.

But the difference is that they recovered faster. They didn’t stay stuck in the feeling. They didn’t ruminate. They didn’t spiral. And this idea has begun to appear in academic literature on equanimity. One early paper out of Harvard suggested that this capacity—how quickly we recover our balance—may be central to what defines equanimity.

So, equanimity isn’t about becoming unshakeable. It’s about becoming less sticky. You still feel everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—but you move through those states more fluidly. You come back more quickly and that changes everything because now the question isn’t, “Did I react?” It’s, “How long did I stay there?”

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

4. Mindfulness and equanimity are both the same and different.

I began teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1996, so I’ve been engaged with how mindfulness unfolded in the West for three decades. And having worked closely with Jon Kabat-Zinn, I can tell you that mindfulness was never just about paying attention. It was about how we pay attention, and that “how” is equanimity. Or, as Jon would say, paying attention non-judgmentally.

When I interviewed meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, I asked her to imagine a Venn diagram with one circle for mindfulness and another for equanimity. How much do they overlap? She said, “Completely.” In that sense, they’re the same. And at the same time, they’re different.

When you step outside the modern mindfulness movement and look across religious and philosophical traditions, you find equanimity everywhere—but not necessarily mindfulness as we define it today. In many religions, equanimity shows up as a kind of inner balance in the face of life’s ups and downs—the “worldly winds” of praise and blame, gain and loss.

When Moses Maimonides brought this idea into Jewish philosophy in the 12th century, he did it through a Sufi teaching, borrowing a story from a Sufi master. So, yes, equanimity is deeply embedded in mindfulness. It is also something that appears across many traditions, in different forms and languages.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Incogni. Protect your personal information online and get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan at incogni.com/nbi

5. Is the world on fire?

It can feel that way. With the overlapping crises we’re living through, it’s hard not to reach for extreme language. Sometimes it feels like no amount of hyperbole quite captures the mess we’re in. And yet, the constant language of outrage and alarm doesn’t help. In fact, it knocks us off balance, narrows our perception, and gates our cognition.

This is reinforced by the algorithms that shape what we see. Anger and outrage generate more engagement, so those are what get amplified and travel faster. But when we’re caught in that loop, we lose access to the capacities we need most: clarity, discernment, and effective action.

I saw this up close in California in 2020. My part of the state was on fire. We had so many evacuation notices that our bags remained packed by the front door for weeks. But the entire world was not on fire, and that distinction matters. Equanimity doesn’t deny reality. It helps us see it more clearly.

I had a conversation with former Congressman Tim Ryan about this—someone who has been in the middle of more than a few political firestorms—and what we kept coming back to was that if we lose our balance, we lose our effectiveness. Equanimity is not a retreat from engagement. It allows us to meet a difficult world without becoming distorted by it.

The Skill Nobody Teaches You: How to Not Know

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:53:25 GMT

The Big Idea: Uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve, it’s one of life’s inevitabilities. The people who handle it best don’t have more answers; they have better tools for functioning without them.

Why It Matters: We’re living through an era of compounding unknowns in our careers, our institutions, our technology, our politics. And yet our tolerance for ambiguity is shrinking. The gap between how uncertain the world is and how certain we demand to feel has never been wider. Learning to close that gap may be the most underrated skill of the moment.

Try This Today: Write down six “guiding principles” for your business, your relationships, or your life. While periods of uncertainty and crisis are unavoidable, a clear set of values can help anchor you.

These ideas come from How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers by Simone Stolzoff. Simone is an author and former design lead at IDEO whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and on the TED stage. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

1. Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty.

Picture a research study with two groups of participants. Group one was told they had a 50 percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock. Group two was told they had a 100 percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock. Who do you think would be more stressed?

You might assume group two—at least group one had a chance of getting off shock-free. But researchers from University College London found the opposite to be true. Participants who had a 50 percent chance of getting shocked felt far more stressed. It’s somehow more comfortable to expect the worst than deal with the worry of not knowing our fate.

In another study, researchers found that professional uncertainty takes a toll on our health similar to that of actually losing our job. We are biologically wired to avoid uncertainty. Think about it evolutionarily: if our ancestors heard a rustle in the bushes, but didn’t know the source of the sound, their uncertainty could have been lethal. But while avoiding uncertainty may have been adaptive in the jungle, today our discomfort with uncertainty can keep us paralyzed.

2. Find your anchors.

Certainty in some aspects of your life makes it easier to hold onto uncertainty in others. In your personal life, perhaps your anchors are a commitment to a person or a place. In your professional life, an anchor might be a commitment to your values or to serving a particular customer.

By clarifying the aspects of your business that will remain constant amidst all that is changing, you’ll be better equipped to navigate the unknown. A telling example comes from Airbnb. Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, handled losing 80 percent of his business at the start of the pandemic.

Chesky knew the pandemic would be a period of unprecedented uncertainty for the company. So, one of the first things he did was create a list of six guiding principles for himself:

· Be decisive.

· Act with all stakeholders in mind.

· Preserve cash.

· Be the hero, not the villain.

· Overcommunicate.

· Win the next travel season.

“In a crisis, you have to make principle decisions, not business decisions,” he said, reflecting on what he learned from the pandemic. “A business decision is a decision you make, predicting the best possible outcome. A principle decision is irrespective of the outcome.”

Principles became Chesky’s anchors as he steered the company through an uncertain future.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

3. Focus on the next right action.

In How to Not Know, I profile a crisis management expert named Meredith who gets brought into organizations when things fall apart. One particular story she told me stayed with me. A large manufacturing firm called her after there had been an accident in their factory that led to several employees getting seriously injured. When she arrived at the company headquarters, the energy among the executives was frenetic.

There was so much to do. They had to issue a press release, communicate with investors, check in with injured employees and their families, conduct safety inspections at the factory, plan when to resume production, talk to their insurance provider, and meet with current employees. The list went on and on.

Meredith got a giant piece of butcher paper and rolled it out over the long boardroom table. One by one, she made a list of everything that needed to be done. Getting it out of the executives’ minds and onto the paper helped the team turn their tasks from amorphous anxieties into clear priorities.

When faced with uncertainty, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, but when we separate what we can and can’t control, it allows us to start making progress. Instead of worrying about all that is unknown, we can focus on one task at a time, which in Buddhism is often called “the next right action.” By taking one next right action at a time, clarity emerges through the fog.

4. Choose curiosity over fear.

One reason uncertainty can be so uncomfortable is because our brains have a natural tendency to catastrophize. It’s a hallmark psychological finding that losing something feels worse than gaining something feels good. So, our natural inclination is to brace for the worst. But while uncertainty can be scary, it is also the birthplace of possibility. Nearly every scientific discovery, world-changing business, and mind-expanding piece of art began with someone’s willingness to engage with the unknown.

In moments when we perceive uncertainty as a threat, blood flows away from our brain to our body as we prepare to either fight or flee. Yet when we see uncertainty as an opportunity to gather more information, we enter what psychologists call approach mode—our blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to our brain. The terminology is apt. When we see uncertainty as threatening, we retreat. But when we’re able to turn toward uncertainty, we approach a new way of thinking.

Though uncertainty can be uncomfortable, we can choose to approach what we don’t know with a sense of curiosity instead of fear. Uncertainty gives our lives texture. Without uncertainty, there would be no mystery, serendipity, or surprise. We can’t know exactly how our lives will go, and therein lies the magic.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by 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. Row through the fog.

In the early 2010s, the gaming startup Tiny Speck was a darling of the tech industry. The company had raised $17 million. The launch of its first game, Glitch, was covered by international media, including The Guardian and the New York Times. Within months of launching, it had tens of thousands of active players.

Despite the external signs of success, the founder had a sneaking suspicion that the company was not on the right path. So, he did something that others might’ve seen as insane. Less than two years after launch, with millions of dollars left in the bank, he decided to shut the game down.

But instead of calling it quits, the founder decided to lean into the unknown. He offered to make his investors whole, downsized the team, and, with the remaining employees, got to work on a product in an entirely different industry.

While developing the game, the team had built a prototype for an internal messaging tool to help them collaborate. The founder decided to go all in on the messaging tool. That tool, Slack, became one of the fastest-growing enterprise software startups of all time. And its founder, Stuart Butterfield, was anointed as one of Silicon Valley’s most visionary entrepreneurs.

“I would love to say that we knew all the answers in advance,” Butterfield said, thinking back to his decision to shut down Glitch. “But the truth is that we discovered our product and opportunity, rather than planning for it.”

The moral of the story isn’t that all’s well that ends well, though the fact that Slack sold to Salesforce for nearly $27 billion wraps the case study up with a bow. The moral is that unless we are willing to face uncertainty head-on, we’ll never discover the possibilities awaiting us on the other side.

Butterfield’s story reminds me of a metaphor I learned while working at the design agency IDEO: being a leader is like sitting in a rowboat on a foggy lake. You can’t see far ahead or know precisely where you’ll end up, but you have two jobs: to maintain faith that you’ll eventually reach land and to keep rowing.

Why Your Haircut Costs More Every Year (And Your TV Set Costs Less)

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:59:02 GMT

The Big Idea: The economy isn’t a machine that someone controls. It’s an evolving system where prices carry information, technology reshapes work, and geography shapes opportunity more than most people realize.

Why It Matters: Your life can feel out of control when your paycheck feels smaller, your rent keeps climbing, and your job looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Understanding the forces shaping those realities is the first step to navigating them.

These ideas come from Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life by Alex Mayyasi. Alex is a longtime NPR Planet Money contributor, founding editor of the James Beard Award–winning Gastro Obscura, and host of the new podcast Gastronomics. Read on for 5 of his big ideas:

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

Give the gift of big ideas.

1. A price tag is a tiny newspaper.

If you drive by a gas station and see that the price of gas is up, that’s like reading a front-page headline. Maybe war in the Middle East is disrupting oil exports. Maybe everyone is getting gas for summer road trips. Maybe it’s both.

You don’t need to know the exact reason because the price tag on gas synthesized all that information—every single thing influencing the supply and demand for gas—into one number. The price is like a tiny newspaper about the state of the world.

Prices contain information. They are also incentives. If the price of gas is high, it incentivizes people to cut down on driving while gas is scarce or in high demand. And it incentivizes businesses to refine and sell more oil to increase the supply.

The information and incentives of price tags are what make the invisible hand work. They allow us to have an amazingly complicated global economy where no one person or organization is in charge.

2. Technology does not automate jobs; it automates tasks.

In the 1970s, banks started installing ATMs, or automatic teller machines. They were literally machines that did the job of bank tellers. But bank tellers did not disappear. For decades, the number of bank tellers in the U.S. kept increasing!

“But bank tellers did not disappear.”

Why? Well, ATMs only replaced some of the tasks that bank tellers did each day. So, tellers used the extra time to do the things ATMs couldn’t, like pitching customers on getting a credit card or hiring a financial advisor. Plus, since ATMs reduced the cost of running a bank branch, banks opened more locations and hired more tellers.

When technology automates people’s work, it is rare that their jobs vanish overnight. Instead, it changes their work. The transition can be painful. But it creates new opportunities, too.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Inside the Box by David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range. We live in a world that prizes freedom and infinite choice, but Epstein argues that the opposite — well-chosen constraints — is what actually unlocks creativity, innovation, and personal satisfaction. With endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Angela Duckworth, this is a paradigm-shifting read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many options.

3. Goods get cheaper, but services get more expensive.

When mystery writer Agatha Christie became a new parent in the 1910s, she and her husband hired a live-in servant and a nanny, but she noted that a car seemed like an unimaginable luxury. Today we experience the reverse: Plenty of people own cars, but a live-in servant is an unimaginable luxury.

This is an example of a powerful economic phenomenon. Over time, technology and innovation have made cars, TVs, and other goods cheaper. But as countries grow and become wealthier, the cost of labor rises. So, services like haircuts, daycare, and concerts get more expensive.

This is a big reason why so many artists struggle to make a living. And why parents in the U.S. now pay around $11,000 per year for childcare. The high cost of childcare is the cost of living in a dynamic and growing economy.

4. The winner-take-all economy.

Before the invention of Spotify and CDs, the only way to hear someone sing was hiring someone to sing. The best singers made the most money, but not that much more than good singers.

Today, everyone in the world can stream Taylor Swift’s albums and listen to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, so good singers compete directly with the world’s greatest entertainers. Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny make millions. Singers who are merely very good need day jobs.

“If you want work-life balance, you should avoid winner-take-all professions.”

In many industries, technology has created this winner-take-all dynamic. If you want to work long hours to be the very best at what you do, this works in your favor. But if you want work-life balance, you should avoid winner-take-all professions in favor of careers like nursing or sales, where the average worker makes a solid salary.

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

5. The power of place.

One of the biggest recent findings in economics is that the American Dream is not dead. It’s just not evenly distributed. When economists looked at poor families that went on to become middle class, they found they were clustered in certain cities and regions. There’s something special happening in those places.

The special sauce seems to be social capital. The American Dream is still alive in these places where people form lots of friendships and connections—especially across class lines. Researchers are still figuring out why this matters so much, but it’s already influencing projects such as replacing public housing that’s only for poor people with mixed-income neighborhoods.

We also see the power of place in how tech companies cluster in Silicon Valley, ad agencies in New York, and TV and film in Hollywood. This is called agglomeration. When workers and companies are in close proximity, it’s easier for them to hire workers, network, and exchange ideas. The pandemic forced millions of people to experiment with remote work. I think many people were surprised by how well it worked. But the power of place is so strong that the majority returned to in-person work and local hiring.

6 Books That Will Change How You Think About the Planet

Panio Gianopoulos — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:03:14 GMT

The challenge of sustaining our planet doesn't follow a calendar. It's constant, and urgent. These six books offer fresh thinking, hard truths, and imaginative solutions for building a future where both humanity and the Earth can thrive.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day! Need a last-minute gift idea? Why not give her a year of big ideas? Her first box will include Inside the Box by David Epstein and A World Appears by Michael Pollan. 20% off any new or gift membership with code MOM2026.

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World

By Peter Brannen

Avoiding the direst future—and surviving into deep time—will require that we both begin to appreciate this cosmic perspective on climate change, as well as see humanity as a crucial component of, and not separate from, the global carbon cycle. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Peter Brannen, or view on Amazon.

Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic

The Arctic isn’t just ice and polar bears; it’s a fast-changing region where climate change, geopolitics, and resource competition are reshaping the world. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Kenneth Rosen, or view on Amazon.

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

An acclaimed environmentalist argues that the only realistic solution to our climate crisis is transitioning to solar power. If we come to run on sunshine, our world will remain just as bright but all the more peaceful and sustainable. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Bill McKibben, or view on Amazon.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Future of Work Is Grey by Dan Pontefract. The workforce is aging. Birth rates are falling. Retirement is being redefined. Pontefract shows leaders how to turn this demographic shift into their greatest source of innovation, resilience, and growth.

Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into Everything They Do for Us and We Do to Them

We’ve abused the oceans for centuries, but fish are sentient, ecosystems can recover, and the sea can heal—if we finally start protecting it. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Rose George, or view on Amazon.

Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away

New York Times reporter and bestselling author David Gelles reveals how Patagonia became a global leader in doing well by doing good and how other companies are adopting its principles. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author David Gelles, or view on Amazon.

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

By Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon &

Cars define the shape of our cities, affect our own health and safety, and have significant effects on our environment and climate. Reimagining our relationship with automobiles can make individuals and society happier, healthier, and safer. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by co-authors Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, or view on Amazon.

Want to be More Creative? Constrain Yourself.

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:15:50 GMT

In an age of infinite options, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to take some away. This week, we came across ideas about how we can paradoxically spur our creativity by limiting our choices. We also learned how a little time-tracking can help us sleep better and why our bathroom habits are making us miserable. Quite a week!

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Is freedom overrated?

In his new book, Inside the Box, journalist argues that constraints, limits and obstacles are what stimulate creativity, innovation, collaboration and personal contentment. Check out our conversation with David on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

📦 Get David’s new book delivered straight to your door by joining the Next Big Idea Club! Learn more at nextbigideaclub.com (use code PODCAST for 20% off).

Laura Vanderkam, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance

Book Bite of the Week

Why do you never seem to have enough time?

What if you’re not actually “too busy,” but just missing the secret to making your time work for you? By tracking your hours, embracing small steps, and saying yes to what excites you, you can turn everyday life into something far more intentional and a lot more fun.

Laura Vanderkam shares key inisghts from her new book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Future of Work Is Grey by Dan Pontefract. The workforce is aging. Birth rates are falling. Retirement is being redefined. Pontefract shows leaders how to turn this demographic shift into their greatest source of innovation, resilience, and growth.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Are your bathroom habits ruining your life?

Your gut isn’t a passive tube. It’s an intelligent organ with hundreds of millions of neurons, its own nervous system, and a direct line to your brain. And most of us have been ignoring (and misusing) it our whole lives.

These ideas come from You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong by Trisha Pasricha. Trisha is a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where she directs the Institute for Gut-Brain Research, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She also writes the “Ask a Doctor” column for The Washington Post. Pick up a copy of her book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Quince. Refresh your spring wardrobe and get free shipping and 365-day returns at quince/com/nbi

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

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

Sara Nović, Mother Tongue: A Memoir

Jen Hamilton, Birth Vibes: Stories and Strategies for an Empowered Birth

Dan Pontefract, The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce

Owen O’Kane, Addicted to Anxiety: How to Break the Habit

Mac Barnett, Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children

Ian Shapiro, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World

Dominic Frisby, The Secret History of Gold Myth, Money, Politics, and Power

Paul Conti, What’s Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health

Attia Qureshi & John Richardson, Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want

David Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better

Courtney Conley & Milica McDowell, Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity—One Step at a Time

Michael Clinton, Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives

Patrick Wyman, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World – A History of Civilization Through Trial and Error, Ice Age to Bronze Age

Freya India, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything

Manoush Zomorodi, Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being

J. W. Mason & Arjun Jayadev, Against Money

You've Been Pooping All Wrong (And It's Affecting Your Brain)

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:01:28 GMT

The Big Idea: Your gut isn’t a passive tube. It’s an intelligent organ with hundreds of millions of neurons, its own nervous system, and a direct line to your brain. And most of us have been ignoring (and misusing) it our whole lives.

Why It Matters: Gut dysfunction doesn’t just mean discomfort. Emerging research links it to Parkinson’s, depression, anxiety, and more. Understanding your gut may be one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your long-term health.

Try This Today: Buy a footstool for your bathroom. Elevating your feet a few inches while on the toilet straightens your rectal angle and makes elimination significantly easier. It’s a two-minute fix backed by basic anatomy.

These ideas come from You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong by . Trisha is a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where she directs the Institute for Gut-Brain Research, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She also writes the “Ask a Doctor” column for The Washington Post. Read on for 5 of her big ideas…

This Sunday is Mother’s Day! Why not give her a year of big ideas? Her first box will include Inside the Box by David Epstein and A World Appears by Michael Pollan. 20% off any new or gift membership with code MOM2026.

Give the gift of big ideas.

1. Your gut is a brain.

Most of us think of the brain in our heads as the command center that runs the show. But your gastrointestinal tract contains hundreds of millions of neurons—more than your entire spinal cord—forming what scientists call the enteric nervous system. This brain in your gut can sense the environment, process information, and coordinate complex activity entirely on its own, without any input from the brain in your skull.

The gut came before the brain, evolutionarily. Even jellyfish, despite having no appreciable brain in their translucent heads, do have a primitive version of an enteric nervous system and can’t survive without it. The gut largely communicates with the brain via a superhighway called the vagus nerve, but it is anything but a passive recipient of instructions. It has its own reflexes, its own electrical rhythm, and its own agenda.

I discovered this firsthand in high school. I had a hunch that psychological stress—the kind you feel when you’re telling a lie—would change the electrical activity of the stomach, explaining that visceral “sinking feeling” people describe when they’re anxious. Using an electrogastrogram, a device that measures the stomach’s electrical rhythm through electrodes on the abdomen, I tested whether telling a lie would disrupt it. It did, quite reliably. The stomach’s electrical rhythm went from a predictable three cycles per minute to pure chaos. That discovery won at the Intel International Science Fair in 2005, and it set the direction for my entire career.

The gut does a bit more than just process your lunch. The gut and the brain have been in dialogue for hundreds of millions of years and we are only beginning to decipher the conversation.

2. Parkinson’s disease may originate in your gut.

I started noticing a certain pattern early in my gastroenterology training. My patients with Parkinson’s disease didn’t just have neurological symptoms. They had gut symptoms such as severe constipation, nausea, and bloating. And when I asked them when those gut symptoms started, the answer was uncanny: often not after their Parkinson’s diagnosis, but years before. Sometimes decades before.

This wasn’t a coincidence. Studies of tens of thousands of patients have confirmed that gut trouble can precede tremors and rigidity by years. Even Dr. James Parkinson himself (the physician for whom the disease is named) suspected the gut had more importance than met the eye.

“Studies of tens of thousands of patients have confirmed that gut trouble can precede tremors and rigidity by years.”

What’s happening, according to a now well-supported theory, is that a misfolded protein called alpha-synuclein—the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease—may originate in the neurons inside the gut wall, then travel up the vagus nerve to reach the brain. Tellingly, patients who had their vagus nerve surgically severed decades earlier turned out to be less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease later in life.

My own lab published a study in JAMA Network Open in 2024 looking at records of over 9,000 patients. People with injuries to the lining of their stomachs and small bowels had a 76 percent higher risk of later developing Parkinson’s.

But this matters beyond Parkinson’s because the same principle—that disturbances in the gut can signal changes in the brain years before anyone recognizes a disease—is now being explored in Alzheimer’s, autism, and conditions we’ve always thought had nothing to do with the gut. The gut may be an early warning system that medicine has largely ignored. The earlier we learn to read it, the better our chances of intervening before the damage reaches the brain.

3. The 100 trillion microbes in your gut shape more than digestion.

Inside your gut live over 100 trillion microorganisms. We call this community and their genetic material the microbiome, and for most of the 20th century, medicine basically ignored it. We now know that was a catastrophic oversight.

Your microbiome begins forming at birth and is largely set by the time you’re three or four years old. As an adult, one of the biggest levers you have to change its composition is your diet. These microbes ferment what we can’t digest, produce compounds that influence everything from our immune system to our gut lining, and send signals via the enteric nervous system all the way back to the brain.

Here’s an unexpected example of just how far that influence reaches. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to understand why some people are naturally motivated to exercise and others simply aren’t. They studied hundreds of genetically diverse mice and measured their exercise capacity. Some ran like athletes. Others barely moved. Genetics explained almost none of the difference. But one factor predicted performance better than everything else combined: the gut microbiome.

“The “runner’s high”—that surge of motivation during exercise—doesn’t originate entirely in the brain.”

To confirm this, they wiped out all the mice’s microbiomes with antibiotics. The previously high-performing runners dropped their activity by 50 percent. Then the researchers traced the mechanism: proteins from the microbiome were signaling neurons in the gut, which sent messages up to the brain, boosting dopamine and the drive to move. The “runner’s high”—that surge of motivation during exercise—doesn’t originate entirely in the brain. It’s being initiated in the gut. That study was published in Nature in 2022.

We are not independent organisms powered purely by willpower and genetics. We are ecosystems. And the 100 trillion organisms living inside us have a much larger vote in how we feel, how we move, and how our brains function than we give them credit for.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Future of Work Is Grey by Dan Pontefract. The workforce is aging. Birth rates are falling. Retirement is being redefined. Pontefract shows leaders how to turn this demographic shift into their greatest source of innovation, resilience, and growth.

4. Modern life has set you up to poop all wrong.

When I tell patients that they’ve been pooping wrong, I don’t mean it as an insult. In some ways, I mean it more as an indictment of modern life.

A successful bowel movement requires three things working in concert:

Propulsion — the muscular contractions that push stool forward.
Pliability — soft enough stool to actually move.
Pelvic floor muscles — to relax and open at the right moment.

I call these the Three P’s. And modern life has found a way to sabotage all three.

The Western diet gives most people inadequate fiber. Over 90 percent of Americans don’t meet the daily recommendation, which means hardened stool. We rush our mornings, which means we’re leaving home without availing ourselves of the body’s natural bowel movement window: the colon surges in activity during the early morning and again after meals, thanks to a reflex wired into us for millions of years. But we too often ignore the signal, defer it, and then wonder why nothing happens on command.

And then there’s the toilet itself. The modern porcelain throne positions you at a 90-degree angle, leaving the sling-like muscle called the puborectalis partially contracted, creating a kink in the rectal tube. It is, essentially, your body stepping on its own hose. Squat—knees above hips, the position our ancestors used—and that muscle fully relaxes. The tube straightens. And no, you don’t need to squat fully. All it takes is a footstool or a discreet stack of books.

Knowledge gaps like these aren’t trivial. They cost people real quality of life, not to mention consequences you really don’t want. My own research found that unnecessarily prolonged time sitting on the toilet—you know exactly what I mean: the kind that happens when you’re distracted by your smartphone—is associated with a significantly higher risk of hemorrhoids.

The list of our misguided bathroom habits goes on and on. But the issue is that most people have never questioned whether they’re doing this right. The answer, I find almost universally, is that they’re not.

5. Gut trauma can cause depression and anxiety.

For as long as most of us have been alive, the relationship between the gut and mental health has been framed one way: stress causes stomach problems. You’re anxious, so your gut acts up. But what if, in many cases, we have the direction entirely backward?

My father, Dr. Jay Pasricha, now Chair of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic and one of the founders of neurogastroenterology, spent years designing experiments to test exactly this. His lab took two groups of rats. One received a mild irritant to their colon shortly after birth. The other experienced nothing unusual. Then both groups were raised identically: the same food, the same environment, the same social conditions.

When the rats were fully grown, the control group barely noticed mild gut distension. But the rats whose guts had been briefly disturbed shortly after birth responded completely differently — nerve impulses from the colon spiked, and the rats contracted their abdominal muscles in discomfort at volumes the others found imperceptible. The gut, during that early vulnerable window, had been permanently sensitized.

But the most unsettling finding was what came next. Those same rats were now depressed and anxious. When placed in water, they barely tried to swim to safety. In open fields, they clung to the edges, afraid. And when his lab cut their vagus nerve (that highway connecting gut to brain), the depression and anxiety disappeared. The gut, traumatized early in life, had been sending distress signals to the brain all along.

“The gut, during that early vulnerable window, had been permanently sensitized.”

What this means is profound. When someone comes to me with depression or anxiety and gut symptoms—and many of my patients do—the gut is not a sidebar. It may be where the story started. The idea that “it’s all in your head” is not just unhelpful. In many cases, it’s directionally wrong. The signal is coming from below.

We have spent a century building the architecture of mental health care entirely from the neck up. What we’re learning is that we need to start listening a bit further south.

The gut is the most underestimated organ in the human body. Once you understand it, everything changes—not just what happens in your bathroom, but how you think about your body, your mood, your health, and the conditions that medicine has long struggled to explain.

You Have Time to Read War and Peace (Here's the Math)

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:21:35 GMT

The Big Idea: Most of us feel we lack time to do everything we’d like to do, but that could be more of a story than a reality. A few small shifts can change not just how we spend our hours, but how satisfied we feel about our lives overall.

Why It Matters: Even people with objectively reasonable schedules walk around feeling chronically behind, which means the fix isn't more hours, it's a better relationship with the ones you already have.

Try This Today: Set one small intention for your evening tonight. Not work, not chores, not the kids’ homework — something you’d genuinely look forward to. You might be surprised by how much this improves your mood, and even your sleep.

These ideas come from Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance by Laura Vanderkam. Laura is the author of several time management books and host of the Before Breakfast and Best of Both Worlds podcasts. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

1. Tracking your time makes you happier with your time.

I’ve tracked my time on weekly spreadsheets for the last 11 years. Yes, I know that makes me sound like a lot of fun! But I find that knowing where my time goes keeps me accountable and helps me cement memories. I’m a big fan of time tracking, and whenever someone wants to spend their time better, I suggest they try tracking their time for a week.

For Big Time, I decided to look more systematically at time tracking. I had 279 people track their time for a week. I asked them various questions designed to measure time satisfaction before and after the week. I found that people’s satisfaction rose significantly. Indeed, agreement with the statement “Generally I have enough time for the things I want to do” rose 25 percent in a week.

Partly this is because time tracking inspires better choices. People didn’t want to document a three-hour YouTube binge in their logs, so they chose more fulfilling leisure-time activities and thus felt better about their time.

But the deeper reason is that seeing where the time really goes helps us rewrite our stories. Even if you work long hours, you don’t work around the clock. If you have a bad night, that doesn’t mean all seven nights of the week were terrible. You probably saw your family. You had some free time. It might not have been as much as you wanted, but it wasn’t zero either. When you see that, you start to see that life is pretty reasonable. Maybe you want to change things, but we’re talking tweaks, not a total lifestyle overhaul. Seeing where the time goes makes us happier with our time.

2. Life should be a circus.

When people say, “My life is a circus,” they mean it is chaotic. But I think this is a slander against circuses. A circus is incredibly well organized. No one gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time. All the acts happen when they are supposed to happen. Tricks are executed with split-second precision. And many of those tricks happen over a net, so mistakes don’t turn into disasters. I think we should aspire for life to be a circus!

True time management masters think of themselves as the ringmaster of their lives. Life is a three-ring circus, with the rings representing your career, your relationships, and yourself. A good ringmaster knows what is going on in all three. She has thought through what needs to happen and when, and she has a plan for when things go wrong.

“As we plan our lives, we should ask what we are truly looking forward to.”

And, of course, a circus is managed for delight. No one wants to watch a show where people are just trudging through their acts. Likewise, as we plan our lives, we should ask what we are truly looking forward to. Maybe everyone gets where they need to go, but what sounds genuinely fun? If there’s nothing in the plan, go back and work on it again until this circus is one you’re proud to present to the world.

3. Big things are doable in small steps.

Many of us walk around with a story that we are starved for time. There’s no way we have time to do something like read War and Peace…or do we?

It turns out that even big things are doable when you break them down into small enough steps and spread them over a big enough chunk of time. For instance, a few years ago, I decided to tackle War and Peace. It turns out that Tolstoy’s epic is comprised of 361 extremely short chapters. I read one chapter a day for a year. Each day, I was reading for just a few minutes, so this project never felt overwhelming. But time kept passing, and my bookmark kept moving forward until on December 27th, I finished it.

So it goes for many things. If you want to listen to all the works of Bach, just listen for about 30 minutes a day, and you will get there in a year. If you want to read all the works of Shakespeare, pick up a 1024-page anthology and read three pages a day for a year. Anywhere is walking distance if you’ve got the time, and by breaking things down into small enough steps, you reduce resistance and make big things feel doable.

The upside of that is that when you do big things, it’s hard to tell yourself a story that you have no time. After all, you have time to read War and Peace! It doesn’t matter if it only took a few minutes a day—that sense of time abundance can carry over into everything else.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Future of Work Is Grey by Dan Pontefract. The workforce is aging. Birth rates are falling. Retirement is being redefined. Pontefract shows leaders how to turn this demographic shift into their greatest source of innovation, resilience, and growth.

4. Time satisfaction comes from embracing your golden hours.

People often talk of the golden years, that time after working when retirees can enjoy family and leisure. We get a miniature version of this every weekday evening during what I call our “golden hours”—the time after work and before bed.

“The key is to set one small intention each day for something you want to do during your golden hours.”

This is often the bulk of the leisure time people have during the week, but these hours are incredibly hard to use well. People are tired. We are out of energy and out of sorts. Still, I think it’s possible to make choices that allow us to feel like these hours actually happened.

The key is to set one small intention each day for something you want to do during your golden hours. It should be something that isn’t work, housework, or the physical care of family members. It should also be something you would genuinely look forward to doing.

I like to spend 30 minutes doing a puzzle or reading a book. Some people like to sit outside, go for a walk, make a special treat for dessert, call a friend, or do a hobby. It doesn’t have to be much, but when I had people try this for a week, their sense of time satisfaction rose significantly.

Interestingly enough, when people started setting golden hour intentions, they also started getting more sleep! It turns out a lot of people stay up late to get me time. But if you build in 30 minutes of me time somewhere else during the evening, you won’t need to stay up late, and this can make all of time feel better.

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5. Opportunities come from saying yes.

A key tenet in a lot of productivity literature is that we should all say no more often. I get it. We feel overscheduled. I don’t want anyone spending time on things that are neither meaningful nor enjoyable for ourselves or the people we care about.

“One way to think about this is to use a rubric to decide whether to say yes or no to things.”

But almost all new opportunities, adventures, and relationships come out of saying yes. After all, if you knew about something great, you’d already be doing it. New things come from talking to someone new, following up, putting in some effort, and seeing where things go.

One way to think about this is to use a rubric to decide whether to say yes or no to things. In general, we want to spend less time doing things that we need to talk ourselves into. If you’re not initially excited, but it won’t be too hard, and it might look good on your resume…that qualifies as a 5 or 6 on a 10-point scale of excitement, and that is how many of us fill our lives.

You want to sit up and pay attention when you start talking yourself out of something. If you’re initially excited but then start telling yourself that the logistics will be complicated, maybe it’s outside your comfort zone, you’d have to call in a favor…listen to that initial excitement. You can probably figure everything else out.

The Workforce Is Aging. Here's Why That's Good News.

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:47:13 GMT

The Big Idea: The workforce is aging fast, and most organizations are completely unprepared. Companies spending all their energy on AI and cost-cutting are sleepwalking past the most consequential workforce shift of our era.

Why It Matters: Ageism runs in both directions: against young workers and old ones, and it’s quietly costing organizations more than they realize. Age-biased workplaces lose more talent, innovate less, and crack faster under demographic pressure. The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires intention.

These ideas come from The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce by . Pontefract is a six-time award-winning author and leadership and corporate culture strategist with over 20 years in senior roles at TELUS, SAP, and BCIT. He is the founder and CEO of the Pontefract Group. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

We just announced our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season: David Epstein’s Inside the Box. Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with the author, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

1. Demographics don’t care about your organization’s strategy.

According to the World Economic Forum, workers aged 55 and older will make up more than 25 percent of the G7 workforce by 2031. That’s roughly a 10-point jump from 2011. And between you and me, I think the forum is underselling the number. My money says it will be higher.

Here’s what nags at me. Every boardroom, leadership room, and workshop I’ve sat in over the last few years has been obsessed with two topics: artificial intelligence and cost control. Remarkably, neither conversation has included the one demographic fact already reshaping the labor market: the workforce is greying, and it’s happening fast. Organizations are bracing for a robot revolution while quietly ignoring (or not even knowing about) the humans that are about to reshape them. Demographic reality is the one trend you cannot disrupt, downsize, or delay.

Older workers are not optional. They are the scaffolding holding up skills transfer, institutional memory, and cultural continuity across every workplace on the planet. You cannot and will not automate your way out of a people problem. The future of work will be grey.

2. Meet the rivers, rocks, and rubies.

While writing this book, I kept bumping into the same clumsy intergenerational dance. Younger workers were dismissed as naive. Older workers were dismissed as obsolete. And the folks in the middle were catching friendly fire from both directions as part of the sandwich generation in the workplace. So, I thought a metaphor might make more sense, particularly given how unhelpful it is to classify workers by generations in the workplace:

· Rivers are your early-career employees. They move fast, change course often, and make some mistakes, but they carry the kind of energy your organization desperately needs—what psychologists call fluid intelligence.

· Rocks are your mid-career professionals. They are the load-bearing walls of the organization. They are steady, thoughtful, and quietly carrying execution on their backs.

· Rubies are your seasoned employees, full of what psychologists call crystallized intelligence. They hold institutional memory, hard-earned judgment, and a phone book of relationships worth more than any CRM.

Most organizations get policy design wrong. They build programs, perks, and promotions for one cohort at a time, as though rivers, rocks, and rubies exist on separate floors breathing different air. Well, they don’t. A healthy organization looks like a riverbed. Rivers flowing over rocks, polishing rubies, shaping one another by proximity.

When you treat a ruby as an expense to be managed rather than an asset to be mined, you lose a library disguised as an employee. When you treat a river as an intern instead of a colleague, you lose the one question that would’ve exposed your outdated assumptions. And when your rocks burn out from mediating between rivers and rubies, while also tending to young kids and older parents outside of work, then you have lost the plot.

The age crisis is real. The generational labels we keep using are not. Stop sorting people by decade of birth and start paying attention to the riverbed.

3. Ageism cuts both ways.

At 27 years old, I walked into a university faculty washroom during my first week on a new job. An older gentleman at the sink looked me up and down and said, “What are you doing here?” I held up my lanyard. “I work here,” I replied, with a face somewhere between puzzled and iridescent. He dried his hands and said, “Interesting. I didn’t know we were hiring such young people these days.” What a shame. I said nothing and went to my meeting, but the comment obviously still lingers because I’m telling the story a quarter of a century later.

Ageism does not only point in one direction. We discriminate against the grey and we discriminate against the green. In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told an audience at Stanford, with a perfectly straight face, that “young people are just smarter.” One year later, he hired Sheryl Sandberg, 15 years his senior, to help him run the company. Or how about 2019, when the “Okay boomer” meme started trending? It did nothing to help the cause. It just added a digital raspberry to a stale conversation.

Every major study and research paper on the subject tells the same story. Age-biased workplaces lose more talent, innovate less, and collapse faster under demographic pressure than organizations that treat age as neutral or even positive. And yet, I would wager that every listener right now has witnessed an age-coded remark this year about a junior colleague, a senior colleague, or a middle-aged professional trying to keep it together—or themselves. Ageism is rampant. It may also be the last of the isms we are willing to admit to.

Today’s Book of the Day sponsor is Comeback by Alfred A. Marcus. Why do once-dominant companies like Intel, Amazon, Disney, and Tesla struggle to reclaim their former glory? Drawing on decades of strategy expertise, Marcus delivers a compelling framework for understanding corporate renewal — and the difficult path from survival to sustained success.

4. Mentorship is multidirectional.

The year was 2009. The Black Eyed Peas were crushing it with their song “I Gotta Feeling.” I was 38 years old. I was mid-career at TELUS as the chief learning officer, overseeing leadership development and corporate culture. That year, I discovered a cluster of so-called older employees quietly producing some of the most useful internal learning content for the organization. They were using video cameras and our in-house habitat video system, which was kind of like YouTube. No prompt, no playbook. These people were just all about purpose. I’d be lying if I said I had proactively considered it because I hadn’t. I was supposed to be guiding the organization, but it turned out they were teaching me.

The real lesson is not who teaches whom. It is that knowledge transfer in the modern organization runs like a roundabout, not a one-way escalator. Every era holds a lane. Rubies carry judgment and networks. Rocks carry execution and memory. Rivers carry fresh eyes and new concepts, and they may break stuff, but that’s okay because we’re all learning. When you build your organization around a single direction of mentorship, you’re going to break three out of every four knowledge flows available to you.

The most intergenerationally healthy organizations I studied did something beautifully boring. They intentionally paired people across age groups. A 24-year-old would coach a 56-year-old on AI tools, and a 56-year-old would coach the 24-year-old on customer empathy and how to recover from a bad boss. Flatten your org chart by age, and you will create a fabulous culture. You may be surprised by who the real students are, too.

5. From gray to gold.

A few years ago, I sat down with one of my mentors, Roger L. Martin, one of the finest management thinkers alive and the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. We were stress testing the argument of this book. He listened, he nodded, and then he said something I have not been able to shake. He said, “Organizations recognize the aging workforce challenge. They see it clearly, Dan, yet they lack the tools to meaningfully respond. It’s like the drunk searching for keys under the streetlight, because that’s where the light is, even if the keys aren’t there.” I took that from Roger as a challenge. There is a path for leaders who know the demographics are shifting and who want to stop fumbling in the dark.

The age crisis is not a problem to be solved once and shelved. It is a standing commitment, renewed daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and visible in how you hire, develop, compensate, and, importantly, how you shape the culture that holds it all together. Here is the promise hiding inside the age crisis: Organizations that treat age as a strategic advantage, rather than a scheduling headache or worse, nothing at all, will outperform their peers on retention, innovation, engagement, and trust. Teams that deliberately mix their rivers, rocks, and rubies will make better decisions, probably faster. Countries that invest in older workers will build more productive, stable, and prepared economies. The firm that stops exacerbating age debt and starts shifting toward inculcating the experience dividend will be the firm that future proofs itself.

In sum, the future of work is grey. It is inevitable. It’s happening. But when organizations and leaders, and maybe you, agree to treat the grey as a golden opportunity, that age debt will become a handsome experience dividend.

Five Rules for Getting Out of Your Own Way

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:03:50 GMT

The Big Idea: Constraints aren’t obstacles to great work, they’re the engine of it. Whether you’re writing a book, running a team, or just trying to get through your inbox, the research is clear: deliberate limits help you focus better, decide faster, and think more creatively than open-ended freedom ever will.

Why It Matters: Most productivity advice tells you to add more: more systems, more tools, more optimization. But the real bottleneck is usually the opposite — too many commitments diluting your best work, too many options paralyzing your decisions, too many tab-switches eroding your focus. Our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance, and without deliberate constraints, we drift toward busyness instead of output.

Try This Today: Write every current commitment on a sticky note — one per note — and put them all on a wall. Then ask yourself: If I had to cut one of these in the next 90 days, which would it be?

These ideas come from Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by . David is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene, and has written as a senior reporter for both Sports Illustrated and ProPublica. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Inside the Box is our Next Big Idea Club pick of the season! Join now and get a copy of the book to read alongside other club members, an invitation to a live Q&A with David Epstein, and other perks. As a bonus, join now and you’ll get a copy of Michael Pollan’s latest book as well.

Give the gift of big ideas.

1. Make all your current commitments visible.

At one genomics lab, the staff took the time to write each of their current projects on Post-it notes (one project per Post-it) and put them up on a wall. They immediately noticed that they had way too many things in progress at once. The lab team saw the importance of picking priorities to focus on.

Making all your commitments visible is a useful exercise. This can be done for personal matters, professional tasks, or both. When taking account of everything, ask yourself, “If I had to cut one of these things out in the next 90 days, which would it be?” That doesn’t mean you have to kill it forever, but maybe you put it on hold because constraints can help clarify your priorities. That’s what this exercise is about. Most people or teams who do this realize that they’re overcommitted and that a lot of medium-priority tasks are competing with top-priority tasks.

Humans are bad at taking things away. So think of this exercise as a subtraction audit. We have a bias called subtractive neglect bias, meaning we overlook solutions that involve taking things away. Do this regularly to actively reduce obligations rather than only accumulating more.

2. Batch your email.

Psychologist Gloria Mark has spent two decades observing people at work to understand what they do all day. In one of her more recent studies, she found that people in offices check email about 77 different times a day. That’s the average. And that leads to lower productivity and higher stress. New evidence suggests that this kind of frequent toggling might even affect immune function, but we do know it affects stress, because switching tasks frequently causes the quality and pace of work to drop. Less gets done, and it’s not done as well.

Dr. Mark likes to describe the brain as a whiteboard: when doing a task, you’re writing on the whiteboard, and when you switch, you erase, but it leaves a residue that interferes a little bit with the next thing. By toggling back and forth all day, you’re building up that residue and shrinking cognitive bandwidth for each successive task. This isn’t to say you can’t answer your email, but consider dividing it into one, two, or three batches a day. What you don’t want to be doing is switching back and forth all day long. In fact, if you can batch your work in general, that can be helpful for boosting productivity and lowering stress.

If monotasking sounds difficult, maybe start your day with 30 minutes of non-toggling work during which you focus exclusively on your most important task. You can gradually work up to longer and longer blocks of time before opening that inbox. Ideally, you can eventually block all your work so that the different types of things you do in a day are done within their own monotask blocks of time. This will increase your productivity and make you feel less stressed at the end of the day.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is The Future of Work Is Grey by Dan Pontefract. The workforce is aging. Birth rates are falling. Retirement is being redefined. Pontefract shows leaders how to turn this demographic shift into their greatest source of innovation, resilience, and growth.

3. Block the familiar solution.

This might be the single greatest creativity prompt. When you block the solution that you’re used to choosing, it forces you to think in new ways. Psychologists sometimes call this a preclude constraint, where you’re precluding whatever the familiar path is to force doing something else.

As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has said, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it’s actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Thinking is energetically costly, so your brain wants to do the thing that’s easy. When faced with a problem or a task, your brain will reach for what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, which means something that’s convenient or habitual.

But if you want to be creative, you want to block that default. Sometimes it’s blocked by necessity, and that’s why we have the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. When the easy option is not a choice, you’re forced to do something inventive. But if you’re just trying to be more creative, think about whatever you’re doing and block it.

Let me give you a sense of how I applied this in some of my own work. When working on this book, I would start new chapters by writing down the first thing that popped into my mind. But then I would say, “Cross that out. I can’t use this as my beginning. I have to find something else.” It was annoying and inconvenient, but it forced me to think hard about what is really the best place to start the chapter, not just the first thing that came to mind.

Whatever your creative task is, don’t jump to the familiar solution. Maybe, at work, consider saying, “If we couldn’t recommend the usual thing at our next client meeting, what would we do instead?” Even if you end up choosing the familiar solution after all, it can be worth exploring the results of this generative, creative prompt before deciding.

4. Start with the box.

This is a tip that comes from Tony Fadell. He’s publicly known as the “pod father” because he was the lead designer of the iPod, and then he went on to cofound the smart thermostat company, Nest. The main advice that he gives entrepreneurs is to start by writing the press release before embarking on the project. In fact, at Nest, he had the team prototype the literal box before they had the product. He said, “This will force us to prioritize the things that we’re trying to communicate to the end user. It will force us to clarify what those things are and decide what the priorities are.”

Similarly, he suggests that entrepreneurs write a single-page press release as if their project were done. Answer: What do I want this to look like? What problem is it solving? What do I hope people say about it when it’s done? That gives a bounding box for the project. Suddenly, you have guide rails to work within. It doesn’t mean you can’t change them, but if you do, you are aware that you are making thoughtful trade-offs. This can keep a project contained and channeled.

I tried this for myself, even just for a few personal projects. I found it a useful exercise that forces you to think about why you’re doing what you’re doing, define your theory of what you’re doing, what you hope it looks like, and what the priorities are. Some people think of it as working backward. These kinds of constraints can be annoying because, as Tony Fadell says, setting boundaries early on slows you down, but they are powerful because they force you to think ahead.

I took a cue from Fadell because my previous books had really sprawled, so this time around, I made a full structural outline of the book on a single page. I tried to foil my own system by writing as small as possible, but this exercise forced me to ruthlessly prioritize. As a result, this was the first time I hadn’t written 50 percent over the length I was allotted for a book. Even though writing this outline slowed me down initially, it drew boundaries that allowed me to write very fast once it came time to execute. I turned the book in early, which is unheard of for me.

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5. Set satisficing rules and stick with them.

Satisficing is a term coined by Herbert Simon, who was a Nobel laureate in economics and one of the founders of AI and cognitive psychology. Satisficing is a combination of satisfy and suffice. What Simon found was that humans cannot optimize their decisions in the way that classical economic theory would have us do because we have limited bandwidth to evaluate different options and predict the future. So, we must satisfy ourselves by selecting good-enough options.

Simon suggested that we should proactively set good-enough rules for our decisions, and once those are surpassed, we go with the option and don’t look back. Maybe whatever decision you make or purchase you make or whatever it is goes way beyond the good enough limits, but once you pass them, you go with it. If you’re making a purchase, you establish what you need the item to do and once you find that option, you take it and move on.

The opposite of satisficing is what’s called maximizing. That’s where you’re really trying to evaluate every option and make the best decision. This is like when you’ve found something you’d like to watch on Netflix, but because there might be something better, you keep searching. Dating apps are an obvious example: you find someone you like, but choose to swipe some more anyway, because who knows what’s around the next corner?

Psychology research shows that it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions. They’re less satisfied with their lives. They’re much more prone to regret. They prefer reversible decisions, even when they end up happier with irreversible decisions. Just the option to always keep their options open is something that draws them into a certain level of unhappiness.

We can all do with a little more satisficing in this world, where it has never been easier to compare every decision and aspect of life to an almost infinite number of other people and other options. It’s important for our well-being to think about and set good enough rules. Simon himself wore the same brand of socks. He always owned one beret at a time and only bought a new one when the one he had got worn out. He told his daughter that a person only needs three pairs of clothing: one on one’s body, one in the closet ready to wear, and one in the wash. He ate the same breakfast every day. He lived in the same house for 46 years. He famously wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” You’d almost accuse him of having low standards if he hadn’t won the highest possible awards in psychology, computing, and economics. Simon recognized that by satisficing, you deliberately save cognitive bandwidth for other areas where it really matters.

It's May! Here's the Month's Best Nonfiction

Panio Gianopoulos — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:01:28 GMT

I’m excited to introduce a new batch of standout nonfiction, the most compelling and thought-provoking titles scheduled for release in May 2026. With so many great books, we’ve organized them by category…

Next weekend is Mother’s Day! Why not give her a year of big ideas? Her first box will include Inside the Box by David Epstein and A World Appears by Michael Pollan. 20% off any new or gift membership with code MOM2026.

Career & Leadership

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by . View on Amazon
Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance by Laura Vanderkam. View on Amazon
Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want by Attia Qureshi & John Richardson. View on Amazon
Get It in Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Your Rights at Work by Ryan Stygar. View on Amazon
Teams That Meet the Moment: Practices for Effective Teaming in the Age of Complexity by Karina Mangu-Ward. View on Amazon
Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…And How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries. View on Amazon
Coachable: How the Greatest Performers Reach Their Highest Potential by Ric Bucher. View on Amazon
Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind) by Emily Durham. View on Amazon
The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down by Sefanie O’Connell. View on Amazon
The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce by Dan Pontefract. View on Amazon

Personal Development

Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. View on Amazon
What’s Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health by Paul Conti. View on Amazon
Addicted to Anxiety: How to Break the Habit by Owen O’Kane. View on Amazon
A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection by Nicholas Epley. View on Amazon
How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers by . View on Amazon
Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left us More Anxious and Divided by Jonathan Alpert. View on Amazon
A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World–and How It Can Save Us by . View on Amazon
Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly by Jack Parlett. View on Amazon

History & Memoir

After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World by Ian Shapiro. View on Amazon
All We Say: The Battle for American Identity by . View on Amazon
Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman. View on Amazon
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald. View on Amazon
The Flag Was Still There: A History of the American Experiment in Five Anniversaries by David McKean & M. Todd Bennett. View on Amazon
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris. View on Amazon

Today's Book of the Day sponsor is Comeback by Alfred A. Marcus. Why do once-dominant companies like Intel, Amazon, Disney, and Tesla struggle to reclaim their former glory? Drawing on decades of strategy expertise, Marcus delivers a compelling framework for understanding corporate renewal — and the difficult path from survival to sustained success.

Economics

How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy by Soumaya Keynes & Chad Bown. View on Amazon
The Secret History of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics, and Power by Dominic Frisby. View on Amazon
Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work by Alvin Roth. View on Amazon
For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage by Stephanie Coontz. View on Amazon
Against Money by J. W. Mason & Arjun Jayadev. View on Amazon

Health

Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity–One Step at a Time by Courtney Conley & Milica McDowell. View on Amazon
Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones by Saira Hameed. View on Amazon
Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives by Michael Clinton. View on Amazon
Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being by Manoush Zomorodi. View on Amazon

Parenting

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett. View on Amazon
Mother Tongue: A Memoir by Sara Novic. View on Amazon
Birth Vibes: Stories and Strategies for an Empowered Birth by Jen Hamilton. View on Amazon
GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything by . View on Amazon

Science & Tech

It’s (Just) Rocket Science: Exploring Physics Through Spaceflight Missions by Trisha Muro. View on Amazon
I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern. View on Amazon
AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter by Josh Tyrangiel. View on Amazon
A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines by Thomas Levenson. View on Amazon

A Sneak Peek at Our Favorite Book of the Season

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:03:30 GMT

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

What’s the best nonfiction book of the season?

Every few months, we pick one book with the power to change how you see the world. Then we build an experience around it: author conversations, reading guides, key insights, and a community of people who love talking about ideas. In this episode, available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, we reveal our latest pick and offer a sneak peek of our conversation with the author.

Have the winning book sent right to your door and join us as we read it together, chat with the author, and more. For a limited time, get 20% off on a membership.

RSVP for Meet-the-Must-Reads

Book Bite of the Week

Are you playful enough?

Playfulness means being curiously, creatively, and courageously engaged with life. Being playful isn’t the easy choice. It requires showing up authentically, risking looking silly, and trying something that might not work. In a world that rewards performance and polish, choosing play is a quiet act of courage that will help you feel alive.

is a creative entrepreneur who co-founded the media brand Refinery29 and, more recently, the creative wellness company NoomaLooma.

Pick up a copy of her new book The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play on Amazon or check out the key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is What’s the Point? by Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and other #1 bestsellers. It’s a clear, actionable framework for making purpose the engine of your work, relationships, and daily life.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Have the rules changed for getting wealthy?

History doesn’t give us fixed rules for getting ahead financially. The “right” way keeps changing, so your best bet is to stay flexible, try a mix of strategies, and not get too excited every time someone claims they’ve cracked the code to wealth. We have an opportunity-rich landscape, but how best to mine it changes in every era.

is a historian who spent over a decade researching and testing out what Americans were told to do with their money for the past 300 years. His previous work appeared in such outlets as the New York Times and Oxford University Press. His new book is How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t). Pick up a copy on Amazon or listen to his big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Quince. Refresh your spring wardrobe and get free shipping and 365-day returns at quince/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:

, Invincible: Defy Your Genetic Destiny to Live Better, Longer
, In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive
Roderick Beaton, Europe: A New History
You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation
, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t)
Tom Rath, What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower

The Tesla Playbook: How to Cut, Simplify, and Outgrow Every Competitor

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:02:53 GMT

The Big Idea: The biggest obstacle to growth is accumulated baggage. The fastest-growing companies in the world share one counterintuitive habit: they question, cut, and simplify far more aggressively than anyone else.

Why It Matters: Most teams respond to problems by adding: more tools, more approvals, more meetings. But that instinct compounds the drag. Radical subtraction is often the best way forward.

Try This Today: Pick one recurring process that feels slow or cumbersome. Write down every step that people say “has to happen.” Then ask why — for each one — until you hit a genuine constraint (law, safety, physics). Everything else is negotiable. What can you delete without anyone noticing?

These ideas come from The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX by Jon McNeill. Jon is a serial entrepreneur who served as president of Tesla during its period of rapid growth, helped take Lyft public, and today serves on the boards of General Motors and Lululemon while running his venture fund, DVx Ventures. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Join us Monday, May 4th at 1PM Eastern for a live call with the authors of the most exciting upcoming books.

1. Question every single requirement.

Organizations don’t slow down because people are lazy or untalented. They slow down because they are surrounded by invisible rules. Rules that once made sense. Rules no one remembers creating. Rules that quietly become handcuffs.

One of the most powerful habits is treating every requirement as guilty until proven innocent. When someone says, “We have to do it this way,” the real question is: Why? Is it a law? Is it physics? Or is it just how we’ve always done things?

One of the clearest examples is about Tesla in China. There was a long-standing norm that foreign automakers could not fully own their businesses in China. It was treated as a hard rule, but we found a way for the Chinese officials to make an exception. After sustained negotiations over 14 months, Tesla secured the go-ahead for the first 100 percent foreign-owned auto business in China, retaining financial ownership even while the land remained formally owned under China’s system. That did not happen by accepting the requirement. It happened by interrogating it.

2. Delete every possible step in the process.

When organizations want to move faster, their instinct is almost always to add: another tool, another layer, another approval, another meeting. But speed rarely comes from addition. Speed comes from subtraction.

Take Tesla’s push to reduce friction in buying a car online. The experience was painfully complex. It took 64 clicks to complete the purchase journey. Elon set a stretch goal to get it down to 10 clicks. The work started by deleting steps customers did not value and then attacking the biggest sinkhole—financing paperwork. The team asked which documents were truly required by law versus simply inherited by the banks and lawyers we had worked with. That led to a potential breakthrough the industry had not even considered: a one-click loan or lease document, pursued directly with banks.

“If a step disappeared tomorrow, would the customer notice?”

Deletion also showed up earlier in that same flow. Tesla realized customers were drowning in choices, with hundreds of thousands of potential combinations. That complexity created more clicks, slowed conversion, and complicated manufacturing and supply chain. So, the team simplified everything, eliminating countless combinations and pushing customers toward core packages aligned with what they wanted.

Ask yourself, if a step disappeared tomorrow, would the customer notice? If the answer is no, you could probably delete it.

A lot of work inside most organizations exists simply to support other work. Reports created so other reports can be written. Meetings held to prepare for meetings. Complexity that is managed by roles that should not exist because the complexity should not exist.

When you delete aggressively, clarity emerges, decision-making speeds up, and ownership sharpens. There’s simply less drag.

We just announced our nonfiction book of the season! To find out what it is and get 20% off on a membership, click here:

3. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

If the process is hard to explain, it’s too complicated. If you can’t explain something, you can’t repeat it reliably. And if you can’t repeat it reliably, you can’t scale it.

This shows up everywhere, not just in manufacturing. One of the best examples I’ve seen is from a completely different world: Alinea, the Michelin three-star restaurant in Chicago.

From the customer’s perspective, it’s theatrical. It feels complex, even magical. But backstage, the kitchen is the opposite of magical. It’s engineered. Everything is designed around simplicity and repeatability. Tools and appliances are placed to eliminate unnecessary movement. Stations are arranged so chefs barely have to turn their heads. The choreography is so tight that plating steps can happen within seconds.

“Everything is designed around simplicity and repeatability.”

When the standard is perfection at speed, you cannot survive on complexity. The only way it works is by stripping out extra steps, removing variation wherever it does not add value, and locking in a system that people can execute the same way, every time.

That’s what simplification really is. Not making things smaller. Making them repeatable, because that’s what scales.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is What’s the Point? by Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and other #1 bestsellers. It’s a clear, actionable framework for making purpose the engine of your work, relationships, and daily life.

4. If you can move faster than everyone else, you will win more often than you should.

I am not talking about cutting corners. I mean making decisions, testing, learning, and improving in short cycles. Fast teams catch problems early and fix them while they are still small.

One of the best examples from my career comes from Lululemon and the Winter Olympics. Lululemon’s product development process was not built for extreme deadlines. Then, in late 2021, Lululemon won the contract to outfit Team Canada for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing. The catch was simple and brutal: the athletes needed the gear in about four months. So, the Lululemon team had to compress time in a way that normally would have sounded impossible. They did two key things:

They loosened the rulebook. They cut approvals and trusted leaders to make calls in real time rather than waiting for permission.
They changed how the work moved. Instead of doing things one step at a time, they ran steps in parallel. Work that used to move like a relay race became more like a kitchen during dinner service, with multiple dishes moving at once.

What makes things move in your organization? What do you do weekly, or daily, that turns talk into action? For speed, you need a system that keeps decisions and progress on a short leash.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fabric. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family at ⁠meetfabric.com/nbi⁠

5. Automate last.

Automation is powerful, but only after the system works. Too many organizations automate a messy process. All that does is lock in and disguise the mess. Fix the work first, then automate it.

You see this in great startups. Early Amazon did a lot by hand, so they could learn the real process before building tech around it. DoorDash started by doing things manually, too, taking orders and delivering food before they wrote software, because you cannot automate what you do not understand.

Especially now, with AI everywhere, the question is not “Can we automate this?” It’s “Should we?” Use technology to speed up good systems, not to paper over bad ones.

“Too many organizations automate a messy process.”

You do not need a factory or a product launch to use this. You can apply it to anything that feels slower, heavier, or harder than it should. A weekly meeting that drags. An approval chain that kills momentum. An onboarding process that takes forever. Even the way your household runs when everyone is rushing out the door.

Pick one thing. Write down what people say “has to happen.” Then ask why. Keep asking until you hit a real constraint, like law, safety, or physics. Everything else is negotiable. Then delete what no one would miss. Simplify what remains until you can explain it in plain language. Speed it up for a week, not to create stress, but to surface what is broken. And only after it works, then let technology help.

The Mental Health Tricks That Actually Work (From Someone Who's Tried Everything)

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:31:21 GMT

The Big Idea: Managing your mental health doesn’t always require a therapist or a major lifestyle overhaul. Sometimes, small, specific, science-backed strategies can get you back on track.

Why It Matters: Tens of millions of American experience mild to moderate mental illness in the form of anxiety, depression, mood disorder, and more. Most find it daunting to get the help they may need and could benefit from simple, practical tools to get them through tough days.

Try This Today: Rate your current mood on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means “I need help immediately” and 5 means “I believe I can fly.” If you’re at a 1 or 2, consider who in your life you could share that number with today.

These ideas come from How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay by Jenny Lawson. Lawson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and humorist known for her unflinching, funny writing about mental illness, chronic illness, and daily survival. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

We just announced our nonfiction book of the season! To find out what it is and get 20% off on a membership, click here:

1. Really? Just breathe?

I hate when I’m having an anxiety attack and people tell me to “just breathe” because what exactly did they think I was doing? I’m always breathing. I can literally do it in my sleep. But it turns out that there are specific breathing techniques that can slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure so that you calm down quicker.

The real trick is finding which breathing technique works for you. My therapist tried teaching me one and it didn’t work at all because I felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, which made me panic even more. That whole experience was particularly unhelpful because it made me feel like I had failed at breathing, which is something I had not even known one could do wrong.

Years later, I had a panic attack at a writing conference. I had managed to get outside so that I could hide in an alley until it passed, but a woman passed by and saw me crouched against the wall. I tried to smile and wave her off, but she squatted next to me and started telling me how to breathe. This was very annoying until I realized that she was suggesting a totally different technique. She said:

“Put your hand on your stomach. Now, breathe in through your nose so deeply that you feel your stomach rise like you’re slowly inflating a balloon in your belly. Excellent. Now let’s inflate that balloon for two seconds. One, two, good. Now breathe out with me for three seconds. Feel the balloon in your stomach deflating. One, two, three. Excellent. Now we do it again.”

“This was very annoying until I realized that she was suggesting a totally different technique.”

Following along with her breathing cues, I started to calm down slightly. She then changed the breathing: into the belly for three seconds, holding my breath for a second, and breathing out for four seconds. As I calmed down further, she expanded that time until I wasn’t hyperventilating anymore. At the end, she patted my arm and went on with her day as if she had not become some guardian angel in the form of an absolute stranger. I later found out that this is called belly breathing—or diaphragmatic breathing if you’re fancy.

This technique works because panicked, shallow breathing can limit your diaphragm’s ability to move and that makes you feel short of breath and pushes you deeper into a panic. Breathing through your belly makes your diaphragm start working again. There are lots of different techniques so if one doesn’t work for you, try another.

2. Smiling is not simple, but it helps.

“Just smile” is some of the most useless advice when dealing with depression. Please don’t tell someone this. And if someone says it to you when you’re dealing with depression, you have my permission to kick them straight in the shin and run away.

However, studies have shown that pretending to smile can make you feel happier. So, whenever I’m in the car, I make myself smile this massively wide grin and it works in two ways:

It makes me feel so stupid that I end up laughing at myself.
A woman driving alone with a perplexingly enormous smile looks incredibly unsettling to the people I’m passing on the road, so they are much more likely to give me room to go around them.

3. Prepare while you feel safe.

We don’t think twice about most of the precautions we use to stay safe in the world. We wear seatbelts or life jackets or motorcycle helmets and lock our doors at night and we carry mace and we check the backseat to make sure there’s not a serial killer hiding behind us. But in the United States, suicide is twice as common as homicide, and we are not nearly as likely to have plans in place if that danger arises. And often we don’t want to admit that we’re in crisis until it becomes overwhelming. Doing a little safety planning in advance can be incredibly helpful. Don’t wait until you’re in crisis to find a crisis hotline. Do it when you feel safe as a favor to future you, just in case.

There are specific hotlines for LGBTQ+ people, for people of color, for religious affiliations, veterans, or any other group that you can imagine. There are text-based hotlines if you are afraid to talk to people. There are peer groups that can understand. There are groups that will connect you with professionals. When you find the right one, look up some reviews to make sure it’s good, then put that number into your phone and label it In Case I Need Help. Hopefully you will never have to use it, but it never hurts to have it.

“Don’t wait until you’re in crisis to find a crisis hotline.”

And many people don’t know that you don’t have to call a crisis hotline for yourself. You can call it if you are worried about a loved one and want advice on how to handle it. Or if you are afraid to admit that you yourself have a problem, you can always talk to them anonymously about ‘your friend’ who just happens to be you and who needs somebody to talk to. Also, if you are speaking to someone on a crisis hotline and it doesn’t seem like they get you, you can thank them for their time, hang up, and call back and talk to somebody else.

Sometimes you might need somebody to give you actionable steps. Sometimes you need help to find the words to reach out to friends or to family or to help you find a doctor. And sometimes you just need somebody to listen and help count down the dangerous hours. No matter what, don’t be afraid to reach out if you need it.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is What’s the Point? by Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and other #1 bestsellers. It’s a clear, actionable framework for making purpose the engine of your work, relationships, and daily life.

4. A scale for “Fine.”

Sometimes it can be hard to find out how people are really doing because you’ll ask and they’ll say, “I’m fine.” And you can tell they are not even close to fine, but they don’t have the words to say it. One of the things I do is instead of asking how somebody is doing—if I really want to know the truth—is I ask them how they’re feeling on a scale of one to five:

One means “I need help immediately.”
Two means “Things are getting on top of me today, but also I might just be hungry.”
Three means “Generally fine.”
Four means “I’m having a great day.”
Five means “I believe I can fly.”

This scale was incredibly helpful for me when my kid was experiencing the difficulties of being a middle schooler—a time when kids absolutely do not want to reach out just as much as they absolutely need to reach out. Having that scale made it easy to express how they were doing rather than just automatically say, “Fine.” It made them think about how they were feeling and it gave us a way of seeing patterns. It gave us an easier language and an opportunity to say, “I really want to know.”

I use that same scale now for myself because it helps me recognize that my own manic fives can be just as concerning as my super low ones, and that threes can be great and that expecting life to always be four is unrealistic. But on those four days, I can happily discuss what makes it a four so that I can better understand what brought me that joy and invite more of it in.

This scale also gives the people that you love a quick shorthand to ask for help or keep you in the loop without always having to turn it into a hard, difficult conversation. It’s helpful too because we don’t always reach out to ask people who we don’t imagine as struggling where they are on a scale from one to five. You might be surprised how often people may need more help than they let on, even if it’s just to have someone listen and care. And don’t forget that sometimes the person that we forget to check in on is ourselves.

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

5. Alone can be together.

I have ADHD. It makes it incredibly hard for me to get things done. I’m a writer and I really struggle with writing. I love having written, but I also find the process lonely and isolating. I know a lot of people go to coffee shops or libraries, but I don’t know how they do it because I get so distracted and I spend all my time eating cake and eavesdropping. A game-changer for me has been online, silent writing with strangers, which sounds weird, but it’s one of the few good things that came from COVID times.

“Looking up at my screen to see the faces of a dozen other people typing away is both comforting and encouraging.”

There are lots of different names for these groups, but they basically consist of a scheduled Zoom meeting where total strangers log on and just write together in the quiet. It sounds ridiculous, but looking up at my screen to see the faces of a dozen other people typing away is both comforting and encouraging. They usually last about an hour. There are sessions scheduled in all different time zones. Some start with a short pep talk, some break into groups, some leave the chat box open so that you can make connections or get feedback or ask, “What’s this word that I’m looking for?”

I pop into a lot of these Zooms. There are also ones where you can silently read with others. There are ones that allow you to study quietly together. There are ones that focus on people knitting or painting or working on their computers silently. These are the most undemanding and helpful clubs that I belong to—if you can call them clubs. Just seeing that I’m not alone even when I’m alone can break me out of a writer’s block. We all feel alone sometimes, but we never really are.

How to Get Rich: Take the Long View

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:03:30 GMT

The Big Idea: The best financial advice isn’t in this year’s bestseller list — it’s in the last 300 years of American history. Every era produced confident money rules that later proved wrong, temporary, or wildly context-dependent. The investors who actually got ahead weren’t the ones who chased the next big thing. They were the ones who understood the long game.

Why It Matters We’re pattern-matching machines living in a 24-hour news cycle — which makes us terrible at financial decisions. We panic-sell, chase trends, and mistake recent history for permanent truth. A longer view is a corrective. The more history you know, the harder it is to be fooled by whoever’s selling certainty this decade.

Try This Today Think about your own financial strategy. Are you relying on one thing — one account, one income, one plan — to carry you? History suggests that’s the riskiest move of all. What’s one additional strategy, however small, you could add to the mix this year?

These ideas come from How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t) by , a historian whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Oxford University Press. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

We just announced our nonfiction book of the season! To find out what it is and get 20% off on a membership, click here:

1. It has never been easier to get ahead than it is today.

In 1676, 100 years before the Revolution, colonists burned the capital of Virginia to the ground because they felt that average people couldn’t get ahead anymore. In the 1800s, big speeches were given saying “the rungs of the ladder to success are sawed off.” Heck, in 1980, there were headlines proclaiming that the Baby Boomers could never afford to retire. How did that turn out?

The same goes for today. Of children born at the bottom, six in 10 rise out of poverty, and four in 10 become middle class, upper middle class, or rich. One in 10 goes all the way to the top. For the privileged born at the top, 64 percent fall out. Of the top 1 percent, 90 percent of their grandkids aren’t particularly wealthy. We may not have perfect mobility in America, but we have a lot more than we think.

Okay, so the Boomer generation was weirdly lucky. Fun historical fact: Working one job for 40 years while saving 10 percent in stocks would have failed to fund retirement in almost half of historical scenarios. Boomers tend to think that what worked for them must work for everyone. That isn’t historically true.

As for the Doomers—they may have to get ahead the same way most people did for most of time. In the 1700s, if you went broke you went to jail, and so did your entire family: wife and kids. They forgot to put that in Hamilton. In the 1870s, the average American owned just one and a half shirts. To afford the other half of that shirt, you had to work on average 60 hours per week. Insurance was in its infancy, so you couldn’t protect your house, spouse, or income. As late as the 1970s, when I was born, the median income was 30 percent lower than today. Nowadays, we work fewer hours for more money with less risk than ever before.

The first step was to take literal steps. In the 1800s, one in three Americans changed addresses every single year! Keep in mind that just getting to America took 30 days, and traveling across the country took the U.S. Army two months. Today, when it has never been easier to go where the opportunity is, only one in 10 Americans moves. You could, if you wanted, put everything you own in a U-Haul and be anywhere in the continental U.S. in under 48 hours.

Americans are becoming increasingly risk-averse at the very moment the financial world is safer and more accessible than ever. Both sides of politics have a warped view of the past: that it was better “back then,” and that someone else is to blame. Anyone telling you it is harder today than ever before doesn’t know history.

Pick up a copy on Amazon

2. What “always worked” was always changing.

In 1835, a runaway slave created money from nothing. Arriving in Michigan broke but determined, William Wells Brown caught a break when a landlord offered him space to start a barbershop—a fabulous idea, save for the fact he owned no scissors, had never cut hair, and everyone in town was short on cash to pay. Undeterred, the young man borrowed shears and printed money. He went to the local printer and had about $20 printed in small denominations ranging from 6 to 50 cents. He handed these out around town, essentially exchanging haircuts for food and lodging. Eventually, other people started trading the tokens too, and before long, Brown’s bucks were treated as money in Monroe, MI. Brown eventually was able to trade his tokens for real cash, and that is how he paid to get to freedom in New York. When he left, his money went to $0.

Money itself has changed dramatically. By 1863, there were around 10,000 unique currencies from over 1,000 issuers. Coins from the Holy Roman Empire lingered in the U.S. for decades after its collapse, because money from a dead empire was better than money from no empire at all. Grandparents taught grandkids to never save money because, like Brown’s self-made funds, it could become worthless overnight. The trick was to spend as quickly as possible.

There was no golden era when everyone was debt-free, saved money, and invested wisely. What works financially is constantly changing. Much of what we consider timeless advice is quite young. Stocks for the long run? Stocks underperformed or were tied with bonds until World War II, making that “truth” younger than either of our last two presidents.

Real estate always goes up, right? But it doesn’t. Adjusted for inflation, houses in Atlanta, Dallas, and Pittsburgh cost the same in 1997 as they had in 1897. Home values in St. Louis did not recover their values until 2003. What has happened in real estate in our lifetimes is entirely new. Home prices going up is historically weird.

Most financial advice is like trying to steer the car by looking in the rear-view mirror. That may tell you where the road was, but it doesn’t say much about where it is going.

3. Dual incomes were always normal.

In the 1890s, New York City policeman John Taylor put a small down payment on a brownstone. How could a beat cop afford a brownstone? The answer was his wife, Agnes. The historical record lists her with no occupation, but she was making money. To pay down their mortgage, Agnes treated the home as an income-producing property. She rented out the rooms in her home to 10 separate boarders at a time, managing their rent payments, laundry service, and meal preparation. She ran a nineteenth-century Airbnb. That is how they afforded their mortgage.

The historical record misses this, because the money women made was usually classified as “domestic industry.” But for all American history, women’s earnings made up the difference between barely surviving and thriving: in total, they added 15 to 25 percent to families’ total take-home pay. Women churned butter, gathered eggs, wove hats to wake up early and sell at local markets. At some point in their lives, about half of women who owned a home rented out rooms for money.

Women were also investors in every era. Women were the most common lenders of mortgages in the 1700s. They owned 50 percent of the shares in AT&T. Every women’s magazine had a financial beat writer, because women were active investors. Heck, Abigail Adams’ lifetime annualized returns were 18 percent, nearly identical to Warren Buffett’s.

Women’s income was so important that, when the stay-at-home-wife movement got started, it was men who were writing angry letters to the newspaper complaining that wives needed to be earning, not learning “at home like scholars.” Two-income families were normal for most of history. The view that women started working in the 1960s is just plain wrong.

And it has warped our dialogue about gender. Women working doesn’t undermine men’s economic roles because it never did in the past. Spouses saw themselves as both working to build a future together. Dual incomes powered most people’s pursuit of the American Dream. It still can, today.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is What’s the Point? by Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and other #1 bestsellers. It’s a clear, actionable framework for making purpose the engine of your work, relationships, and daily life.

4. Retirement happened long before Social Security.

“I wish I had a villa in Florida to retire to” is a sentence from a letter in 1830s Baltimore. By the early 1900s, one in three elderly people was retired, Coral Gables was bursting at the seams with old people, and the day the first Social Security check was cashed, nearly half of 65-year-olds were done working. How was that possible?

Rather than relying on a single government-run system, Americans used multiple strategies in their golden years. Paid-for farmland or rental houses were leased. Businesses were sold to junior partners. Annuities offered retirement plans from the insurance industry.

Some companies offered pensions, though not as many as we often think. Pensions typically covered around 15 percent of workers, and they never covered more than 40 percent of the workforce. Another strategy we’ve forgotten is state-run old-age insurance. By 1934, there were 30 of these. Alaska offered its own version of Social Security before it was even a state. The final strategy was raising good kids who would help Mom and Dad as they aged.

Social security didn’t revolutionize retirement; it standardized it. Social Security, private annuities, pension plans, 401(k)s, rental real estate, paid-for homes, and kids who aren’t screwed up are a pretty potent combo. Most of our retirement anxiety is misplaced. If you combine just a few of these strategies, you will be just fine.

The average 401(k) balance, if it had to fund retirement alone, would run out in under 6 years. Social Security offers a menial income, barely enough to survive. But when you combine these various strategies, the most typical scenario, using 150 years of market returns, is to die with more money than you started with. The lesson of history is to combine as many strategies as possible into one wonderful retirement. And never forget, your ancestors rarely lived to see so many free years. Worry less. Enjoy them more.

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

5. The next big thing is usually a bad idea.

Reading history distorts time. It makes everything seem fast. Everyone should have seen “it” coming, whatever “it” was: values that crashed (like tulips or Beanie Babies) and things that went boom (like Bitcoin or NVIDIA). But reading history and living history are not the same.

Financial life moves at two speeds: Fast Time and Slow Time. Most of life is lived in Slow Time, but most financial history is written about Fast Time (when all assumptions change at once). The real role of such histories is to give the reader a thrill. It’s a murder movie where we scream at the screen, “Look behind you! It’s the subprime mortgage lender. Run away from the mortgage!”

Mistaking Slow Time for Fast Time changed my town forever and, as a bonus, inspired the Netflix hit series Schitt’s Creek. I live in Braselton, Georgia, a tiny town outside of Atlanta, once owned by superstar actress Kim Basinger. Depending on your generation, you know her as a Bond girl, Viki Vale, Eminem’s mom, or that old Fem-Dom in Fifty- Shades Darker. She owned the town as an investment.

Her plan was to turn the empty mills into a tourist attraction and build a movie studio... in Georgia, in the 90s. But building a dream happens in Slow Time. Taxes mount. Investors get anxious. Soon, you run out of cash. Basinger declared bankruptcy. Actor Eugene Levy found this story, and the rest was pandemic-era comedy gold starring himself as a failed businessman whose final remaining possession is a backwater town with a funny name.

But who gets the last laugh? Today, the fastest growing movie production studios in the world—bigger than New York and soon to overtake California—are in “Y’allywood,” a district just outside Metro Atlanta. The town Basinger bought is home to one of Atlanta’s largest tourist attractions, a winery and resort called Chateau Elan. They sell accessible French luxury on Georgia clay. It’s surrounded by mansions of pro athletes, famous rappers, and C-level reality stars. And it works. It’s profitable. You should visit.

Basinger, bless her heart, just didn’t understand that she couldn’t speed up time. Investing in the future is rarely as profitable as we think because the future rarely arrives tomorrow. It takes its time, and so should we.

The Science of Tiny Habits: How Little by Little Becomes a Lot

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:01:01 GMT

The Big Idea: Lasting change doesn’t require a breakthrough moment, iron willpower, or a new personality. It requires low-resistance actions, done consistently, pointed in the same direction—and a few key skills most people were never taught.

Why It Matters: Most people fail at change not because something is wrong with them, but because they’re using the wrong strategies. They treat change like a character test when it’s actually a learnable skill.

Try This Today: Think of one habit you’ve been struggling to start. Now make it so small it feels almost embarrassing. Don’t “exercise for 30 minutes”—just put on your shoes. Don’t “meditate”—just sit quietly for 60 seconds. Notice what happens when you remove the resistance entirely.

These ideas come from How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life by . Eric is a behavior coach and host of the award-winning podcast The One You Feed, who has guided thousands worldwide in creating lasting habits—after transforming his own life from homelessness and addiction. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

We just announced our nonfiction book of the season! To find out what it is and get 20% off on a membership, click here:

1. Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

You’ve heard some version of this idea: Rome wasn’t built in a day, slow and steady wins the race, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. And yet, when we attempt change in our own lives, we can’t help but hope for faster results—the silver bullet, the epiphany, the makeover montage. But the good news is that meaningful, lasting transformation doesn’t take a lightning-strike miracle or willpower of steel. Little by little will become a lot.

When I say, “little by little,” I specifically mean low-resistance actions, done consistently over time, in the same direction:

Low resistance is about choosing actions we’ll actually do.
Consistency is about repetition.
In the same direction means that all the little steps are headed toward the same thing.

The harder something is to do, the more motivation we need to tackle it. The easier it is, the less motivation we need to get started. We can think of the combined challenge posed by difficulty and motivation as our overall resistance to a given action.

There are two ways to lower that resistance. The first is to raise our motivation level, which is easier said than done. Motivation is more a feeling than anything else, and feelings don’t have levers you can pull. The other way? Make the behavior easier. Make it smaller.

Let me give you an example from this very morning. I was groggily scrolling through the New York Times, wanting to do anything but ride my bike. I had this internal negotiation: “Okay, it’s time to do our one-hour ride.” And my brain said, “Are you nuts?”

“Make the behavior easier. Make it smaller.”

But instead of trying to pump myself up, I changed the task. Instead of “Get on the bike and ride for an hour,” I made it “Just put on your bike shoes and clip into the bike.” And I got on the bike and started pedaling.

We believe we get motivated and then act, but often it works the other way around. We act, and motivation follows. As the saying goes in 12-step programs: “Sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.”

2. Change is a skill you can learn.

Most people don’t fail at change because they’re lazy. They fail because they’re trying to solve a skills problem with shame and willpower.

That framing matters because when we treat change like a character issue—”I’m just the kind of person who…”—we’re already halfway to quitting. As a coach, I heard that sentence constantly: “I’m just the kind of person who can’t stick with anything,” or “who has no willpower,” or “who never finishes what I start.” Those beliefs get so ingrained that they start to feel like facts. Once they feel like facts, we behave like they’re true.

Writing this book brought me levels of self-doubt I hadn’t faced in a long time. With each new page, my brain would ask, “Who are you to offer wisdom to anyone?” or “Is there a more boring sentence outside of an accounting textbook?” And once that voice gets going, avoidance gets tempting. So, we work through that as follows:

We work with negative self-talk, not against it. This is where a lot of self-help veers into “positive thinking.” Full cheerleader mode has never worked for me. I’ve found it easier—and just as effective—to aim for neutral. Instead of “I can definitely do this,” I ask: “Do you know you can’t?” And even my most pessimistic self has to admit the answer is no, I don’t know that. I might not believe I can, but I no longer believe I can’t, which is a place to start.
We shift how we label obstacles. A.J. Jacobs once told me he loved a quote from Quincy Jones: “I don’t have problems, I have puzzles.” A problem feels heavy and final. A puzzle is an invitation. You roll up your sleeves and work on it. You assume there’s a way through—even if you can’t see it yet.
We stop using self-judgment as our main fuel source. Yes, self-criticism is a type of fuel. But it burns dirty and eventually gunks up the engine. Learning doesn’t happen in states of stress. Judgment collapses our consciousness. We lose the ability to experiment, adjust, and learn from mistakes—the exact things that change requires.

If you’ve struggled to change, the most accurate conclusion usually isn’t that something is wrong with you. Rather, you’ve just been using the wrong strategy or missing a few skills.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is What’s the Point? by Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and other #1 bestsellers. It’s a clear, actionable framework for making purpose the engine of your work, relationships, and daily life.

3. What you want most vs. what you want now.

Our inner motivational landscape is far more complex than that question suggests. We have a complex interplay of needs, wants, beliefs, and values swirling inside us. But for practical purposes, I’ve found it most useful to boil it down to two basic camps: your values—what you’ve decided is worth wanting—and your desires—what you want, whether you like it or not. Values are what you want most. Desires are what you want now. The gap between them is where much of our struggle lives.

One of the most common ways desires win is what I call the Shortsighted Stumble—when our only perspective is now. Researchers call this delay discounting, which is a fancy way of saying we value immediate gratification over longer-term effects.

There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons where Marge tells Homer that someday he’ll regret not spending more time with the kids. Homer replies, “That’s a problem for future Homer. Boy, I don’t envy that guy”—before pouring vodka into a mayonnaise jar, shaking it up, and slugging it down. This disgusts even me, a former alcoholic who drank rotgut wine that never saw a grape. But the scene gets to the core of this pitfall: we’re not thinking of our future self, or the future at all.

In recovery, we used a technique called “playing the tape all the way through.” Don’t stop at the first frame, which shows how good it would feel to do the easy thing. Keep going. Picture what happens after.

“The goal is to see and feel the likely consequences of your present choice.”

I might suddenly have a craving to get high, and all I’d be thinking about is how good it would feel. Playing the tape through means thinking about what comes next. I might feel good for a few hours, but then I would want to get high again, with even more intensity. And I didn’t have any money, which would mean I’d have to steal something, and oh yeah, I was already facing fifty years of prison time.

Most of us aren’t on that trajectory, but the same principle applies. If you’re tempted to hit snooze again, picture the next scene: the frantic scramble, the awkward slide past your boss’s office, the slow burn of shame that hangs around all morning. Suddenly, pulling off the covers doesn’t seem so bad.

The scientific term for this is episodic future thinking—imagining in detail experiences that might yet happen to you. The goal is to see and feel the likely consequences of your present choice. Because change doesn’t usually come down to knowing what you want most. It comes down to remembering it at the exact moment you want something else.

4. YOU are the meaning maker.

One of my favorite phrases of all time comes from Anaïs Nin, who wrote: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

For us humans, there’s simply no such thing as an objective view of reality. Even when we think we’re seeing all the facts, we’re always seeing them through the colored lens of our own perspective. There is no view from nowhere—no perfectly removed perch from which we can see all angles at once. And when we forget that—when we assume the way we’re seeing the world is just the way it is, rather than the way it looks to us—we can cause ourselves a lot of needless suffering.

Your mind is a projector, screening a movie onto the world around you that is a blend of your memories, expectations, and interpretations. Rather than seeing raw reality, you see a story whose plot, characters, and even genre are shaped by your past experiences, cultural background, emotional state, and personality traits. Someone else watching the same screen would see a completely different movie.

It would be nice if we could just take the glasses off completely, but that isn’t possible. What we can do is find the edges of the frames and remember that other views exist. We can begin working with perspective by asking three simple questions:

What am I making this mean? This makes us aware that we’re actively creating meaning. It usually happens automatically, and subconsciously, so this question catches the mind’s meaning-making machine in the act. Sometimes the question alone is enough to make us reconsider our conclusions.
What else could it mean? “Could” is key. The goal isn’t necessarily to replace your interpretation. It’s to recognize that other interpretations are possible.
What meaning is most useful? We never have all the facts. If I’m creating the meaning, and several meanings could fit, why not choose the one that empowers me and reduces suffering?

Much of our suffering comes from the meaning you’re making, not the facts themselves. These three questions interrupt your meaning-making machine and give you back the power to choose your interpretation.

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

5. Extreme language produces extreme emotions (and behavior).

This morning I woke up with some back pain, and my first thought was, “My back is killing me.” It’s obviously hyperbole, but that’s the point: extreme language produces extreme emotions. When my inner narration goes dire, my emotions follow it—and then my behavior follows the emotions. A better internal conversation would be—eyeroll emoji—“I feel your pain, Eric, but a tight lumbar is unlikely to cause your death.” The best way to move forward with my day was to scale back how I was describing the pain to myself.

Or take this classic: “I can’t believe they did that!” Think about that statement. You can believe it. You just would have chosen for that person to act differently. Try rephrasing to: “I wish they hadn’t done that.” If you’re auditioning for The Real Housewives, you may want to stick with the original, but assuming you want a calmer existence, try the reframe.

Extreme language produces extreme emotions. More measured language creates space for a more balanced, middle-way perspective. I never thought I’d be treating the lessons of third-grade English like a red-string conspiracy board, but adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns can become little bombs of extremity in our descriptions of reality:

Adjectives like horrible, disastrous, and unbearable can tip “this is unpleasant” into despair.
Adverbs like always and never turn a messy reality into an on-off switch. Want to turn a discussion into a fight? Accuse the other person of always or never doing something. It works like a charm. Inside our own heads, they sound like: “I always mess up,” “I never finish anything I start.”
Pronouns plus absolutes—everyone and no one—turn a bad moment into a global verdict: “No one loves me.” “Everyone thinks I’m stupid,” after a presentation to five people goes a little less well than you hoped.

When you notice these red-flag words, experiment with substitutions that reflect the nuance of reality: “That was unpleasant.” “I’m having a hard time right now.” “Sometimes I feel like you’re not hearing me.”

The goal isn’t to gloss over what’s hard. It’s to remind ourselves that reality is rarely black and white. There are real benefits to seeing in full color.

Apple in the Post-Tim Cook Era

Michael Kovnat — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:26:16 GMT

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

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Whither Apple?

In celebration of Apple's 50th birthday, we're probing the company's past and peering into its future with — former New York Times tech columnist, current CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, and author of the recent New York Times bestseller Apple: The First 50 Years. We begin by looking backward, exploring the improbable story of the hippie pranksters who built the world's first trillion-dollar company. But we're not just here for the history. We also look ahead, asking: What cool new tech are they cooking up in Cupertino? Why has Apple been so slow on AI, and does the company have a plan to catch up? And is John Ternus the right guy to succeed Tim Cook? Listen to our conversation with David on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

Are you okay?

A treasure chest of concise, simple tips and tricks that help manage the head and the heart—strategies that break through brain paralysis, make it possible to create when feeling empty, and help someone survive, and sometimes even thrive, when depression lies to us. , is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and humorist. She is the author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, Broken (in the Best Possible Way), and the proprietor of Nowhere Bookshop, an indie bookstore in San Antonio, Texas. Pick up a copy of her new book How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself on Amazon or check out the key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is How to Get Rich in American History by Joseph S. Moore, PhD — 300 years of financial advice, the good, the bad, and the gloriously ridiculous. A “dare you to put it down” read (William Bernstein).

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Why are so many of us misdiagnosed?

According to one influential study, almost all of us are going to be misdiagnosed at some point in our lives. Even in our age of high-tech medicine, doctors get it wrong surprisingly often. And a wrong diagnosis can be a fatal error. So what can be done about it?

Alexandra Sifferlin is a health and science editor for The New York Times Opinion desk, and a former deputy editor at Elemental and staff writer at Time, where she covered medicine and public health. Her new book is The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, and you can hear her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books this week. Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Gary Slutkin, The End of Violence: A Prescription for a Peaceful Society

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure

Carissa Véliz, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

Aiko Bethea, Anchored, Aligned, Accountable: A Framework for Transcending Bullsh*t and Transforming Our Lives and Work

Roxanne Khamsi, Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health

Valerie Fridland, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents

Michael P. Murphy Jr., Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live

Megan Garber, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency

Why Your Life Feels Empty (And the Neuroscience Fix You Haven't Tried)

Michael Kovnat — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:30:54 GMT

The Big Idea: There’s a reason why so many people report that their lives feel meaningless. Modern life — dominated by screens, scrolling, and the hustle-and-grind culture — has steadily weakened the part of the brain that generates a sense of meaning in the first place.

Why It Matters: For adults under 30, the single strongest predictor of clinical depression and anxiety isn't financial stress or relationship problems. It's answering yes to one question: Does your life feel meaningless? That sense of emptiness contributes to loneliness, conspiracy thinking, and other ills. But there are straightforward interventions that can restore meaning to our lives.

Try This Today: Start with the three-fence rule: no phone for the first hour after waking up, no phone for the last hour before bed, and no phone at the table during meals. The goal isn’t digital minimalism for its own sake. It’s creating enough stillness that your brain’s right hemisphere can do its job: processing love, meaning, and the deeper questions your left brain was never equipped to answer.

These ideas come from The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist and professor at Harvard University, where he teaches the science of happiness. He’s also a columnist at The Free Press and a CBS News contributor. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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

1. We have a meaning crisis.

In teaching about happiness, a lot of the advice I give is actually about unhappiness. Some years ago, I went searching for reasons behind our unhappiness epidemic: why are rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness increasing? There are many popular explanations, but none really hold water.

When I started talking to a lot of young people, one word kept showing up: meaning. Young people—especially young people in college—wanted to know what they are meant to do. They would say things like, “My life feels meaningless. Why is that? What is the meaning of my life?” I decided that this is where I needed to look.

Survey data shows that, for people under 30 years old, the number one predictor of clinical depression and generalized anxiety is the answer yes to the question: Does your life feel meaningless? We have a meaning crisis in our society that is particularly acute for people under 35. We also see it most prevalently in people who would seem to have the least problems; those considered to be highly educated strivers.

2. The meaning of meaning.

Upon digging into philosophy and psychology, it turns out that the meaning of meaning has three parts:

Coherence – An answer as to why things happen the way they do. Some people answer this with religion or science. If you know someone going down the rabbit hole on conspiracy theories, that’s a cry for help about meaning and the only way out is giving them a better way to find coherence.
Purpose – An answer as to why you are doing what you are doing. Everyone needs a sense of direction or goals, otherwise life will feel like going in meaningless circles.
Significance – An answer as to why your life matters, and to whom. This is really a love question: Who loves me? Does God love me? Does my family love me? Do I have friends? Feeling like your life doesn’t matter to anybody is a problem.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is How to Get Rich in American History by Joseph S. Moore, PhD — 300 years of financial advice, the good, the bad, and the gloriously ridiculous. A “dare you to put it down” read (William Bernstein).

3. Where to go to find meaning.

I remember when I was a young man, just trying to find my way. In my early twenties, I was a pretty serious musician. I practiced a lot, but I was very insecure and didn’t understand the meaning of my life. One day, I asked an older guy, “What do I do to find the meaning of my life?” And he said, “You know what you need to do, man? You need to go live at the beach. Maybe work at a surf shop in San Diego. Then you’ll find the meaning of your life.” In other words, his answer to where do you go to find meaning was the beach.

There’s nothing wrong with the beach, but that’s not the right answer. I like the beach plenty, but the place you actually need to go to for finding meaning is the right side of your brain.

There’s a whole theory in neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. This is just a fancy way of saying that the right and left sides of your brain do different things. The left side of your brain is where you answer technical questions—the how and what questions. The right side of your brain is the complex side that answers why questions—including the meaning and mystery of your life, love, happiness, and all that you really care about. If you want to find the meaning of your life, you need to exercise the right hemisphere of your brain.

“The right side of your brain is the complex side that answers why questions.”

But exercising the right hemisphere of your brain is getting harder. The hustle-and-grind culture is a culture of technical problems. Technology also places us in a left-hemisphere world where we can spend all day typing what and how questions into the Google search bar or ChatGPT. We engage our technical left brain from the moment we wake up to check our phones, and then we continue to use it when we go to work on Zoom, swipe right on a date, scroll through our friends’ posts on social media, or feel the victory of beating a game online. The truth of the matter is that the right brains of modern people have been getting weaker.

We feel like we’re living in a simulation, don’t we? We’re simulating ordinary life, but the one thing that can’t be simulated is the meaning of life. For that, you need to get to the right side of your brain.

4. The first step to finding meaning.

People use devices and technology to self-soothe in our stressful world—but then, they get hooked on them. Do you have a hard time letting go of your phone from time to time? Maybe you feel a little anxious when your phone is not near you? Well, it’s not your fault.

That’s how all addictions work. They affect the dopamine system in the brain. Whether it’s drugs and alcohol or gambling or any sort of behavior that you compulsively repeat and escalate, it activates neurochemistry in your brain that gives you a sense of craving. And that’s exactly what’s happening with your device habits. We’re horribly addicted to technology.

Every time we feed that addiction, we close off the right side of our brain and disconnect from the meaning of our lives. The first step to finding meaning is getting clean of device addictions and technology fixation. Now, I’m not saying to throw your phone into the ocean, but we need to put some fences around it.

“We’re horribly addicted to technology.”

For starters, don’t use your phone during the first hour after you wake up because this is when you’re programming your brain for the day. Then set it aside for the last hour of the day when you’re getting ready to rest. Also, don’t pick it up while you eat your meals, and invite human company to share the table with you whenever possible. Just those three things will help you get your life back from technology addiction and make it possible for you to start exploring the right side of your brain. That’s how to get clean.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Bitdefender. Get 30% off your plan at bitdefender.com/idea.

5. How to live a clean life.

Meaning comes when you’re using your right brain, and doing so means loving people in real life. Happiness is love because love brings meaning, but love can only happen with other people—maybe with God, but certainly not with inanimate objects like money or even online friends. It requires in-real-life experiences.

Now, I’m not saying this as a moralist, but as a behavioral social scientist. We are wired in our evolutionary environment to be together in person. Our brains don’t work very well when we’re interacting virtually. If you want to open the right side of your brain, you need to cultivate relationships in person.

If you don’t know what to do, you need to serve somebody. You need to lift somebody else up. You need to have an experience with somebody that you truly love. And when you do, you’re going to find your life changing. When you do these things in search of meaning, your meaning will find you—and not the other way around. Because when you open the right side of your brain, you’re opening the aperture that contains the ancient wisdom that you need. Your meaning is out there and will find you if you give it the opportunity. When it does, your life will never be the same.

Why Your Doctor Gets It Wrong—and a Simple Shift That Would Fix It

Michael Kovnat — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:26:58 GMT

The Big Idea: Structural flaws in American healthcare have created a “diagnosis crisis,” meaning nearly all of us will be misdiagnosed at least once in our lives.

Why It Matters: Researchers at Johns Hopkins estimate that close to 800,000 Americans become permanently disabled or die each year because a dangerous disease was misdiagnosed. This isn’t a rare tragedy. It’s a structural failure hiding in plain sight.

Try This Today: Before your next appointment, write down your symptoms in chronological order: when they started, how they’ve changed, what makes them better or worse. Research shows that a detailed patient history is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools available. And a clear narrative can help your doctor avoid errors.

These ideas come from The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis by Alexandra Sifferlin, a health and science editor for The New York Times Opinion desk and a former staff writer at Time. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. Nearly every American will suffer from a diagnostic error.

In the United States, diagnostic errors—which can include a delayed diagnosis, a wrong diagnosis, or a missed diagnosis—affect at least five percent of adults every year. According to an influential 2015 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimated that close to 800,000 Americans become permanently disabled or die each year because dangerous diseases are misdiagnosed.

That being said, doctors do usually get diagnoses right, with some estimates suggesting around 90 percent of the time. But given there are around 155 million emergency room visits each year and around 1 billion physician office visits, even a low error rate can translate into a lot of affected people. It is worth trying to improve these numbers.

2. Delayed diagnosis is costly for everyone.

The longer a diagnosis takes, the more patients cycle through appointments, tests, and ineffective treatments. The U.S. spends twice as much on health care as comparable countries and yet has worse outcomes. Americans may be less likely to seek medical attention because of cost or because it takes so long to finally get a doctor’s appointment. Sometimes they seek medical attention only when things are quite bad. This is a costly cycle.

“A doctor may have no idea if their diagnosis was right for the patient they saw.”

There is currently no federal reimbursement incentive for hospitals with lower diagnostic error rates. Major health care systems in the U.S. don’t systematically track diagnostic errors. A doctor may have no idea if their diagnosis was right for the patient they saw. If doctors and hospitals were incentivized to reduce diagnostic error rates, and if health care systems tracked the errors that do occur, this would decrease overall costs for everyone involved and more efficiently ensure that patients receive appropriate care.

3. We need doctors back at the bedside.

For centuries, the physical exam was critical for diagnosis and helping doctors gain experience. But as technology advances, many physicians have begun prioritizing new tools over listening to patients and observing their symptoms. A better balance restores the physical exam and patient interaction as the foundation of care, with technology used to confirm or refine what clinicians learn at the bedside. Research suggests that this approach reduces diagnostic errors and creates a more rewarding experience for both doctors and patients.

However, that’s not to say technology isn’t important. It is. Everything from the stethoscope to an ultrasound is important for diagnosis. Now, there is a lot of excitement around artificial intelligence and the ability of large language models to take great amounts of medical information and aid in diagnosis. There are still many unanswered questions and potential overhype of AI, but it might radically change healthcare diagnosis.

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4. Diagnostic mistakes arise more from how doctors think than from what they know.

Errors frequently emerge during the reasoning process itself: when uncertainty is handled poorly, alternative explanations are overlooked, or reflection is cut short. Diagnosis is not simply a technical task but a judgment skill.

“Errors frequently emerge during the reasoning process itself.”

Advocates of this view emphasize that such judgment can be strengthened through deliberate training, particularly by prioritizing clinical reasoning in medical education and by creating systems that allow physicians to review outcomes across many cases.

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5. A more humane approach to medicine can go a long way.

The National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network brings together clinicians and researchers of different disciplines to diagnose some of the most complicated medical mysteries. These experts work together to understand each patient in a holistic way with longer appointments and access to the best technology. They have been able to diagnose many people with rare or even novel diseases.

In speaking with participants for my book, what stood out most was not the specialized tests or advanced tools, but how people were treated. Patients emphasized the humanity of the care—being listened to, taken seriously, and respected. Even those whose diagnostic journeys remain unfinished described the experience as profoundly better than anything they had encountered before.

One woman I profiled spent decades undiagnosed and in severe pain before clinicians at the Undiagnosed Diseases Network spent time with her and her family and discovered that she and her four siblings shared a very rare disease experts hadn’t known about before.

Your Brain Wants You to Be Happy.

Michael Kovnat — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:49:50 GMT

The Big Idea: Flourishing isn’t something that happens to lucky people; it’s a set of skills anyone can develop. A new book argues that four trainable capacities—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—are rooted in brain networks that can be shaped through practice. You don’t have to overhaul your life. You just have to show up for a few minutes a day.

Why It Matters: Learning to flourish doesn’t just benefit you. It can create downstream effects for everyone around you. In one study, public school teachers who practiced well-being skills for just five minutes a day over 28 days didn’t just feel better themselves—their students scored significantly higher on standardized math tests. The teachers hadn’t changed their curriculum. They’d simply become more present, more connected, more purposeful.

Try This Today: Before your next meal, pause for sixty seconds and trace the chain of people it took for that food to reach your plate—farmers, drivers, packers, store workers. Let yourself feel the interconnection. This kind of “conscious habit,” a small reframe layered onto something you already do, can quietly change the quality of your life.

These ideas come from the new book Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl. Richard is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the Founder and Director of their Center for Healthy Minds. Cortland serves as a Contemplative Scientist at the university’s Center for Healthy Minds and as Chief Contemplative Officer at the affiliated nonprofit, Humin.

Read on for five of their big ideas.

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1. We are born to flourish.

Flourishing is a learnable skill. Some people believe that their general well-being is fixed and there’s not much they can do to improve it, but research shows that this is not true.

The qualities that underlie flourishing are rooted in brain networks that exhibit neuroplasticity. These networks can be shaped by experience and training. With very simple exercises, our minds can actually be nourished and changed.

2. Flourishing is comprised of four basic skills.

The four basic, trainable skills of flourishing are awareness, connection, insight, and purpose.

Awareness refers to our capacity to be mindful and voluntarily deploy our attention. It also relates to our capacity for self-awareness, meaning to be aware of our own bodies, minds, feelings, and thoughts. Another component of awareness is a process that psychologists and neuroscientists call meta-awareness, which is awareness of our own minds—knowing what our minds are doing. This may sound a little bit strange, but have you ever been reading a book, set it aside after a few pages and then realized that you have no idea what you just read? That is an example of not knowing what your mind is doing. But that moment of recognition is a moment of awakening, and that is meta-awareness.

Connection includes qualities that are important for healthy social relationships, like appreciation, gratitude, kindness, and compassion. This is the antithesis of loneliness. These qualities are vital for human flourishing.

Insight is the deep appreciation and understanding of how our thoughts, beliefs, and expectations shape our experience of the world. Each of us has thoughts, beliefs, and expectations of ourselves. This constitutes our narrative self—the self that we tell ourselves exists. Knowing that we filter our experience of the world through our own personal lens helps us keep in perspective that other people in the same situation may have a very different experience. Insight is vital to developing empathy.

Purpose is not so much about finding something especially significant to do with our lives, but about finding meaning in even the most pedestrian activities of daily life. Can taking out the garbage connect with our sense of purpose? Of course it can be. It simply requires a little reframing.

3. Cultivating flourishing is easier than you think.

Research shows that it only takes a few minutes of daily practice to nurture each of these four qualities of flourishing. We don’t have to sit and meditate for hours, days, months, or years. It’s something that can change rather quickly, although regularity of practice is important.

I like to remind people that when humans first evolved, none of us were brushing our teeth. And yet, a very large segment of the world now brushes their teeth daily because we recognize its importance for physical hygiene. The data shows that if we dedicated as much time to nourishing our mind as we do brushing our teeth, then this world would really be a different place.

“We don’t have to sit and meditate for hours, days, months, or years.”

According to our research, five minutes a day for 28 days can produce measurable change in well-being, levels of stress and anxiety, and it even can change aspects of our biology. It doesn’t take much to get these circuits in the mind going because we are innately predisposed to cultivate these qualities.

Another important element to mention is that you can cultivate these qualities while engaged in other daily activities. It doesn’t require that we formally sit and meditate. You can do it as you’re commuting. You can do it as you are washing the dishes. You can even do it while you’re brushing your teeth. The data shows that, at least in the early stages, the benefits are comparable when done paired with other activities as they are if done as standalone practices.

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4. Flourishing is contagious.

When you are around people who are flourishing, you also feel good. Flourishing changes the social landscape by benefiting all the people in its presence.

One of our amazing research findings comes from public school teachers in the U.S. They were randomly assigned to cultivate their well-being using our Healthy Minds program. When teachers did this for 28 days, for approximately five minutes a day, their well-being improved. This part was expected. But we also had access to the academic performance of the students who were taught by these teachers. We found that, on standardized math tests, students taught by teachers assigned to flourishing training performed significantly better than students in classrooms taught by teachers in our control group. The students had no idea that there was research going on.

“Flourishing changes the social landscape by benefiting all the people in its presence.”

This is an example of the downstream effects of having a teacher in the classroom who is fully present, really connected to their students, has insight into how their own thoughts and expectations may be shaping their experience of situations, and comes into the classroom with a strong sense of purpose. That teacher will be more effective at teaching than a teacher who has not nurtured these qualities. This is empirical evidence for the conjecture that flourishing is indeed contagious.

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5. Conscious habits.

We can use daily activities as reminders to do little practices that cultivate flourishing. For example, we eat every day. If we paused for a minute or two before eating in order to reflect on how many people it took for this food to end up on our plate, then we would cultivate a sense of appreciation for the network that made this meal happen. It would heighten our sense of interdependence.

We are not isolated but rather exist in a connected and dependent web of humanity. Something like nurturing our sense of appreciation every time we eat is a little element we can add to a daily habit that, in turn, cultivates overall human flourishing. We need flourishing now, possibly more than ever.

Secrets of the Starving Artist

Michael Kovnat — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:31:29 GMT

🧠 The Big Idea Making a living and making art have always been in tension, but that tension is not necessarily a problem to be solved. It’s the condition under which almost all great art gets made.

💡 Why It Matters We tend to romanticize the artist who transcends financial reality, but history tells a different story: the hustle is inseparable from the work. The constraint of financial pressure forced many great artists make creative choices that made their work unforgettable.

✅ Try This Today Think of a creative project you’ve been putting off until you have more time, money, or resources. Now ask: what’s the smallest, scrappiest version of it you could actually execute this week, using exactly what you have right now?

These ideas come from the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life, by . Mason has worked as the managing editor of Metropolis, the executive editor of Print, and a senior editor at Core77. His freelance writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate. Read on for five of his key insights.

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