Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence that forms an introduction to The School of Life.

This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing–in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives.

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as "happily ever after". The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence.

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm - and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don’t have to stay where we are now: our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way. So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting—yet often confusing and difficult—experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we're supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This book argues that twenty-first-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.

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.

From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do? Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

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?

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.

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.

For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare--poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a US Armed Forces icon and one of the world's top endurance athletes. The only man in history to complete elite training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force tactical air controller, he went on to set records in numerous endurance events.

The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.

The world’s leading high-performance coach and multiple New York Times best-selling author Brendon Burchard delivers the six habits of personal growth that will help you create the life of your dreams. Forged from Brendon Burchard’s personal experiences, data from his GrowthDay app, and his many years as a high-performance coach, The 6 Habits of Growth presents the tools you need to construct the life of your dreams.

By cutting out the noise and providing a clear and proven plan, this road map helps even brand-new entrepreneurs make decisions quickly, get their product up for sale, and launch it to a crowd that is ready and waiting to buy. This one-year plan will guide you through the three stages to your first $1 million: the Grind (months 0-4), the Growth (months 5-8), and the Gold (months 9-12). If your goal is to be a full-time entrepreneur, get ready for one chaotic, stressful, and rewarding year. If you have the guts to complete it, you will be the proud owner of a million-dollar business.

Meditation makes you more productive because it lets you earn back time. For each minute you spend meditating, you'll earn around nine minutes back, as Chris Bailey - author of The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus - will show in this candid and counter-intuitive guide to the productivity benefits of meditation.

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

A lack of quality sleep can hinder your alertness and quality of life while awake, as anyone with sleeping issues already knows. Suffering through sleepless nights does not have to be your reality. Instead you can fall asleep fast and get quality sleep tonight and every night. Hypnosis has been used for centuries to cure many ailments, including the inability to get better sleep. You can help yourself improve the quality of your life with hypnotherapy.

The ancient Toltecs believed that life, as we perceive it, is a dream. We each live in our own personal dream, and these come together to form the dream of the planet, or the world in which we live. Problems arise when our perception of the dream becomes clouded with negativity, drama, and judgment (of ourselves and others), because it's in these moments of suffering that we have forgotten that we are the architects of our own reality and we have the power to change our dream if we choose.

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

Words. We use them all the time, every day, mostly without giving them much thought at all. We take for granted that they’re here at our disposal whenever we need them. But if you’ve ever wished you could communicate more effectively, words are the place to start. It’s incumbent upon you to choose the best words to accomplish your goals, because how you choose to communicate influences—well, everything! The power of communication shapes our professional goals, our relationships, and our lives—so the words we choose to use carry a great deal of power.

Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence that forms an introduction to The School of Life.

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.

We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as "happily ever after". The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence.

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of chairs, walls, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet, a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that is rarely mentioned: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety. Best-selling author Alain de Botton asks, with lucidity and charm, where our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them.

The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.

Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.

This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing–in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives.

We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learned intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?

The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.

Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.

This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes, and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate, and in the best sense, practical.

Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety, despair and imposter syndrome.

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.