Kaizen — The One-Minute Rule

Start so small your brain can't say no. One push-up. One sentence. One minute. Tiny habits bypass resistance and compound fast. Progress > pressure.

When you attempt to make a massive change, your brain's amygdala interprets the sudden shift as a threat and triggers a fight-or-flight response. This psychological resistance is what we usually experience as procrastination or hesitation. By shrinking a task down to just one minute, you keep the threat detector offline. You make the commitment so ridiculously trivial that the friction to begin vanishes completely.

The true magic of this method lies in overcoming kinetic inertia. The hardest part of almost any task is the transition from doing nothing to doing something. Once you sit at your desk and write for sixty seconds, momentum takes over, and the neural barrier to continuing drops significantly. You are no longer trying to force yourself to complete a daunting project; you are simply riding the motion you have already started.

In the long run, this practice shifts your identity from someone who avoids work to someone who acts daily. Consistency, even in micro-doses, reinforces neural pathways far more effectively than sporadic bursts of intense effort. Over time, these atomic actions compound, turning daily momentum into a habit that operates almost entirely on autopilot.

Ikigai — Your Reason to Wake Up

Stop asking "what should I do?" Start asking "why do I get up?" Purpose fuels energy. When your why is clear, discipline becomes effortless.

Relying on willpower alone is a losing game because willpower is a finite cognitive resource that depletes throughout the day. When you force yourself to work on tasks that feel meaningless, every action requires active self-control, leading to mental fatigue. Ikigai grounds your daily efforts in a deeper intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be rewarded for.

When your daily tasks align with a clear purpose, the brain releases dopamine in anticipation of meaningful progress. This neurochemical shift changes your perception of effort: tasks stop feeling like demands imposed on you and start feeling like steps toward an intrinsic goal. Discipline ceases to be an act of self-denial and becomes a natural expression of intent.

Finding this clarity requires moving beyond short-term gratification and examining what genuinely gives your life direction. It isn't about discovering a grand, static destiny overnight, but rather cultivating awareness around the activities that bring flow and vitality. Once your overarching "why" is established, choices become clearer and daily friction drops naturally.

Hara Hachi Bu — Eat to 80% Full

Overeating destroys focus, mood, and drive. Lighter body = sharper mind. Most "laziness" is just physical overload.

Much of what is labeled as "laziness" is actually a physiological response to metabolic overload. Digestion is one of the most energy-intensive processes the human body undertakes. When you consume a heavy meal until you are completely stuffed, your body redirects significant blood flow and resources to the gastrointestinal tract, triggering a dip in mental sharpness and physical drive.

The practice of Hara Hachi Bu—stopping when you feel roughly 80% full—accounts for the delay between your stomach filling and your brain receiving satiety signals. It takes about 20 minutes for hormones like leptin to signal fullness to the brain. By leaving a little room, you avoid post-meal lethargy and keep your metabolic state balanced throughout the afternoon.

Maintaining a light, energized physical baseline directly protects your executive functioning. Stable blood sugar levels prevent the mid-day energy crashes that ruin focus and fuel procrastination. Treating nutrition as a tool for cognitive clarity rather than just indulgence provides a steady stream of physical energy for deep work.

Pomodoro + Ritual — Anchored Focus

25 minutes on. 5 minutes off. Add a trigger: a breath, a sound, gesture. Your brain learns: this signal means focus. Neuroscience calls it conditioning.

The human brain is not optimized for continuous, unbroken focus over long stretches of time. Attempting to work for hours without pauses leads to cognitive fatigue, increasing distraction and error rates. Structuring work into short, time-bound intervals lowers the psychological barrier to starting, because committing to 25 minutes feels manageable even when energy is low.

Pairing this timing technique with a sensory ritual creates a powerful classical conditioning loop. When you perform a specific action—like taking three deep breaths, putting on specific soundscapes, or lighting a candle—right before starting a focus block, your brain begins to pair that trigger with immediate concentration. Over time, the trigger alone helps prompt a flow state.

The mandatory short breaks are just as crucial as the work blocks. Resting for 5 minutes allows the brain's default mode network to consolidate information and clear out metabolic waste products built up during intense focus. This rhythmic balance between exertion and brief recovery keeps performance steady across the entire workday.

Seiri & Seiton — Clear Your Space

Clutter raises stress and kills focus. Clean room = clean mind = clean action. Your environment shapes your output.

Your immediate environment acts as an external baseline for your working memory. Every object in your visual field competes for neural processing power, even if you aren't actively looking at it. A cluttered desk creates subtle background visual noise, forcing your brain to expend mental energy filtering out distractions rather than focusing entirely on the task at hand.

Seiri (sorting and discarding the unnecessary) and Seiton (arranging necessary items systematically) streamline your physical workflow. When every tool you need has a designated spot, you eliminate micro-frustrations and unnecessary delays. This spatial order signals to your nervous system that your environment is organized and safe, lowering baseline cortisol levels.

Designing your workspace deliberately leverages choice architecture. By removing friction from productive habits—like keeping your notebook open—and adding friction to distractions, you let your physical environment do the heavy lifting of maintaining focus for you.

Kintsugi Mindset — Finish Imperfectly

Laziness is often fear of failure in disguise. Done beats perfect. Always. Completion builds momentum. Perfection kills it.

What looks like laziness on the surface is frequently perfectionism in disguise. The subconscious logic is simple: if you don't complete the project, it can't be judged or found lacking. This fear creates an invisible wall, causing you to delay starting or endlessly edit early stages rather than pushing a project through to completion.

Kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold—teaches us to value history, flaws, and iteration over pristine, untouched potential. Applying this mindset to your work means viewing initial drafts and flawed attempts not as failures, but as essential materials to refine. A flawed, finished product can be improved; an unstarted idea remains useless.

Completing tasks releases dopamine, reinforcing the habit of finishing what you start and building self-trust. Each finished piece of work acts as concrete evidence that you can act despite uncertainty. Shifting focus from flawless execution to consistent completion builds genuine momentum over time.

Wabi-Sabi — Move Before You're Ready

Stop waiting for ideal conditions. Perfection is procrastination wearing a mask. Movement creates clarity. Not the other way around.

Waiting for the "perfect moment," complete information, or ideal inspiration is a subtle trap. Conditions are rarely perfect, and waiting for them usually masks a fear of taking action. True clarity doesn't come from thinking about a problem in isolation; it comes from real-world feedback generated by taking action.

Wabi-Sabi encourages us to accept impermanence and imperfection in all things, including our readiness. Taking action with imperfect information forces you to adapt to real constraints. The moment you act, you generate fresh data, uncover genuine obstacles, and see the next logical step far more clearly than you ever could while sitting still.

By stepping forward before you feel fully prepared, you break the cycle of overthinking. Action builds confidence and momentum, which in turn generates the energy needed to keep going. Action creates clarity; waiting only prolongs doubt.

Abstract

In the Japanese philosophy of life, ‘ikigai’ broadly refers to having a ‘reason for living’, or a purpose in life. From a phenomenological and empirical viewpoint, ikigai is reported to increase human well-being and even life expectancy. However, it remains difficult to translate, define and formalize with regard to contemporary psychological theories. In this respect, the aim of this paper is twofold: to capture as accurately as possible what ikigai is, and to examine whether the concept applies to a professional context. We first offer a comprehensive overview of ikigai, bridge the gap between this specific body of literature and related psychological theoretical frameworks, such as those addressing motivation, well-being, and attention. On this basis, we conceptualize an integrated cognitive-motivational model of ikigai using an IPO (Input-Process-Output) framework: we organize dispositional or situational factors supposedly supporting ikigai as inputs, fueling the core process of ikigai (mainly built from motivational and attentional mechanisms), which produce outcomes (including well-being). A feedback loop completes the model and allows the process to maintain over time. This conceptual proposal is a first step towards applying and testing the model in professional contexts, in order to renew our approach of engagement, well-being, and performance at work as well as inspire workplace evolution.

Overview & Summary

This paper addresses the Japanese concept of ikigai—broadly translated as "a reason for living" or a sense that "life is worth living"—and seeks to formalize it within modern psychological literature to evaluate its applicability to the workplace. Although empirical research in Japan connects ikigai to increased psychological well-being, better health, and reduced all-cause mortality, the concept lacks a consensual academic definition and a formalized cognitive model.

To bridge this gap, the authors synthesize cross-cultural literature and psychological theories—specifically Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Mindfulness, and Seligman’s PERMA framework—to construct an Integrated Cognitive-Motivational Model of Ikigai using an Input-Process-Output (IPO) framework with a continuous feedback loop.

Cultural Context and Evolution of Ikigai Concepts

Cultural Specificities

• Sociocentric vs. Individualistic Selves: The Japanese self tends to be socio-centric, contextual, interdependent, and aligned with collectivist values. In contrast, Western (especially North American) views prioritize individualism, autonomy, and personal distinction.

• Interpretation of Needs: Collectivist cultures emphasize contribution to the group, social hierarchy, and relational harmony, whereas individualist cultures focus on personal desires, self-reliance, and individual accomplishment.

Japanese Conceptualizations

• Kamiya’s Framework (1966): Identified seven universal needs that ikigai satisfies:

• Survival

• Growth and Change

• Future orientation (goals and dreams)

• Influence (feeling necessary to others)

• Freedom of choice

• Self-fulfillment/personal development

• Meaning of life (a sense of personal value and worth)

• Kumano’s Hierarchical Model (2006, 2012): Identified four central psychological states (Life-affirmation, Meaning of life, Life fulfillment, and Existential value) and five value-laden cognitive mechanisms (making sense of the past, setting future goals, being absorbed in the positive present, accepting negative situations, and coping with negative situations). Kumano placed subjective well-being and quality of life as peripheral rather than central to ikigai.

Western/Popular View (Winn’s Diagram)

• Developed as an adaptation of Andrés Zuzunaga’s "Purpose Venn Diagram" combined with Dan Buettner’s TED talk on Okinawan longevity.

• Represents ikigai as the intersection of four domains:

• What you love

• What you are good at

• What you are paid for

• What the world needs

• Strengths: Synthesizes internal personal desires, external financial rewards, and altruistic impact.

• Limitations: The inclusion of economic compensation ("what you are paid for") is debated; classical Japanese ikigai operates independently of financial rewards and can be found in family, hobbies, or community roles.

The Integrated Cognitive-Motivational Model (IPO Framework)

The authors model ikigai as a dynamic cognitive-motivational system using an Input-Process-Output (IPO) structure connected by a continuous feedback mechanism.

1. Inputs (Antecedents & Context)

Inputs consist of the dispositional traits and situational conditions required to initiate and foster the ikigai core processes:

• Situational Factors (Work Environment):

• Social & Physical Environment: Job content, organizational climate, workspace ergonomics, communication dynamics, and physical working conditions.

• Job Characteristics: Task variety, task identity, significance, autonomy, and feedback (per Hackman & Oldham) shift the perceived locus of causality inward, enhancing self-determination.

• Dispositional Factors (Individual Differences):

• Causality Orientation: Stable individual traits regarding motivational orientation (intrinsic vs. controlled/extrinsic) that influence how individuals interpret workplace tasks and environment.

2. Core Processes (Intrapersonal Mechanisms)

The engine of ikigai integrates motivational regulation and attentional processing:

• Self-Determination Theory (SDT): Fulfills three basic psychological needs:

• Competence: Feeling effective and capable.

• Autonomy: Feeling like the origin of one's actions.

• Relatedness: Feeling connected to and valued by others (strongly aligned with the sociocentric aspect of ikigai).

• Motivational Continuum: Spans from external regulation to intrinsic regulation. While traditional SDT sees intrinsic motivation as the ultimate goal, ikigai elevates identified and integrated regulations—doing things because they align with deeply held values or benefit society ("what the world needs").

• Mindfulness:

• Defined as nonjudgmental, open present-moment awareness.

• Serves as a wide, receptive attentional filter that balances self-interest with prosocial, altruistic goals (self-transcendence).

• Helps individuals align daily actions with core existential values.

3. Outputs (Observable & Internal Outcomes)

• Well-Being (Psychological & Subjective): Framed using Seligman’s PERMA model:

• Positive Emotions (P)

• Engagement (E)

• Relationships (R)

• Meaning (M)

• Accomplishment (A)

• Eudaimonic well-being (meaning, self-acceptance) is prioritized as a primary output over short-term hedonic pleasure.

• Physical Health & Longevity: Supported by empirical data linking strong ikigai to reduced cardiovascular/all-cause mortality and overall health maintenance.

• Workplace Performance: Proposed as a direct output resulting from enhanced intrinsic motivation, optimal engagement, and present-moment attentional focus.

4. Feedback Loop (Commitment Process)

• Behaviors and positive outputs reinforce psychological commitment (Kiesler & Sakumura).

• A continuous commitment loop feeds back into the core processes, sustaining ikigai as a self-maintaining, lifelong dynamic state.

Key Applications, Limitations, and Future Directions

• Workplace Design & Industry 4.0/5.0: The model offers a practical framework to design jobs, organizational management practices, and technological tools (including robotics in industrial/railway maintenance contexts) that satisfy workers' psychological needs, foster meaning, and promote well-being alongside productivity.

• Cultural Portability: Translating a socio-centric Japanese life philosophy to Western corporate settings presents challenges, particularly around navigating extrinsic rewards vs. intrinsic/altruistic values.

Summary

Core Philosophy: Writing as a Tool for Therapeutic Control

Alain de Botton posits that the writer’s primary impulse centers on processing two fundamental dimensions of human experience: pain and pleasure. Writing functions as a deeply therapeutic mechanism of control. By transposing chaotic internal sensations into structured linguistic ideas, a writer can mitigate the intensity of pain and preserve fleeting, fugitive moments of beauty. This act of naming emotions provides profound psychological relief.

De Botton suggests that humanity can be categorized by how individuals process their suffering—whether through distraction, physical exertion, achievement, substance use, or writing. True writers belong to the latter group, using empirical self-observation to mine their own minds. This stands in sharp contrast to the traditional academic system, which discourages introspective self-analysis in favor of dissecting historical authorities like Cicero, Socrates, or Foucault.

The Creative Process: "Cooked" Feelings and the Archaeology of Fragments

A writer cannot immediately translate every raw emotion into art. De Botton describes a maturation process where thoughts must be fully "cooked" before they are coherent enough to introduce to a stranger. He illustrates this with an observation of a happy couple in a restaurant: he realized that the beauty of their evening was actually storing up a heavy emotional debt that would amplify their future pain if the relationship ended. This fragmented insight took weeks to settle in his mind before it crystallized into a coherent essay on the toll of pleasure.

For de Botton, writing begins with fragments rather than complete narratives. He compares the process to archaeology, where one discovers a tiny shard of pottery and must patiently excavate the surrounding soil to reconstruct the vessel. An entire book often starts as a single fragmented scene—such as a man emerging from a dental office in a state of despair—acting as a magnet that slowly attracts related ideas over time. Consequently, the standard "book" format is merely an arbitrary industry construct; human thought naturally occurs in sentences, aphorisms, and brief images.

Suffering, Loneliness, and Freud’s Sublimation

Genuine creative work requires the writer to step away from the desk to think, walk, and feel. Drawing on Marcel Proust, de Botton explains that suffering is the ultimate catalyst for deep insight. When life runs smoothly, individuals feel integrated with society and have little reason to challenge conventional wisdom. Desperation, dislocation, and the threat of existential collapse force writers to read life against the grain, stripping away polite societal scripts to reveal raw truths.

This dynamic aligns with Sigmund Freud’s concept of sublimation, where artistic expression serves as a vital alternative to madness or self-destruction. Facing the conflicts of existence, the artist channels their distress into creative work to integrate their shattered mind. Writing is born out of a sense of fundamental loneliness—the feeling that no one in one's immediate environment truly understands. In this light, art serves as a life raft. For example, Vincent van Gogh's paintings of irises are not mere aesthetic studies of flowers; they are desperate graspings for beauty painted through a lens of profound agony.

Resisting the "Supposed To": Art, Politics, and the Illusion of the News

De Botton strongly critiques the invisible scripts of what humans are "supposed" to do, think, or feel. This artificial conditioning impairs creative businesses, results in sterile social rituals, and limits personal relationships, which only become authentic when individuals drop their polite facades and reveal their inherent "weirdness."

Similarly, political frameworks reduce the immense nuance of human nature into simplistic left-or-right binaries. In reality, human beings are highly contradictory; even the fierce military conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte wrote incredibly sweet, desperate love letters to Josephine.

The modern obsession with news consumption further standardizes our inner lives. Drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, de Botton notes that modernity has elevated the news to the place once held by religious liturgy. Rather than offering wisdom, the news prioritizes surface-level novelty. True wisdom, by contrast, lies in identifying timeless archetypes and myths. Art works in opposition to the news by stabilizing dislocation, helping us see past routine habits to appreciate the true mystery and gravity of existence.

The Inner Reader, Childhood Trauma, and the Legacy of Comfort

Effective writing requires an appeal to the "inner reader." Bad writers fail to ask how their observations will fit into and serve the life of another person. Good writing bridges authentic self-expression with structured communication that the audience can digest and metabolize.

De Botton shares that his own writing style was shaped by two contrasting childhood figures: his highly academic, pedantic father and his uneducated, nature-loving Swiss nanny. His work seeks to bridge these two worlds, aiming to be rigorous enough for the academic and accessible enough for the nanny. Furthermore, his venture, The School of Life, is an extension of a childhood coping mechanism. Shipped to an English boarding school at age eight, he coped with the trauma by inventing a teddy bear, acting as a loving father to the toy and comforting it through imaginary hardships. The School of Life continues this exact mission, translating complex psychological distress into comforting, digestible wisdom for a wider audience.

AI, Art, and the Future of Writing

Though a trained psychotherapist himself, de Botton admits to occasionally using artificial intelligence as a therapeutic sounding board, noting its proficiency in parsing interpersonal dynamics. However, he warns against using it to generate creative writing. Because AI compiles and averages what has already been written, it cannot capture the unique, lived sensations of an individual.

The rise of AI challenges human writers to abandon generic formulas and double down on absolute honesty and self-exploration. True geniuses, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, do not have thoughts different from our own; they simply possess the courage and fidelity to express the quiet, embarrassed thoughts that the rest of humanity neglects.

Transcript

Interviewer: You've written so many books, and then also with The School of Life, you have almost 10 million YouTube subscribers. As I was thinking about what you do, what gives you joy as a writer, and what gives us—the viewer of a School of Life video or the reader of your books—a sense of relief, it is this joy of capturing sensations and emotions in words. So much of the world is not concrete, and writing makes it concrete. In doing so, it gives us clarity, peace, or whatever else we need.

Alain de Botton: That’s beautiful. I think you've got it there. Let’s end it there.

Interviewer: End of the podcast!

Alain de Botton: I mean, yes. It is all about two things in particular that interest me: pain and pleasure. Anything that is painful, I want to put words to it. Anything that is very beautiful, I want to put words to it. It is about capturing and—to use a slightly strange word—controlling the experience. Controlling pain in order to lessen it, and controlling beauty in order to keep a hold on something that is fugitive.

The idea is that the more I can do this—it is broadly therapeutic. It is why people journal. I began as a writer as a teenager, trying to master emotions that felt bigger than me. I felt a basic sense of relief, which has not changed to this day, at turning an emotion into an idea, at putting words to feelings. Once you do that, they lessen, and that brings enormous relief.

I think you can divide humanity by what people do with their pain. Some people drink their pain away. Some people talk their pain away. Some people exercise their pain away. Some people achieve their pain away. And some people want to write it away. I'm one of those, and it is all about processing difficult feelings.

I wrote my first book, which in the United States was called On Love and in many other parts of the world was called Essays in Love. That was an attempt to understand sensations around love that had been very painful and mysterious. I gained relief from writing it, and in a rather magical process, it ended up in the hands of other people who would say things like, "How did you know that about me?"

And of course, I would say, "I have no idea about you. I'm just keeping track of myself." If I am doing that faithfully, then it may have an echo in somebody else. It’s very strange how that happens. Sometimes people say to me, "What research have you done? What is your authority base? What are you claiming this on?" And I go, "Just empirical observation of me."

I think that all of us are this incredible library of sensations, this incredible data source. Yet so often, particularly in the academic world, the feeling is: let's ignore ourselves as a source of data. Let's go and find out what Cicero said, what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said. While that can be helpful, it is far better to mine your own mind. But there's not much encouragement for that. The whole school system is based on trying to get you to find out what other people thought, rather than going into what you might think.

Interviewer: What do you do when there's a pain or an emotion that you're grappling with, but you can't quite name it? You know there's something there. I've always struggled to feel my emotions; this has been a lot of what I've learned over the last five years in particular. A lot of writing for me—and actually the pain of writing—is to almost force myself to feel the thing, to stop the resistance, and then to somehow name the thing to constrain it. Once you've constrained it, now you can look at it as almost an object separate from you. But it's remarkably painful. How do you do that?

Alain de Botton: There is definitely a moment when certain feelings are not ready to be turned into literature or words. It's not ready; it's not "cooked." Partly, that has to do with not understanding what it is sufficiently. After all, a piece of prose has to obey certain rules of coherence. You have to be able to understand it well enough to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know it. You have to be able to introduce a stranger to a feeling, and in order to do that, you have to know it a little bit yourself.

Let me give you an example. I am writing about love again at the moment. For about three weeks, I was toying around with an idea. I saw a couple in a restaurant having a lovely meal. It was summertime in London, and they looked really happy. I had a thought: if their relationship breaks down, it is an evening like this that will cost them dear. This beautiful evening will be the locus of pain. Let's say the man is abandoned, or the woman is abandoned—they will return to that memory of the lovely meal when the future looked beautiful.

I became interested in how a pleasurable experience later turns into a nightmare. Observing my own life, I've seen how, when a relationship breaks down, you don't really sit around lamenting the arguments you had or the bad times with their siblings. Your mind turns toward the beautiful times: that holiday you took, or that amazing walk you enjoyed one evening. These are the moments that cause pain because they were beautiful.

I thought, "Isn't it a dark thought that beautiful things are storing up a cost that the participant isn't yet fully aware of?" It’s really the ideology of mourning and loss. You only lose what is beautiful and good. Therefore, while achieving anything beautiful and good, if you're a wiser, older person, you think, "Wow, this is what I might have to pay for later on."

These thoughts were in my head, but for a while, they were tangled. Then yesterday, it all came to me. Often it does come in a sudden moment of, "Right, this is cooked. This is bubbling; it's at boiling point." I was looking through my notes and thought, "Okay, I know what this is. This is a little essay on the debt that we may have to pay for our pleasures." It emerged as a little piece. That is a journey from fragments to something more complete. You have to be able to name it and see it because, as you were hinting, sometimes you don't know what a feeling is or where it belongs. If you imagine our minds as giant libraries with index and stack systems, sometimes you get some words and think, "I don't know what book this is or where it would go on the stacks." It takes a while, and then eventually, you find a location for it in your intellectual worldview.

Interviewer: Tell me about that word "fragments." I think that's where so much of writing starts.

Alain de Botton: Absolutely, and I think it should start there. Novice writers often get this wrong. They say things like, "I just don't know where to start with my book. I don't know what the story is." I always compare it to archaeology. In archaeology, you come across a little broken bit of a pot. You know there are other bits of that pot somewhere in the area, and you have to dig through the dirt to assemble them into a plausible pattern. It takes a long time. You can panic and think, "I'll never get this." But many books start with a fragmented idea or image.

I'm working on a book now, and I just have an image of a man emerging from a visit to a dental hygienist in Wimpole Street in London. He has gone there in a moment of despair and inner turmoil, had his teeth cleaned, and is now emerging into the street. I'm slowly assembling fragments from all over, marshaled by that scene. It’s like a powerful magnet that draws in filaments from elsewhere. For a long time, the magnet is not switched on, so the filaments are just lying around.

No one thinks in "book" terms. A book is an arbitrary construction dictated by the publishing industry—it’s a certain number of words glued together. No one naturally thinks in terms of books. We think in sentences, images, and fragments, and gradually we may end up with this thing called a book. But it is always a slightly artificial construction.

This is why I began by being interested in aphorisms and maxims—the tradition of the short, pithy statement. The original tweets, right? I remember reading the 17th-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld, who wrote The Maxims. It is a beautiful book of about 200 fragments. For example: "To say one never flirts is itself a form of flirtation." Another is: "There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing." Or: "We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others."

I remember reading this book and thinking, "I love this." It's not a novel, biography, or poem. It’s a psychological glimpse of a truth, just two lines long. That’s how I began writing. I wrote a selection of aphorisms for friends at university, and we would laugh because some of them were about people we knew. Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit," and there is a distinct wit and humor in a maxim. I’ve always found it really hard to fit into a pre-existing form, so my books tend to be quite odd.

Interviewer: Before we go further, I think you're saying something really profound. There's that line: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." How do you write a book? One sentence at a time. It’s fine to just think in sentences, paragraphs, and stories. You don't have to carry the weight of the giant project, let alone the identity of "being a writer." Often, people get blocked by the weight of that giant concept.

Alain de Botton: Yes, and also by the modern expectation of genre. For a long time, to be a writer meant to write a certain kind of realistic 19th-century novel with characters in a realistic setting, where a disembodied, offstage narrator tells you what everybody is thinking. Action is prioritized over reflection. I remember thinking, "This is not for me. I don't love this kind of book." It took me a while to discover books that I actually liked.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera was extremely important to me. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, along with his essay The Art of the Novel, were immensely significant texts because they had an incredible freedom. He was messing around with the rules. Kundera would tell a bit of a story, stop, and give you a reflection on tonal music and Beethoven. Then there would be another bit of narrative, followed by a reflection on three words from a dictionary. I thought, "Wow, why not?" This opened up a whole new horizon.

Interviewer: It’s like a collage.

Alain de Botton: Yes. I was also really inspired by modern visual artists like Joseph Cornell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Christo. These were all people who, in different media, were playing with form and conveying a unique sensibility.

I ended up writing books that don't really fit standard definitions. I've written a couple of novels, Essays in Love and The Course of Love, which are very inspired by Kundera in their mixture of narrative and psychological analysis. I've also written collages and books that rely heavily on images. I’m very interested in using pictures in intriguing ways so that the text and the picture bounce off each other.

Interviewer: How do you think about what it means to live like a writer? So little of the work actually happens with your fingers pecking at a keyboard. Most of the work happens when you're thinking—whether you're in the shower, on a walk, or traveling. How do you view that part of the process, which actually takes up the majority of your time?

Alain de Botton: It is paradoxical. It takes writers a long time to realize that if they are not doing anything at 9:00 AM on a Monday, it doesn't matter. The really good work could be happening on a Sunday night at 4:00 AM. As you say, real work is feeling and thinking, and it may not happen in standard office hours.

I used to be a "good boy" who wanted to be a proper member of society, thinking, "I must sit at my desk; I can't go to the park." But now I think, if the park is where you think, go to the park. If going on holiday is where you think, go there.

Marcel Proust, the great French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time—which is a mixture of essay, novel, and philosophy—talked about creativity and suffering. He said if you had a magical choice for an evening between meeting a great mind like Plato or Descartes, or going out with someone who will make you suffer, you should choose the person who will make you suffer. He believed that suffering is the great catalyst of insight.

We know this from music. Think of the great breakup albums: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks or Phil Collins’ Face Value. These great pieces of music emerge from being torn apart. Good writing is often on the side of madness, death, dislocation, and chaos. If things are going well for you, you harmonize with the world. You feel kinship with the way things are, and you aren't a rebel, a revolutionary, or a tragic figure. You like the world because it is treating you well. But when you are desperate or reading life against the grain, you are more likely to find the great truths that lie outside the normal, satisfied, smug consensus.

Interviewer: Let me add to that. When reason disappears, emotion and the animal within us take over, and we escape preconceived language. If you get really angry at someone and start yelling, you will say things you've never said before—deep feelings that suddenly burst out. A lot of writing feels trite or contrived when we are just rearranging words and thoughts that other people gave us. In suffering, anger, sadness, and grief, our conventional wisdom disappears, and the raw animal within us comes out.

Alain de Botton: That’s right. In a way, you have to have nothing left to lose. You say, "Fuck this," and you are just there with certain truths because you've given up lying, deceiving, or offering sentimental reassurances. Great works of literature often have a relationship to desperation. It could be driven by death—the sense that your time is coming up and asking yourself, "Is there something I still want to tell the world that I didn't dare to say before?"

Someone once said, "Good thinking is good feeling." But what good feeling really means is not caring to subscribe to the normal bromides that we live by.

Interviewer: It hit me the other day that sometimes you read someone's writing and think, "I want to write like that." But then you realize you can't just write like that; you have to think like that. And to think like that, you have to live like that.

Alain de Botton: That's right. We aren't necessarily talking about the clichéd image of a writer in a black cape escaping bourgeois society. You could be wearing a t-shirt. It’s not about outward signs; it’s about where your soul is.

Writing is an act of communication. If your communication with the people around you is already perfect, what is the point of writing? Loneliness and a loneliness of experience are absolutely key—the sense that no one around you understands.

What is writing? Socrates was interesting on this. He believed we shouldn't write books because books were born out of a despair over human communication. He thought the true way to do philosophy was not to write it down, but to engage a group of people in a dialogue. He lived in a small, golden-age city where he could have those conversations. But many of us can't, so we become writers because no one is listening and no one is speaking properly in our immediate lives.

Freud used the word "sublimation" to describe the origins of artistic activity. The artist is faced with an acute version of all the dilemmas that afflict people: the conflict between duty and pleasure, life and death, money and creativity. Freud saw the artist as someone compromised by these conflicts, with their artistic work arising as a way of reconciling fantasy and reality. When the world cannot be as you wish it to be, you can either go mad or create a work of art. The work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress. It is an alternative to losing your mind; it focuses the mind when disintegration is in the air.

Interviewer: This has me thinking about pleasure and pain. When I'm riding high, I think, "Wow, we get to live in this world, explore, meet people, and travel. It's so vast and magical." But in moments of pain, the tragedy of it all hits. You get this one life, and you're just stuck on this earth, wondering how you're going to cope.

Alain de Botton: Absolutely. Every life has moments of severe distress. You would have to be extremely unimaginative or incredibly lucky not to run into regular distress. Even in the privileged West—without even talking about geopolitical tragedies—living in a relatively peaceful, prosperous, and well-ordered society, you are going to hit so many walls. Someone you love will not love you back, or they won't love you in the way you need. Someone will betray you. Welcome to aeons of suffering.

Then you will face the conflict between who you are, how you want to be seen, and how others actually perceive you. You will be misread and misrepresented. There will be conflicts around money, status, and achievement—the pull between income, happiness, respectability, and fame. You can look at a baby in a cradle and know that this person is going to hit these walls. That is before anything major even goes wrong. Talk to anyone over 30, 40, or 50, and you will find evidence of incredible scars.

It is from this suffering that our receptivity to art is born. Look at Vincent van Gogh's Irises. The man was in pieces. He was suffering like a religious saint—lonely, desperate, misunderstood, and aching for love. Today, he is one of the most famous people of the 19th century, but in life, he was abjectly desperate. When he looks at flowers, he isn't just showing us a plant; he is showing us a flower seen through the lens of agony. When you look at beauty through the lens of agony, it becomes a life raft. He wasn't just painting; he was painting a last reason to live. In the end, he didn't make it, and that is what lends his work such poignancy. Some of the most beautiful things humans have created were born out of a negotiation with something appalling.

Interviewer: It’s easy to think, "I want to produce something beautiful." But the image that comes to mind is a rubber band. As you stretch pain on one side, you get beauty on the other. Truly beautiful and astonishing work seems to require a sacrifice—not just in work ethic, but a sacrifice of what we have gone through to get there.

Alain de Botton: Yes, but we don't need to go hunting for suffering. It will find you. Just sit still. If anyone is sitting there wondering when their great suffering will arrive, don't worry. Life is cooking it up.

Consider the abstract painter Agnes Martin. She painted regular, minimalist lines across canvases. Her life was filled with pain; she suffered from a severe psychiatric disorder and lived alone in New Mexico. Her highly orderly, calm canvases were a desperate attempt to hold onto stability in a chaotic world. They are moving because you sense the chaos that the painting is resisting—the other side of the rubber band.

Interviewer: Tell me about the things you love and hate, because you've said before that you are inspired not just by beauty and wisdom, but also by ugliness and cruelty. I’d never heard anyone put it that way.

Alain de Botton: Let's look at the visual environment. London, where we are, has some really ugly parts, like all modern cities. Why are they so ugly? What went wrong? How can humans build beautifully in one era, and then, when the world has even more resources, build in such an ugly way? Ugliness in architecture is a physical translation of the visual blindness of the human animal.

It enraged me, so I wrote a book called The Architecture of Happiness. It was born out of living in a horrible, ugly part of London because I couldn't bear my surroundings and thought, "This is so unnecessary."

There are psychological examples, too. I want to protest against mean-mindedness, sentimentality, cruelty, and humiliation. A lot of writing is about revenge—the silenced person finally having their say on the page. Many writers are meek in person; you meet them and think they wouldn't hurt a fly, but then you pick up their text and it's incredibly sharp. They do it because they aren't good at hitting back in real life, so it all comes out on the page.

Writing can be revenge against the people who didn't believe in you, didn't understand you, or trampled on you. Look at book dedications; they aren't just dedicated to loved ones, but sometimes implicitly to hated ones or those who doubted the author. Writing is revenge, writing is a cure, writing is a memorial—it falls under many different headings.

Interviewer: What is so cool about the written word is that it is the closest medium we have to translating human consciousness. I found it interesting that at the end of the day, you will come home and download your thoughts. I imagine different levels of consciousness: "What do you think about right now?" versus "What did you think about today?" As you sit in stillness and jot things down, you realize there are so many layers. The first thoughts we have when someone asks what we are thinking often don't capture the core of what is actually going on.

Alain de Botton: Music does this directly, too. If you asked people whether they would rather have an extraordinary facility for music or for words, most of us would choose music. There is something incredibly direct about it. Music represents the movements of the soul with minimal intellectual intervention, which is why it speaks across ages and cultures. Would you rather have written Hey Jude or War and Peace? In a way, you'd want Hey Jude, wouldn't you?

Interviewer: I don't know! That’s an interesting conversation. Would you rather have painted the Sistine Chapel, written Hey Jude, or written War and Peace? That would be a fun bar conversation.

Alain de Botton: The Sistine Chapel doesn't do it for me, but Van Gogh's Irises does. Because I can write, I am naturally attracted to what I can't do, so I envy songwriters and artists. But perhaps if I were a songwriter, I would admire writers.

Interviewer: The reason I bring up consciousness in writing is that when I read David Foster Wallace, I feel like I'm putting on his glasses and stepping into his brain in a way that no other medium can replicate. A painting can show me how someone saw something, and music can make me feel something directly, but writing is unique in capturing the precise contents of the mind.

Alain de Botton: We need all of these mediums. Gustave Flaubert wrote a line: "We are all mute bears banging desperately on a drum as we look at the beauty of the stars." We are trapped, articulate-starved animals aware of living in a vast universe, and we don't know what to do other than mutely bang our fists.

All of us go to our graves with most of our experiences still locked inside us. When someone dies, millions of unique impressions, thoughts, and sensations are permanently deleted. Every now and then, in the history of culture, a few things are rescued from this burning library. Think of every person as a library of millions of books being tipped into the ocean, and occasionally someone rescues a book or two, giving us a fragmentary impression of what it was like for that person to think. But this is just a fraction of what humans have actually thought and felt.

Writers are scribes for the thoughts that most humans have no time or inclination to write down themselves. That is why readers will say, "That was my life you were describing; that was my thought." We bathe in this wider community of shared thoughts. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." Geniuses do not have thoughts that are fundamentally different from other people; they simply have a unique fidelity to their more neglected thoughts—the thoughts that are pushed aside due to habit, embarrassment, shame, or social convention.

Interviewer: How much of your experience as a writer has been about discipline—sitting down at 9:00 AM and waiting for inspiration to find you—versus channeling something from beyond?

Alain de Botton: It’s like sailing. You have to be out on the lake with your ship, and you must have your sails unfurled, hoping for a prevailing wind. Or it’s like holding a butterfly net; you have to be out there with the net, otherwise you won't catch anything.

But what does it actually mean to be out on the lake with your net? Does it mean sitting at your desk at nine o'clock? It means keeping your brain switched on and being attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That is the real work. If you are scrolling endlessly on your phone, you are lost; your mind is not with you.

Interviewer: I love that. I’ve been sitting down for 20 to 30 minutes at the end of the day, trying to fill an index card with my thoughts, focusing on being "attentive to my own sensations and thoughts." I am blown away by how many sensations and thoughts exist within me that I completely ignore during the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Alain de Botton: Yes. We would need hours of processing just to pay attention to what happens in a single minute. The human perceptual mechanism is purposefully dampened down. George Eliot wrote: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

What she is saying is that you are hearing it anyway, but you repress it to function. To be fully alive to all that resonance would cause you to lose your mind. Even as I speak to you now, I am pushing away so many thoughts. Every time I construct a sentence, I am sacrificing other potential sentences in order to sound logical. But I am dimly aware that I am also thinking of what I have to do later, what happened earlier, and so on. Because I am not yet mad, I can maintain a coherent thread.

Our minds are incredibly rich instruments. I can look at you, but I'm also looking at those books on the shelf and thinking about the shape of their spines. Our minds have evolved a triage system over thousands of years to determine what is important right now. This is why very old people, small children, or those experiencing psychosis are fascinating but maddening to talk to; they cannot keep a coherent thread. You ask a child what they did in the garden, and they say they were playing, but then they point at the table and forget the question because they cannot triage their thoughts.

A good artist or writer borrows from the art of triaging, but they triage according to a more diffuse, associative sense. They go outside the normal bounds of what is considered "important." If you put David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, he doesn't just notice the bar; he is alive to other resonances outside the normal purview.

Interviewer: I had an experience recently while working on a documentary in London. On the first day, we stood on Waterloo Bridge for five hours. I was responsible for holding some caution tape to guide pedestrians. Thousands of people walked past, and not one of them looked at the embankment or the architecture; everyone was just rushing from point A to point B. But because I had to stand there and stare at the same view for six hours, the details came alive. I noticed the subtleties in the architecture and how the changing sunlight altered the buildings. I realized I had never actually looked at the world.

Writing is like taking handcuffs and tethering yourself to an idea, forcing yourself to look. Painting is the same. I am mesmerized by the details that reveal themselves in hour three or four that I completely missed in hour one. When you share that, people ask, "How do you see so deeply?" And the answer is just, "I looked at it longer than you did."

Alain de Botton: That’s right. Small children are excellent guides to this. When you take a toddler to the park, you might be focused on getting to the destination. But the child doesn't care about the park; they are waking up to the mysteries of existence. They see a brick wall and want to run their hand along the mortar, or they spot some moss and want to stroke their cheek against it. The artist is someone who, when everyone else is rushing to the park, is detained by something unusual, and turns that observation into a work of art.

Interviewer: What has been the role of poetry in your life, both as a reader and a writer?

Alain de Botton: From an early age, I felt on the back foot with poetry. I felt like I had missed some early class on the subject. I would read poems and think, "What is going on here? Why are they using this weird language?" At the same time, I noticed I had a poetic turn of phrase.

Prose is usually about summarizing broadly to reach a destination; you don't care as much about the specific words, as long as the information is conveyed. That’s why safety manuals are written in prose. Poetry takes a more meandering, associative route, focusing on making things resonant, beautiful, and thoughtful.

I was interested in that as a writer, but I didn't know the formal rules of meter and syntax. However, poetry can exist within prose sentences; there is a hybrid called the prose poem. Charles Baudelaire wrote prose poems, abandoning formal poetic structure while retaining its resonance.

The poets I favor are those who are easy to read—poets who don't fry your mind with mythological figures like Achilles or Ajax, but who use ordinary words in ordinary situations in fresh ways. Philip Larkin is a poet for people who don't understand poetry; he is very easy to comprehend. W.H. Auden is another.

Interviewer: For me, the rules of poetry don't help. The only way I get anything out of a poem is to read it, find a line that strikes me, and then memorize it. Only then does it come alive.

Alain de Botton: That’s very interesting. It suggests that poetry is meant to be spoken and shared, which is how poetry began. Memorizing and speaking it is a wonderful way in.

Interviewer: What moved you to spend so much of your career distilling the works of other writers? In the early days of The School of Life, you did guides to Nietzsche, Sartre, and others.

Alain de Botton: I wrote a book called The Consolations of Philosophy focusing on six philosophers, and another called How Proust Can Change Your Life. I’ve always been interested in how we talk about other thinkers. I never wanted to be an academic. Academics claim to be perfectly faithful to the original texts. I was less interested in being strictly faithful and more interested in charting what a writer made me think—where they took me. It becomes a personal interaction. I don't ask, "What did Nietzsche actually say?" but rather, "What can he say to us now? What resonances exist between his ideas and our lives?"

I prefer a more flavored, personal response. If you close a book by Nietzsche and ask yourself, "What really stayed with me?" the answer is often different from a Wikipedia page. That is why my books and videos have resonated with so many people; they aren't academic exercises.

Interviewer: It strikes me how much writers get bogged down by what they feel they are "supposed" to write. In school, we are pushed in a certain direction. It’s probably a good thing you didn't take that formal poetry class because academic analysis of poetry is so left-brained and analytical, focusing on iambic pentameter rather than just appreciating the art. We get weighed down by rules.

Alain de Botton: This rule of what you are "supposed" to do is one of the great problems of life. Let’s look at business for a moment, which is a highly creative enterprise. Consumer businesses get this wrong all the time because they try to guess what will please the customer based on conventional rules, rather than what would actually be delightful. The same fakeness and sentimentality enter business as they do into creative works.

Think of a bad restaurant that wants to be elegant but doesn't actually think about what elegance means. Do they really need those flowers? Do people actually want to start their meal with melon?

Or think of hosting a dinner party. When people reach a certain stage in urban life, they invite a colleague over to break bread, and suddenly they panicking: "I have to host a dinner party, so I have to buy chicken and serve a formal first and second course." They are hampered by convention instead of thinking, "What do I actually want to do?"

Why not just serve crisps and a can of tuna, lie on the sofa, and chat? Or turn out the lights and look at the stars, go for a walk between courses, cry together, or do the washing up? Let's just be weird, because life is weird. There is what you are supposed to do, and then there is the truth, which is the weirdness of life.

This happens in relationships, too. When you start dating someone, you ask, "How are you?" and they say, "I am very well, how are you?" Then, three months down the line, you find out they hate ice skating and only went to impress you. You suddenly emerge as a much more complicated, lovable, and weird person, and that’s beautiful.

Interviewer: It’s so interesting that the writers we love, we love for their idiosyncrasies. They bend grammar and structure in weird ways, but it feels true to who they are. Yet, when we sit down to write, we freeze and think, "I'm not supposed to do that."

Alain de Botton: This is why it is helpful to ask yourself: "If there were no rules, if I couldn't fail, and if I were going to die tomorrow, what would I actually say?" That is the thing you should write.

Early in my career, I thought I had to write standard novels based on 19th-century structures. Eventually, I threw out those rules and produced Essays in Love, which was much weirder and more original, and people liked it. Now, I am a spoiled boy—I only do what I want. I know that if I am getting bored while writing, the reader will get bored, too.

Every morning, I wake up and write whatever I feel like writing. I no longer think in terms of books; I write prose pieces that are about 800 words long. I write in the early morning when other people's agendas are not yet on the horizon. It is a protected, personal space right after sleep. I write what pleases me, and then I find a place for it later. I have about 22 books on the go, and I think, "Oh, I'll slot this piece in there, or it will belong somewhere else one day." It is written from the heart, and I have given up the old way of working where I had to knit the next logical section of a tapestry.

Interviewer: My friend Jeremy Gowan once told me: "If you're ever struggling with writer's block, remember three words: be more honest."

Alain de Botton: Yes, that is exactly what writer's block is. It is a conflict between shame and the desire for honesty—a tension between what you are supposed to feel and what you are actually feeling. It is a very useful rule of thumb for relationships, too. When a relationship gets stuck in game-playing and double-guessing, ask yourself, "What do I really want to tell this person?" It may not always be possible to say it, but keeping it in view is incredibly helpful.

Interviewer: I have to credit you with changing my mind on the news. There is a part early in your book where you quote Hegel, who said that a society becomes modern when it elevates the news to the level of what religious faiths used to be. It made me realize how obsessed the modern world is with the constant consumption of news—obsessing over people we will never meet and places we will never go. It shapes our mental horizon, telling us what we are "supposed" to think about.

Alain de Botton: It is incredibly powerful. People will routinely say, "We are living in a very sad age." But compared to what? The fourth century in Abyssinia? The twelfth century in Syria? They think this way because CNN alerted them to something that happened in a specific place.

Our inner lives have been industrialized and commercialized, which is toxic for authentic, free thinking. You aren't really a mature adult until you choose to remain ignorant of certain things that everyone else deems important. If there is a popular singer or movie that you know nothing about, congratulate yourself. You are preserving your mental energy for your own experience. We don't need to know everything that everyone else knows; we need to know the interesting parts of our own minds.

Interviewer: The word "new" is right there in the "news." Knowing all the new things seems like the antithesis of the pursuit of wisdom, which is about cultivating the small percentage of old truths that have stood the test of time.

Alain de Botton: Yes, or spotting the archetypes—realizing that the so-called "new" is just a repetition of the old. It’s the story of a tyrant who forgave his enemy, a society that became decadent, or greed getting in the way of goodness. The news wants us to think that every event is an anomalous novelty, whereas art pulls us in the opposite direction.

Consider Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre. It depicts a real 19th-century shipwreck where the passengers ended up on a raft and resorted to cannibalism. Victor Hugo or another writer remarked, "The people on that raft—that is France." The painting became a metaphor for the state of the entire nation.

All large-scale events have a metaphoric quality. The ancient Greek myths of Troy, Odysseus, and Penelope were once news items, but they became myths because they speak to eternal aspects of the human condition. The story of Odysseus returning to Penelope is your story, my story, and everyone's story. But the news wants to direct us only to surface-level novelty. It is much healthier to think in a mythic way rather than a media way.

Interviewer: Politics is also deeply woven into the news, and politics is a mind-killer. If we discuss Van Gogh's paintings, we can look at them fresh. I might like one, and you might not, and we can discuss the colors. But if we discuss a politician, we come to the topic with pre-packaged scripts and word traps. It immediately creates divisiveness and team-based thinking, whereas we can look at ancient Greece with fresh eyes because we don't carry those modern political biases.

Alain de Botton: Political structures give you a map of what you are supposed to think. If you are on the left, you are supposed to have certain loves and hates; if you are on the right, the same. But once you go beyond politics and get to know people, you find immense complexity.

I remember playing a game with friends where we tried to reduce shame by confessing which politicians we found sexually attractive, despite completely disagreeing with their politics. We ended up giggling because there were such striking discrepancies between what we were supposed to feel and what we actually felt. No one actually thinks in a purely left-or-right way; they just think they are supposed to.

Consider ideas of masculinity and femininity; a real man does not think or feel like a simplified archetype. Look at Napoleon’s letters to Josephine—this fierce military conqueror wrote the sweetest, most desperate love letters. A true picture of human nature is highly nuanced, and politics is a massive, crude abbreviation. When people argue about politics, they are often trying to make the world simpler than it actually is. Inside every right-winger, there is a left-winger, and vice versa. Whenever we encounter a simplified version of humanity, we know deep down it isn't true.

Interviewer: I am surprised by how much you have referenced paintings today. I want to hear more about how you pull from visual art in your creative expression.

Alain de Botton: Many paintings represent a piece of who we are. If you want to understand me, look at certain paintings. The work of Cy Twombly is very important to me—his chalk-like writing on dark canvases looks like a portrait of what thinking actually feels like. He is making mental maps of the inner state.

Abstract artists are wonderful at this; you can look at a Mark Rothko painting and see what melancholy, dejection, or humiliation looks like. Or you can look at a realistic painting and see representations of hope, courage, or serenity. The visual environment is constantly communicating values to us.

Stendhal wrote: "Beauty is the promise of happiness." When we find something beautiful, it isn't just an isolated aesthetic experience; it is promising us a happy way of living. It is always worth asking someone who loves a certain house or landscape, "What is the way of life you imagine there? What values do you associate with it?"

In a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, the poet looks at an ancient Greek bust of Apollo in a museum, and the statue beams a vision of life to him, challenging him to change his life. Every object suggests how to live. This chair suggests a certain way of being; it has a vision of life. If your car, your chair, or the font in your book turned into a person, what kind of person would they be? Things have character, and we are very good at making those connections once we allow ourselves to do so.

Interviewer: As writers, how should we think about our readers? In what ways should we serve them, and in what ways should we write solely for ourselves and worry about the reader later?

Alain de Botton: You must have a reader inside you. We are all readers as well as writers. What makes people boring conversationalists is that they have stopped wondering how their words sound to someone else. They don't ask themselves the crucial question: "How does what I am saying fit into someone else's life?"

We all know people who tell boring travel stories, focusing on airport bureaucracy that was stressful for them but is completely useless to the listener. But a skilled storyteller takes that same material and connects it to a universal theme, saying, "You know how bureaucracy has a certain sadism to it?" Suddenly, they have prepared the material so the listener can digest it.

A good writer thinks about where their words will land in the reader's mind, but they must first be faithful to themselves. It must start with you and what you want to say, and then you find a bridge to what the reader can absorb.

A very perceptive friend of mine once looked at my writing style and my history. I had a highly academic, pedantic father who spoke in a solemn, professor-like way. I also had a nanny who raised me because my parents were away for long periods; she was uneducated but very clever, loved nature, and grew up in a rural Swiss village. My friend told me, "You are basically trying to write books that can be understood and liked by both your academic father and your nanny." That is exactly what I am doing—trying to speak to two very different audiences.

I also had a teddy bear when I was small. I had a lot of problems as a kid, and I processed them by pretending my bear had the same life as me, and I was its father. I was shipped to an English boarding school at age eight, and to cope, I imagined my bear went to boarding school too. I would talk to it gently every evening, comforting it and promising that the holidays would come. Someone once told me that The School of Life is just a continuation of that teddy bear—I am doing for a wider audience what I did for that toy, translating difficult experiences into digestible comfort.

Religions do this beautifully, too. I am not a believer myself, but I have immense respect for religious belief. Religion is a fantastic way of externalizing and metaphorizing our inner lives, ascribing wisdom and kindness to a supernatural figure. I say this with respect, not like Richard Dawkins, who dismisses it as immature. Religions are incredibly complex and beautiful structures that help humans cope with the pain of existence by reifying our mental processes. There is a common thread between children's imaginative play, the creation of art, and the formation of religions.

Interviewer: What else can we take from the faiths you’ve studied? You’ve spoken about the difference between a lecture and a sermon—that a lecture provides information, whereas a sermon provides information and a story to change behavior.

Alain de Botton: Yes, I am firmly on the side of the sermon. Many people have been deeply hurt or traumatized by religion, and we must honor their experiences. But even for atheists, there is so much to learn from religious structures.

Religions are the most sophisticated attempts in history to influence and shape the human inner life. Art tries to do this, but it is much weaker today because modern artists work as lone creators. They aren't trying to build a church or a movement; it is just them against the world. Today, we have massive corporations amplifying commercial messages, and lone creators who are tiny in comparison. At their peak, religions used art, architecture, poetry, music, fashion, and scents to amplify a unified message. I find that fascinating.

Interviewer: One word that comes to mind regarding your work is enchantment. We live in an age of disenchantment, where we only value logic, reason, and literal cause-and-effect. I think your work resonates so deeply with non-believers because they feel that sense of enchantment. The tools of enchantment slip past the analytical gates of the rational mind.

Alain de Botton: The most wonderful thing about religion is its openness to the numinous or the mystery of existence—what theologians call the mysterium tremendum. We all have intimations of this. The night sky is there every night, yet we rarely pause to feel its weight. If we truly took on board what the clear night sky is telling us, we would have to lie down and question everything.

As the children's nursery rhyme goes: "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are." Kids feel that wonder. We have let scientists take over that territory, and they build planetariums to tell us how many moons Saturn has. That is great work, but most of us don't care about the stars from a mathematical perspective. We care about the night sky because it reorients us as human beings, reminding us that our immediate, daily priorities are only a tiny part of a vast existence.

Every time we travel and land in a foreign place, we think, "The world is so strange and beautiful." We are temporarily jolted out of our routines. But most of the time, we live under the numbing influence of habit. Art is a stabilized form of dislocation—a way of looking past habit to see the true mystery, beauty, and pain of everything.

Interviewer: How does artificial intelligence factor into your writing and reading process?

Alain de Botton: I don't use it in my writing, but I do use it as a therapist. That might sound strange because I am actually a trained, practicing psychotherapist myself; I see clients one day a week. But I find AI is actually quite good at taking fragments of interpersonal psychology and, if prompted correctly, teasing out helpful insights.

Any creative person today has to ask whether the game is up or if they still have something to contribute. The good news is that AI forces us to do what we should have been doing all along: stop doing what we are "supposed" to do, and be completely honest. We must explore our own experiences with deep authenticity, because AI only provides a summation of what has already been thought and said. It can recombine data elegantly, but it ultimately delivers standardized answers. To survive, creative people must deepen their self-exploration to stay ahead of the machine.

Interviewer: Why don't you use it in your writing?

Alain de Botton: I might use it for quick research, like finding a painting or a specific type of cafe. But if I asked AI to write an essay on nostalgia in my style, it would do a decent job, but it wouldn't capture why I want to be a writer. I don't write just to produce a certain word count; I write to honor specific personal feelings. AI cannot know those feelings because it isn't me.

If I gave my writing over to AI, it would crush my unique intuition. I would rather write the essay myself, and perhaps afterward ask the machine if I missed any major historical points. But normally, I can't be bothered. I am not trying to write a definitive reference article; I am trying to do justice to my own state of mind. It is a more personal, selfish project.

Interviewer: If I invited you to teach a semester-long writing class at a university, how would you structure the curriculum? What would you tell the students?

Alain de Botton: First, I would want to challenge their preconceptions of what it means to be a writer and what kind of books they think they are supposed to write. I would also explore why they want to be writers in the first place, because writing is not a very fun career, and perhaps they would be happier doing something else.

I would run introspection exercises, like the index card exercise you mentioned. We would all go to the park, look at the same view, and then write two different pieces: one describing what we think we are "supposed" to say about a park, and another describing what was actually going on in our minds, which might have nothing to do with the park at all. This would show the contrast between conventional expectations and authentic inner thoughts, flexing that introspective muscle. I would want to help students connect with their unique inner voice and those neglected thoughts that Emerson spoke of.

Interviewer: It’s striking that in your answer, you didn't mention grammar, syntax, or any of the technical things we learn in school. You focused entirely on emotional authenticity, the difference between what we feel versus what we are supposed to feel, and examining your motivations. That is not how most people teach writing.

Alain de Botton: Yes. It is probably no surprise that I have never been asked to teach!

Interviewer: Thank you so much, Alain. This was such a joy and a pleasure.

Alain de Botton: Thank you. What a pleasure.

Summary

Introduction: The Crisis of Cognitive Overload and the Maximized Brain

In our rapidly evolving modern world, many individuals experience profound cognitive overload. This phenomenon is driven by two primary factors: a desperate urge to hoard information to make sense of rapid societal changes, and a relentless pressure to maintain extreme levels of productivity to keep pace with these changes. To cope, we construct elaborate systems, stick rigidly to exhausting routines, and manage endless task lists—often at the expense of our mental health.

Compounding this stress is the digital "leaderboard" of social media, which fosters perpetual self-comparison. We constantly question whether we are fast, productive, or ambitious enough. This state of mind births what neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff terms the Maximized Brain: the subconscious belief that any goal we pursue must be executed in its largest, most ambitious form. For example:

• Instead of simply exercising, we commit to going to the gym every single day.

• Instead of writing a simple daily page, we resolve to write a novel.

• Instead of testing a creative side project, we try to build a high-growth startup.

This maximalist approach is highly fragile. It routinely leads to overwhelm, emotional burnout, and eventual abandonment because the friction of the goal is simply too immense for our primitive brains, which have not evolved since prehistoric times.

The Four-Quadrant Mindset Matrix

Mindsets act as the default filters through which we view the world, subconsciously driving our choices, relationships, and emotions. By mapping the two core drivers of personal growth—Curiosity and Ambition—on a coordinate matrix, Le Cunff identifies three restrictive subconscious mindsets and one empowering alternative:

• The Cynical Mindset (Low Curiosity, Low Ambition): Driven by a constant state of survival, individuals in this mindset have lost interest in exploration or self-improvement. They frequently engage in self-soothing or avoidant behaviors like "doom scrolling," consuming negative news cycles, and debating these current events endlessly with others while mocking earnest or curious individuals.

• The Escapist Mindset (High Curiosity, Low Ambition): These individuals retain a strong sense of wonder but have entirely abandoned their personal or professional ambitions to dodge the weight of responsibility. This mindset manifests as seeking temporary relief through retail therapy, binge-watching, or planning elaborate fantasy vacations instead of taking active steps to improve their daily lives.

• The Perfectionist Mindset (Low Curiosity, High Ambition): Characterized by self-coercion, toxic productivity, and overwork, perfectionists try to conquer life's inherent uncertainty through sheer labor. They are entirely driven by fixed outcomes, falsely believing that happiness is a milestone deferred until a specific goal is conquered.

• The Experimental Mindset (High Curiosity, High Ambition): This is the ideal alternative. In this state, uncertainty is viewed not as a threat, but as an open invitation to learn, play, and grow. Failure is reframed from a personal deficit into a valuable objective data point.

Because these mindsets are highly fluid and context-dependent rather than static personality traits, individuals can intentionally transition toward the Experimental Mindset through conscious self-awareness.

The Anatomy of a Tiny Experiment: The PACT Framework

To cultivate an experimental mindset, Le Cunff proposes substituting intimidating, high-stakes goals with Tiny Experiments based on the scientific method. This cycle begins with basic observation, moves to formulating a research question, designs an experiment to gather data, and concludes with an objective analysis to decide the next path forward.

To formalize these experiments, individuals commit to a PACT—a highly structured commitment device characterized by four key attributes:

• Purposeful: It must align with something the individual genuinely cares about, imbuing daily actions with micro-purposes rather than demanding a grand, intimidating "life purpose."

• Actionable: The task must be immediately executable without requiring outside permission, additional resources, or complex preparations.

• Continuous: It must be practiced regularly over a pre-determined timeframe (e.g., daily for two weeks, or weekly for two months). Setting a fixed duration prevents the Maximized Brain from quitting prematurely when initial results are uncomfortable.

• Trackable (Not Measurable): It avoids complex key performance indicators (KPIs) or objectives and key results (OKRs). Tracking is binary: did you perform the action today, yes or no?

Distinctions from Other Frameworks

• PACT vs. New Year's Resolutions: Resolutions are typically overly ambitious, highly rigid, and prone to early abandonment. A PACT is small, highly achievable, and can be initiated at any point in the year.

• PACT vs. Habits: A habit is an indefinite commitment to a behavior pre-determined to be beneficial. A PACT is a temporary diagnostic tool designed to test if a behavior actually suits the individual before they commit to making it a habit.

Data Analysis: Balancing External and Internal Signals

When analyzing the results of a PACT, one must weigh two distinct data pools:

• External Signals: Objective metrics such as financial returns, career progression, audience growth, or traditional markers of success.

• Internal Signals: Subjective emotional data, including energy levels, enjoyment, anxiety, and fulfillment.

To illustrate this balance, Le Cunff shares her personal experiment with becoming a YouTuber. She committed to a PACT to write, film, and publish one video per week until the end of the year. Externally, the experiment was highly successful, yielding high subscriber counts, positive feedback, and collaboration offers. Internally, however, Le Cunff felt intense dread and anxiety when filming, which triggered severe procrastination on filming days. By prioritizing internal data alongside external success, she confidently ended the channel, choosing instead to focus on her thriving newsletter.

Navigating Uncertainty and the Power of Affective Labeling

Modern society is marked by rapid technological and cultural disruption, leaving individuals with an deep-seated sense of instability. In response, our brains seek artificial control by consuming endless streams of information, mistakenly conflating raw information with actual knowledge.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the human brain is hardwired to fear the unknown. In primeval environments, unexpected noises or unfamiliar foods represented lethal threats. Today, this translates into intense neural activity when facing uncertainty. Studies show that human beings experience significantly higher levels of psychological stress when facing uncertainty than when anticipating known physical pain. This is why we often prefer receiving immediate bad news over waiting in suspense; bad news grants a comforting illusion of control.

Affective Labeling as a Neural Intervention

To shift from fearing uncertainty to collaborating with it, Le Cunff recommends Affective Labeling—the practice of putting exact words to complex emotions.

• Neurological Impact: Affective labeling downregulates activity in the amygdala (the brain's primitive center for unconscious emotional processing) and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex (the seat of rational, logical thinking).

• The Landscape Technique: If finding a precise word for an emotion is too difficult, individuals can describe their internal state as a physical landscape (e.g., "a stormy day over a dark forest" or "a steep, scary cliff overlooking a beautiful sea").

By processing our emotions before attempting to solve the objective problems of a life disruption, we protect our long-term mental health and clear our cognitive space to make better decisions.

Embracing Liminal Spaces

Liminal spaces are transitional phases of life where the old reality has dissolved but the new one has not yet formed. Because the brain craves clear, binary classifications (e.g., safe vs. dangerous), these periods feel highly uncomfortable. Le Cunff illustrates this with the airplane metaphor:

• Anxious Avoidance (Response 1): Trying to escape the transition by sleeping, drinking alcohol, or waiting anxiously for the flight to end.

• Mindful Agency (Response 2): Embracing the disconnection from daily routines (such as having no Wi-Fi) as a pocket of freedom to read, journal, reflect, or let the mind wander.

True freedom resides in the brief gap between a stimulus and our response. Pausing to choose our reaction rather than relying on automatic, fear-based defaults builds the confidence needed to adapt to a changing world.

Deconstructing the Three Subconscious Cognitive Scripts

Cognitive scripts are internalized behavioral patterns that dictate how we assume we should behave in specific scenarios. While useful for routine tasks (e.g., knowing the order of events when visiting a doctor or dining at a restaurant), they become highly damaging when applied to major life choices. Le Cunff identifies three dominant scripts that restrict human potential:

• The Sequel Script: The subconscious assumption that our future choices must maintain narrative continuity with our past. This script compels individuals to stay in careers solely because they match their university majors, or to repeatedly date the same type of person to maintain behavioral patterns.

• The Crowd Pleaser Script: Making major life decisions designed to satisfy the expectations of parents, partners, peers, or colleagues, prioritizing their comfort and validation over personal fulfillment.

• The Epic Script: The culturally celebrated belief that a meaningful life must be marked by grand ambitions, massive impact, and monumental success. This script stigmatizes simple, present, and deeply connected lives, falsely insisting that putting all of our emotional eggs in one high-stakes basket is the only path to validation.

The Epic Script has gained immense popularity due to Survivorship Bias on social media, where the exceptional successes of a few passion-driven founders are broadcasted, while the thousands who followed the exact same path and failed remain completely invisible. This has led to a 700% surge in the use of the phrase "find your purpose" in literature over the last twenty years.

Breaking Free

To break free from these scripts, one must identify the word "should" in their daily internal monologue, as it is a prime indicator of an active cognitive script. By replacing "should" with "might" (e.g., "What might I explore today?" instead of "What should I do?"), individuals open up possibilities for curiosity-driven choices. Le Cunff offers three core diagnostic questions to evaluate these scripts during any life transition:

• Am I following my past, or am I discovering my path? (Counteracts the Sequel Script)

• Am I following the crowd, or am I discovering my tribe? (Counteracts the Crowd Pleaser Script)

• Am I following my passion, or am I discovering my curiosity? (Counteracts the Epic Script)

Reframing Procrastination & Mindful Productivity

In a society shaped by post-industrial work moralization, productivity has been elevated to a measure of personal virtue, while procrastination is viewed as a character flaw. This cultural dynamic has fueled a massive commercial productivity industry of time-tracking software, structured templates, calendars, and wearable devices.

Le Cunff challenges this view, arguing that procrastination is not a sign of laziness, but rather an invaluable neurological signal. She introduces the Triple Check Tool to diagnose the root cause of procrastination across three dimensions:

• The Head (Rational Block): You are not logically convinced that the task is worth doing.

• Remedy: Redefine the strategy or brainstorm alternative approaches with colleagues.

• The Heart (Emotional Block): The task feels boring, painful, or thoroughly unengaging.

• Remedy: Redesign the experience to make it enjoyable (e.g., working from a favorite coffee shop or co-working with a colleague).

• The Hand (Practical Block): You lack the necessary tools, skills, or resources to execute the task.

• Remedy: Raise your hand and request targeted training, coaching, or mentorship.

If a task aligns across the Head, Heart, and Hand, but procrastination persists, it indicates systemic or environmental barriers that require either direct communication with stakeholders or removing oneself from that environment entirely.

The Second Arrow of Suffering

Le Cunff connects this to the Buddhist parable of the Two Arrows:

• The First Arrow: The initial negative event or difficult emotion (e.g., the act of procrastinating).

• The Second Arrow: The self-inflicted shame, guilt, and anger we experience for feeling that initial emotion.

While the first arrow is often an unavoidable part of human life, the second arrow is entirely optional. Eliminating self-blame allows us to address the root causes of our work blocks with clear, scientific curiosity.

Mindful Productivity and Magic Windows

Traditional productivity treats time as a series of rigid boxes to be packed with tasks. Mindful Productivity shifts this focus from time to energy, managing our physical, emotional, and cognitive resources. This approach centers around identifying and utilizing our Magic Windows—those natural daily periods of deep focus and effortless flow where time seems to slip away. By answering three key questions, individuals can structure their workdays around these natural energetic peaks:

• When is my Magic Window?

• What specific tasks belong in this window?

• How can I protect and keep this window open?

The Practice of Self-Anthropology

For action-oriented individuals, the hardest part of any new venture is simply starting, because they focus heavily on final outcomes. To overcome this friction, Le Cunff introduces the concept of Self-Anthropology: treating your own life as an ongoing field study.

By stepping back and documenting your daily existence with the objective curiosity of an anthropologist, you begin to question deep-seated assumptions and identify areas ripe for tiny experiments.

The 24-Hour Self-Anthropology Exercise

To practice this, spend 24 hours recording objective observations in a notebook or phone, taking note of:

• Fluctuations in energy levels and mood throughout the day.

• Which conversations and social encounters left you feeling energized or drained.

• Daily cognitive insights from articles, podcasts, or thoughts.

• The direct emotional and behavioral outcomes of your tasks.

Moving from Observation to Experimentation

• Observe: Identify patterns (e.g., "I notice that I feel highly energized when presenting my ideas at work, but I also experience brief spikes of performance anxiety beforehand").

• Hypothesize: Formulate testable solutions (e.g., "Perhaps taking a brief public speaking class, working with a performance coach, or simply volunteering for more internal presentations will build my confidence").

• Experiment: Select a single hypothesis and design a brief, structured PACT (e.g., "I will volunteer to give one short team presentation every two weeks for the next business quarter").

• Evaluate: At the end of the set timeframe, collect and analyze both internal and external data points to decide whether to persist, pause, or pivot.

By adopting this continuous cycle of self-observation and low-stakes experimentation, you can shed the burdens of perfectionism and linear success, designing a life of genuine agency, agility, and curiosity.

Transcript

Part 1: The Experimental Mindset

I'm Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I'm a neuroscientist and the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

Are we all experiencing cognitive overload?

A lot of us are currently experiencing cognitive overload, and there are many reasons for that. One of them is that the world is changing fast, and we're trying to hoard as much information as possible to understand what's going on around us. Another one is that we're trying to be as productive as possible in order to keep up, again, with this world that keeps on changing. Because of that, we try to build systems. We try to stick to routines, and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process.

In essence, there is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved. They're still the same that they were thousands of years ago. We're all staring at a giant leaderboard with social media where we can see how other people are progressing, their success, and where we keep on comparing ourselves to each other. This creates anxiety because we keep asking ourselves: How am I doing? Am I doing better? Am I being fast enough? Am I being productive enough? Am I being ambitious enough?

What is the maximalist brain?

What I call the maximized brain, or the maximalist brain, is this belief that we have that whatever we do, it has to be the biggest, the most ambitious version of this goal. When we want to exercise, we decide that we have to go to the gym every single day. If we want to start writing, we decide that we're going to start writing a book. If we want to explore a new project, we decide that this has to be a startup.

The problem with the maximized brain is that it very often leads to overwhelm and burnout, and sometimes just completely abandoning our projects because they're just too big. Tiny experiments offer an alternative to this maximized approach where instead of going for the bigger thing, you go for the thing that is most likely to bring you discovery, fun, enjoyment, and that is based on your curiosity rather than an external definition of success. When you're running a tiny experiment, you're not trying to do something big; what you're trying is just to learn something new.

How did you discover the experimental mindset?

I divide my life into two separate chapters. In the first one, I had a very linear approach that was driven by traditional definitions of success. I did my best to do well in school, and then I got a good job at Google, and then I tried to climb the corporate ladder, getting a promotion, working on the best projects possible. From an external standpoint, I should have been happy, but I wasn't. Instead, I was feeling empty inside. I was both bored and burned out.

I left my job at Google thinking that I should try to do something different and not realizing that I was following yet another script of success. I decided to start a startup, and again, I didn't find happiness there by following this idea of success that everyone around me was following. It's only when my startup failed, and for the very first time in my life I didn't have a clear idea of what I was supposed to do next in order to be successful, that I finally asked myself: "What is it that I wanted to do? What would make me happy even if I forgot about the traditional definition of success?"

And so I went back to the drawing board, and I started thinking about what I was curious about—again, not based on traditional definitions of success. What were topics I would be excited to explore even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain. I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and why we feel the way we feel. So I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience. I completed my graduate studies and I got a PhD in neuroscience.

Throughout this journey, I decided to learn in public, and this is how I started my newsletter. Every week I would pick a topic that I had discovered in my studies in university, and I would take those neuroscience insights and turn them into practical tools that I would write about in the newsletter to help other people apply them in their life and work. This tiny experiment of starting to write online and sharing what I was learning in public was the beginning of my work of trying to understand how we can live more experimental lives.

Why is mindset so important?

A mindset is a default way of seeing the world, and our mindsets influence so many things in our lives. They influence our decisions, they influence our relationships, they influence the way we think, and even the way we feel. When we're not aware of our mindsets, they can impact the direction of our life, the path that we're taking, without us even realizing it.

Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life where you're making choices in accordance with what you actually want and going where you actually want to go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions. The great thing about mindsets is that they can actually change, but the first step is to make them conscious.

What are the mindsets that hold us back?

There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy, conscious lives. These three mindsets are called the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset, and the perfectionist mindset.

• The Cynical Mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we're actually sometimes even making fun of earnest people who still have this high level of curiosity and ambition. When we're cynical, we feel like there's no point trying because we're in survival mode all the time. So things that we might be doing instead include doom scrolling, sitting on the sofa going through negative news, being stuck in this cycle, and then maybe even spending a lot of time and energy discussing and debating those negative news with other people.

• The Escapist Mindset is when we're still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. We're trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge-watching, or dream-planning our next vacation instead of doing something right now to change our lives.

• The Perfectionist Mindset is when we try to escape uncertainty through work. We have high ambition but low curiosity. That might look like self-coercion, overworking ourselves, and toxic productivity. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful, then we'll be happy.

You can picture those three subconscious mindsets on a 2x2 matrix where the two different factors are curiosity and ambition:

• Cynical Mindset: Low curiosity, low ambition.

• Escapist Mindset: High curiosity, low ambition.

• Perfectionist Mindset: Low curiosity, high ambition.

Those mindsets are actually very fluid and they might change depending on our situation, different triggers, and different ambitions that we might have at the moment. This is actually really good news because that means that these mindsets are not fixed personality traits. We can change them by becoming aware of them and then making the decision to change our mindsets. This is something we can achieve.

What mindset should we strive for?

There is an alternative to those three mindsets, which is called the Experimental Mindset. This is a mindset where your curiosity and your ambition are both high. In an experimental mindset, you're open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow, and to learn.

Having an experimental mindset helps us completely reimagine our relationship to ambition and to goals. When you have an experimental mindset, instead of chasing those linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you're open to designing experiments. Instead of trying to get to a specific outcome, you start from a research question. Anytime you don't understand something, it doesn't create fear; it creates curiosity.

Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from. It means being open to making mistakes because you know you're going to learn from them. It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don't know what's coming, and this is great. It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected.

How do you cultivate an experimental mindset?

The idea of cultivating an experimental mindset is based on the scientific method, and this is very simple. First, you start by observing your current situation by looking at the world around you. Then you ask a research question, and you design a tiny experiment to collect data which you can then analyze. Based on those results, you can decide what your next step is. What's great about that is that even though you don't know where you're going, you can trust that you're going to grow through each cycle of experimentation.

To design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity. A great way to do this is to design what I call a PACT. This is a commitment device where you say, "I am going to run this experiment." The way it works is that you choose one action, you then decide on a duration, and you say, "I will perform this action for this specific duration."

Why does it look like that? There are several reasons:

• The first one is that when a scientist designs an experiment, they decide in advance on the number of trials. You don't simply stop in the middle if the results don't really look like what you expected. You collect all of the data, and once you have all of that data, you can analyze it and decide what the answer is.

• The second reason is that it allows you to notice when you're falling prey to the maximized brain. You can make sure that you're keeping your experiment tiny enough that you're actually going to complete it by choosing a duration that is reasonable, something you can actually achieve, so you can collect all of the necessary data.

A PACT is:

• Purposeful: It needs to be something you care about. What's great is that when each PACT you design has purpose imbued into it, you don't need to have a grand purpose in life.

• Actionable: This is something that you need to be able to do right now. You don't need extra resources. You don't need help from other people. This is something you can try straight away.

• Continuous: This is something that you need to do regularly. Again, you decide on the duration and the number of trials, and then you say, "I'm going to do this action for two weeks," or two months, or one year.

• Trackable, not measurable: You don't need complicated metrics. You only need to be able to say whether you did it or not. Did you do the action? Did you perform it? Yes or no? That's the only tracking you need.

A PACT is not a New Year's resolution. This is not something that you decide on that is very ambitious at the beginning of the year and that you're going to abandon. This is something small and achievable that you can start doing at any point during the year.

A PACT is not a habit either. The difference between a habit and an experiment is that with a habit, you're very clear that this is something that's going to be good for you, and so you commit to it for an indefinite amount of time. For example, you say, "Starting today, I'm going to go to bed at the same time." Whereas with an experiment, you're not quite sure whether this is going to work for you or not; you're going to test it. So you're going to say, "I'm going to go to bed at the same time every night for two weeks, and only then am I going to decide whether this is good for me or not and whether I want to turn it into a habit."

And a PACT is not a KPI, an OKR, a performance metric, or whatever people call them in the corporate world. It's really just about learning something new. It's not about being successful or getting to a specific outcome.

How do you analyze the collected data?

Once you've completed your PACT and you've gone through the entire duration of that data collection phase, you can finally look at the data. I highly encourage you, while you're running your PACT, to take little notes. It can be very simple—a few bullet points on your phone, something in your journal—just to keep track of whether you did it or not and how it felt. Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your PACT as is because it works for you, pause it if you feel like that's not really something you want to keep going with, or pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation.

A lot of us tend to only pay attention to external data or internal data when we're analyzing our experiments. For example, we might only look at the external metrics of success or only at the internal feelings that we might be experiencing. But both are very valuable in order to make the right decision when it comes to your next steps.

The external signals might show you whether this is something that is worth pursuing in terms of financial success, career, or any ambition that you might want to explore. But the internal signals are also very important. There's no point being successful externally if it feels horrible to work on this project. Equally, if it feels really good but you have no way to sustain yourself with this project, it might be worth reconsidering the parameters to find a way where you can have an overlap between external success and internal positive feelings and emotions.

How have you personally employed the experimental mindset?

Let me give you an example. I designed an experiment where I wanted to explore whether I wanted to become a YouTuber. This was something I had noticed a lot of friends around me doing, and they seemed to have a lot of fun. That piqued my curiosity enough that I wanted to give it a try.

So I designed a PACT, and I said, "I'm going to publish a video every week until the end of the year." It was a very simple PACT, which I completed. Every week, I published a new video. At the end of my PACT, I looked at the data. External data was pretty good: looking at the traditional metrics of success of a YouTube channel, I got to a good number of subscribers and received a lot of positive comments. People seemed to like the videos, and I even had some people reaching out and asking if we could collaborate together.

But looking at the internal data, I actually did not enjoy producing these videos. Every week when I had to sit down in front of the camera, I was dreading it. I love having face-to-face conversations with people and seeing their reactions in real time, but just looking at a camera with no feedback whatsoever was very uncomfortable for me. As a result, every week I was procrastinating for so long. Every time I had to film a video, I felt deeply anxious, and I was not even able to work on anything else on those days where I was supposed to film.

This is a typical example showing why it is so important to consider both the external and the internal signals before making a decision. Based on this, even though the YouTube channel was fairly successful in such a short amount of time, I decided to stop. I realized that I was not going to be a YouTuber, and I preferred to keep on writing my newsletter.

What are some tiny experiments anyone can do?

You can run tiny experiments in all areas of your life.

• In work, for example, you could say, "I'm going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks where I share the most interesting links that I find."

• In relationships, you could say, "I'm going every Sunday to sit down and send a note to a friend I haven't talked to in a while."

• And when it comes to your health, you could say, "I'm going to go for a walk for 20 minutes for 20 days to see how I feel at the end of that experiment."

With an experiment, you're not making any assumptions as to whether this is going to work for you or not. A habit that a friend has—for example, going for a run three times a week—might not be that good for you. Maybe when it comes to your health and body movement, you prefer dancing or something else. That's why it's interesting to run an experiment before committing to a habit. When it comes to running, for example, you could say, "I'm going to try that. I am going to go and run three times a week for three weeks, not for the rest of my life, and at the end of the three weeks, I'm going to decide whether this is what I want to keep doing or if I want to experiment with another way to move my body."

Why should we commit to curiosity?

In essence, committing to curiosity is ensuring that you're going to live a life that is intentional—that you're going to live your life, not the life that other people are expecting you to live. Curiosity keeps you adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world. It ensures that you stay open to new possibilities, and frankly, it just makes life more fun.

This all might sound philosophical, but there's actually a lot of neuroscientific research showing that when we experience a thirst for water, the same parts of the brain activate as when we experience a thirst for information. So when we say, "I'm thirsty for knowledge; I want to learn more; I want to know more," we couldn't be more right. Thinking about your own mindsets and developing this self-awareness is really just a way to direct this curiosity towards the things that you actually want to do with your life.

Part 2: The Illusion of Certainty

Why is there a feeling of uncertainty in the world?

The pace of technological and societal change has accelerated massively. We feel like we cannot rely anymore on those traditions and institutions that used to give us a sense of stability. It's become increasingly difficult, or maybe even impossible, to know what skills we should invest in in order to build the careers of the future. To make it worse, we have infinite access to information, which makes us feel like if we just keep on reading, listening, and watching, we might get that key information that is going to finally give us this sense of elusive certainty.

This modern environment is anxiety-inducing. The problem today is that it's become really, really hard to know the difference between information and knowledge. Information is just a piece of data; it could be valid, it could be not valid, it could come from any kind of source, and it could be based on different contexts and circumstances that we're not aware of. By consuming all of this information, we might actually not take action to go out into the real world and collect our own data and our own knowledge, which would be much more helpful in order to make our decisions.

The less control we have, the more we seek it, and that might take a lot of forms. For example, trying to consume as much information as possible just so we feel like we have a sense of clarity as to what is going on. That could also look like sticking to the safe path—the more obvious one where we feel like we understand all of the parameters—or sometimes that could even look like doing nothing because we're too afraid to do something dangerous.

How are uncertainty and anxiety linked?

Uncertainty fuels anxiety. Research shows that when we experience uncertainty, our neural activity intensifies. Our brains are basically on high alert, getting ready for any threat that we might face, and that happens even when there's no actual danger.

In studies, uncertainty has been found to cause more stress than individual pain. The reason why is because when we know we're going to experience pain, we can mentally prepare for it. Whereas when we're facing uncertainty, the doubt of not knowing what kind of pain or what level of pain we will face is actually more stressful than knowing exactly what's going to happen. This is also why we prefer getting bad news over waiting for an answer. Bad news feels better because now we know; even if it's negative, we feel like we're in control.

Why did our brains evolve to fear uncertainty?

Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty, and that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. When you think about the conditions in which our species started, the more information you had, the more likely you were to survive. A weird noise in the bushes or a new food that you'd never tried before—all of these could be lethal. So anytime you find yourself in a situation where you feel like you don't understand everything that's going on, or where you feel like you don't have all of the information, your brain is trying to get to a solution.

Obviously, this was very useful in the jungle, but not so much in our modern environment. We try to get to an answer as quickly as possible, which means we sometimes go for the most obvious one rather than the most interesting one. It might even reduce our ability to connect with other people, because we feel it is better to stay with people that we understand and people we know rather than trying to connect with strangers, because strangers could mean danger, uncertainty, fear, and anxiety.

How should we approach uncertainty instead?

Instead of fearing uncertainty, we should learn to collaborate with it. What that looks like is seeing uncertainty as an opportunity for learning and for growth. When there is no uncertainty, when we know exactly what we're doing, that means we're not growing anymore. So we should actually seek uncertainty, embrace it, and every time we face it, say, "Hello, welcome back. Let's work together."

All scientists know that real growth requires both trial and error. If you keep on repeating the same trial and everything works as expected, it means that you're not growing; you're not learning anything. You're just repeating the same thing that you know is working already. It's only through errors that you can adjust your path, try new approaches, and discover that some of your assumptions were wrong. This is why all scientific experiments are just cycles of trial and error, and this is modeled after nature. This is how nature evolves, and this is how we can evolve. By making sure that we try new things, make mistakes, and learn from them, we can grow in our personal and professional lives.

What is the linear model of success?

A linear model of success is based on a fixed outcome that we try to get to. It implies that first you do A, then B, then C, and then you'll be successful. There are lots of problems with a linear model of success. One of them is that it assumes that you know where you're going, which might not always be the case. Another one is the assumption that wherever you want to go right now is where you will want to go a few years from now. Things are changing very fast, our world is evolving, and you should allow yourself to change the direction of your ambitions as the world changes.

Another problem is that linear goals breed toxic productivity and unhealthy comparison. When we're all climbing similar ladders in parallel next to each other, we might compare ourselves to each other, looking to the right and to the left and asking, "Is this person being faster? Is this person working harder? Is this person being more successful?" This creates toxic productivity when we overwork ourselves just trying to climb those ladders as quickly as possible.

This can create a sense of ambivalence toward goals. It feels so exhausting to keep on climbing this ladder with no certainty at all that we might get to the top or that we might get there fast enough. This exhaustion from constantly comparing ourselves to each other has led some people to adopt a new mantra: "No goals, just vibes."

How can we go from linear success to fluid experimentation?

To break free from this goal-obsessed life, we need to go from rigid linearity to fluid experimentation. That means letting go of the focus on the outcome and instead embracing the joy that we can find in the process. Instead of focusing on climbing the ladder, we should try to design cycles of experimentation. Instead of focusing on certainty, this is all about focusing on curiosity. Breaking free from this goal-obsessed life and developing an experimental mindset is all about going from outcomes to processes, from ladders to growth loops, and from certainty to curiosity.

How can labeling emotions help manage uncertainty?

Affective labeling means labeling your emotions. It really just means putting words to feelings, and it's incredibly helpful because it allows you to better connect with and understand your emotions so you can manage them better. Affective labeling allows us to reduce activity in the amygdala, which is involved in unconscious emotional processing, and to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in rational thinking. This allows us to better manage our emotions.

What's great about affective labeling is that it's very simple, doesn't cost anything, and you can do it straight away whenever you want to better regulate your emotions. It's really just about picking a word to describe your current emotion. If you can't find the right word, there is research showing that describing a landscape is also a great way to practice affective labeling. You could say, for example, that "it's a stormy day over a dark forest," or you could say that "it's a scary cliff over a beautiful sea." That's a great way for you to describe your emotions when you cannot find just one word that captures exactly what you're feeling, acting as a way to map out your emotional landscape.

Whenever we face a disruption in our life, it's very tempting to try and immediately solve the objective consequences—the actual problems that arise from that disruption—and completely ignore the emotional experience of that disruption in the process. Affective labeling is really about making space for that emotional processing before you deal with the objective consequences.

The reason why this is important is twofold:

• First, this is going to be better for your mental health in the long term. By processing these emotions as you go through them rather than ignoring them, you're going to be more connected to yourself and experience better mental health.

• Second, this is also going to help you better solve the actual problem. When your mind is clear and you have processed the emotions, you will be able to think about the actual consequences in a more efficient way.

This practice is particularly useful for people who like to feel like they're in control and who tend to hide their emotions underneath something else rather than connecting with them. This might look like hiding an emotion underneath a more manageable, surface-level emotion that we are more familiar with. For example, if we're sad, we're just going to say that we're a little bit angry or a little bit disappointed about this, when really the core emotion is sadness. Or sometimes that might look like hiding the emotion under thinking, logic, and the rational brain, where we convince ourselves that we are looking for a solution, being proactive, and dealing with the problem, so everything is fine and we're not feeling anything too complicated or unmanageable.

Why do humans struggle with transitional periods?

We struggle with liminal spaces and transitional periods because our brains really like to be able to categorize situations as safe or dangerous as quickly as possible. When we can't do that, it feels very uncomfortable. We want to get out of this transitional space, get back to safety, and get back to a sense of clarity.

Imagine that you're on a plane 30,000 feet up in the sky with no Wi-Fi. There are two different responses that you can have:

• Response 1: You feel anxious. Because of that, you might try to sleep the entire time to ignore that you're on the plane. You might drink alcohol to dull some of the anxiety, and in general, you just want the flight to be over as quickly as possible.

• Response 2: You feel like, "This is great—no Wi-Fi, nobody can contact me. This is freedom." You might decide to watch a movie that you've been meaning to watch for a long time, crack open a book you wanted to read, journal, or just let your mind wander, really enjoying that space of transition that is outside of your daily routine and outside of the sense of certainty that you normally have as you go about your daily life.

There's a famous quote that has been attributed to a lot of different psychologists, including Viktor Frankl, which says: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." What that means is that whenever we find ourselves in a situation or face a trigger, there is a little gap before our response, and in that gap lies the freedom to make a choice. Are we going to go for the automatic response—the one we have no control over—or are we going to pause and ask ourselves, "How do I want to respond to this situation?"

Every time we use that freedom, every time we pause and ask ourselves, "What do I actually want to do?", we prove to ourselves that we have agency and that we are able to make our own choices. That doesn't mean it is always the correct choice. In many cases, there is no such thing as making the right choice because we don't have all of the information and things are changing so fast. But at least we know that we don't have to go for the automatic response. Ultimately, that means living a life not of rigid control, but of agency, experimentation, and exploration. This allows us to build confidence in our ability to adapt as the world changes around us.

Part 3: The Three Cognitive Scripts That Rule Your Life

How do we discover our purpose?

When you ask happy people how they discovered their passion, if they give you an honest answer, they'll tell you they stumbled upon it. What we can learn from that is that finding your passion and finding your purpose in life is not really about seeking it, obsessing over it, or applying a step-by-step plan to figure out what it is. Instead, it's about following your curiosity, experimenting, exploring, trying new things, and trusting that you will figure out what makes you excited to wake up in the morning.

What is a cognitive script?

A cognitive script is an internalized behavioral pattern that tells us how we're supposed—or at least how we think we're supposed—to act in certain situations. They can be very helpful for routine tasks and decisions in everyday life. Cognitive scripts were first discovered in a seminal 1979 study where researchers found that people follow very similar scripts in similar situations, such as going to the doctor or dining at a restaurant. Since then, researchers have found these cognitive scripts in all areas of life.

For routine, everyday decisions, cognitive scripts are actually very practical and useful. For example, you know that when you go to the doctor, you're supposed to wait in the waiting room, and then someone is going to call your name, and then you're going to go into the doctor's office, and this is where you're going to start telling them about whatever the issue is. You know in which order you're supposed to do all of those different actions. That's great, it's useful, and it's a pretty good thing that you don't have to overthink it every time you go to the clinic.

The problem with cognitive scripts is when we use them to make the more important decisions in our lives, in our careers, and in our relationships. Instead of asking ourselves, "Is that really what I want to do? Is that my decision?", we let our choices be driven by those stories that we have internalized—by those scripts that tell us how we're supposed to behave in a given situation.

What is the sequel script?

One of these scripts is the Sequel Script. That's the script where we feel like we've always behaved in a certain way, so we're going to keep on behaving in the exact same way. We feel like the narrative of our life needs to make linear sense.

This is the script that makes people choose careers that are aligned solely with whatever they studied at university. This is the script that makes people keep on dating the same kind of people they've been dating before, and this is, in general, the script that makes us repeat the exact same behaviors and patterns that we've had in the past.

In relationships in particular, what's very interesting is that we want the "sequel" to connect to whatever the previous experience was. This might mean dating the exact same type of person, or choosing the next person in response to whoever we were dating before. They might look like the complete opposite, but the truth is we still picked this person based on a sense of continuity with whatever the previous experience was before.

With the sequel script, it's quite obvious why it limits the possibilities that we might explore in life. Because we feel like whatever decision we make next needs to make sense in relation to the decisions we made in the past, we ignore a lot of the more left-field, unexpected decisions that could be brilliant opportunities for growth, exploration, and self-discovery.

What is the crowd pleaser script?

Another cognitive script that rules our life is the Crowd Pleaser Script. This is the script where we make decisions based on whatever is going to please the people around us the most. Quite often, those other people are our parents. We might make decisions based on whatever is going to make them feel like we are safe and successful.

But the audience for the crowd pleaser script can also be your friends, your partner, or your colleagues. What you don't realize when you follow the crowd pleaser script is that you're not making decisions based on what you want and what would make you happy, but rather based on what will make others around you happy.

What is the epic script?

Finally, there's the Epic Script, and this one is very insidious because it's actually celebrated in our society. It's the script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big, it needs to be very ambitious, and it needs to be highly impactful. Anything less than that is considered a failure.

The epic script is an extreme version of the idea of following your dreams. Because of that, it has created a form of stigma around having a small, simple life—a life that is focused on just being happy in the moment, being present, being connected, and exploring your curiosity. It makes us worry: "If I don't have those external signs of success, if I'm not following some grand passion, then am I really living a meaningful life?" This is the anxiety-inducing question created by the epic script.

When you think about it, this is a very myopic definition of success where we try to put all of our eggs in the same basket. We choose this one thing, and we say, "If I succeed at this, then I'm successful in life." The problem with this is that if we fail at this particular project or this particular goal, we feel like we have failed at life entirely. The other problem with putting all of our eggs in the same basket is that sometimes the basket just becomes too heavy, and we drop it altogether.

Our modern, hyper-connected online world has made the epic script unfortunately very popular. We have become overly obsessed with finding our purpose. Mentions in books of the phrase "find your purpose" have surged 700% in the past two decades alone. We see all of those success stories of people who have found their passion and are very happy as a result. We see the entrepreneur who followed their passion and was highly successful, but we don't see the thousands of other ones who tried the exact same thing and failed. This is called Survivorship Bias, and it's very unfortunate how nowadays we are basing all of our decisions—and even our self-worth—on that incomplete information.

What should we do when we notice we are following a cognitive script?

Once you have identified the cognitive scripts that rule your life, you can actually break free from them. It starts by seeing them as stories we tell ourselves rather than truths that we need to follow blindly.

A really good way to do this is to stop for a second every time you hear yourself saying, "I should do this." The word "should" is actually a really good signal that there might be a cognitive script at play. Once you've identified the places and situations in your life where you're using that word "should," you can decide to replace it with another word: "might."

• "What might I want to do instead of what I should do?"

• "What might I want to explore?"

• "What might I want to experiment with?"

If you want to start writing your own scripts in life, there are three questions that you can ask yourself while designing your next experiment:

• Am I following my past, or am I discovering my path?

• Am I following the crowd, or am I discovering my tribe?

• Am I following my passion, or am I discovering my curiosity?

Those three questions together allow you to embrace the liminal space we're all in, to make friends with uncertainty, to start experimenting more, and, very importantly, to deal with those three powerful cognitive scripts that underlie a lot of our decisions on an unconscious level.

Part 4: In Defense of Procrastination

Why does procrastination have a negative connotation?

Procrastination has become a bit of a dirty word, and that's because we have just been through hundreds of years of moralization around productivity and work. Being productive has come to mean that you are a good, useful, helpful contributor to society. In a way, we have all agreed to tie our self-worth to our productivity, and so not being productive means that you're being lazy, you're not contributing, and you're not being helpful to society.

Because of the efficiency worship that we developed in the industrial age, we now see procrastination as a character flaw rather than what it actually is: a signal that is worth listening to. This has propped up an entire industry of productivity, whether it's online courses telling you how to manage your life and your time to make the most of every single minute, templates to track all of your tasks, wearables to tell you whether you've been using your time correctly, or calendars ruling the way we spend our day. Even if at a personal level you don't feel like productivity is the most important thing you want to optimize for, it's very hard to resist the sirens of our society telling you, "You must be more productive."

As a result of this society that keeps telling us we need to be productive to be a good person, whenever we find ourselves procrastinating, we just try to ignore it. We push through using sheer willpower, and we feel self-blame and self-judgment. Instead, there's a very simple tool that you can use whenever you experience procrastination—a tool that is based on self-discovery, on thinking like a scientist, and trying to understand what the signals are.

What is the Triple Check Tool?

This tool is called the Triple Check, and it's about asking yourself: "Why am I procrastinating? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand?"

• The Head (Rational): If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be working on that task in the first place.

• The Heart (Emotional): If it's coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't think this is going to be fun or enjoyable to work on.

• The Hand (Practical): If it's coming from the hand, it means that even though at a rational level you feel like you should be working on this, and at an emotional level you feel like it looks like fun, at a practical level you feel like you're not equipped with the right tools or you don't have the right resources in order to get the job done.

How can the triple check inform what we do next?

What's great about the triple check tool is that it's not just a tool for diagnosis; it also tells you what to do in each of those situations:

• If the problem is rational, coming from the head, it means that you might want to redefine the strategy. Maybe reach out to your colleagues and tell them, "Hey, I'm not quite convinced this is the way we should go about this. Do you want to go and brainstorm together and see if there's a better approach that we could use?"

• If the problem is emotional, coming from the heart, you might want to redesign the experience so it's more fun. That could look like going to your favorite coffee shop, or grabbing a colleague and saying, "Hey, let's do a little bit of co-working while I work on this task."

• If the problem is practical, coming from the hand, where you feel like you don't have the right tools, resources, or skills, then raise that hand. Ask for help. Tell the people you're working with that maybe you need a bit of mentoring or coaching, or you need to take a course in order to be able to do that task.

Sometimes you'll go through the triple check—head, heart, hand—and everything feels in alignment, yet you're still procrastinating. In this case, it might be worth looking outside of yourself for systemic barriers. That means having honest, sometimes difficult conversations with other stakeholders, redesigning your environment if it is not conducive to you being focused and productive, or sometimes completely removing yourself from that work environment and doing something else, because you might not be able to change that situation every time.

What are magic windows?

Your magic windows are those moments of high productivity, creativity, and focus where you feel like there is zero effort involved, time is flowing, and your attention is completely locked onto the task that you're working on. Whether you've noticed it or not, we have all gone through those kinds of magic windows in our lives. Those are the moments when you look at the time and you feel like, "Where did it go? What happened?" Maybe you were lost in a conversation with a friend, maybe you were working on a creative task, or maybe you were taking a walk. Those are your magic windows, and what's amazing is that once you learn to identify them, you can start becoming a bit more intentional and opening those magic windows at will during your daily life.

What is mindful productivity?

You might think that mindfulness and productivity are antithetical and don't really belong together. But when you go back to the very definition of mindfulness, it's really about paying attention to your experience in the present moment without self-blame or self-judgment. Mindful productivity is about cultivating this awareness in the way you work and direct your focus. Mindful productivity is really about answering three key questions:

• When is my magic window?

• What belongs in this window?

• How can I keep that window open?

What is mindful productivity's most valuable resource?

The traditional definition of productivity only focuses on time as the most important resource, and the assumption is that every minute is a little box that you need to fill with as much stuff as possible in order to be productive. With mindful productivity, you consider other very important resources: your physical resources, your emotional resources, and your cognitive resources. That really means thinking about your emotions, your energy, and your executive function. Practicing mindful productivity requires you to change your perspective on what the most important resource is, shifting from time to energy.

How does managing emotions influence productivity?

We have a very negative relationship with procrastination. If you go online trying to find solutions for how to deal with procrastination, you're only going to find articles that tell you how to "beat" or "defeat" procrastination—very violent language. But instead, if we start seeing it as a useful signal, it allows us to better connect with the emotions surrounding that procrastination and to understand that this is really just our brain trying to send us a message. By reconnecting with these emotions instead of trying to ignore them, not only are we going to understand ourselves better, but we will also better understand our relationship to work and become more productive in the process.

What does death by two arrows mean?

In Buddhist philosophy, there is a concept called "death by two arrows" that tries to explain some of the sources of human suffering. The way it works is that whenever we experience a difficult event or emotion, that's the first arrow. In the case of procrastination, when we procrastinate, that is the first arrow. But then there's a second arrow, which is the shame and the self-blame that we experience because of that initial experience.

What's very important to know is that second arrow is completely optional. We don't have to add a second layer of suffering to the difficulties and the challenges that we are facing in the first place.

What's the hardest part of knowing what to do next?

The hardest part of knowing what to do next is often simply getting started. The reason why is because we focus too heavily on the outcome rather than the process. By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, you can let go of any rigid definition of success. You let go of that binary result you're looking for, and instead focus on a research question—a hypothesis that you might have, something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore. Whatever the outcome, whatever the result, if you learn something new, that's progress.

How can we practice self-anthropology?

A great way to start reimagining what your life could look like is to practice what I call Self-Anthropology: becoming an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study. Just imagine an anthropologist who goes somewhere to study a new culture. They know nothing about this culture and everything is new to them, so what do they do? They take their notebook out and they start taking field notes. They ask questions like: Why are people doing things the way they're doing them? Why do they care about this? Why is this thing so important to them?

You can do the same thing with your life. As a little exercise, you can say that for the next 24 hours, you're going to treat your life as if you were an anthropologist. Take a notebook or use your phone and start taking little notes. Observe what gives you energy and what drains your energy, the conversations that you enjoy having, and the projects that you like working on. Just by doing this, you are going to start questioning a lot of your scripts, a lot of your assumptions, and a lot of your goals, and you're going to open a window for experimentation.

There's no fixed rule when it comes to what you can include in your field notes. It should really be guided by your curiosity, but here are some ideas for inspiration:

• Include insights that you have during the day after reading or listening to something.

• Capture your mood.

• Capture your energy levels.

• Capture the results of encounters and conversations with other people.

Just like a scientist, you need to first start with observation. It can be really tempting when we're a "doer" and we like to get things done to jump straight into designing the experiment, but it's important to have that initial phase of observation.

Let's walk through an example of how this works:

• Observe: Let's say you observe that you get a lot of energy from giving presentations at work, but also a little bit of performance anxiety.

• Hypothesize: In the second step, you need to formulate a hypothesis. Maybe you would benefit from taking public speaking classes. Maybe you would benefit from being coached. Or maybe you would benefit from just practicing more and giving more presentations at work. The great thing is that you can just pick one of those hypotheses and start testing it; the other ones will still be there if you want to try them later.

• Experiment: You pick one of them, and that's the last part where you design a tiny experiment. You say, "I'm going to commit to this action for this specific duration." In this case, you could say, "I'm going to commit to giving a presentation every two weeks at work for one quarter."

• Analyze: At the end of the quarter, you look at the data. You see how you felt at an internal level, but you also look at the signals at an external level: Did my colleagues enjoy it? Did that bring me new projects? Was that something that was valued inside of the company?

Based on those external and internal signals, you can confidently decide whether you want to keep going, stop, or tweak your experiment for the next cycle.

Summary

In this insightful dialogue, philosopher Alain de Botton and the host explore the psychological traps of overthinking, the compensatory nature of intellectual work, and how differing cultural frameworks shape our mental well-being.

The Trap of Intellectualizing Emotions

The discussion opens with an examination of the human tendency to turn feelings into theories—a habit common among highly intellectual individuals. De Botton argues that intellectualizing is not inherently flawed; rather, the danger arises when our intellectual "maps" no longer match the "territory" of our actual emotional reality.

• The Map vs. Territory Metaphor: Human beings are natural theory-makers who create mental frameworks to navigate chaos. However, clinging to outdated or overly rigid theories prevents us from engaging with the full complexity of our emotional lives.

• The Power of Ignorance: True wisdom requires a willingness to abandon old maps and return to a state of basic ignorance. This concept is illustrated by:

• Socrates: Who was deemed the wisest because he recognized the limits of his own knowledge.

• Picasso: Who remarked that while he could paint like the master Raphael as a child, he spent his old age learning how to draw with the unburdened simplicity of a child.

Creation as Compensation

The speakers address the paradox of public intellectuals and self-help figures. They propose that almost everyone’s creative or philosophical body of work is a "thinly veiled autobiography."

• Those who write guides on goodness, wisdom, or emotional poise are often those who struggle most with chaos, anger, and internal fragmentation.

• Writing and thinking serve as compensatory activities. Recognizing this human vulnerability in public figures prevents us from holding them to impossible standards, acknowledging that their fragile grip on their own ideals is precisely what fuels their drive to study them.

Cultural Attitudes: British Melancholy vs. American Optimism

The conversation contrasts the psychological profiles of British and European societies with that of the United States:

• European Tragic Realism: Grounded in a historically tragic outlook, European culture traditionally views human beings as inherently flawed and subject to arbitrary fate. In Britain, this manifests as a melancholic, dark, yet comforting humor (exemplified by Monty Python and The Smiths). This mindset accommodates the natural gap between human aspiration and reality, fostering a comedic modesty.

• American Perfectibility: Founded on the belief that a perfect society ("a city upon a hill") can be built in the present, American culture embraces boundless optimism. While this drive has fueled monumental technological and social advancements (such as Silicon Valley), the psychological toll is immense. It subjects individuals to punishing, unrealistic ideals of personal success.

The Dark Side of Meritocracy

The dialogue culminates in a critique of modern meritocracy. While the ideal of a fair society where everyone gets what they deserve sounds noble, its psychological consequences can be devastating:

• The Burden of Failure: In a system believed to be perfectly fair, success is earned, but failure is also viewed as entirely deserved. This leads to the harsh American label of "loser"—someone who played a fair game and failed due to personal inadequacy.

• External Fate vs. Self-Blame: In cultures that believe fate is arbitrary or controlled by external forces (such as the ancient Greeks), failure is met with pity rather than judgment. Conversely, in highly meritocratic systems where individuals are deemed solely responsible for their destinies, the psychological pressure is intense, correlating with higher rates of suicide and severe self-blame when life does not go as planned.

Transcript

Host: I'm interested in the temptation to intellectualize emotions. You know, you were talking before about the sort of "why" beneath the "why" and getting below the neck, as it's known in embodiment. We have this very developed—who was that philosopher that talked about being a philosopher is like being a mouse with a huge, oversized ear on its back? You know, you have this one particular thing that you've grown to monstrous size.

Anybody that is smart can do the work, but often "doing the work" is just turning feelings into theories. I wonder, and I'm interested in this temptation: how do we overcome intellectualizing emotions as opposed to actually sitting and feeling them?

Alain de Botton: What's wrong with intellectualizing? Intellectualizing gets a bad name because, at some point, it ceases to have an accurate relationship to reality. In other words, your theory has left behind the facts. Your map is no longer mapping the territory accurately. That's what's wrong with it.

There's nothing wrong with having a map, but there is something very wrong with having a misguided map. I think when we say intellectualizing is bad, it's when it gives us a rather rigid description of the territory which no longer sees the actual, full complexity of the terrain it is purporting to represent.

Host: Mhm.

Alain de Botton: And so what do we need to do? We need to constantly check our maps against the territory. In other words, we need to think, "Okay, I've got this nice neat theory. Maybe I need to blow it up because it's liable to have grown a bit stale. I need to head back out into the world and assume I know nothing. I must blow up my theory in order to build a better one." So it's not about abandoning theories. Humans are naturally theory-makers.

Host: Mhm.

Alain de Botton: There's nothing wrong with that. There's something wrong with clinging to outdated theories.

Host: If you hold it too tightly, that's an issue. I've got this visual in my mind of the difference between a waymarker, which is planted to give you an idea of the terrain, and a tether to which you are attached. Like, "Oh, I can't move from this thing anymore." This made sense five years ago when I first left university, and that explained where I was at, and it gave the chaos in the world a sense of order. I understood where I was going and what was happening. If that no longer has accurate explanatory depth, I need to come up with a new theory, and that's scary. I have to start all over again. You tell me I have to start all over again.

Alain de Botton: I think we regularly have to start all over again. Think of that old adage: Socrates was asked why he was so wise, and he said that he was wise because he knew that he wasn't wise. In other words, a capacity to acknowledge one's ignorance is at the root of sophisticated thinking. You should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance.

Remember the story of Picasso, who went to an art school in his old age. He looked at some children scribbling and doing drawings, and he said, "When I was their age, I could paint like Raphael, and now I'm learning again how to paint like them." That's really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again.

I think that's a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say, "You know what? I don't know much at all." People often say to me—they must say this to you as well—"Oh, you must know so much about love, or death, or this or that. You spend all your time thinking." And I rush to tell them I literally don't know anything. This is not false modesty; it's a genuine sense that with every passing day, I know less. It's not even wisdom; it's just comedic, really. With every passing day, I know less.

Host: I love that. Yeah, the other thing to consider there is that almost everyone's body of work is a thinly veiled autobiography.

Alain de Botton: Yeah.

Host: You are looking to the person who has put the most time into this. Why do you think they put the most time into this? Because they see themselves as most deficient in precisely all of the different areas that they are focusing on.

Alain de Botton: 100%. Exactly. So someone who is providing a guide to goodness probably finds goodness really hard. Somebody who is really interested in wisdom is actually in deep touch with the chaos in themselves and in the world. You wouldn't do it otherwise. You're right, it's a compensatory activity, and so be it.

We should never look to our gurus to actually be perfect. If somebody is going to go, "Oh, I thought they'd be wise, and then I saw them cursing at the airport. What a fool they are," you want to say, "Of course they did that!" They are so invested in maintaining a sort of adult poise precisely because they have a fragile hold on it. They wouldn't bother otherwise, and that's okay. That's absolutely fine.

Host: I think I mentioned this to you last time, but I think it's one of the reasons why your work in particular, and Oliver Burkeman's work—who wrote Four Thousand Weeks—is a very sanguine look at human nature. It's got a distinctively British quality to it, which I love. It doesn't get too big for its boots. It's kind of got a "Carry On" comedy sort of signature to it.

Alain de Botton: I mean, look, bless the Americans. The problem with America is that it was started by people who thought you could build Jerusalem on this earth—that you literally could build a city on a hill here and now. Whereas European culture was a tragic culture, which essentially thought of human beings as inherently flawed, the playthings of the gods, and unable to master the show until maybe the next life, but definitely not this one. This immediately creates a comedic modesty around the gap between your aspirations and your reality.

Growing up in Britain—I mean, Britain doesn't do many things well, but one of the things it really does well is a kind of melancholy, dark humor. This is the home of The Smiths. This is the home of Monty Python. These people are latching onto the fact that life is absurd and dark, and that the most sophisticated response is a kind of rich, somber, hilarious laughter.

The reason why America has changed the planet so radically is that it's made up of people who think perfection is possible and that you don't have to wait until the next world. You do it right here and now with some tools, and you go to Silicon Valley, and off you go. And it's wonderful. It has created wonders of the world.

However, psychically, my goodness, the toll has been enormous. It's enormous because it forces everybody in that society to measure themselves against an ideal which is so punishing. The secret sorrows of the American heart is a volume without end. It's a very big volume because that is a society that puts its people under unbelievable psychic stress. Because of "blue-sky thinking," you believe you can do all of these things.

Host: I wonder whether that is one of the reasons why victimhood culture in its modern incarnation hasn't quite caught on in the UK in the same way as it's often pointed at in the US. Because if you're a child in America, you are told you can be whatever you want to be. The sky is not even the limit; you can go beyond that and go further. Literally, a South African living in America—Elon Musk—is the guy trying to go past the moon to go and do this thing.

It's a paradox of meritocracy, isn't it? We hear a lot about this idea of trying to build a society where everybody gets to where they merit to be. It's a wonderful, beautiful idea. But if you really think that you can create a society where everyone deserves to be exactly where they are, my goodness, you're going to have a problem explaining why you failed in that society. Because not only is success merited, but so is failure. This is why failure is so crushing if you really believe in meritocracy.

Alain de Botton: Yes, in certain European countries, with that tragic idea, no one thinks it's a meritocracy. Everyone thinks the whole system is random, that it's rigged. The ancient Greeks were obsessed with the idea of the arbitrary nature of fate because the gods are in control of human destiny, not humans. Humans can't control their destiny.

But in the modern American view, of course you control your destiny, and you are responsible. This is why the American word for someone who hasn't succeeded is a "loser." A loser is somebody who played a game which had fair rules and they messed up, and therefore they deserve no pity; they just deserve to be called a loser.

This is why the more meritocratic the system is, the more psychological pressure there is, and the more impetus there is to kill yourself if you don't succeed. Suicide rates skyrocket the more people believe that individual destiny reflects the absolute essence of who you are. Conversely, suicide rates fall when the explanatory factor for failure is thought to lie outside the individual.

Summary

This summary provides an overview of the life-altering insights shared by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, during her conversation with host Hala Taha on the Young and Profiting podcast. It details her personal background, the neurological mechanics of her stroke, the warning signs of a stroke, her groundbreaking "Four Characters of the Brain" framework, generational shifts in cognitive dominance, and practical strategies for achieving cognitive balance and whole-brain living.

Introduction and Biological Motivation

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's journey into neuroscience was deeply personal. Growing up with a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia, she observed profound differences in how they uniquely perceived the same reality. While she might interpret their mother’s shouting as terror for their safety, her brother perceived it as anger. This stark contrast in emotional processing sparked a lifelong quest to understand how the brain constructs our perception of reality, normal versus abnormal cognitive function, and the cellular basis of human consciousness.

Prior to her stroke, Dr. Taylor viewed consciousness from a strict neuroanatomical perspective. She believed that every human capacity is mapped directly to specific brain cells and that even a single-celled organism possesses a fundamental form of consciousness, defined by its semipermeable membrane separating "self" from "other." In her view, the human body is a highly organized, multicellular culmination of various nested levels of consciousness operating in dynamic neural constellations. Climbing the academic ladder at Harvard Medical School and working under Nobel laureate David Hubel, she integrated her scientific rigor with her artistic passion, specializing in the visualization of cells, neurotransmitters, and neural relationships.

The Stroke: Experiencing Brain Death from the Inside Out

On December 10, 1996, at the age of 37, Dr. Taylor experienced a massive hemorrhagic stroke caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation (AVM). An AVM is a rare malformation where high-pressure arteries connect directly to low-pressure veins without the buffering capacity of a capillary bed. These malformations typically rupture between the ages of 25 and 45. In Dr. Taylor's case, it had caused chronic, severe migraines since age 17—a symptom that permanently disappeared after surgical removal of the ruptured tissue.

Over the course of four hours, Dr. Taylor watched her own brain shut down:

• The Initial Pain: She woke up to a sharp, pounding pain behind her left eye and extreme light sensitivity.

• Dissolution of Boundaries: While exercising and taking a shower, she watched her motor coordination fail. The sound of running water became painfully amplified. Crucially, as the hemorrhage expanded into her left hemisphere, she lost the ability to define the boundaries of her physical body. Her arms and skin seemed to blend with the molecules of the shower wall, bringing about a state of profound sensory euphoria and boundaryless connection to the universe.

• Loss of Language and Panic: Her right arm became paralyzed, signaling a stroke. Attempting to make a phone call took 45 minutes of painstaking effort. By the time she connected with a colleague, her speech had degenerated into unintelligible, animal-like sounds (which she likened to a golden retriever's bark), though she believed she was speaking clearly.

• The Lack of Fear: Because the hemorrhage was drowning her left emotional brain (the seat of fear and anxiety), she felt no panic. Instead, she felt a profound, peaceful surrender, observing her cognitive collapse with scientific curiosity.

Her survival and recovery were miraculous. After a golf-ball-sized blood clot was surgically removed from her left hemisphere, she spent eight years fully rebuilding her brain. Guided by her mother, who treated her like an infant in an adult's body, she had to relearn colors, sounds, speech, vocabulary, and motor skills from scratch.

Stroke Warning Signs: The S.T.R.O.K.E. Acronym

To help the public quickly identify and respond to stroke symptoms, Dr. Taylor developed the acronym S.T.R.O.K.E.:

• S - Speech: Sudden difficulty speaking, understanding language, or producing coherent sounds.

• T - Tingling: Acute numbness or a tingling sensation, typically concentrated on one side of the body.

• R - Remembering: Sudden inability to recall basic information, such as a spouse's name, current location, or common facts.

• O - Off-balance: Sudden loss of coordination, difficulty walking, dropping limbs, or physical drooping on one side of the face or body.

• K - Killer Headache: A sudden, excruciating, throbbing, or pulsating headache, often localized to one side.

• E - Eyes: Sudden, dramatic changes or deficits in vision.

Prevention Strategies: Dr. Taylor emphasizes that stroke prevention requires maintaining healthy vascular pressure in the brain. The blood vessel walls in the brain are exceptionally thin and transparent. Chronic anger, stress, lack of sleep, and poor diet elevate internal vascular pressure, increasing the risk of rupture. Sleep is particularly critical, as it acts as a cellular flushing system where metabolic waste accumulated by active neurons is cleared.

The Four Brain Characters (Whole Brain Living)

Traditional neurology historically claimed that only the analytical left cerebral cortex is conscious, leaving the remaining parts of the brain classified as unconscious. Dr. Taylor's stroke dismantled this myth, revealing that the brain is divided into four distinct anatomical modules of cells—two emotional (limbic) and two thinking (cortical)—split between the left and right hemispheres. Each module houses a distinct personality or "Character" that influences our decisions, habits, and self-perception:

• Character 1: Left Thinking (The Analytical Brain):

• Attributes: Highly organized, logical, structured, and obsessed with details, language, planning, and linear time.

• Role: Focuses on identity, status, achievement, and maintaining control over the physical environment.

• Character 2: Left Emotional (The Protective/Reactive Brain):

• Attributes: Powered by memory, pain, past trauma, and fear.

• Role: Acts as a defensive scanner, projecting past negative experiences onto the present to protect us. It is the seat of the "imposter syndrome," anxiety, tribalism, and the exclusionary "us versus them" mentality (which underlies racism and social division).

• Character 3: Right Emotional (The Experiential/Playful Brain):

• Attributes: Playful, highly creative, sensory, physical, and deeply connected to the immediate present.

• Role: Seeks raw experiences, joy, laughter, and collective bonding without judgment of right or wrong.

• Character 4: Right Thinking (The Wise/Spiritual Brain):

• Attributes: Boundaryless, peaceful, compassionate, and deeply rooted in a sense of universal love and awe.

• Role: Acts as the internal observer, recognizing our connection to all of humanity and the universe, offering deep, calm, and unconditional reassurance ("I got you").

Generational Shifts in Cognitive Dominance

Dr. Taylor outlines how societal structures and technology have shaped the dominant brain hemispheres of different generations:

• The Greatest Generation & Baby Boomers: Historically dominated by the left hemisphere. Winning World War II and building post-war financial security required intense discipline, pragmatism, and left-brain organization. This fostered a zero-sum, transaction-focused economic model where financial profit and material security were valued above all else.

• Generation X: Technologically savvy and pragmatic, serving as a transitional group that built the digital tools we use today.

• Millennials & Gen Z: Increasingly right-brain dominant. Dr. Taylor traces this to developmental shifts, such as childhood exposure to interactive technology (e.g., Teddy Ruxpin) and visual learning systems (e.g., teaching arithmetic using pictures rather than rote memorization). Consequently, younger generations prioritize collective well-being, collaborative decision-making, ethical alignment, and human connection over pure corporate profit.

This generational friction is evident in modern workspaces. While Baby Boomers may struggle to understand a younger worker's willingness to quit a high-paying but unfulfilling job, Millennials and Gen Z find the traditional, profit-at-all-costs corporate grind alienating.

Actionable Strategies for Whole Brain Living

Dr. Taylor stresses that the goal of human evolution is not to abandon the left hemisphere for the right, but to practice "whole-brain living" by consciously integrating all four characters. She shares two key physiological rules to help individuals regain control of their minds:

• The 90-Second Rule: When an emotion is triggered, a chemical cascade is released by the brain, flushing through the body and runing its physiological course in less than 90 seconds. If an individual remains angry, anxious, or sad for longer than 90 seconds, they are making a conscious, often habitual choice to re-stimulate those neural loops. By simply pausing and watching the feeling dissipate, one can choose to exit the emotional reaction.

• Tapping into the Right Brain: To balance an overstimulated, stressed left brain, individuals must practice mindfulness. This includes physical exercise without competition, listening to music, breathing consciously, eating meals mindfully without digital distractions, and allowing oneself to play and create without an end goal.

Ultimately, Dr. Taylor suggests that our primary purpose as human beings is to love one another. By balancing analytical drive with deep empathy and systemic connection, humanity can move past its current state of geopolitical and cultural division toward mutual profit, peace, and holistic survival.

Transcript

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Brain cells are like people. We're social; they're social. A single cell can have 10,000 to 15,000 connections in a network with other neurons. Ten to fifteen thousand—that is a social network. Talk about influencers, boy, it's those brain cells.

Hala Taha: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, experienced the unthinkable. She witnessed her own brain shut down, moment by moment. Today's conversation will change how you understand your brain and how you use it.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Running a business is very different than being an entrepreneur, especially in this day and age. Entrepreneurs have to have creativity. In order for you to do everything that you do, you have to have brain cells that perform that function. We have four major modules of cells inside of our head: two emotional—the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere—and then two thinking—the right thinking and the left thinking. The value of the right hemisphere says, "I care about people." Creativity is in the right hemisphere. It is that left emotional brain that looks at someone and says, "You're different from me. I'm going to push you away." We are skewed to the values of the left hemisphere.

Hala Taha: When you were 37, you had a stroke. It took you about 45 minutes or longer to realize that you were having a stroke, and you were somebody who studied the brain. How can we know if we're having the symptoms of a stroke, and what do we do immediately when we feel those symptoms?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So, the warning signs. Here are the warning signs. I use S-T-R-O-K-E to help people remember. S stands for—

Hala Taha: Hey, YAPfam. Welcome back to another amazing episode. Today's conversation will change how you understand your brain and how you use it. Our guest is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist who experienced the unthinkable. At just 37 years old, she suffered a massive stroke and witnessed her own brain shut down, moment by moment.

That life-altering experience became the foundation for Whole Brain Living, a powerful framework that reveals the four distinct characters inside your brain that shape your thoughts, emotions, habits, and decisions. Once you learn to recognize them, you'll gain the ability to consciously choose clarity over chaos, intention over reaction, and calm over stress.

We're going to be covering this extensively in today's conversation. But first, if you're new here, hit that follow button so you never miss a dose of wisdom.

Dr. Jill, welcome to the Young and Profiting podcast.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I am so happy to be with you. Thank you.

Hala Taha: Likewise, I'm so excited. I love talking about the brain. I love understanding the brain more. As entrepreneurs, we're using our minds every day, and we need to make sure that we're optimizing our minds and our productivity. So, I am very excited for this conversation today.

Something that really made me curious when I was researching you, Dr. Jill, and was really eye-opening, is that you were actually studying the brain before you had this traumatic stroke. When I had heard about you in the past, I thought that you had a stroke and then you got interested in the brain. But it turns out you were actually studying the brain long before you had your accident, which I want to hear all about.

But first, talk to us about why you decided to study the brain. What were you curious about? What were the kind of questions that you were trying to solve when you were initially starting out as a scientist and researcher?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Thank you. Yes, I have a brother who is 18 months older than I am, and he would eventually be diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia. As a child, I just noticed that this guy and I were completely different in the way we interpreted our experiences.

For example, if we were out playing kickball, and the ball goes flying out into the yard, and my mom is on the stoop, and all of a sudden she jumps up and she's screaming at us. I interpreted that as terror—she was afraid her kids were going to get killed if we ran out into the street. But my brother interpreted her hollering as anger. That is a fundamental difference when we are not understanding and perceiving people's emotions in the same way.

So, I became really fascinated with what the differences were between me and my brother, and what was going on. It had to be at the level of the brain, because biologically, he is the closest thing to me that exists in the universe. I became fascinated with body language, social relations, vocal languaging, and what I am as a human being. I was just fascinated with what I am as a living being.

That caught my attention, and then as I got older, I really became fascinated with how our brain creates our perception of reality. What is normal, and what is not normal? I grew up to be a neuroanatomist. I study the brain at a cellular level, because fundamentally, I figured the differences between me and my brother were going to be in the way our brains wired themselves.

Hala Taha: Something I really want to dig deep on is the fact that you were studying what our reality is. What is perception? How do we perceive reality and consciousness itself? Talk to us about how you thought consciousness worked before you had your accident.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, that's a big question. I believed that every ability we have is because we have brain cells that perform that function. To me, the single-celled organism is life—that is the miracle. We just happen to be a bunch of cells stuck together for multicellular life, which is also fantastic. But I was fascinated with the single-celled organism.

How did the universe create a bunch of atoms and molecules that work together in order to become a blueprint for a living entity? That living entity is defined by having a boundary, a cellular membrane that is semipermeable. Things exist outside in the universe beyond that membrane, and then that membrane allows some things in, giving it a perception of its environment.

So, I was very cellular; I was very anatomical. My perception of consciousness was: I do believe that a single cell has a consciousness. It's, of course, not like ours, but I believe it still has an awareness of the difference between itself and that which is outside of itself.

Hala Taha: And you believed this before your accident—that each individual cell had its own consciousness? That's so interesting. Why did you believe that?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, because what is life? To me, the difference is in the universe's ability to put all the atoms and molecules in the right formation in order to come up with genetic material. That genetic material then becomes something, which is ultimately nothing other than atoms and molecules. I don't believe that we have the physical construct of a human body and then consciousness suddenly happens to us. I think that we are a culmination of consciousness.

We have different levels of consciousness, and different parts of our brain work together in constellations of skill sets that then end up looking like separate consciousnesses, which also end up looking like different personalities. I always had that construct, but I was focused on working in the lab. I was teaching and performing neuroanatomy in the gross anatomy cadaver lab. I loved my life, and I loved what I was doing. I had that same thinking pattern, really focused at a cellular level on the differences between my brain and my brother's brain.

Hala Taha: One last question before we get into your accident and what happened: who were you back then? Who was Jill back then? How did you self-identify and define success?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I was climbing the Harvard ladder. I had my PhD in neuroanatomy, and my first post-doc was at Harvard Medical School. I grew up in Indiana, and once I got my PhD, I went to Harvard for my post-doc. I was studying in the lab of David Hubel, a Nobel laureate. It was a very alpha personality—go, go, go, let's achieve.

From David Hubel's lab, I moved from the Department of Neurobiology to the Harvard Department of Psychiatry because I wanted to focus my basic science research on schizophrenia and what the differences were at a neuroanatomical level. I was climbing the Harvard ladder, doing what a girl had to do.

But I was also an artist in my heart, and I chose neuroscience to make a living. When I went to the labs, I said to all of my mentors, "I'm an artist in my heart, so give me projects that you care about that have an aesthetic component to the science." That meant the visualization of cells, neurotransmitters, and the relationships between them. It allowed me to make beautiful art and learn new things in the lab at the same time.

Hala Taha: So, you got to combine both passions, which is great.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah.

Hala Taha: When you were 37, you had a stroke. Take us back to the morning of the day that it happened. What were some of the initial things that you realized were happening? What did you think was happening in the moment, and how did things unfold?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: First of all, I'm a PhD. I am a scientist. Of course, I had learned neurology and studied stroke at a cellular level, as well as dementia and all kinds of neurological trauma. But I was a scientist, a lab rat; I was not an MD or a practicing clinical neurologist.

When I woke up on the morning of December 10, 1996, as soon as I sat up, I had a major pounding pain behind my left eye. It was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain. I was generally very healthy, knock on wood. But I had this pounding pain, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to exercise and get my blood flowing, and hopefully I will feel better."

I got up, but as soon as I stood up, I realized that the light coming in through the windows was really burning my eyes. It was uncomfortable. So, I closed the blinds. I got on my Cardio Glide—it was a full-body exercise machine back in the '90s. I was jamming away on this thing, and I looked down at my hands, and they literally looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought, "Wow, that is unusual."

The pounding kept going, and I just looked at myself. It was as though I was observing myself having this experience instead of actually being inside the body having the experience. The pounding in my head just wasn't getting any better, so I thought, "Okay, enough of exercise."

I decided to take a shower, because at this point, I was still planning on heading to work. I started walking across my living room, and every step was rigid. It was as though I was having to actively tell my legs to move: Move. Coordinate. Move.

As I was getting into the shower, lifting my leg, there was literally this conversation going on inside of my body: Okay, you muscles, contract. You muscles, relax. I lost my balance while in the shower. I leaned up against the wall and turned the water on. I pulled out the nozzle, and when the water hit the tub, the volume was so amplified that it literally knocked me backward. It was like raw energy just knocked me over.

I was leaning up against the wall, looking at my arm, and I realized I could no longer define the boundaries of where I began and where I ended. I felt like atoms and molecules blending with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

About this time, your audience is probably thinking, "Man, this sounds like some kind of a psychedelic trip—psilocybin, maybe." Having not had that experience, I can't speak to it directly. But if you've ever had a similar experience, it is the dissolving of the boundaries of where we begin and where we end as a biological creature. Because we are this massive conglomeration of cells and the energy of the life of those cells. A group of cells in that left hemisphere, right where the hemorrhage was happening, had gone completely offline. Because of that, I could no longer define the boundaries of where my body ended.

Eventually, I got out of the shower, went into my bedroom, and mechanically dressed myself. I just somehow got dressed. Then I asked myself, "Can I drive? Can I drive?" In that instant, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. That was the moment I realized, "Oh my gosh, paralysis. A warning sign of stroke. Oh my god, I'm having a stroke."

The very next thing my brain said was, "Wow, this is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" That alpha personality was saying, "Okay, we're having a stroke. We'll do this for a few weeks, learn what we can learn, and then we'll go back to work."

After that, it took about 45 minutes for me to actually figure out how to make a phone call and get help.

Hala Taha: Wow, what a powerful story. I really want to dive into what was happening neurologically, but I'm also very curious: could you have prevented this stroke to begin with? Do you feel like there's anything you could have done to prevent this, or that we can do to prevent the same thing happening to us?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, there are different kinds of stroke. There are two primary types of stroke. One is hemorrhagic, which is when blood vessels rupture and blood seeps out into the brain tissue. That was the kind of stroke I had. Specifically, I had what we call an arteriovenous malformation (AVM).

Essentially, you have an artery, which is a high-pressure system, coming in. Usually, it tapers down to a very small capillary space where red blood cells line up, and then at the other end, it connects to a low-pressure vein that absorbs fluid to take deoxygenated blood back to the heart. In my case, I had a congenital malformation where an artery was directly connected to a vein without the capillary network to neutralize the pressure. These blood vessels usually rupture between the ages of 25 and 45. I was 37 at the time.

So, no, I did not know it was there, and there was nothing I could do about it unless someone had given me an MRI and said, "Oh, Jill, we have a problem." We do that now, but back then in 1996, we weren't routinely giving people MRIs.

However, I had been diagnosed with migraine headaches at the age of 17—20 years before this thing ruptured. I have not had a single migraine since I had the surgery to remove the malformation. If there is someone in your audience who experiences chronic migraine headaches, and none of the current medications—which are actually excellent for migraines—help, I highly encourage them to go get a scan. Go get your brain looked at to see what's actually going on inside of your head. Knowing if you have an organic vascular problem is incredibly important.

Hala Taha: Yes, being preventative. Now, like you said, MRIs are widely available. Immediately when you said that, I thought of a person in my life who always gets migraines. I need to tell them to go get an MRI scan.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: If the medications don't work, then absolutely, you want to go and see what else might be going on inside. I have had people write to me and say, "I heard you give this advice on a podcast, and it saved my life." Who knows who we can positively influence out there?

Hala Taha: Absolutely. One more question: it took you about 45 minutes or longer to realize that you were having a stroke, and you were someone who literally studied the brain. How can we know if we are having the symptoms of a stroke, and what should we do immediately when we feel those symptoms?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: The most typical type of stroke happens when a blood clot is thrown somewhere in your body and travels up into the blood vessels of the brain. Because those brain arteries get smaller and smaller as they taper, the blood clot eventually blocks the flow of blood. That is called an ischemic stroke.

To help people remember the warning signs of a stroke, I use the acronym S-T-R-O-K-E:

• S stands for Speech: If you suddenly have any problems with language—either formulating words or understanding them. If you try to speak and what comes out is garbled or makes no sense, even if you can still hear the correct language in your head, that is a huge warning sign.

• T stands for Tingling or Numbness: Usually, this occurs on only one side of the body, though not all the time. Pay close attention to what is going on with your limbs and how they feel.

• R is for Remembering: All of a sudden, are you experiencing an acute problem with memory? For example, suddenly forgetting your spouse's name, where you are, or basic details. This is not like forgetting where you parked your car, which is common; it is a sudden, major cognitive lapse.

• O is for Off-balance: If you suddenly feel very off-balance. Often, one side of the body or one side of the face will droop. You might find yourself dragging a leg or experiencing sudden paralysis in an arm.

• K stands for Killer Headache: This is a throbbing, pulsating, intense headache—like the intense ice cream brain-freeze pain, but severe. It is a major warning sign, usually on one side of the head.

• E stands for Eyes: Sudden, major problems with your vision.

A stroke happens quickly—boom. What can you do to help prevent it? Pay attention to what you are eating, because food makes a massive difference.

Also, how much sleep are you getting? Sleep is the time period when the incoming stream of sensory information shuts down. This is when brain cells turn on their garbage collection system, and fluid flushes out all the cellular waste. Your brain is made of roughly 86 billion neurons that are constantly communicating, consuming energy, and creating waste while you are awake. When we go to sleep, the system is flushed.

How stressful is your life? The stress circuitry is a constant "go, go, go, do, do, do" loop. It tells us: "I reached a goal, I'll celebrate for a second, and now I want more." There is always this driving force of the left brain that wants more.

We can manage this stress. Our vulnerability to vascular injury is high because if you look at a human brain, you can actually see the blood inside the vessels because the blood vessel walls are incredibly thin and transparent. When we get angry, hold in rage, experience deep fear, or feel out of control, that high emotional state directly impacts the internal pressure system of the brain. That is simply not healthy for the biological organism.

Hala Taha: Such good tips. I feel like that is so helpful. I want to go back to your story. Suddenly, you found yourself with awareness but without any physical control. You were witnessing your own brain shutting down. What happened next?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: What was really interesting to me was experiencing how the two hemispheres of the brain process information in completely different ways.

The left hemisphere houses our language centers. Language is the ability to take a sound—like the word "dog"—and associate a specific meaning and comprehension to that sound. It allows us to read, write, perform mathematics, and speak multiple languages. The left hemisphere is a very, very busy place.

Because my hemorrhage was in my left hemisphere, those circuits began to go offline. When they did, I would drift into the consciousness of the present moment. The right hemisphere is a "right here, right now" processor. It is entirely focused on the present moment.

In the present moment, my name doesn't exist—that information is housed in the left hemisphere. The physical boundaries of where I begin and end are also in the left hemisphere. Right here, right now, there is only the richness of the immediate sensory experience. And in that state, it feels like pure euphoria. It is beautiful, because there is no judgment of what is right, wrong, good, or bad. It's just, "Wow, I am alive."

On the morning of the stroke, I waffled back and forth between the two hemispheres. I went from being in the present moment thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm alive!" to shifting back to the left brain thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm having a problem. I need to get help."

Eventually, I was able to make a phone call and get help. But by the time help arrived, I had lost all language. I could no longer speak. To myself, I thought I sounded like a golden retriever barking, and the person on the other end of the line also sounded like a golden retriever to me. Fortunately, he recognized my voice, realized something was terribly wrong, and did what he needed to do to get me help.

Hala Taha: So, you felt like you were barking?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes, in my mind, the communication made no sense.

Hala Taha: Were you afraid at this time? Did you feel fear?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No, I did not. I was very fortunate that the cells in the emotional portion of my left brain—where fear, anxiety, and trauma are processed—were swimming in a pool of blood as well. My fear center was offline. I was completely fine, and I didn't really care.

The right hemisphere doesn't care about those things; it thinks life is great and peaceful. I was motivated to save myself, but I had no linear information to attach myself to normal reality or organize my rescue.

As I waffled between the two hemispheres, I knew I was in grave danger. Right after I finally managed to make the phone call, I dragged myself down the stairs, unlocked the front door, and curled up into a little fetal ball on the floor. I heard a voice inside my own mind saying, "Hold on. Hold on." And I remember thinking, "What am I holding on to? What does that even mean?"

It meant: Don't leave the body. Over the course of four hours, I had become so profoundly disabled that I was afraid if I went unconscious, I would never be able to make this body work again. In the consciousness of the right hemisphere, I felt energetically as large as the universe, because we are energy, and there are no boundaries in energy. When you are connected to all that is, there are no small details or fear of death.

Hala Taha: You just knew that if you left your body, you wouldn't be coming back.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I felt like I would be gone.

Hala Taha: What happened next in terms of your recovery? How did you get better, what did you learn, and how did you realize there are "four characters" in the brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: As I was passing out, I was in an ambulance arriving at the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room. I felt my spirit surrender; at that point, I had no say. I was gone.

Within moments, they took my gurney into the emergency room under bright lights. People were poking and prodding me, setting up IVs, and handing me a consent form to sign. I remember thinking, "What is wrong with you people?" They had to take my hand and help me make a scribble on the page.

They gave me anti-inflammatories and steroids, and they already had a CAT scan from the first hospital showing the hemorrhage. Because I worked at Harvard, they recognized me as a colleague, so I received incredible care. They stopped the bleeding, and two and a half weeks later, they performed major brain surgery. They cut my head open and removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball.

They sewed me up, sent me home, and told my family, "We have no idea how much of her function she will ever get back. Her job now is to try to recover."

I have a mother who is an absolute angel. She dropped everything in her life to come take care of me. She surrounded me with an environment of love, watching to see what I could learn and what was blocking my progress. She recognized that I was essentially an infant in a woman's body.

At first, I couldn't even see color. She had to teach me what colors were. She had to teach me how to make sounds to produce language, rebuild my vocabulary, and teach me how to walk. She taught me everything. She raised me twice.

Hala Taha: Wow. What did this experience teach you about consciousness? A lot of us don't think about consciousness at all—it's just something that is. Explain to us, simply, what you believe consciousness actually is.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Let's start with a single cell. That single cell contains the entire DNA blueprint required to multiply and differentiate into all the different kinds of cells that make up the body.

Initially, you have three layers of cells: the ectoderm, which becomes the nervous system (brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves) and the skin; the mesoderm, which becomes the muscles; and the endoderm, which becomes the connective tissues and internal organs. All of this is made of highly differentiated groups of cells.

Eventually, we end up with this magnificent human brain. The brain is divided into two hemispheres. The primary evolutionary difference between a reptile and a mammal is the addition of our emotional limbic system. Reptiles do not have complex emotions; mammals do. And the primary difference between typical mammals and humans is the massive explosion of our thinking cerebral cortex.

We humans have four major modules of cells inside our heads: two emotional modules (divided between the right and left hemispheres of the limbic system) and two thinking modules (divided between the right and left cerebral cortex). Most of us have heard the pop-psychology myth that "the right hemisphere is emotional and the left hemisphere is analytical." Anatomically, that is simply not true. We have both emotional and thinking modules in both hemispheres.

The primary difference for me when I lost my left hemisphere was that I lost linear time. The right hemisphere is entirely a "right here, right now" machine. The emotional component of the right hemisphere processes the raw, physical experience of the present moment—what it feels like to be alive, to sit, to walk, to feel the temperature of the air, or to feel the water against your skin. The right thinking module is also entirely rooted in the present. If you are purely in the right hemisphere, only what is directly in front of you exists; the past and the future do not exist, and neither does your name or language. It is a state of deep gratitude, love, and connection to all that is, beyond the physical limitations of the self.

By contrast, the left hemisphere steps completely out of the present moment. If I ask you, "Hala, what did you have for dinner last night?"

Hala Taha: I had Asian food.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly. Where did you go in your mind to remember that? You don't have that Asian food right in front of you. You had to step out of the present moment and leave me here alone to access a different consciousness that runs in your background.

The beauty of the left emotional brain is that it acts as a catalog of everything you have ever experienced. It is constantly running to help you navigate and survive. If the ground suddenly started to shake right now, your brain would say, "Earthquake! I need to get out of this building." That emotional reactivity is designed to protect you in the present moment based on threat data from your past.

So, we are running four distinct consciousnesses:

• Right Emotional: The raw, physical, sensory experience of the present moment.

• Right Thinking: The peaceful, wise, boundaryless observer connected to the universe.

• Left Emotional: The protective scanner that uses past memories and fears to keep us safe.

• Left Thinking: The analytical, logical, detail-oriented coordinator that plans, organizes, and speaks.

When we understand all four of these characters, we gain the power to choose who and how we want to be in any given moment. That is true personal power.

Hala Taha: This is fascinating. I've only ever heard of the classic "left brain versus right brain" concept. Let's bust some common pop-psychology myths about the brain. What do we need to know?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: The biggest myth is that we only use 10% of our brain. No, if a brain cell is alive, you are using it.

Consider this: for an entrepreneur to do everything they do, they have to use diverse groups of brain cells. Some people say, "Oh, I'm not creative at all." But creativity is a function of the right hemisphere because it operates outside the box of what is "right, wrong, good, or bad"—which is the domain of the left brain.

Brain cells are highly social. A single neuron can have 10,000 to 15,000 connections forming a massive social network. The same is true for humans; we are social creatures. If we don't socialize, we become rigid, set in our ways, and emotionally decline. The same thing happens to neurons.

Another major myth is that the right brain is purely emotional and the left is purely analytical. As I mentioned, we have emotional and thinking processing centers in both hemispheres.

Hala Taha: Let's talk about how the left and right sides of the brain uniquely perceive reality.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: According to traditional medicine, only one-quarter of our brain is considered "conscious," and that is the left thinking tissue. Look at the state of the world—it's a bit of a mess because we almost exclusively value that one portion of our brain.

Imagine the world we could live in if we stopped treating the other three-quarters of our brain as unconscious and out of our control. Whole-brain living is about recognizing which parts of your brain you are using, deciding if you are balanced, and choosing when to activate different circuits.

If your left analytical circuitry is running all the time, that is your stress circuitry. It can interfere with your sleep, your health, and your relationships. We are not single-celled organisms, reptiles, or simple mammals. We are human beings, and we have these four wonderful groups of cells designed to serve us. To be a whole, successful human, we need to utilize the skill sets of all four characters.

Hala Taha: Just to recap the four characters for our listeners so we are all on the same page:

• Left Thinking: Identity, planning, control, organization, and achievement.

• Left Emotional: Pain, fear, trauma, and memory.

• Right Emotional: Play, creativity, and connection.

• Right Thinking: Witness, wisdom, peace, and universal love.

Let's talk about how these four characters specifically influence an entrepreneur.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Running an established business is very different from being a creative entrepreneur, though there is a lot of overlap today.

If you operate solely from the left thinking brain, you focus strictly on the physical brand, the product, the logistics, and the finances—you hire "bean counters" to watch the money. But if you want to grow, you also have to hire a creative team. The creative team might terrify the left brain because they don't look at strict historical data. Instead, they operate on intuition, saying, "If a customer shops for this, they will reach for this package design over that one." The left brain panics because that requires changing production based on a feeling. All of life is this dynamic relationship between the right and left hemispheres.

Entrepreneurs must have right-brain creativity. You might be relaxed, letting your mind wander, and suddenly—boom—you get a brilliant idea. But if you don't act on that idea, it just goes back into the collective ether. To bring it to life, you have to turn on your left brain. You have to organize it, get funding, plan steps A through Z, and figure out how to sell it.

Along the way, you have to manage your left emotional brain, which might trigger imposter syndrome: "Who am I to start a company? I don't know what I'm doing. How do I know who to trust?" Firing someone or managing team conflict can be terrifying for that emotional center.

This is where you need your right thinking brain—your vision and wisdom. It steps in and reminds you: "You can do this. You have good intentions, excellent logical skills, and emotional strength. You are not alone."

When the left emotional fear says, "Who am I to do this?", the wise, loving right thinking character can step in and say, "I've got you." That isn't arrogance or narcissism; it is healthy self-awareness. Fear is meant to be temporary information, not a permanent lifestyle. It is a warning to look at the bigger picture, find your balance, and keep moving forward.

Hala Taha: Would you say that modern society is heavily left-brain dominant? What part of the brain do we need to understand and tap into to help solve our current global crises? It feels like the world is constantly facing conflict, war, and deep division. Why are we so skewed to the left brain, and how can we change that?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: You are absolutely right. We are heavily skewed to the values of the left hemisphere, and this has been dominant for a very long time.

After World War II, the "Greatest Generation" focused on prosperity and stability. They valued family (right brain), but also focused heavily on building roots, the American Dream, owning a home, saving money, and buying nice cars (left brain). Because the U.S. played a decisive role in ending the war with the atomic bomb, it positioned itself as a dominant global power. The system naturally became highly disciplined, organized, pragmatic, and left-brain dominant.

The Baby Boomers inherited this left-brain focus from their parents, who wanted them to have everything. Then, the Boomers had Millennials and Gen Z.

Technologically, a major shift occurred. Think about the creation of early interactive toys, like Teddy Ruxpin in the '80s. It was one of the first times we put a talking, simulated creature into a child's crib to soothe them. Gen X came along as technologically savvy creators, building the digital world.

When we taught the older generations math, we made them memorize timetables: two times two is four, six times six is thirty-six. That is pure, rote left-brain training. But for Millennials and Gen Z, we introduced visual concepts: "Two chickens plus two goats equals four animals." We gave them a visual, which actively trained their right brains.

As a result, younger generations are much more right-brain oriented. They value collective collaboration, group decision-making, and alignment with their personal values over pure corporate loyalty. A Boomer might stay at a job they hate for 40 years just for a paycheck, while a Millennial or Gen Zer will leave a toxic or unfulfilling job immediately because they prioritize their mental and emotional well-being.

Because of this shift, younger generations are more naturally collaborative and group-focused. However, they are still trying to fit themselves into an older corporate structure that prioritizes pure left-brain, zero-sum financial profit.

Hala Taha: That explains so much about the shifting political and cultural dynamics we see today.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Let's look at how this plays out politically.

The value structure of the right hemisphere cares deeply about people, social programs, food security, mental health support, and rehabilitation. It is inclusive.

The left brain focus, particularly the left emotional center, is tribal. It says, "There is a 'me' and a 'you.' If you don't look like me, sound like me, or belong to my tribe, you are a threat." This tribalism is fueled by politics, sports, and nationalism.

When the left emotional brain looks at someone of a different race or culture, it says, "You are different, so I am going to push you away." And when we push others away through racism or bias, our left brain naturally attempts to elevate itself as superior to justify the exclusion.

By contrast, when the right hemisphere encounters someone different, it says, "Oh, you are different! You have different skin, speak a different language, and eat different food. I am curious about you; I want to know you better."

Racism and division really boil down to which neural circuits we are choosing to run.

Hala Taha: Do we have conscious control over which parts of our brain we use? Is our brain dominance something we are born with, or is it programmed in childhood? Can we consciously change it as adults?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because society and traditional medicine have taught us that only our left thinking brain is conscious, we grow up assuming the other three-quarters of our brain is an untouchable "unconscious" black box.

But during my stroke, my left thinking brain, my left emotional brain, and my right emotional brain were completely wiped out. All I had left was my right thinking tissue. I had to live entirely in that consciousness.

As I recovered and slowly regained my right emotional tissue, I realized that was a completely different state of awareness. To function in society again, I had to deliberately rebuild my language and analytical circuits in my left hemisphere. I literally used my intact right hemisphere to rebuild the neural pathways in my left hemisphere.

Because of that experience, I learned how to consciously choose which part of my brain to activate. In an instant, I can choose to be highly analytical, playful and creative, or quiet my mind to connect with the present moment.

My TED Talk about this experience went viral in 2008, and I was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people because people recognized the profound implications of this concept. My book, My Stroke of Insight, spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

I realized that while people walked away with a reverence for my story, my actual goal was for them to develop a deep reverence for their own minds. There is nothing wrong with capitalism or money, but that represents only one-quarter of who we are. It shouldn't dictate our entire existence. Our greatest power as human beings lies in our present-moment relationships with ourselves and one another.

Hala Taha: We have about ten minutes left, so let's focus on how we can practically use the right side of our brain. How do we catch ourselves when we are stuck in our left brain, and how do we build the habits to tap into our right brain? Hala, what do you personally do for fun?

Hala Taha: I like to work out, go out to dinner, go to the movies, and spend time with my boyfriend.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Working out gets you into your body, which is excellent for activating the right hemisphere's experiential processing.

But if you are doing yoga, holding a pose, and simultaneously planning a business call or analyzing a problem, that does not count. You have to bring your mind completely into the present moment.

If you are doing something physical, be completely physical. Listen to the music, feel the movement of your muscles, and get your entire body awake. If your physical activity is always highly competitive, you are still operating out of your left brain.

Enjoy the simple fact that you have a physical body that can move. Play, laugh, have joy, and be creative without needing a specific business purpose.

Your left analytical brain might hear this and think, "What a total waste of time!" But you need to realize that your creative genius lives in that right-brain tissue. The left brain is the coordinator—it wants to do, plan, build, and check things off a list. But your raw genius lives in the present moment, where you can look at the world with fresh eyes and see new possibilities.

When you eat, actually taste your food. Don't eat while watching a movie, scrolling on your phone, or standing up. Take a pause from the constant "go, go, go."

If the pause feels uncomfortable to you, start small—just try it for five seconds. Focus entirely on your breath. This is why breathwork and yoga are so powerful; breathing only happens in the present moment.

Allow yourself to feel a sense of spiritual awe that you exist at all. Think about the absolute miracle of your physical body—your eyes, your voice, your hands, even your internal organs. Be grateful that you are here in this world.

It is the same feeling of awe you get standing on a mountaintop looking out over a vast horizon, or standing on a beach watching the ocean. It reminds you: "I am alive, and I have this brief window of time to exist in this form. How do I want to connect? How can I bring gratitude into my daily life?"

When you operate from that space of appreciation, you can consciously choose how much time and energy you want to spend in your busy left hemisphere. This is not about being solely right-brained or left-brained; it is about being a whole, integrated human being.

Hala Taha: After everything you have lived through, what is the most important thing you want people to understand about who they really are?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I want people to understand that every single ability we have is made possible by living brain cells, and this brain is an incredibly precious, vulnerable organ. Please take care of it.

We live in a society where people regularly use drugs and alcohol that disrupt their brain function. I lost my mind and so much of my brain tissue, and I had to work incredibly hard for eight years to rebuild it. Now, I might drink a beer twice a year, and that is plenty for me. I want to protect what is going on inside my head.

If people truly value the unique skill sets of all four characters, they will see that they can live their lives with real intention and choose who they want to be in any given moment. To me, that is true freedom.

Hala Taha: I totally agree. This was an absolutely incredible episode. Personally, I learned so much about the distinct differences between the left and right hemispheres. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

I always end my show with two final questions. First, what is one actionable thing our listeners can do today to become more profiting tomorrow? Given your expertise, it can be directly related to the brain.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Since your entrepreneurial audience spends most of their time engaged in the intense, analytical work of the left brain, my actionable tip is to regularly pause throughout the day and ask yourself: "Which of the four characters am I operating from right now? Is this where I want to be, or do I want to make a different choice?"

This is especially helpful when you become upset. When an emotion is triggered, the chemical cascade released by your brain takes less than 90 seconds to completely flush through your body. If you remain angry, sad, or jealous for longer than 90 seconds, you are making a biological choice to keep re-stimulating that loop.

Ask yourself: "Do I really want to stay in this negative loop, or am I ready to let it go?"

Hala Taha: I love that. It is all about stepping outside of your immediate reaction. What is your secret to profiting in life? This can go far beyond finances and business.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I truly believe that our number one job as human beings is to love one another. If we approach life with the mindset that our energy should benefit all of us collectively, then we all profit.

Hala Taha: Dr. Jill, thank you so much for your time. Where can our audience go to learn more about you and your work?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: My website is DrJillTaylor.com. Thank you so much, Hala. I was really looking forward to this.

Hala Taha: Likewise! What an incredible conversation with Dr. Jill. I'm still processing everything we learned today about the brain and consciousness.

We covered so much ground. I study productivity and performance constantly, but Dr. Jill showed me that we've been missing three-quarters of the picture. We've been conditioned to think only our left brain is active, leaving us running on a single cylinder when we have four powerful characters inside our heads.

Your creative genius is not hiding in your endless to-do list. It lives in your right hemisphere—in play, presence, and purposeless creativity. When you are grinding through your day, checking off tasks and analyzing metrics, you are stuck in that left-brain loop.

When you pause, get into your physical body, and actually taste your food instead of scrolling through emails, that is when your mental breakthroughs happen. When the left emotional fear of imposter syndrome kicks in, tap into your right thinking wisdom that says, "I've got you. You can do this." That is whole-brain living.

To my fellow entrepreneurs: your drive and ambition are beautiful, but they are only one-quarter of who you are. The real magic happens when you balance that hustle with presence, play, and genuine human connection. Get out of your head and into your body.

Also, please remember the warning signs of a stroke: speech problems, tingling, memory issues, balance trouble, severe headaches, and vision changes. If you suffer from chronic migraines that don't respond to medication, please go get an MRI scan. Your brain is precious—protect it.

If this conversation opened your eyes to a new way of thinking about consciousness and success, please share it with someone who needs to hear this message. And if you learned something valuable today, please drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Castbox.

You can also watch the video version of this episode on YouTube by searching "Young and Profiting." Connect with me on Instagram @yapwithhala or on LinkedIn.

A big shout-out to my incredible YAP production team. Thank you for all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off. Go out there and start profiting!

The crucial question of what leads to a happy and healthy life is contrasting common beliefs with long-term scientific evidence. While many people, particularly the young, believe that wealth and career success are the primary drivers of happiness, extensive research suggests a different, more profound answer.

The Challenge of Studying Happiness

The video begins by highlighting the difficulty in accurately studying happiness. Standard methods, such as asking people what will make them happy, are often unreliable because individuals are poor predictors of their future emotional states. For example, studies on lottery winners show that after an initial spike in joy, their happiness levels often return to baseline, with some even becoming more miserable due to social isolation. Another significant challenge is the unreliability of memory. Retrospective studies, which ask older people to recall what made them happy, are flawed because memory is reconstructive, capturing only fragments of past experiences rather than a complete and accurate record.

To overcome these limitations, the ideal methodology is a longitudinal study that follows individuals throughout their entire lives. The video centers on one such project: The Harvard Study of Adult Development.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development

Initiated in 1938 and now in its 85th year, the Harvard Study is the longest-running in-depth study of human development ever conducted. It originally began as two separate, unaware projects: one tracking 268 Harvard sophomores and another following 456 boys from Boston's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The two studies eventually merged, creating a diverse cohort that included individuals who became factory workers, lawyers, doctors, and even a U.S. President.

Over the decades, researchers have collected a vast amount of data through regular questionnaires, interviews, and physical examinations. The study expanded to include the participants' spouses and over 2,000 children. As technology advanced, data collection evolved to include DNA analysis, brain scans, stress tests measuring cortisol levels, and other modern biological markers, all in service of understanding human wellbeing.

The Two Major Findings for a Happy Life

After 85 years of research, two primary conclusions have emerged.

1. The Importance of Physical Health: The first key takeaway is unsurprising: taking care of one’s physical health is fundamental to longevity and wellbeing. This involves a balanced diet, regular exercise, avoiding substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, smoking), and seeking preventive healthcare. The video cites supporting evidence, such as a Taiwanese study of over 400,000 people which found that just 15 minutes of daily exercise reduced the risk of death by 14% and added three years to life expectancy. Exercise also significantly protects cognitive health, with meta-analyses showing it reduces the risk of cognitive decline by 35% and dementia by 14%.

2. The Surprising Power of Relationships: The most significant and unexpected finding from the Harvard Study is that good relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term happiness, health, and longevity. This conclusion is supported by numerous other studies, which reveal several key lessons:

• Relationships are critical for physical health. A meta-analysis of 148 studies found that individuals with strong social connections had a 50% greater likelihood of survival. The negative impact of loneliness is profound; research by Julianne Holt-Lunstad equates its health risk to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese. Poor social connections are also linked to a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke.

• It's the quality, not quantity, of relationships that matters. The study distinguishes between being alone and feeling lonely—the subjective experience of being less connected than one desires. Both introverts and extroverts need connection, but the number of connections may differ. A bad marriage can be more detrimental to health than a divorce. Crucially, the Harvard Study found that relationship satisfaction at age 50 was a better predictor of being healthy at age 80 than cholesterol levels.

• Good relationships protect the brain. Individuals in secure, supportive relationships in their 80s were found to have sharper memories for longer. Conversely, loneliness accelerates cognitive decline and increases the risk of dementia.

The primary mechanism behind these benefits is stress regulation. Strong relationships act as a buffer against life's daily stressors. When a person with supportive connections experiences a stressful event, they can share their feelings and calm their body's "fight-or-flight" response. Those who are isolated are more likely to remain in a state of chronic stress, leading to higher levels of inflammation and cortisol, which gradually wear down multiple body systems over time.

Revisiting Wealth and Achievement

The study provides a nuanced answer to the role of money and achievement. While "badges of achievement" do not guarantee happiness, engaging in meaningful work does contribute to it. When asked in their 80s, participants' biggest regret was spending too much time at work and not enough with loved ones.

Regarding money, recent research has reconciled conflicting findings. A 2010 study by Kahneman and Deaton suggested emotional wellbeing plateaus around a $75,000 annual income. However, a later study by Killingsworth found no such plateau. A collaborative re-analysis of the data revealed that for incomes below roughly $100,000, more money is associated with more happiness for everyone. Above that threshold, additional income does not increase happiness for the least happy people, but it continues to benefit those who are already moderately to very happy.

Conclusion

The overarching message is that while physical health and financial security are important, the true foundation of a happy and long life lies in cultivating warm, high-quality relationships. The video concludes with a call to action: to treat social connections like physical fitness—a practice that requires consistent, deliberate effort through small, regular actions. It’s never too late to lean into relationships and improve one's wellbeing.

This Microsoft Research paper, "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking," presents a comprehensive analysis based on a large-scale survey investigating how Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) technologies are influencing human critical thinking abilities across various domains. The study acknowledges the dual-edged nature of Gen AI, identifying both significant opportunities for augmentation and considerable risks of degradation.

The research begins by framing critical thinking as a multifaceted cognitive process involving analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation. It highlights the unprecedented capabilities of Gen AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), to process vast amounts of information, generate diverse content, and perform complex reasoning tasks. The primary objective of the survey was to gather empirical insights from a diverse demographic including students, educators, professionals, and AI researchers on their perceived experiences and the observed effects of Gen AI on their own critical thinking or that of others.

The survey methodology involved a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative Likert-scale questions to gauge agreement on various impact statements and qualitative open-ended responses to capture nuanced experiences and elaborations. Participants were asked about their frequency of Gen AI use, the specific tools they employed, and their perceptions regarding its influence on aspects like information analysis, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity.

The findings reveal a complex landscape. On the positive side, a substantial portion of respondents reported that Gen AI acts as a powerful cognitive augmentor. It was frequently cited as a valuable tool for brainstorming, generating initial ideas, and exploring diverse perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked. Users found it adept at synthesizing information rapidly from vast datasets, thereby reducing the initial cognitive load associated with information gathering and allowing them to focus more on higher-order analysis and evaluation. For many, Gen AI facilitated the automation of routine or repetitive analytical tasks, freeing up mental resources for more complex, creative, and strategic thinking. Educators noted its potential in personalizing learning experiences and offering immediate feedback, which could, if properly utilized, foster deeper engagement with critical concepts.

Conversely, the survey also unearthed significant concerns regarding the potential erosion of critical thinking skills. A prominent finding was the risk of over-reliance on Gen AI outputs, where users might become less inclined to engage in independent thought, rigorous fact-checking, or deep analytical processing. This reliance could lead to a 'deskilling' effect, where fundamental cognitive abilities like information synthesis, logical deduction, and error detection atrophy due to externalization to AI systems. Participants expressed worries about the phenomenon of 'algorithmic bias' and 'hallucinations,' where Gen AI might generate plausible but incorrect or biased information, making it harder for users to discern truth from falsehood without sufficient domain expertise or critical vigilance. There was also concern that the ease of generating content might reduce the effort invested in original thought and creative problem-solving, leading to a homogenization of ideas or a diminished capacity for truly novel contributions. The 'black box' nature of some AI models, where the reasoning process is opaque, further complicates the development of user trust and the ability to critically evaluate AI-generated solutions.

Nuance in the findings highlighted that the impact of Gen AI is not uniform and largely depends on the user's existing critical thinking proficiency, AI literacy, and the context of use. Highly skilled critical thinkers often leveraged Gen AI as an advanced tool to enhance their existing capabilities, viewing it as a co-pilot rather than a replacement for their intellect. In contrast, those with developing critical thinking skills were more susceptible to the negative effects, such as accepting AI outputs uncritically. The importance of 'prompt engineering' skills – the ability to effectively communicate with and guide AI models – emerged as a critical factor in maximizing positive outcomes and mitigating risks.

The paper concludes with significant implications for education, professional development, and policy. It advocates for the urgent integration of 'critical AI literacy' into curricula across all levels, emphasizing the need to teach individuals not just how to use Gen AI, but how to critically evaluate its outputs, understand its limitations, and ethically interact with it. The study underscores the necessity for developing metacognitive strategies that encourage users to reflect on their own thinking processes in conjunction with AI. Ultimately, the research suggests that the future of critical thinking in the age of Gen AI will hinge on fostering a symbiotic relationship where humans leverage AI's strengths while actively nurturing and exercising their unique cognitive capabilities, ensuring that technology serves as an amplifier of human intellect rather than a substitute for it.

This document provides a curated list of ten essential psychology books compiled by Ivaylo Durmonski. The author's primary goal is to guide readers toward understanding the human psyche for self-improvement and fostering better relationships, rather than for manipulation. He posits that studying psychology allows individuals to manage stress, understand their emotions, and reinforce positive behaviors in themselves and others, ultimately contributing to a better world. The list is intentionally concise to be accessible and actionable for both newcomers and existing enthusiasts in the field.

The 10 Must-Read Psychology Books

The article presents the following ten books, each chosen for its significant contribution to understanding human behavior, thought, and emotion.

1. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

This foundational text explores the concept of emotional intelligence (EQ), defining it as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions and influence the emotions of others. Goleman argues that EQ is a critical skill for personal and professional success, teaching readers how to remain calm under pressure, resist temptation, and navigate complex social situations with empathy and reason. The book is recommended for everyone, as mastering emotions is a universally beneficial life skill.

2. Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

A cornerstone in the study of persuasion, Cialdini’s book outlines six universal principles of influence: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. While widely adopted by marketers to understand consumer behavior, the book’s insights are valuable for anyone who interacts with others, offering subtle methods to build rapport and ethically persuade.

3. The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson

This comprehensive work delves into the field of social psychology, examining how individuals are influenced by their social environments. Aronson covers a wide range of topics, including conformity, obedience, prejudice, aggression, attraction, and politics. The book provides a clear and often humorous overview of human behavior in a social context, making it essential for anyone seeking to become a more informed and effective member of society.

4. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

A seminal work in psychoanalysis, this book introduces Freud’s theory that dreams are a gateway to the unconscious mind. He argues that our deepest, often suppressed, longings and desires are revealed in our dreams, albeit in an encrypted, symbolic form. The book aims to teach readers how to decode these symbols to better understand their true selves and unrealized ambitions.

5. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Neurologist Oliver Sacks presents a collection of fascinating case studies of patients with various neurological disorders. Through these real-life stories, including the titular case of a man with visual agnosia, Sacks explores the intricate connection between the brain and identity. The book deconstructs what it means to be human and how individuals struggle to maintain their sense of self when faced with profound neurological challenges.

6. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

In this extensive and highly praised book, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky provides a genre-defining examination of why humans act the way they do. He synthesizes research from neuroscience, genetics, and primatology to explain behavior on multiple levels—from the neurobiological events that occur seconds before an action to the evolutionary pressures that shaped our ancestors millions of years ago. It is a detailed, academic work for those deeply interested in the biological roots of behavior.

7. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains the two systems that drive human thought: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional; and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and logical. Kahneman reveals the cognitive biases associated with System 1 thinking and demonstrates how relying on it can lead to poor decisions. The book is essential for anyone looking to improve their rationality and decision-making processes by understanding the mechanics of their own mind.

8. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a leading expert on traumatic stress, offers an authoritative guide to understanding and healing from trauma. The book explains how trauma reshapes both the body and brain, affecting a person’s capacity for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. Drawing on decades of clinical experience, van der Kolk explores innovative treatments that help survivors reclaim their lives. It is a vital resource for individuals who have experienced trauma and for those who seek to help them.

9. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely challenges the assumption that humans are fundamentally rational actors. Through a series of experiments, he demonstrates that our irrationality is not random but systematic and predictable. The book explores the hidden forces (such as emotions, social norms, and expectations) that shape our decisions, helping readers understand why they repeatedly make the same mistakes and how they can learn to make better choices in their personal and professional lives.

10. The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan

In this work on developmental psychology, Robert Kegan presents a theory of how an individual's sense of self, motivations, and understanding of the world evolve throughout their lifespan. He outlines distinct stages of development, showing how our relationship with ourselves and others changes as we age. The book is particularly recommended for parents wishing to understand their children's development but offers transformational insights for anyone interested in the lifelong process of personal growth.