Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins

In his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill interviewed hundreds of American businessmen to gather their wisdom on how to achieve professional success. In his follow-up, Outwitting the Devil, Hill examines how failure and bad habits keep people from reaching their fullest potential, this time through a single interview—with the Devil himself.

Outwitting the Devil describes how you can escape the Devil’s influence and avoid being turned toward inaction and evil by dedicating yourself to concrete goals, embracing positive habits, and refusing to be defeated by failure. He argues that in doing so, you can find your way to professional and financial success. In our guide, we’ll explore HIll’s ideas and will examine their connections to the New Thought spiritual movement, as well as the impact his works had on the self-help world today, such as the works of Norman Vincent Peale and Rhonda Byrne.

Shooting selfies on vacation. Posting Facebook updates on our kid's graduation from pre-school. Garnering awards and promotions to add to our LinkedIn profiles. Guess what, America? We've become self-obsessed. In David Brooks’s The Road to Character, the New York Times columnist suggests we take a good hard look at ourselves and remember that we weren't always so narcissistic.

Brooks outlines the moral shift that took place after World War II when we transitioned from honoring humility, self-discipline, and public service to worshiping at the altar of "the Big Me." He also reminds us that our current self-focus isn't even making us happy. To help us recalibrate our moral compasses, Brooks details the lives of war heroes, civil rights activists, advocates for the poor, writers, and deep thinkers who've tackled the work of building moral character, then outlines a 15-point plan to help us live more virtuous—and ultimately happier—lives.

The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.

How much does it cost to get into Heaven? According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it will cost you a lot: It entails self-denial, suffering, and voluntary forfeiture of your civil rights.

Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and seminary professor living in Germany in the 1930s. He wrote The Cost of Discipleship as a wake-up call for the church, which he felt had rendered Christianity somewhat meaningless by making discipleship too “easy.” He lived as he preached—his Christian beliefs compelled him to speak out against Hitler’s regime and ultimately led to his execution in 1945. (He doesn’t discuss the Nazi ideology in this book, but he was openly critical of it, leading the Nazi Party to regard him as an enemy of the state.)

In this guide, we’ll discuss Bonhoeffer’s teachings on discipleship, with additional historical and religious background and context to make them more accessible, even if you don’t have a strong background in Christian theology.

What can you learn from 5,000 years of history? Are we in truly novel times, or do we face the same problems that the Romans and Egyptians faced 2,000 years ago?

Will & Ariel Durant, Pulitzer Prize winning historians, are famed for writing The Story of Civilization, a massive 9766-page, 11-volume treatise of the entirety of Western history. They compiled the most important recurring patterns in this book. Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, considers this one of his 3 must-read books.

Learn how human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years, how societies cycle between inequality and redistribution like a heartbeat, and why eventually all civilizations fall.

For millennia, humans struggled with three serious problems—famine, plagues, and war—which led to the deaths of millions of people and to the rise and fall of global empires. People coped with these problems and answered life's questions with religion. However, in the modern era, we no longer rely on prayer—we’ve mostly overcome these three problems through the development of technology and medical knowledge.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, envisions a future in which technology replaces humanist ideals and liberal government. Dissecting the concepts of religion, immortality, and technology, Harari argues that the world of the future may be run by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, not human beings.