In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

You might believe you’re thinking clearly in the moments that matter most. But in all likelihood, when the pressure is on, you won’t be thinking at all. And your subsequent actions will inevitably move you further from the results you ultimately seek—love, belonging, success, wealth, victory. According to Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish, we must get better at recognizing these opportunities for what they are, and deploying our cognitive ability in order to achieve the life we want.

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.

Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past. Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change. With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life. Through a sequence of engaging stories and pithy examples, he shows how we can use our newfound grasp of the unchanging to see around corners.

Dr. John Delony decided to get to the root of the issue by mapping out a plan to understand where our anxiety is coming from and the actions we can take to change it (because he's been there too). Over the past 20 years, he's learned through research, personal experience, and walking alongside countless others that there are six daily choices people have to make to create a non-anxious life.

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.” And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them?

Many of us dread having to convey our ideas to others, often feeling ill-equipped, anxious, and awkward. Public speaking experts help by focusing on planned communication experiences such as slide presentations, pitches, or formal talks. Yet, most of our professional and personal communication occurs in spontaneous situations that creep up on us and all too often leave us flustered and stumbling for words. Stanford lecturer, podcast host, and communication expert Matt Abrahams provides tangible, actionable skills to help even the most anxious of speakers succeed when speaking spontaneously.

Money - investing, personal finance, and business decisions - is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money.

We've all had the desire to travel through time and see what our lives will be like later in life. While we want the best possible future for ourselves, we often fail to make decisions that would truly make that a reality. Why are so many of us so disconnected from our future selves? Based on over a decade of groundbreaking research, Your Future Self explains that, in our minds, our future selves often look like strangers.

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world. In this timely and enlightening book, the best-selling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.

In The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal: Much of human life has an unconsidered component that explains an array of behaviors previously thought to be unrelated, including why winners cheat, why geniuses often suffer with mental illness, why nearly all diets fail, and more.

For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F*ck positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, shit is f*cked, and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn't sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is - a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is his antidote to the coddling, let's-all-feel-good mind-set that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.

Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of listeners, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding, and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.

My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.

How the Earth Works takes you on an astonishing journey through time and space. In 48 lectures, you will look at what went into making our planet - from the big bang, to the formation of the solar system, to the subsequent evolution of Earth.

Chemistry and Our Universe: How It All Works is your in-depth introduction to this vital field, taught through 60 engaging half-hour lectures that are suitable for any background or none at all. Covering a year’s worth of introductory general chemistry at the college level, plus intriguing topics that are rarely discussed in the classroom, this amazingly comprehensive course requires nothing more advanced than high-school math. Your guide is Professor Ron B. Davis, Jr., a research chemist and award-winning teacher at Georgetown University.

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.

In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.

How Dogs Love Us answers the age-old question of dog lovers everywhere and offers profound new evidence that dogs should be treated as we would treat our best human friends: with love, respect, and appreciation for their social and emotional intelligence.

In The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw approach the world of quantum mechanics in the same way they did in Why Does E=mc2? and make fundamental scientific principles accessible - and fascinating - to everyone.The subatomic realm has a reputation for weirdness, spawning any number of profound misunderstandings, journeys into Eastern mysticism, and woolly pronouncements on the interconnectedness of all things. Cox and Forshaw's contention? There is no need for quantum mechanics to be viewed this way.

Our true origins are not only human, or even terrestrial, but in fact cosmic. Drawing on recent scientific breakthroughs and cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins illuminates the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the cosmos. This newly revised and updated edition features such startling discoveries as the more than 5,000 newly detected exoplanets that shed light on the origins of and possibilities for life in the cosmos.

At the end of his career, Albert Einstein was pursuing a dream far more ambitious than the theory of relativity. He was trying to find an equation that explained all physical reality - a theory of everything. Experimental physicist and award-winning educator Dr. Don Lincoln takes you on this exciting journey in The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality. Suitable for the intellectually curious at all levels and assuming no background beyond basic high-school math, these 24 half-hour lectures cover recent developments at the forefront of particle physics and cosmology.

In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.

Scarcity isn't just one of the key principles of influence, it's arguably the most powerful—invoking the kind of primal instincts that were essential to our ancestors' survival. It's also the explanation for why, in the mid-1990's, $29.99 Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls were being scalped for $7,000 apiece. In The Power of Scarcity, Dr. Mindy Weinstein leverages her deep expertise in both marketing and psychology to reveal how this influence principle can be used to boost sales, win negotiations, spark action, develop community, build customer loyalty, and more.

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Where are you in your life right now? Are you living every day at your highest level? Are you living an abundant life? Wherever you are in your life, this book will give you the roadmap to live your life at the highest levels of existence. Every day, every hour of our lives, we have to make decisions. We have to decide if we are going to live a life of abundance or if we are going to settle for less. In this book, you will learn the formula for living a life of abundance.

In business, and in life, everything is changing fast, apart from how we behave. Our ways of thinking and making decisions have changed little since we lived in agricultural and industrial societies, but the problems we now need to solve are entirely different. It requires a revolution in thinking and behavior to meet the challenges that now face us and to avoid disaster we need to totally rethink the model. Part business biography, part business blueprint, Total Rethink explains how this can be done.

A global revolution in entrepreneurship is under way, inspiring women to blaze a trail of financial self-reliance and become self-made...It means being rich in every way: rich in money, rich in family, rich in love, rich in time - abundant! When you become self-made, the change in you inspires change in those around you, because one of the greatest rewards of a self-made life is seeing how the sparks from your personal revolution can light a fire in others.

Failure can ruin lives and families. There’s no denying it. It can destroy your health and obliterate your self-esteem. But it also holds a lot of value on the road to success. Failure Rules! walks you through five essential rules to help you pull value from any failure—as proven by Andrew Thorp King’s personal stories of dramatic, cascading failures in business, relationships, art, and life. Journey through key failure lessons from a wildly diverse set of successful entrepreneurs, creatives, and authentics.

Michael Crawley immerses himself in various endurance cultures and asks what makes enduring together meaningful to people. He learns how Nepalese runners face different challenges depending on their location up a mountain, from those in the lowlands and ‘middle hills’ to Sherpas from the Solu Khumbu, and observes Tarahumara ultrarunners’ ability to cover extreme distances on highly technical terrain. But he also delves into the history of Dance Marathons, six-day pedestrianism races in Madison Square Gardens and the unique Enhanced Games.

Are we hardwired to crave more? From food and stuff to information and influence, why can't we ever get enough? Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis and one of the world's leading experts on behaviour change, shows that the problem isn't you. The problem is your scarcity mindset, left over from our ancient ancestors. They had to constantly seek and consume to survive because vital survival tools like food, material goods, information, and power were scarce. But with our modern ability to easily fulfil our ancient desire for more, our hardwired "scarcity brain" is now backfiring.

In Upgrade Yourself, you'll learn simple habits and strategies to transform your mindset and change your life for the better. You'll be introduced to the core of what you need to know to become the best version of yourself - nothing less! By the time you reach the end of Upgrade Yourself, you'll have a stronger mindset, you'll develop better habits, you'll have more discipline and a more exciting vision, and you'll be able to design a better life for yourself.

Within their fields, thought leaders are sources of inspiration and innovation. They have the gift of harnessing their expertise and their networks to make their innovative thoughts real and replicable, sparking sustainable change and even creating movements around their ideas. In Ready to Be a Thought Leader?, renowned executive talent agent Denise Brosseau tells listeners how to develop and use that gift as she maps the path from successful executive, professional, or civic leader to respected thought leader.

As an ambitious person, I inevitably have a lot on my plate. In just two years, I went through pretty much every life change you can imagine. I planned our wedding, got married, moved jobs, moved countries, wrote and published a book, completed an MBA, became a father to my baby son, and then coped with his sudden serious illness, all whilst working full time. I had to be the lion. I created new habits and thought patterns, and reconnected with my purpose to get sh*t done. I became stronger, a master of time management, productivity, and motivation. As a result my goals got closer.

Everyone has a story. Pull up a chair in Kafe Kabir and listen to four people explore friendship and love, writing their own pages of life from the cosy café to the ends of the world.

The Ten Commandments for Business Failure is a cautionary bible for business leaders from a widely admired elder statesman who has seen and heard it all.

In The Comfort Crisis (2021), Michal Easter explains why it’s so important to shut down the outside world and reconnect with nature, for all the benefits it provides for our relationships and our physical and mental health. The world we live in today is embedded in comfort, routine, and fake pleasures. It tries to shift our priorities and alter them, by keeping us focused on the hustle of our daily lives.