School of Life

The School of Life is dedicated to exploring life's big questions. We don't have all the answers, but we will direct you towards a variety of useful ideas that are guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, and console. We all want to live in a better world, but sometimes it feels like we lack the ability to make a difference. Author, broadcaster, and journalist John-Paul Flintoff offers a powerful reminder that through the generations, society has been transformed by the actions of individuals who understood that if they didn't like something, they could change it. Combining fresh new insights from history and other disciplines, this book will give you a sense of what might just be possible, as well as the inspiration and the courage you need to go about improving and changing the world we live in.

A fresh approach to matters of the heart, teaching us that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck. Love has a history and we ride - sometimes rather helplessly - on its currents. Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. And it has been a disaster for love. Relationships challenges the assumptions of the Romantic view of love. It shows how to develop new attitudes that can lead to a psychologically mature vision of love: • That it is OK that love and sex may not always belong together • That discussing money early on, in a serious way, is not a betrayal of love • That realizing that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple • That we will never find everything we need in another person, nor they in us • That spending two hours discussing whether bathroom towels should be hung up or can be left on the floor has its own dignity Full of applied real-life examples, and enlivened throughout with humor and cultural anecdote, this innovative guide paves the way to a new, brighter future for love.

A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking. We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve. Among other things, we learn how to grasp fragile and flighty thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear, at what times of day to try to work and for how long, how to make use of our boredom and instincts, and how to overcome timid and predictable approaches to the largest problems. The result is an operating manual to that most wondrous, though intermittent and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

An examination of the importance of self-knowledge, providing practical exercises to aid self-discovery. In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: 'Know yourself'. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions-particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and what our priorities and potential might be.

A thought-provoking essay that teaches us that confidence is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that can be learned. We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering, economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free ranging variety of confidence-one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives. On Confidence walks us gently and wryly around the key issues that stop us from making more of our potential.

A collection of the essential emotional lessons we need in order to thrive. We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one's psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame? The School of Life is an organisation dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives — and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness. To read the book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives — and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns learned in childhood. When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago, we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. Perhaps we were over-disciplined and cowed, not allowed to be willful or difficult-and so learned to tell white lies and people-please. Or perhaps our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile and so we had to assume the role of parent, burying our true needs and desires deep underground. When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves are clear to see. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can set about correcting the harmful behaviors we mistakenly believe to be innate. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we might then break free from the learned patterns of our childhoods.

A guide to our anxious minds, offering a route to calm, self-compassion, and mental well-being. Far more than we tend to realize, we're all-in private-deeply anxious. There is so much that worries us across our days and nights: whether our hopes will come true, whether others will like us, whether the people we care about will be OK, whether we can escape humiliation and grief... Too often, we bottle up our anxieties or try to avoid looking at them directly. We are ashamed of how worried we are and end up feeling isolated and yet more worried. None of this is necessary. Anxiety is deeply normal and, like so much else that troubles our minds, it can be understood and brought under our control. We all deserve to wake up every day without a sense of foreboding. This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes, and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate, and in the best sense practical.

A practical guide to making wiser, more informed choices in love. Finding and choosing a partner is one of the most consequential decisions we will ever make. This guide explains everything from why we have "types" and how our early lives inform our romantic decisions as adults. It sheds light on harmful and repetitive patterns and provides insight on how to break them. Drawing on in-depth analysis, How to Find Love explains our instinct for romantic self-sabotage and provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love. • A GUIDE TO MAKING BETTER DECISIONS IN LOVE: and how to choose the "right" partner. • PRESENTS THE TOOLS WE NEED: to break unhealthy relationship habits. • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S GIFTABLE ESSAYS SERIES: other titles include Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Why We Hate Cheap Things, and Self-Knowledge. • DRAWS FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S CORE CURRICULUM

The School of Life is dedicated to exploring life's big questions. We don't have all the answers, but we will direct you towards a variety of useful ideas that are guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, and console. A practical and inspirational guide to examining your career and deciding whether it truly makes you happy-this book will show you the steps it takes to find a job that truly makes you thrive. The desire for fulfilling work is one of the great aspirations of our age. This book reveals explores the competing claims we face for money, status, and meaning in our lives. Drawing on wisdom from a variety of disciplines, cultural thinker Roman Krznaric sets out a practical guide to negotiating the labyrinth of choices, overcoming fear of change, and finding a career in which you thrive. Overturning a century of traditional thought about career change, Krznaric reveals just what it takes to find life-enhancing work

The School of Life is dedicated to exploring life's big questions. We don't have all the answers, but we will direct you towards a variety of useful ideas that are guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, and console. An Economist Best Book of the Year. Everyone accepts the importance of physical health; isn't it just as important to aim for the mental equivalent? Philippa Perry has come to the rescue with How to Stay Sane -- a maintenance manual for the mind. Years of working as a psychotherapist showed Philippa Perry what approaches produced positive change in her clients and how best to maintain good mental health. In How to Stay Sane, she has taken these principles and applied them to self-help. Using ideas from neuroscience and sound psychological theory, she shows us how to better understand ourselves. Her idea is that if we know how our minds form and develop, we are less at the mercy of unknown unconscious processes. In this way, we can learn to be the master of our feelings and not their slave. This is a smart, pithy, readable book that everyone with even a passing interest in their psychological health will find useful.

THE SCHOOL OF LIFE IS DEDICATED TO EXPLORING LIFE'S BIG QUESTIONS IN HIGHLY-PORTABLE PAPERBACKS, FEATURING FRENCH FLAPS AND DECKLE EDGES, THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES CALLS "DAMNABLY CUTE." WE DON'T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS, BUT WE WILL DIRECT YOU TOWARDS A VARIETY OF USEFUL IDEAS THAT ARE GUARANTEED TO STIMULATE, PROVOKE, AND CONSOLE. We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way. So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting---yet often confusing and difficult---experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we're supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This book argues that twenty-first-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment. Covering topics that include lust, fetishism, adultery, and pornography, Alain de Botton frankly articulates the dilemmas of modern sexuality, offering insights and consolation to help us think more deeply and wisely about the sex we are, or aren't, having.