What If Your Brain Was Your Best Friend?
A special offer from Brené Brown and some smart takes on emotional intelligence we came across this week.
Here’s our roundup of the most interesting big ideas we read or listened to this week:
Book Bite of the Week
How to make your brain your best friend.
By understanding—and befriending—your brain, you can fine-tune how to treat it right and walk through life feeling your best. You can’t load it with negative self-talk, viral clips of enraged people, and more tasks than it’s designed to handle at one time and then expect it to function healthily or happily. Ease and delight become daily norms when your brain becomes your bestie. Pick up a copy of Rachel’s book on Amazon or check out her summary here on the Next Big Idea app.
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This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast
What exactly are emotions? They more or less run your life—pushing and pulling you from one mind-state to the next all day long. Yet their true nature remains mysterious. Are they physical sensations in the body? Ancient instincts? Or just brief glitches in our otherwise rational minds? Marc Brackett has spent his career chasing that mystery—and what he’s found is that emotions aren’t enemies to suppress or distractions to ignore. They’re signals—powerful ones—that can help us live, work, and connect more wisely. Marc is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and in his new book, Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, he shows us how to turn emotional confusion into clarity. Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
This week, Book of the Day is brought to you by Robert Glazer, an award-winning CEO, and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author. The Compass Within: A Little Story About The Values That Guide Us, is a powerful business parable that uses fictional storytelling to share a framework to help readers identify and live by their personal core values. Book of the Day members can get Robert’s companion course for free with their purchase—just buy a hardcover copy and register here.
This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast
An entrepreneurial take on AI.
Dave Blundin has co-founded 23 companies, co-hosts the Moonshots podcast, runs the VC firm Link Ventures, teaches at MIT, and has been building neural networks since the 1980s. His take: “[AI is] under-hyped. It’s absolutely going to change the world in the next couple of years more than any change in human history. There’s nothing even vaguely comparable to it.” Listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Happy Pub Week!
Guys, dust off that nightstand because a bunch of new Must-Reads just hit the bookstores, including Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, Digital Exhaustion by Paul Leonardi, Charlatans by Moises Naim and Quico Toro, Pull by Brennan Spiegel, Team Intelligence by Jon Levy, The Art of Spending Money by
, Don’t Be Yourself by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Flash Teams by Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, Less is Liberation by , Warhead by Nicholas Wright, and A CEO For All Seasons by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, and Kurt Strovink.