The World's Best Book Summaries
What is the relationship between resilience and well-being? How can you strengthen your resilience? Resilience is one of the few positive psychology principles that you should strengthen in order to increase personal well-being. According to Flourish by Martin E. P. Seligman, you can do so by developing several vital aspects of your life. Continue reading to learn how resilience will improve your lifestyle.
How can you gain a confident body posture? Why does technology make your posture worse? In Presence, Amy Cuddy says that you can enhance your presence by making powerful postures habitual in your daily life. Being intentional about small adjustments to your posture can build over time into drastic improvements in your confidence and ability to express yourself. Continue reading if you want to feel self-assured through your posture all the time.
Do certain people help you think through things more thoroughly and accurately? Do you feel more creative and productive in particular environments? Nancy Kline’s Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind explains that what and how we think determines everything we do and say. Kline argues that, when people listen to us well, they help us think more effectively. Continue reading for an overview of this book that takes a novel approach to both thinking and listening.
What is a formal fallacy? How often do you perpetrate them? Can you detect them in the arguments of other people? According to psychologist Steven Pinker, one of the main reasons people think irrationally is that they use logic and critical thinking incorrectly. They engage in fallacious arguments that lead to irrational conclusions. Formal fallacies are one common type of fallacy that people commit. Read more to learn about a couple of common formal fallacies and the psychological bias that’s behind them.
What is the importance of presence? How does presence strengthen your creative and communication skills? Social psychologist Amy Cuddy asserts that presence has numerous benefits. These include proactivity and taking on challenges, improving your ability to build trust, enabling you to think creatively, and increasing your resilience even when things don’t go your way. Continue reading for in-depth reasons why you’ll benefit from having presence.
Are you hyper-focused on having the perfect body? How can you love your body the way it is? The relentless pressure from societal expectations can turn eating into a struggle for many people. That’s why Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch tells you to accept your unique body and ditch the diets that are causing you to hate it. Continue reading to learn how to love your body.
What are you really good at? What do you enjoy so much that it can make you lose track of time? If you have ADHD, you can achieve incredible things when you take on challenges that align with your strengths and passions. Edward Hallowell and John Ratey explain how and why this works in their encouraging book ADHD 2.0. Keep reading to learn how to thrive with ADHD by leveraging your natural interests.
How well do you know the basic rules of logic? How often do you break them? Can you tell when others use flawed thinking? Steven Pinker argues that people often act irrationally even when they think they’re not. He examines how you can be more rational and make better decisions by improving your critical thinking skills and by understanding—and thus avoiding—the logical fallacies that people often fall victim to. Continue reading for Pinker’s explanation of formal and informal fallacies.
Is your mind burdened by self-doubt in front of others? How can you have presence? According to Amy Cuddy, “presence” is having faith in your abilities and feeling comfortable in your own skin, which naturally leads to an easy, confident mindset. She adds in her book Presence that when you embody presence, you exhibit agency over your self-expression. Find out how to have presence and remove a negative mindset.
What if you could make better decisions because you’re able to make better predictions? How can an eighteenth-century statistician help you? People often miscalculate the probability of an event occurring and then make poor decisions based on that miscalculation. Steven Pinker explains how you can use Bayesian reasoning to make more accurate assessments of evidence and, in turn, make more accurate predictions about the future. Read more to learn how to use Bayesian reasoning to make decisions that are based on a better understanding of what’s going on.