The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes


David Robson - 2019
    This is the "intelligence trap," the subject of David Robson’s fascinating and provocative book.The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including "strategic ignorance," "meta-forgetfulness," and "functional stupidity." Robson reveals the surprising ways that even the brightest minds and most talented organizations can go wrong—from some of Thomas Edison’s worst ideas to failures at NASA, Nokia, and the FBI. And he offers practical advice to avoid mistakes based on the timeless lessons of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Daniel Kahneman.

Prescription for Life: Three Simple Strategies to Live Younger Longer


Richard Furman - 2014
    Richard Furman is a vascular surgeon with decades of experience. But his personal journey into living younger longer began with a tight pair of pants. Rather than go up a size, he decided to get back to his ideal weight. He changed how he ate. He began to exercise regularly. He started intensive research into what it takes to prevent the kind of conditions his patients had. What he found changed his life . . . and will change yours.Do you want to be healthy and active all of your life?Do you want to enjoy not just long life but quality life?Do you want to be there—wholly there—for your family and friends?Aging is inevitable, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, stroke, erectile dysfunction, and other age- and obesity-related problems are not! Simple, sustainable changes you make today can mean the difference between enjoying time with friends and family, and wasting it in doctors’ offices and hospitals.

How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making


Ryan Hamilton - 2016
    Over millennia, philosophers, theologians, and mathematicians have all weighed in on the topic, and in recent centuries, economists, psychologists, and sociologists have joined the investigation. Now, you can learn what science has revealed about how we make choices. In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. Incorporating the outcomes of his own published experiments and those of his esteemed peers, Dr. Hamilton presents information that allows you to better understand the choices you face every day, the tools you can use to make the best decisions for your personal goals, and how to most effectively influence the decisions of others. LIFETIME MANUFACTURER WARRANTY. Your satisfaction is important to us, and we at The Great Courses offer a lifetime replacement warranty to purchasers of our products from The Great Courses on Amazon - if a DVD or CD disc ever breaks, warps, or gets damaged, we will replace it free of charge. If you have any concerns with your product, or want to request a replacement, please contact The Great Courses through our Amazon storefront for more information.

Communication in Marriage: How to Communicate with Your Spouse Without Fighting


Marcus Kusi - 2015
     Many couples (including us) have had to deal with these communication problems at some point in marriage. And it’s not fun! The yelling, shouting, anger, frustration, rejection, resentment, interrupting, blaming, insults... It can definitely be overwhelming. It could even destroy your ability to not only communicate effectively with your spouse, but also enjoy your marriage. The lack of communication in your marriage can even lead to a divorce. But don't worry. No matter what communication problems you struggle with, you can learn how to communicate effectively with your spouse today. Whether you feel you are not being heard, cannot hear your spouse, or want to communicate better with your spouse without fighting or yelling, this book will show you how. For the past 7 years, we have used these proven communication skills to go from arguing and fighting whenever we communicated to communicating effectively without fighting, calling each other names, and being disrespectful. As a result, we now have a better marriage. In this Communication in Marriage book, you will learn: 1. How to communicate effectively with your spouse without fighting. 2. Why trust is essential for effective communication in marriage. 3. Clearly understand why we all communicate differently. 4. How to improve communication in your marriage. 5. How to communicate through conflict, even with a difficult spouse. 6. Our tested, simple and proven step-by-step plan for effective communication in 7 days or less. 7. How to communicate through difficult emotions. 8. How to prevent communication problems with your spouse. 9. Why your past experiences affect the way you communicate with your spouse. This book will show you proven communication skills married couples need to communicate effectively with each other. We have tested and continue to use these effective communication skills in our marriage every single day. And they work! Whether you feel like you cannot communicate with your spouse, or improve communication in your marriage, you can become a better communicator in your marriage by reading this book today. You don't need another fight or argument! You can communicate better with your husband or wife. How would your marriage be different if you had no communication problems? Scroll to the top to download your copy of this communication in marriage book for couples today. Click the BUY NOW button at the top of this page.

Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer


Duncan J. Watts - 2011
    As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners, and Experts with Something to Teach


Danny Iny - 2018
    The name of today's game, both personally and professionally, is to be constantly learning: just enough, just in time, and never stopping. But where can knowledge workers, professionals, and lifelong learners go to find the training and education they need to stay current and thrive?It's no secret that universities and colleges are struggling to keep pace and stay current. Often out of touch, exorbitantly overpriced, and slowed by unwieldy infrastructures, bureaucracies and tenure, these institutions are fundamentally designed to deliver a mode of education that still serves an important purpose, but leaves many of our individual and collective needs for learning and growth sorely unmet.This crisis is an opportunity for the experts and professionals who possess the knowledge and skills that are so sorely needed by so many. The solution is to package their expertise into leveraged learning programs that create transformation for the lifelong learners who need them, and profit for the experts who create them.Danny Iny, a successful educator entrepreneur, has been leading the charge on this growing movement. And in Leveraged Learning he lays out the guidebook for navigating and thriving in this new world – both as a lifelong learner, and as an expert with something to teach.As a lifelong learner, you'll gain the skills and acquire the tools that you need to grow and thrive:* How education has changed, and the implications for knowledge workers and professionals.* Why the education system is failing you, and what alternatives to consider.* How to hack your patterns of behavior to support and accelerate your learning.* The two layers of learning that you must stack together to achieve mastery.* Which mental habits are critical to achieving ongoing, sustained success.* How to tell which online courses are worth taking, and which to avoid.* Why most online courses have single-digit completion rates, and how to transcend the statistics.And as an expert with something to teach, you'll learn how to package your expertise for others' benefit, and your profit:* What it really takes to develop a lucrative revenue stream from your expertise.* The piloting methodology that has worked for thousands of successful online course creators.* How to design a curriculum that engages students and leads to mastery.* What to test, measure, and iterate as your course grows and evolves.* Research-based techniques to help every student perform at the 98th percentile of success.* Methodologies for peer-based feedback that cost-effectively support student learning.* How to engineer student success with accountability, gamification, and artificial intelligence.All this and much, much more is yours for the taking. Leveraged Learning is your indispensable guide to staying current, growing, and thriving in the modern world.From the book:"The current dysfunction of education is so egregious because it hurts so many of us. Most obviously, it hurts the graduates who find themselves with a degree that has practically no market value, forced to make ends meet as Starbucks baristas or Uber drivers.It hurts the bearers of a combined $1.4 trillion of student debt. For those keeping score, that’s more than credit card debt... and unlike credit card debt, you can’t even declare bankruptcy and free yourself of the potentially lifelong consequences of a bad decision you might have made as a teenager.It hurts the employers who are starved for talent. Education hasn’t prepared job seekers with the skills to fill more than six million open jobs in the United States alone, even as almost seven million Americans are unemployed and looking for work. It hurts the learners who seek alternatives. They waste enormous amounts of time and money bouncing between a host of imperfect options like MOOC programs with completion rates that max out at 15 percent, overpriced continuing education programs offered by universities, and courses provided by private instructors of varying quality.And it hurts educators and learning professionals. They labor heroically to brighten their students’ futures, but often that their best efforts can’t overcome the inertia and challenge of the systems in which they operate.We all hurt from the broken nature of modern education, that no longer prepares us for success. And we all need a solution that is more than just a band-aid.Thankfully, such a solution exists. That’s what this book is about."

Mindful Framing: Transform your Anxiety into Vital Energy


Oscar Segurado - 2018
    with JUST 15 MINUTES in the morning ANXIETY AND STRESS are epidemic in today’s fast-paced world. In response, many turn to meditation and related practices with limited long-term success.Oscar Segurado, MD, PhD, understands why. Meditation worked well for thousands of years, but can’t counter the effects of life in the twenty-first century. Instead, you need a new approach to control anxiety, especially given the proven connection between stress and serious diseases, including cancer, caused by a dysfunctional immune system. A mere fifteen minutes of mindful framing in the morning creates a solid mental framework for the rest of the day. You are the screenwriter and director of a lifestyle movie leading to a calm mind, healthy relationships and a vigorous body.It’s a modern world. We need a modern way to transform anxiety into vital energy. Segurado offers the way: mindful framing. Five steps towards a NEW FRAME OF MIND Recognize your TRIGGERS OF ANXIETY while riding an imaginary bus Leverage your FIVE SENSES while experiencing virtual sensations Connect with MOTHER NATURE while traveling through a fictional landscape Harmonize your EMOTIONS with those of others while watching a symbolic "emotional tree" Invigorate your immune system while exploring your ORGANISM with your "mind's eye" Scroll up and grab a copy today.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains


Nicholas Carr - 2010
    He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

The Little Girl in the Window: A Psychological Thriller


C.G. TwilesC.G. Twiles - 2021
    There, she starts a relationship with the last man she should—and who has no idea Romy is behind the drowning of his high school girlfriend and their unborn child. Bad lady. Horrible woman! When a pale little blonde girl with eerily blue eyes starts hurling insults through Romy’s window before vanishing into the woods, Romy fears her past has returned with a vengeance.She’s never told anyone about the worst mistake of her life. So how does the little girl seem to know about it? Who is she?And how to stop her before she reveals Romy’s darkest secret?A new twisty, suspenseful psychological thriller from C.G. Twiles, author of the top 800 Amazon Kindle bestseller The Neighbors in Apartment 3D, as well as The Last Star Standing, and Brooklyn Gothic.For fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, Shari Lapena.

Viral Parenting: A Guide to Setting Boundaries, Building Trust, and Raising Responsible Kids in an Online World


Mindy McKnight - 2019
    A cross between Jen Hatmaker and Rosalind Wiseman, VIRAL PARENTING is a guide to raising responsible, safe, and communicative kids in the digital world. Mindy shares practical tools for having honest conversations with kids of all ages about privacy, bullying, respectfulness, and family time, while emphasizing the importance of trust and open communication. These strategies are timeless--whether applied to texting, snapping, Facebooking, kiking, or whatever social media platforms await us in the future, this book is ultimately about teaching children about personal responsibility and safety. Mindy shares practical tools for creating family rules for kids of all ages about privacy, bullying, respectfulness, and family time, while emphasizing the importance of trust and open communication. Using family contracts, guided conversations, device checks, and respectful but firm oversight, the McKnights have raised a close knit family and navigated the complexity of being world-wide internet celebrities with grace. McKnight will show any parent of any child or teen how that's done--setting non-negotiable guidelines and offering a savvy perspective toward privacy that audience have been begging for.

Marriage Fitness: 4 Steps to Building & Maintaining Phenomenal Love


Mort Fertel - 2004
    Revolutionary step by step system marriage success.

Linea Nigra


Jazmina Barrera
    Drawing from a wide range of inspirations and traditions, from Louise Bourgeois to Ursula K. Le Guin to the influential indigenous Nahua model Luz Jiménez, Barrera’s treatise is as philosophical as it is candid. It is a book that clarifies motherhood, but also celebrates the mysteries of the body—like the linea nigra, the black line, itself.Writing over the course of her first pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, and young motherhood, Barrera embraces her subject fully. She intersperses notes from her reading life, making lucid connections between maternity and earthquakes, lunar eclipses, plants, and animals. She sends out an impassioned call for a great proliferation of pregnancy books: for more writing by the expectant; for a canon and a counter-canon of motherhood prose—each of them a shrine and generous guide to all of these radical acts.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better


Clive Thompson - 2013
    But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding "yes." The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and analysis. We learn more and retain it longer, write and think with global audiences, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter, better connected, and often deeper—both as individuals and as a society. In Smarter Than You Think Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old. Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There's the seventy-six-year old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment—giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life, even going back decades. There's a group of courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade—and solved it collaboratively in only one month. Smarter Than You Think isn't just about pioneers. It's about everyday users of technology and how our digital tools—from Google to Twitter to Facebook and smartphones—are giving us new ways to learn, talk, and share our ideas. Thompson harnesses the latest discoveries in social science to explore how digital technology taps into our long-standing habits of mind—pushing them in powerful new directions. Our thinking will continue to evolve as newer tools enter our lives. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley


Emily Chang - 2018
    It's a "Brotopia," where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don't Be Evil! Connect the World!)--and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer--who got their start at Google, where just one in five engineers is a woman--reveal just how hard it is to crack the Silicon Ceiling. And Chang shows how women such as former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, entrepreneur Niniane Wang, and game developer Brianna Wu, have risked their careers and sometimes their lives to pave a way for other women.Silicon Valley's aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It's time to break up the boys' club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.

Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World


Peter S. Goodman - 2022
    The most affluent people emerged from capitalism's triumph in the Cold War to loot the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people, and leaving them tragically unprepared for the worst pandemic in a century.Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more.Goodman's rollicking and revelatory exposé of the global billionaire class reveals their hidden impact on nearly every aspect of modern society: widening wealth inequality, the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, the shrinking opportunity to earn a livable wage, the vulnerabilities of our health-care systems, access to affordable housing, unequal taxation, and even the quality of the shirt on your back. Meticulously reported yet compulsively readable, Davos Man is an essential read for anyone concerned about economic justice, the capacity of societies to grapple with their greatest challenges, and the sanctity of representative government.The New York Times's Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires' systematic plunder of the world--brazenly accelerated during the pandemic--has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning. --EVAN OSNOS"Excellent. A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one. --NPR.org