It will change your life. Simplicity at its best: The checklist is one of the world’s oldest—and most effective—productivity systems. If anything, author and entrepreneur Alexandra Franzen shares, it is just as valuable now as it was during the days of the Roman Empire. Writing out a simple checklist allows us to tangibly plan our day and set in stone what we want to accomplish.Cut out unnecessary noise: There are countless apps and organizational systems out there to help us straighten out our lives, but often they only add to the madness. Trying to keep up leaves us feeling drained and overwhelmed. Learn how to choose your highest priorities, set realistic goals, celebrate tiny wins, and feel calmer every day with the magic of checklists.Be realistic about the time in a day: By physically writing down our tasks on a single piece of paper, we force ourselves to limit how much we can do in a day. Too often, we cram our day with tasks and chores and leave almost no space for self-care or time with loved ones. We end up disappointed in our inability to complete our never-ending to-do list. Checklists help you plan your day in a more gentle, realistic way. You accomplish what needs to be done—and enjoy things you want to be doing, too. In the life-changing Checklist Book, learn: The history of the checklist and why it remains to be relevant and effective today The science behind the success of checklists, such as the instant satisfaction we feel when we put a check next to a finished task How to create a basic daily checklist—and checklists for specific situations, like moving to a new city or navigating a divorce Readers who love life-improvement books like The Bullet Journal Method, Free to Focus and Atomic Habits will love The Checklist Book.

    His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world. Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of Codes as we grow up within our culture. These Codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the Codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do. Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest-lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us. In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes. Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

    Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is "the elephant in the brain." Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their "official" ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policies designed to favor or discourage them. You won't see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.

    The translator, Lev Shulyak an accomplished inventor, engineer and TRIZ expert published the book at his own expense to bring it into American classrooms. This new edition has been revised extensively by Shulyak and editor Steve Rodman, who have added valuable information not found in the original.Topics include an introduction to the development of the TRIZ theory, and a wide range of problems and the solutions that TRIZ helps produce.

    This book lays out the key skills and capabilities required to ensure that problems do not remain hidden in your organization. It explains how leaders can become effective problem finders, unearthing problems before they destroy an organization. The book explains how leaders can become an anthropologist, going out and observe how employees, customers, and suppliers actually behave. It then goes on to present how they can circumvent the gatekeepers, so they can go directly to the source to see and hear the raw data; hunt for patterns, including refining your individual and collective pattern recognition capability; "connect the dots" among issues that may initially seem unrelated, but in fact, have a great deal in common; give front-line employees training in a communication technique; encourage useful mistakes, including create a "Red Pencil Award"; and watch the game film, where leaders reflect systematically on their own organization's conduct and performance, as well as on the behavior and performance of competitors.

    This is not a "how-to" book in any sense. Korn wants to get at the why of craft, in particular, and at the satisfactions of creative work, in general to understand their essential nature. How does the making of objects both reflect and refine our own identities? What is it about craft and creative work that makes them so rewarding? What is the nature of those rewards? How do the products of creative work inform society?

    During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

    This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success. But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? To answer these questions, Selfie by Will Storr takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now. It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately – our self.

    Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

    Our passions and talents may actually surprise us. In Mindshift, Barbara Oakley tells the stories of people who have overcome learning "handicaps" of all kinds—such as Imposter's Syndrome and advancing age—and shows how we can turn perceived weaknesses into strengths. For example, people may feel like they're at a disadvantage if they pursue a new field later in life; yet those who change careers can be fertile cross-pollinators—they bring valuable insights from one discipline to another. The power of simple persistence in building talent is also often underestimated. Dr. Oakley reveals the latest neuroscientific insights into how our brains change when we learn something new. She shares strategies for learning that are backed by brain science, including practical exercises to apply in our own lives.

    He describes how teaching any subject at any level can be made more effective if students are introduced to the "whole game," rather than isolated pieces of a discipline. Perkins explains how learning academic subjects should be approached like learning baseball or any game, and he demonstrates this with seven principles for making learning whole: from making the game worth playing (emphasizing the importance of motivation to sustained learning), to working on the hard parts (the importance of thoughtful practice), to learning how to learn (developing self-managed learners).Vividly explains how to organize learning in ways that allow people to do important things with what they know Offers guidelines for transforming education to prepare our youth for success in a rapidly changing world Filled with real-world, illustrative examples of the seven principles At the end of each chapter, Perkins includes "Wonders of Learning," a summary of the key ideas.

    Written by one of the foremost experts on mathematical magic, it employs considerable historical data to summarize all previous work in this field. It is also a creative examination of laws and their exemplification, with scores of new tricks, insights, and demonstrations. Dozens of topological tricks are explained, and dozens of manipulation tricks are aligned with mathematical law.Nontechnical, detailed, and clear, this volume contains 115 sections discussing tricks with cards, dice, coins, etc.; topological tricks with handkerchiefs, cards, etc.; geometrical vanishing effects; demonstrations with pure numbers; and dozens of other topics. You will learn how a Moebius strip works and how a Curry square can "prove" that the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts.No skill at sleight of hand is needed to perform the more than 500 tricks described because mathematics guarantees their success. Detailed examination of laws and their application permits you to create your own problems and effects.

    And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

    After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found?In The Hot Hand, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen offers an unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation into these questions. He begins with how a $35,000 fine and a wild night in New York revived a debate about the existence of streaks that was several generations in the making. We learn how the ability to recognize and then bet against streaks turned a business school dropout named David Booth into a billionaire, and how the subconscious nature of streak-related bias can make the difference between life and death for asylum seekers. We see how previously unrecognized streaks hidden amidst archival data helped solve one of the most haunting mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. Cohen also exposes how streak-related incentives can be manipulated, from the five-syllable word that helped break arcade profit records to an arc of black paint that allowed Stephen Curry to transform from future junior high coach into the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Crucially, Cohen also explores why false recognition of nonexistent streaks can have cataclysmic results, particularly if you are a sugar beet farmer or the sort of gambler who likes to switch to black on the ninth spin of the roulette wheel.A brilliant investigation into when streaks exist and how they can be taken advantage of, The Hot Hand is essential reading for anyone who thinks they’ve got a shot.

    In this short, provocative, and useful HBR Single, motivational psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson translates the psychological secrets of these winning human beings for your use. Halvorson expands on her immensely popular blog post to give more detail on each of her nine suggested actions-from getting specific about goals and aggressively monitoring your achievements to understanding the importance of having "grit." By emphasizing what successful people do consistently and effectively, Halvorson provides the path to help you accomplish your goals, once and for all.